Page 49 - 1936

Straw was an efficient teacher and knew just how much business to mix with the play.
Each afternoon, after she had put the work on the board, she would sit with the
problems beside her on her desk and watch her struggling students through all-
seeing spectacles. One after another we clever children would go up to the desk and
ask some question about our paper. During our stay at the desk we generally were
able to glance idly at the page that Miss Straw had placed there and carry back to
our seats enough information to keep us busy for some time. Surprisingly enough
our class became quite adept at fractions.
Besides fractions, we worked on books of ships which we drew ourselves and,
in the spring, we made books of pressed flowers. At Christmas, too, we all made
wreaths and tree ornaments cut from colored paper and stuck with paste from big
paste jars.
About the middle of the year big business reared its ugly head when Bill
Alexander brought hand-moulded lead soldiers to school and sold them at exorbitant
prices to his gullible classmates.
It was about this time, too, that we obtained our first pair of football pants,
and, being a tough crowd even then, we used them to great advantage. Eventually
we became so well organized that, after an undefeated season in the seventh grade,
we were given a football dinner by Bob Aldrich’s dad.
After a full and eventful year we again moved up the education ladder to the
Second Intermediate, confident of the future but just a little bit sorry to leave Miss
Straw and her sunny classroom.
Returning to Moses Brown after a far too short vacation, we were directed to our
new workshop, where our new teacher, Miss Chappell, was smilingly awaiting us. We
were beginning to like Miss Chappell, who was shorter and quicker than Miss
Straw, when, and just imagine the effect of this next on an assemblage of young
men, she informed us that our classroom had formerly been a girls’ parlor.
Miss Chappell, who taught music in the Intermediates, did her level best to
make us a group of fine singers. At assemblies, in the mornings, she carefully
sounded her pitch-pipe before she gave the signal for our discordant voices to quaver
forth. She also had a tricky arrangement made of wood and wire with which she
could make musical scales on the blackboard. I’m afraid that, standing in the end­
less aisles miles from each other, where the slightest squeak that we might make
made us feel like soloists, we did not appreciate her valiant efforts.
In this grade we became conscious of the hardest work of all our term at school
so far. Miss Chappell initiated us to "projects”! One project was a paper-bound
leaflet of lined paper into which we laboriously copied and recopied reams of inky
material concerning all the phases of "Cotton.” In the back of this book we pasted
several varieties of both cotton and cotton cloth. Another project took in all the
branches of "Lumber” and its uses. For this last project we also made a "moving
picture” consisting of large sketches of the lumber industry, drawn by the members
of the class, joined to make a film. The film was rolled on two wooden reels in an
open box. When one reel was turned, the audience could see the entire process

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