Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Our Last Days

1971; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/45224239

1554-9631

Marshall R. Craig,

My early school years, until I was in the seventh grade, in fact, were spent in a two-room school.The school was in southern Arkansas, three miles from the nearest town, El Dorado -El Dorader, we called it -City of Liquid Gold.The school sat high off the ground on cement blocks (Mr. Brownfield's hogs appreciated the space under it) in the middle of what had once been Old Man Pratt's farm but was then a thriving oil field.When I started there, Pratt School was overcrowded (the school board had not anticipated the oil boom), and the first and second-graders sat on benches around the wall.There under a series of young women, each in her first year out of "normal" training, I learned reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and science, and there I would have learned poker if the teacher hadn't taken the cards away from the boy who sat next to me on the second-grade bench.He had just dealt the cards and was going to tell me the rules, when he forgot himself and yelled, "Hey, you've got too many cards."The teacher interrupted the fifth-grade boy who was reading "Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham," and took the cards away.