{"id":3966,"date":"2012-01-03T11:45:07","date_gmt":"2012-01-03T16:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/?p=3966"},"modified":"2012-01-03T11:58:24","modified_gmt":"2012-01-03T16:58:24","slug":"an-important-day-in-my-public-school-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/?p=3966","title":{"rendered":"An important day in [my] public school education."},"content":{"rendered":"

It was December 1961<\/strong>.\u00a0\u00a0 Mrs. Wales<\/span> was my second grade teacher at Kelton Elementary school – she was universally considered to be a battleaxe spinster – but also the teacher you remember when you are older as one of the most important persons in your youth.\u00a0 She was approaching retirement and “old school” – back when you actually expected your students to learn things, and not worry about their “Self esteem”.<\/p>\n

President Kennedy has just launched the race to the moon<\/strong> six months earlier.\u00a0 Mrs Wales viewed our education as much more than practicing our McRuffy cursive writing and learning our numbers – we needed to get our minds around math and science to prepare us for the world we were about to join..<\/p>\n

The focus of much of what we did was creating scrapbooks<\/strong> about the things we were learning about – construction paper with crayon drawings with stars and glue and stickers of things we were learning about.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At the end of the portion of the year, the books were bound together and sent home to our parents to admire and provide permanent memories for us.<\/p>\n

One of the scrap books was a book about the moon, sun and all the nine planets and the mlky way<\/strong> and the rocket ships we were going to help build to get us to the moon.\u00a0 None of us 2nd graders believed going to the moon was possible, at least not in our lives – let alone by 1969.<\/p>\n

Another important scrap book was the dinosaurs<\/strong>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We learned about the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the Brontosaurus [which turned out to be a classification mistake], the triceratops, the stegosaurus… \u00a0\u00a0 Pittsburgh is the home of the Carnegie Musuem of Natural history<\/a>, one of the best in the world. \u00a0 The Dinosaur room<\/a> made it clear that this huge creatures that lived up until 66 million years ago were not just something in Fred Flinstone’s cartoons.<\/p>\n

Back to the story…\u00a0\u00a0 Mrs Wales got our attention and announced she had something important we all needed to know.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “There is no Santa Claus<\/strong><\/span>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a story that your parents have told you, and there may have been a man who lived a long time ago in another part of the world, but the jolly old man in the red suit with the reindeer who gives presents at Christmas is just your parents.”<\/p>\n

I was shocked.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We cried.\u00a0 I didn’t believe her.\u00a0\u00a0 Other classmates eventually volunteered they already knew this, and in fairly quick order it all made sense and that was that.<\/p>\n

Then another of the brighter students, one that was really troubled by this news asked….\u00a0 “Does this mean Jesus is just a story that our parents made up, too?<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

If you’ve had kids (which I have not and the prospects look likely that will change)…\u00a0 how did you handle this situation?\u00a0\u00a0 When did you (or your kids) find out about Santa Claus?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 With the story of the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, how did you convince your children that the story of Jesus is different?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What do you think about parents telling their children from the beginning that Santa Claus doesn’t exist?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was December 1961.\u00a0\u00a0 Mrs. Wales was my second grade teacher at Kelton Elementary school – she was universally considered to be a battleaxe spinster – but also the teacher you remember when you are older as one of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-politics","category-collapse-of-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3966"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3968,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3966\/revisions\/3968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}