Tag: Education

Textbook Time

Le Mirage 1969

As the new semester starts, students in the fall of 1968 rush the cashier with textbooks and other school supplies. Then it’s back to the dorms for a change of clothes because the Methodist Student Center is hosting a back-to-school party tonight.

Later on, it’s going to get groovy, man. Lose your shoes and let your hair down.

Don’t overdo it because you’ll have to be up early in the morning. Isn’t campus lovely this time of year?

Linda is delighted that the University Complex South just got the new typewriters in. They’re super intuitive.

Lily is excited to use the dictaphone in shorthand class, the wave of the future.

Don’t worry; teachers are always willing to help students with vocabulary words.

And students are willing to point out where professors may have spilled potato salad on their ties.

You can catch up with your old friends and talk Aqua Net. No boys will ever run their fingers through your hair again.

Go wild and take a modern dance class.

But before long, those term papers will be due.

So be sure to put on that thinking cap and make it another great year of academics!

Whistling Dixie

1963 Comet

Actually, these students weren’t whistling Dixie at all, because that term doesn’t involve any whistling. Whistling Dixie isn’t even racist, though the word might trigger you. I feel sorry for a former classmate with that name. Nope, whistling Dixie just means laying out your pipe dreams in idle chitchat, sharing your hopes as you’re shooting the breeze, with the connotation that you may not ever actually bring that dream to pass.

One could apply it to teens who forego college in order to, as they put it, “pursue dreams of being influencers.” One could apply it to endless promises of political candidates on either side of the spectrum. As you age, you may become more jaded and skeptical by hearing decades of unfulfilled promises, coming to think that most promises are just folks whistling Dixie, telling you what want to hear, but never making good on it.

However, if I tell my husband I’m doing two loads of laundry, the dishes, mowing the back yard, and fixing up a beef roast today, I’m not whistling Dixie. It’s not balderdash, rubbish, nor hogwash. It’s the real deal, y’all. Or as the kids simply say, “FACTS.”

So just make sure that when you start laying out your strategy, that you’ve got good intentions and a solid path to make it come to pass. Otherwise, folks might be inclined to disbelieve you, as they say. And I ain’t whistling Dixie.

Life Before Sonicare

Living Lens by Newhouse

Over 100 years ago, these Jewish children practiced oral hygiene with a standard “Toothbrush Drill,” popular at New York public schools. Pretty sure these kids didn’t have gingivitis.

Good oral hygiene was also important for these young women during singing class at Jewish People’s School in Otwock, Poland in the 1920s. Note that every single one wore her hair bobbed.

If those girls played their cards right, they might end up with nice Jewish boys, like the ones below at Yeshiva College in NYC, where students were able to “harmoniously combine the best of modern culture with the learning and the spirit of Torah.”

Today let’s pause and be grateful that we have the freedom to worship in our country without being persecuted.

giphy.com

 

 

When The Substitute Is Wearing White Diamonds

The Dust Bowl by Duncan & Burns

If you’ve frequented this blog, you know I loooooooathe White Diamonds. Having endured the presence of not one, but two Boomer women in my life who sported the scent, I can honestly say that it makes my stomach churn. Colognes are so subjective. In any event, these poor kids wish they were breathing the scent of rank perfume. Instead, they were stuck in an Oklahoma one-room school smack dab in the middle of the Depression, covering their mouths against the dust that had permeated the air and suffocated cattle. Dust pneumonia, aka the brown plague, proved lethal for children and the elderly. Makes the cedar pollen plumes of smoke in my home state seem tame.

Photo by Bert Garai/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Take A Seat (Literally)

Nat Geo Dec ’85

Back in 1985, the ill-equipped school system of Managua (Nicaragua’s capital) couldn’t provide desks for each student. In order to make sure she always had a seat, this young student carried her desk to school and back from the barrio she lived in.

Lest you think this is a thing of the past, a 2012 article reported on Central China’s  Macheng City in Hubei province, where the elementary schools had 2000 desks for 5000 students. In some cases, grandparents helped bear the burden.

https://www.chinasmack.com/chinese-schoolchildren-must-bring-their-own-desks-to-school

Fortunate families strapped them to the backs of scooters. I guess the police don’t fine you for that.

Makes a simple classroom chore seem like nothing.

Michael H/Getty Images

Masochists In The Midst

Ralph Kestly

Setting: First day of school, fall 1939, at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras.

Plot: Same old song and dance. Upperclassmen defile face of newbie frosh. Onlookers smile. Well-dressed people spank each other with paddles.

Y’all, I just don’t get it. I don’t get hazing. I didn’t do the Greek scene. I would never have allowed myself to be humiliated like that. But golly, it’s in every single one of my yearbooks. The tradition continues!

People have always been cruel, since the first brothers to exist, Cain and Abel, became murderer and murderee. Honestly, murderee rolls off the tongue better than victim. Why don’t we say that instead? Anyhoo, the point is that violence always has been and always will be, and praying for world peace (which Andie McDowell’s foolish character did in Scrooged) is like trying to boil the ocean, as they say.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jmZRORDUM0

Fun fact to temper bitterness: That looming tower is the FDR Tower, which contains a carillon of 25 bells. What’s a carillon? A set of bells.

The tower still stands today (unless Dorian takes it out).

It commemorates then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt, and will remain named after him until future generations decide they don’t agree with something he did–at which point, it will either be renamed in honor of a more PC and palatable figure–or toppled altogether in the name of retribution.

 

I Was Espresso When Espresso Wasn’t Cool

National Geographic Society

Granted, the fellow on the left looks 57, but apparently, he and his buddy were both Roman university students, sipping caffe espressos made from Brazilian beans between classes way back in 1937. Each student’s neckerchief bears colors denoting his course. Would you get a new neckerchief each time you changed majors?

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