Friday, August 24, 2018

Montoursville 2018: My schools (Part 2)

[Undated postcard of Lyter Elementary School, published by Merrimack Picture Post Card Company of North Springfield, Vermont. I believe that my fourth-grade classroom was the set of three windows on the far left.]

When we moved back to Montoursville in late 1980, I returned to Lyter Elementary School. This time I was an "upperclassman" within the elementary school — a fourth-grader instead of a first-grader.

My teacher was Mr. Rees Daneker, who was very cool1, and these are some of my scattered fourth-grade memories from that two-thirds of a school year (1980-81):

  • I aced all of my spelling quizzes.
  • A girl named Danielle sat right in front of me and would turn around and sing snippets of Blondie's "One Way or Another."
  • In art class, we painted, worked on a papier-mâché projects, and were introduced to those wonderful markers that smell like fruits and spices.2
  • In music class, we learned the basics of rhythm and beat. One of the songs we used for this was Air Supply's "Every Woman in the World." I used to be able to recall another song that we used, but it's slipped my mind.
  • As far as what we learned in Mr. Daneker's class beyond spelling and mathematics, my memory is hazy. There was almost certainly a unit on Christopher Columbus, but I'm pretty much drawing a blank.
  • One day we gathered in the cafeteria to watch Pollyanna.
  • I have a memory that the principal announced to the entire school, via the intercom system, the news that President Reagan had just been shot on March 30, 1981. I see that TV reports first aired around 2:42 p.m., so it's certainly plausible, timing-wise, that this happened. But I do not 100% trust my memory on this and might be conflating it with something else.

And then it was on to middle school...

Footnotes
1. Rees Daneker, on the right in the top row, was an assistant coach for the 1978 Montoursville High School baseball team, which finished the regular season with a 30-3 record and was the No. 1 seed in the PIAA District Four playoffs.
2. The blog Children of the 1990s states: "For a generation facing increasing concerns of huffing and household chemical abuse, it seems strange in retrospect that our parents and teachers once actively encouraged good old fashioned marker sniffing."

1 comment:

  1. I remember those markers :)
    For some time, I thought that I was a jinx. I was home sick (with the tv babysitting me) when Reagan, the Pope, and John Lennon were shot.

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