School Days, Well Spent

Photo: Candor Visuals

At McCollum Elementary School in west Wichita, Mr. Haynes, the other sixth-grade teacher, set up the television in his room for both classes to watch a few World Series games that October 1963.

This was done with my teacher Mrs. Johnston, near retirement, likely eager for an afternoon off curricularly. The dear woman let us store transistor radios in our school desks and pull them out periodically (and during recess) to check the game’s progress. Though the next month that year would pitch the nation a political cataclysm, that our nation – even its schools, especially its young – could pass time together watching a game where the key player repositions his cap, fidgets with the uniform, looks around the diamond, and sometimes goes behind the mound to dust his fingers before every throw – indicates how much faster we are moving through the day than we were then.

Few schools could today pull the abovementioned off – attention spans and all of that. – Mike Witherspoon