Rural Seventh Grade in 1966-67
Following the death of Mary Ruth in mid September, I was soon back on the farm with my grandparents and back in the rural school I had attended for first, second, and third grades. Except for my first-and-second-grade teacher, all the teachers had changed.

Ima Kerns was the seventh-grade teacher at Midkiff Grade School when I returned. Whereas in earlier years one teacher kept the students the entire day, it had been determined that students would change classes for reading and math, but mainly Mrs. Kerns was the seventh-grade teacher. Mrs. Kerns was an older woman in her fifties, and not unlike Mrs. Parsons with first and second grades, Mrs. Kerns was still taking college classes; she and Mrs. Parsons would sometimes carpool for this purpose. Mrs. Kerns was a stout woman with black hair and a somewhat rectangular face, likely to have been quite attractive in her younger years, but the sternness with which she generally carried herself tended to cause most seventh-graders to overlook this point of attractiveness. It seems that the many rural schools of the 1960s had difficulty obtaining teachers with college degrees, which is undoubtedly the same today when traditional academic ability and knowledge are the basis for college degrees, as opposes political correctness as the primary requisite for modern teacher certification and related degrees.

Whether or not Mrs. Kerns had a college degree, she taught regularly and consistently, applying that traditional Christian principle that one was to earn one’s pay when paid for work. In this class of fewer than forty students there were a few academically disinclined, disruptive students who wanted to challenge authority in one manner or another. During a science lesson one student challenged Mrs. Kerns’ pronunciation of habitat, insisting the word was habit because the student had never heard the word, habitat, previously; therefore, he decreed that Mrs. Kerns did not know how the word was pronounced. This served to disrupt the class for several minutes while Mrs. Kerns explained the difference between the two words in spelling and pronunciation. The student was subsequently reported by another student as having called Mrs. Kerns a bastard, which absolutely infuriated her, and she proceeded to explain that a bastard was a child born of unmarried parents and her parents had been married by the preacher such-and-such well before she was born. Mrs. Kerns seemed not to realize that the term was not intended literally, but was merely a term of offense; however, during Mrs. Kerns’ day, and into the 1980s in the area, to be born of unwed parents was an indication that one’s family was lacking in the most basic moral qualities that commanded the respect of the community. In addition to science Mrs. Kerns also taught history, spelling, and art-music appreciation.

One of the most humorous things Mrs. Kerns did was role-reversals with some of the badly-behaved students; she had an incredible talent for recalling incidents of poor conduct and emulating the same while pretending to be the student and with the badly-behaved student pretend to be the teacher; the two would simply switch desks. In one such incident she became Greg, and Greg became Mrs. Kerns. Remarkably, Greg had also noticed how Mrs. Kerns reacted to disruptive conduct; he quickly slid open the center drawer of the teacher’s desk, grabbed the hairbrush-type paddle, and began wielding the paddle in the direction of the disruptive student while threatening to thrash Mrs. Kerns-the-student if she continued to interrupt the lesson and disrupt the class. Perhaps only students who received such threats remembered the conduct of the teacher; except for this incident, I would never have recalled how Mrs. Kerns would threaten to paddle disruptive students although it seems she rarely did; she attempted to treat these early teenagers as if they were young adults with whom reason might be employed, which often was a time-wasting effort, but the effort was made, nonetheless.

As a teacher I generally cannot recall irritating student conduct from one hour to the next, preferring to forget disagreeable situations as quickly as possible; although, I apparently have the ability to dredge up rather explicit details in cases where students have a parent challenge a situation a month after the event. Nonetheless, I certainly cannot casually recall such drivel as if it were important information. Perhaps my childhood experiences in dealing with grizzly, ghastly situations cause me to regard nearly everything as relatively mild; the experiences necessarily taught me to shrug off annoyances from others as largely irrelevant to my identity, as opposes dwelling on negative feelings related to the conduct of others. Mrs. Kerns, on the other hand, was able to recall explicit details of obnoxious conduct for weeks and months, demonstrating expert ability at intonations, body language, idiotic comments, and general conduct of disruptive students. I still find it entirely remarkable that anyone could recall such drivel in explicit detail, much the way professional comedians are able to mimic and exaggerate the conduct of politicians and celebrities. The other teachers for seventh grade taught reading, math, and physical education; reading in the morning, math in the afternoon, and physical education whenever agreeable to Mrs. Kearns and the phys ed teacher.

The reading teacher, Garnet Craft, generally had students read aloud and then discussed the answers to questions about the reading material. On one occasion she required students to memorize a stanza from a poem, The Blind Men and the Elephant by John Godfrey Saxe, describing six blind men that went to see an elephant, each man forming a different concept based on feeling the tusk, trunk, ear, leg, side, and tail; I had not bothered to learn the assigned stanza the previous night and attempted to do so immediately before the reading class. Fortunately, the eighth-grade teacher functioned as principal, and something arose that prevented the class from meeting that day, during which time I memorized the second stanza as required and then proceeded to memorize all of the stanzas the text contained, which seems to have excluded the ninth stanza since it has an unfamiliar look to it; or, it required turning the page to see it, which I did not do.

The math teacher, Avenelle Cummings, had brown hair, perhaps brown eyes, and a rather trim figure considering she had five children. Mrs. Cummings focused on problems related to fractions with perhaps just a touch of algebra by way of using letters for unknown quantities. The class was enjoyable because Mrs. Cummings made the effort to teach. On one occasion Mrs. Cummings growled at her son, Robert, that one could not drive the approximate thirty miles to town in only fifteen minutes as he claimed, except by traveling at one hundred twenty miles per hour, for which she had quickly written a math equation on the board to prove her point, and further growled that one could not travel at that speed on a winding, two-lane road even if there were no other cars to slow the pace, which was never the case. Robert seemed to delight in pushing her buttons from time to time as his eyes would twinkled with laughter while his mother growled on. We basically did a detailed rehash of multiplication and division using fractions and decimals.

By the time I was in seventh grade the school had acquired a physical education teacher, Ruth Garrison, who was an attractive lady of medium build, brown hair, and perhaps gray eyes; and a wonderfully caring personality. Mrs. Garrison did the physical education classes for all eight grades, and although we did the regular exercises, I mainly recall playing baseball in her class … although we seem to have played volleyball, 4-40 Relays (something like running about 40 feet or yards with a stick and transferring the stick to another runner who did likewise with four to a group), and other athletic-related activities.

Seventh grade was largely a readjustment to rural life. Nothing noteworthy seems to have occurred my last year at Midkiff Grade School; with the possible exception of an incident with the new third-and-fourth-grade teacher, Maude Scites, alleged to be as bad as the teacher I had for those grades. While walking down the hall with a friend this teacher opened her door and accused us of having opened and slammed her classroom door closed; and demanded that we write a hundred times that we would not do what we had not done. We reported the incident to Mrs. Kerns with the statement that we had done nothing and were not doing the assigned punishment. Despite her knowing that we were truthful and not inclined to such childish conduct as Mrs. Scites had accused, Mrs. Kerns stated that we had to do the assignment since a teacher had mandated it. Mrs. Kerns may have gone and spoken to Mrs. Scites since the old biddy summonsed us to her classroom and relented, stating we did not have to complete the punishment after we had nearly finished writing it, provided we did not do again what we had not done in the first place.

Clearly, teachers knew that they had to stick together when it came to disciplining students; whether or not they agreed with one another. With only five or six teachers responsible for well over one hundred students, it would have been disastrous for teachers not to support one another in matters of discipline.