Our Number One (first born) grandchild started school a few days ago — third grade already!
We’ve been fortunate to attend “grandparents day” at her school the past couple of years and I was thinking the other day about sitting in her classroom and looking around — how classrooms have changed since I went to school.
Of course we had wooden desks with inkwells arranged in rows with the teacher’s desk up front, but lots of other physical changes (besides the seating) to her classroom environment struck me as well. There aren’t any more chalkboards (we used to call them blackboards) — now some have “whiteboards,” but a lot have “smart boards” where both humans and computers can write/draw on them. We used to always have a world globe in our classroom… of course that was before Google Maps — and — countries used to keep the same name, sometimes for years. We also had pull down maps (like a window shade) usually mounted above the chalkboard. And to sharpen our pencils, every room had a pencil sharpener — mounted on the wall and you had to crank it by hand.
Times have changed…. Emily probably wouldn’t recognize half the things in our classrooms — and — to be honest, I don’t recognize a lot of things in her room.
Good Luck in third grade. Em.
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