Classroom Discoveries

Permanent Record got its start with a set of old vocational school report cards. Now I've gotten involved with another set of school-related artifacts.

The photos you see above are from the Instagram feed of Miriam Sicherman, a fourth grade teacher at the Children’s Workshop School in New York City. The artifacts shown in the photos — old coins, 1940s candy wrappers, tickets stubs from a theater that used to be next door to the school, a 1920s baseball card, a 1940s student assignment, and a lot more — were all excavated by her students from a gap in the floorboards of her classroom's closet. One of the students, a 10-year-old named Bobby Scotto, noticed that gap a few months ago, reached in, and began pulling out interesting finds. Soon the whole class was joining in, and Sicherman turned it into a way for the kids to learn about archaeology.

It's a great story, and I had fun writing about it in a recent New York Times article. Check it out here.

Meanwhile, as long as we're talking about schools: There was a great find a few days ago in Oklahoma City, where contractors renovating a high school removed some chalkboards from a classroom wall and found an older blackboard with lessons that had been written in 1917 and were still perfectly legible and intact, including this Thanksgiving scene:

Here's a video with further details (if the video isn't embedding properly, and/or if you want additional info, look here):

(Big thanks to reader Paul Deaver for letting me know about the Oklahoma City story.)

Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York; click to enlarge

A report card full of good grades is a nice thing for a student to receive. But how about a certificate affirming that the student was "A Good Boy" or "A Good Girl"?

I'd never heard of that until I saw the two cards shown above, both of which date back to the late 1800s and are now in the ephemera collection of the Museum of the City of New York. They're among several school-related items that were recently featured in an article on the museum's site, which should be of interest to anyone who's been following Permanent Record.

Perhaps the award cards were sort of like an early version of getting a gold star from the teacher. It's interesting to see that the cards were issued by the Department of Public Instruction -- apparently an early name for the Department of Education. The latter, more familiar name appears on this 1913 report card, which was also featured in the museum's article:

Note the little comment at the bottom: "An excellent boy." That's presumably even better than being a good boy, right?

(Special thanks to Carrie Klein and Kirsten Hively for bringing the MCNY article to my attention, and to MCNY archivist/blogger Lindsay Turley, who graciously provided high-res scans of the items featured in this post.)

Click images to enlarge

Reader Jared Wieseler recently found and scanned some school records pertaining to his grandmother, Laurentia Keiser, who grew up in Nebraska. What you see above are the inner and outer panels of her sixth grade report card from 1932.

Lots of interesting details here, beginning with the near-perfect handwriting of Laurentia's teacher, Edith Billerbeck. What was it about 20th century schoolteachers that gave them such perfect penmanship? Like, were they hired strictly on that basis or something? And do today's teachers still have great handwriting, or has that gone to hell in the computerized era?

Other items of note:

• It's also interesting that a report was sent to Laurentia's parents every month (when I went to school in the 1970s, it was quarterly).

• Laurentia's father, Stephen Keiser, must have had a strong preference for pencils over pens: He used a pencil every time he signed the report card. (Or maybe he simply couldn't afford pens -- this was during the Great Depression, after all, and inexpensive ballpoint pens wouldn't come into common use until the mid-1940s.)

• Too bad Ms. Billerbeck didn't fill out the graph on the back of the card. That would have made for a great visual.

• Laurentia didn't study arithmetic; she studied mental arithmetic. I love that.

• I don't think I've ever seen orthography listed on a report card before. In academic terms, orthography covers a wide range of subject matter; given the other topics already listed on Laurentia's card, however, I believe it referred simply to spelling. Anyone out there know more?

Here are the front and back of a card from two years later, when Laurentia was in the eighth grade (you can click to see a larger version):

Laurentia still had the same teacher, so it must have been a very small school. Good to see Mr. Keiser was sticking to his pencils, too. But what I really love about this card is the little "If You Wish to Succeed in Life" tutorial. Interesting that the very first attribute they chose to stress was caution.

Laurentia eventually graduated from the eighth grade, at which point she was given diploma, which was produced in its own little folder (again, you can click to enlarge):

I especially like the seal at the top, with the books on the left, the stagecoach on the right, and the wreath of wheatstalks sprouting from an ear of corn. The seal at lower left complete with two different colored ribbons, is a nice touch as well.

Jared -- Laurentia's grandson -- says there's lots more where this came from. "I also have an eighth grade diploma for Laurentia's sister, Teresa, that seems to be actual felt affixed to cardstock, wrapped in gold fabric that's sort of like the lining of a suit jacket," he says. "It has an added matching ribbon tied around the diploma."

Sounds amazing. Jared, if you're willing to share, let's see more!

The report card shown above (it's the same card -- the two images show the outer and inner panels) isn't from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls. It's from P.S. 69 in the Bronx, which is where Peter Wunsch attended school while growing up in the 1950s. He had saved his report cards and was kind enough to scan this one and send the scans to me.

This document is more in line with what most of us think of when we hear the term "report card." It was sent home for the student's parents to review and sign. The Manhattan Trade student files, although I frequently refer to them as report cards, are actually the students' permanent records, and are filled with much more information than a standard report card. Still, conventional report cards like Peter's have something that the permanent records do not: a parent's signature. It may not seem like much, but sometimes something as simple as signature can be something to cling to, a cherished reminder of a loved one who's passed away.

"The reason I sent you this particular report card is it's one of the few in which I received a good grade in conduct," says Peter. He also sent along his second grade class portrait (that's him in the back row):


Click to enlarge
Peter had some interesting commentary on this photo:

The teacher, Ms. Friedlander, wearing pearls, hosted a really early Sunday-morning AM radio show that we all listened to regularly.

The chubby boy on my left, Alan Friedlander (no relation), worked in the World Trade Center and was one of the 9/11 victims. There was a campaign earlier in the year to re-name P.S. 69, and Alan’s name was one of the nominees. I believe the entire naming is stuck in NYC bureaucracy. …

I notice in looking back that the then-middle class neighborhood was almost entire white. I always thought of myself as the outsider because I was the only Jewish person in the class. I never thought about how Cathy (Korean adoptee) or Mercedes (the tall Hispanic girl) must have felt.

I recently went back and toured the area. My father’s candy store is now a dental clinic and both the synagogue I attended and the movie theater are both Hispanic churches.

Unfortunately, I haven't saved any of my old report cards. Have you saved any of yours? If so, and if you're willing to share them, please send them my way and I'll feature them in a future installment of Permanent Record.

A few posts ago I featured the odd-seeming Non-Fraternity Membership Statement that was included in the student records I found at the old Cass Tech building, an abandoned school in Detroit (the photo shown above is what Cass looked like when two friends and I explored it last summer; most of it has since been torn down). Two readers have helped shed a bit of light on this.

First, Erik Shmukler found the original 1929 Michigan law that served as the basis for the anti-fraternity statement, along with a 1930 court case that affirmed its constitutionality. Here's his summary of his findings:

The brief synopsis of the reasoning behind the law is that these organizations [i.e., fraternities and such] were considered disruptive to the educational atmosphere of public schools. I was hoping for some amazingly worded stuff that referenced some kind of sensational crime wave perpetrated by marauding gangs of high school frat boys, but alas, I can't find anything other than what seems to be a bunch of adults concerned that kids wouldn't pay attention in school.

It seems that the biggest change since 1929 is that the onus is now on the school officials to make sure there are no secret organizations, as opposed to penalizing kids for joining them. I'm trying to connect the dots between 1929 and the present day in terms of changing the focus from kids to the adults, but I'm having trouble filling that in.

Interesting. You can see the original law and excerpts from the court case -- all of which Erik copied and pasted from Lexis-Nexis -- here.

In addition, Chris Powers turned up a 1956 issue of the National Association of Secondary School Principals Bulletin that includes a 12-page article about secret societies in public schools. Unfortunately, the article costs $25 to view -- too steep for me. But if anyone out there feels the urge, let us know what you find.

Big thanks to Erik and Chris for their contributions -- much appreciated.

I didn't set out to become a report card collector, specializing in student records from old vocational schools, but that's what's happened. In addition to the 395 Depression-era files from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, I also stumbled across a small stash of 1950s report cards from Cass Tech, a vocational school in Detroit. (I'll explain how I found the Cass Tech files -- and will give further info on how I found the Manhattan Trade cards -- in the Slate series next month.)

By and large, the Cass Tech files aren't as interesting as the ones from Manhattan Trade -- with one exception. Each Cass Tech student record includes a "Non-Fraternity Membership Statement" like the one shown above (here's a larger view, so you can read it). It cites a 1929 state law that prohibits

any organization [in the public schools] whose active membership is composed wholly of chiefly of pupils in the public schools of this state and perpetuating itself by taking in additional members from the pupils in the public schools on the basis of the decision of its membership rather than upon the right of any pupil who is qualified by the rules of the school to be a member of and take part in any class or group exercises…

In short: Don't join a private club that excludes other kids. But if such groups were already banned, why was it necessary to make the students -- and their parents! -- sign a promise not to join them? And why was the ban enacted in the first place? Was it just to ensure that all kids would have equal access to school activities, or was there something larger at work? (If the law had been enacted in, say, 1952, it would be easy to view it as an outgrowth of McCarthyism. But it was enacted back in 1929, which doesn't seem like a particularly anti-secret society period.)

I've spoken to one Cass Tech student from this period (not the one whose signed form is shown at the top of this entry), and he had no memory of any of this. I've also tried Googling the statute in question -- the Public Acts of Michigan of 1929, Section 7664 -- to see if I could glean any legislative history, but I came up empty.

If anyone from Michigan knows more about this, I'm all ears.