I wrote my first children’s book, The Last Scream, when I was eight years old. Like Mother Nature has sucked up everything-all sounds, winds, human talk and cries. The quiet makes me think I’m going to die. Not even fat water bugs that come out when you turn down the lights. The lamp on the nightstand makes the room glow, seem unreal. I must’ve fallen asleep, because when I wake, Mama Ya-Ya has her hands thrown over her head and she is sleeping deeply. The weatherman says, “Katrina is headed directly for New Orleans. If we were watching Oprah, we’d be having a good time. At the bottom of the bed, Spot is lying on his back, his belly up. I sit beside her, a pillow behind my back. By 1966, the one-room country school had become a thing of the past.I press the power button and the screen lights up, and there he is, the sweaty weather man. School districts consolidated, pooling their resources to provide more teachers, broader curriculum, and opportunity for extracurricular activities. Equipped with little more than a blackboard and a few textbooks, teachers passed on to their pupils cultural values along with a sound knowledge of the three Rs.īy the turn of the century, the population began to shift to the cities and country schools began to lose students and tax support. She had to be a nurse, janitor, musician, philosopher, peacemaker, wrangler, fire stoker, baseball player, professor, and poet for less than $50 a month. The school teacher, sometimes slightly older than her pupils, was a renaissance individual. When they arrived on their first day of school they may have only known how to speak a foreign language but they soon learned how to speak, read, spell, and write English. They got to school on foot, on horseback, or in a wagon. The children who attended ranged in age from five to 21 and endured dust storms, prairie fires, and cattle drives swirling past the school house in order to get an eighth grade education. They were called names like Prairie Flower, Buzzard Roost, and Good Intent. For a hundred years, white frame or native stone one-room schoolhouses dotted the section corners across Kansas.
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