School, bobwar and French class

In a group discussion last week George said he got milk in bags at his school.

Bags of milk? It does exist in Canada. Never seen it in the US.

George said he’s still not over trying to get the straw into the bag of milk without poking through both sides. 

“Y’all had milk,” I said. “Must have been one of those private schools. We had water. Had to haul it in buckets from the creek behind the school.”

“And you had to walk to school uphill both ways,” Lisa said.

“Oh, heck no. We wished we could walk. We had to crawl under bobwar that was laid across quicksand pits,” I said.

Lisa then wondered who Bob was and why he was at war.

Bobwar = barbed wire, I explained.

“Our school was so poor, we had to ration letters of the alphabet. If we ran out before the week was over, we couldn’t spell anything except QUYXZ. So we learned to spell using as few letters as possible. That’s why I became a newspaper columnist.”

When Quinton Yuniver Xavier joined us at Immense Pain Consolidated Primary School, Penitentiary and Regional Landfill, we had to switch to learning Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese pictograms every so often.

George said his school eventually moved to cartons of milk. He said it was great fun taking them outside and stomping them. The pop was amazing.

“Y’all got to stomp them? We had to recycle them. I got one dated 1959. Dad engraved his initials BB Jan. 18, 1959, on the carton,” I said.

If there was no water in the creek, which we had to dig out every week, we didn’t get to drink. Some kids died of dehydration. Running out of water killed me a few times too.

“Coach Marquis de Sade taught us math. If anyone died from dehydration, he made us run extra laps in math class,” I said.

Tammy asked why we ran laps in math class.

“Well, how did you learn to do math?” I asked.

She said the class had math books, pencils and paper.

“Wow. Y’all were rich. We had one math book Coach de Sade kept locked in a filing cabinet. He pulled it out at the beginning of the year and said, ‘You don’t need books.’ We learned math by running laps.”

Sandy could not believe it. She asked how running laps taught us math.

“Well, Coach de Sade got Rodney to run 3 laps. Becky ran 2 laps. He asked us how many laps they ran when we added it together. When none of us could figure it out, we all had to run 5 laps.”

That was for addition. When we did subtraction, we ran laps backward.

When we got to multiplication, we had to run laps with our legs crossed. Division meant running backward with our legs crossed.

Coach de Sade was stumped for a short while on how to teach us algebra. Then, the Village People came out with their song YMCA. When we did algebra, we had to run and make the letters at the same time.

Geometry class meant running laps while making shapes. If we had to make a triangle, 2 people ran while leaning into each other and carrying a third person. That made all three sides.

Making a square was pretty hard. That was 2 people running and carrying one person on their shoulders and another in their hands. We never did get to more advanced shapes like the cosine of a polynominaldecaquadron, or whatever it was.

We tried. A bunch of kids went to the hospital with bruised hair, dislocated ear joints and torn eyelashes. Some parents got upset so the School Board voted to discontinue geometry.

They replaced it with a foreign language. French. Because, of course, a bunch of farm boys from Southwest Georgia needed to learn French in case France ever invaded so they could surrender again, or we decided to move to France to start farming omelette du fromage over there. Why should we learn Spanish so we could more effectively miscommunicate with the Hispanics that just started moving in?

To this day, I can still speak French. Try this with me. “Je Ne Sais Pa Francois.” Pronounce it however you like. It means, “I have no idea what you are trying to tell me because I don’t speak French.”