“First, children must want to read,” Miss Anna F. Magill would tell the teachers who came from all over the United States to learn her methods. “And second, they must have something worth reading.” She’d taught longer than any other teacher in any other school in New York City and always at P.S. 166 on Eighty-Ninth between Amsterdam and Columbus. She was the author of nine Anna F. Magill Readers and three Anna F. Magill teaching manuals, published by Ginn and Company of Boston and year after year, she terrified the first grade students in the school. She terrified their parents, too. She even terrified the principal. Or maybe it was awe.
She was in her sixties by the fall of 1938, gray-haired and stocky with thick, somewhat bowed legs and wobbly knees. She wore low-heeled black shoes with shoelaces and alternated among three different flannel dresses, one red, one blue, one purple. All three had a matching tie that went around the waist and all three had most of the color washed out. People washed by hand on scrubbing boards in those days, using brown cakes of Kirkman’s Borax soap—a nickel a bar, six for a quarter--strong stuff, made in Brooklyn; it washed out dirt, killed germs, cured poison ivy, and used right, stopped kids from speaking disrespectfully.
There were forty kids in our class, five rows of desks with fold down seats, eight desks per row, each with a circular hole in the upper right corner for an inkwell and a storage place underneath for books. It was the middle of the Depression and life on the street was precarious, but not more so than in Miss Magill’s classroom. The smartest and best-behaved sat in the first seat, first row, the slowest and least well behaved in the last seat, last row. No seat was permanent; you could be promoted right and forward or demoted left and rearward at any moment of any day.
There was no art, no music, no career education, no computers, pens or pencils. Miss Magill ran a boot camp for readers. Each day, she stood you up, taught you the letters, how to pronounce them, how to pronounce combinations of them, how to turn the combinations into words. When she was finished, she sat you down. Six months of that, and of studying her textbook, and every kid in our class—first seat, first row to last seat, last row had learned how to read.
Teachers were allowed to hit kids back then. Miss Magill never that, but if you misbehaved, or declined to learn, she transfixed you with a furious glare, and came striding across the classroom toward you, rocking side to side on her wobbly knees, her two hands spread wide, picking up speed as she came. She stopped one step in front of you and smote her palms together like the percussionist in the Philharmonic clashing cymbals at the climax of Tchaikovsky’s 1812. The pop of her palms an inch from your nose scared those who saw it as much as those it happened to.
My mother told me there were kids in my class who threw up their breakfasts on the way to school each morning, but Miss Magill never scared me. The rules of engagement were clear. Do what she said, and she stamped little red stars onto the pages of the two by three inch notebook we each had to carry. She used a red-inked stamping pad and a sturdy rubber-stamp with a handle. Five red stars and she pasted a raised blue star in your notebook; five blues got you a raised silver star; five silvers a raised gold.
One Sunday, before I had learned to read, my father took us to a seafood restaurant on Third Avenue and we all got sick. I had nightmares, threw up, had to stay home from school on Monday and spent the day studying my Magill Reader. Around two in the afternoon, I turned to a Robert Louis Stevenson poem, and suddenly I could read.
When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.
My holes were empty like a cup,
In every hole the sea came up,
Till it could come no more.
It was the “g” that had been giving me trouble. Once I understood the different ways to read a “g,” all the doors opened and I ran through the whole book. It was full of Stevenson and Mother Goose and next day in class when it came my turn to read I whipped through “Hickory Dickory Dock,” Little Boy Blue,” and “Where Go The Boats.” Nothing to it! Bring on the Bible! Bring on The New York Times!
I got four hundred thirty five red stars that month and Miss Magill gave me a Platt and Munk book called “Children of Foreign Lands” as a prize. “For Excellent Effort,” she wrote on the blank page after the cover—the only prize I ever won in over twenty-one years of education in different schools, universities and the U.S. Army. I still have the book in my library. The pages are stuck together from the basements I’ve lived in over the years, but I can still open to that blank page after the cover. It’s signed Anna F. Magill, November 1938, in Miss Magill’s perfect Palmer Method handwriting.
To be continued
Herb L.
oldtimewriter.com
