Looking Back by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online

IVER E LEMENTARY WAS not a good school. They told us constantly that it was one of the best in the state, but the state was New Hampshire, and that was like calling an ant hill the highest point around because it rose up from the Sahara Desert. One fact of New Hampshire politics I learned early: we had no broad base tax. No sales or income tax because the antifederalist farmers and shoe factory workers who feared the Reds and creeping socialism acquired their political philosophy from William Loeb’s Manchester Union Leader (the paper that, on the day of Joe McCarthy’s death, ran his full page photo edged in black). We in Durham were a specially hated target, a pocket of liberals filling the minds of New Hampshire’s young with highfalutin intellectual garbage. And that was why the archaic New Hampshire legislature always cut the university budget in half, and why my family had only one car, second hand (my father taught at the university). And the Union Leader was the reason, finally, why any man who wanted to be elected governor had first to pledge himself against the sales tax, so schools were supported by local property taxes and the sweepstakes, which meant that they weren’t supported very well. So Oyster River was not a very good school.
    But in all the bleakness—the senile teacher who fell asleep at her desk; the annual memorization of Kilmer’s Trees, the punishment administered by banging guilty heads on hard oak desks—we had one fine, fancy new gimmick that followed us from fourth grade through eighth. It was a box of white cardboard folders, condensed two-page stories about dinosaurs and earthquakes and Seeing Eye dogs, with questions at the end. The folders were called Power Builders and they were leveled according to color—red, blue, yellow, orange, brown—all the way up to the dreamed-for, cheated-for purple. Power Builders came with their own answer keys, the idea being that you moved at your own rate and—we heard it a hundred times—that when you cheat, you only cheat yourself. The whole program was called SRA and there were a dozen other abbreviations, TTUM, FSU, PQB-all having to do with formulae that had reduced reading to a science. We had Listening SMI Builders too—more readers’ digested mini-modules of information, read aloud to us while we sat, poised stiffly in our chairs, trying frantically to remember the five steps (SRQPT? VWCNB? XUSLN?) to Better Listening Comprehension. A Listening Skill Test would come later to catch the mental wanderers, the doodlers, the deaf.
    I—and most of the others in the Purple group—solved the problem by tucking an answer key into my Power Builder and writing down the answers (making an occasional error for credibility) without reading the story or the questions. By sixth grade a whole group of us had been promoted to a special reading group and sent to an independent study conference unit (nothing was a room any more) where we copied answer keys, five at a time, and then told dirty jokes.
    SRA took over reading the way New Math took over arithmetic. By seventh grade there was a special Developmental Reading class. (Mental reading, we called it.) The classroom was filled with audio-visual aids, phonetics charts, reading laboratories. Once a week the teacher plugged in the speed-reading machine that projected a story on the board, one phrase at a time, faster and faster. Get a piece of dust in your eye, blink—and you were lost.
    There were no books in the Developmental Reading room—the lab. Even in English class we escaped books easily. The project of the year was to portray a famous author (one of the one hundred greatest of all time). I was Louisa May Alcott and my best friend was Robert McCloskey, the man who wrote Make Way for Ducklings. For this, we put on skits, cut out pictures from magazines and—at the end of the year, dressed up. (I wore a long nightgown with my hair in a bun and got A-plus; my friend came as a duck.) I have never