I never attended Kindergarten. I’ve had the audacity, over the years and decades, to claim that fact as the underlying reason for every life failure (or life lesson gone awry) that I’ve ever experienced since age 6. Prior to my family moving to Boonville that year, when I was assigned to Mrs. Elsie Hickey’s 1st grade class, we had spent the previous two years living in the small town (even smaller than Boonville) of Fort Jones, located on Highway 3, near Yreka, in Siskiyou Co., fairly near the Oregon border — where, I was eventually informed, no Kindergarten class existed. Clearly, in 1956, successful completion of Kindergarten was not the prerequisite to academic success that it is today, as evidenced by the fact that I am now in possession of a Master’s degree, in addition to completing half of a program for a second one, with a 4.0 GPA. I suppose the six months that I spent student-teaching in a Kindergarten class in Dixon, in Solano County (the town that my family moved to after leaving Boonville in 1959, when I started 4th grade), while obtaining my elementary teaching credential at UC Davis in the early 70s, partially filled the void.
Actually, skipping grades in school was kind of a family tradition. Since my brother’s birthday is in late November, he didn’t begin 1st grade in Linton, North Dakota, where we lived at the time, until he was almost 7 years old, right around the time of my first birthday. By the time he had begun 2nd grade the following year, his teachers had determined that he was so far ahead of his classmates that he needed to be bumped ahead to 3rd grade, clearly making him the youngest member of his class. As he is now in possession of a Master’s and PhD from UC Berkeley, is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, was salutatorian of his high school graduating class in Dixon, and has spent practically his entire career teaching at one of the most prestigious universities in the country, skipping 2nd grade definitely did not in any way hinder his academic progress.
In fact, my parents have always insisted that the only factor preventing him from being class valedictorian was the amount of school he missed during his freshman (and only) year at Anderson Valley High School, necessitated by his recuperation from infectious mononucleosis that year (the 1958-59 school year), while at the same time attempting to overcome the adverse effects to his proper height growth brought on by a severe thyroid deficiency. This was evidenced by the fact that at his eighth grade graduation the previous year, where the graduates were lined up at the beginning of the ceremony (for the processional into the auditorium) by height from tallest to shortest, my brother was the very last in line. He did eventually recover from “mono,” and his height finally stabilized into a normal range, but the amount of time lost in school that year placed him slightly academically behind the actual valedictorian at his graduation from Dixon High School in 1962.
My mother, on the other hand, had skipped 8th grade in her home town of Carthage, Tennessee, which is why, in 1956, when she was hired to teach 1st grade alongside Mrs. Elsie Hickey, in addition to committing to the completion of the coursework for her elementary teaching credential, she had to take the required test on the US Constitution that she had missed, before beginning that first year of her 25-year teaching career. With me starting school, she decided that she wanted to go back to work, so once we were successfully moved into the Methodist parsonage next door to the church, she made a visit to the office of the Anderson Valley Unified School District to apply for a job as a secretary, the work she had done at the Smith County Bank in Carthage for six years between her sophomore and junior years in college. Upon her arrival and inquiry about available positions, she was informed that they desperately needed another teacher at the elementary school, and, since she had her Bachelor’s degree and had taken a few education courses in college, they could hire her with a provisional credential and assist her with completing the requirements for a permanent one.
The fact that there was more than one class per grade level at the elementary school ended up being extremely beneficial for both my mother and me; me being her student and her being my teacher would not have been an advantageous situation. For the rest of her life, even after she retired in 1981, my mother always referred to that first year as her “trial by fire,” particularly after discovering, very early on, that 1st graders were far from being the optimal age for her to teach; and, of course, with me being the same age as her students, she couldn’t even walk away and leave it behind at the end of the day. The following year she was able to move up to 3rd grade, which was a much better “fit” for her, where she remained for the 1958-59 year, our final year in Boonville, until finally settling on 4th grade the year after that, in Dixon, where she remained until retirement.
For me, 1st grade in Mrs. Hickey’s class and my piano lessons were two of the best things that had occurred up to that point in my young life. I loved the educational and social stimulation, meeting new friends, excelling at my school and musical lessons, and, quite frankly, having ample time with my chronological peers away from my family members. Since we did not own a piano, I practiced every day next door at the church, where, when not being directly supervised, I would switch from the tedious “finger exercises” to playing the ever so much more harmonious hymns from the hymnal — which greatly assisted my choral singing, begun at age 17 during my senior year in high school.
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