Shade Tree Wisdom 8/24/07

This morning on my walk I met a school bus, empty, just cruising slowly along.
I suppose checking a route, or a new driver, or just using tax payers' funds to see if the bus ran OK. After all, the Conroe ISD equipped every bus with machinery that will cause less harmful emissions.

But it did remind me that schools across the land are opening.

School days, school days,
Dear old golden rule days,
Readin’ and writin’ and ‘rithmatic,
Taught to the tune of a hickory stick.
You were my queen in calico,
I was your tongue-tied bashful beau,
You wrote on my slate, ‘I love you, Joe’,
When we were a couple of kids.

And I wondered, do children still memorize? And have a time on Friday afternoon for reciting to the class? Girls used to recite love poems, boys choose such things as The Charge of the Light Brigade.

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do or die,
Into the valley of death,
Rode the six hundred.

And I believe everyone was asked to learn the 16 lines of Sir Walter Scott’s Innominatus;

Breathes there a man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself has said,
This is my own, my native land
Whose heart has ne’er within him burned,
As Home his footsteps he has turned,
From wandering on a foreign strand..

And of courser, there was also the class jokester who recited such lines as this:

Methuselah ate what he found on his plate,
And never, as people do now,
Did he note the amount of the calorie count,
He ate it because it was chow.

And when the class a settled back down Miss Kuehner said, quietly, “Hal, that isn’t quite what I had in mind.”

Do schools still do that? Ask children to memorize? We, and I was greatly blessed in this, had religion also, and so added memory work of Bible verses and sections. Yes, I can still recite some of them in the language I learned them in. Can you?

How blessed we are to have this Word in the heart to direct, guide, and bring us God’s peace in Christ.

GPD 8/24/07