A visit with the past

NAPERVILLE, Ill.

The dry-erase board propped up at the front of Renae Brooks' first-grade classroom at River Woods Elementary School listed the "school rules."

* Rule No. 1: No talking.

* Rule No. 2: No talking.

* Rule No. 3: No talking.

It might seem a bit harsh for a classroom of today, but for one day only, first-grade classrooms at River Woods were transformed into the kinds of learning environments the students' grandparents would have attended. The desks, normally grouped into tables, were arranged in neat rows. The students sitting at them, who would normally be dressed in casual clothing, were wearing their Sunday best.

This glimpse of the past was part of the students' social studies unit on differences between life "then and now."

"Our purpose is to show kids that things change," Brooks said. "Some things change; some things stay the same."

Upon returning from winter break, River Woods first-graders wrote to their grandparents, asking them to describe the schools they went to and to tell of the lives they led when they were children.

"I only remember one thing," Ivan Scroggs said of letters he exchanged with his grandparents. "My grandpa went to a one-room school."

Other grandparents told of eating lunch from tin pails and playing games such as jacks, dominoes, marbles and pick-up sticks. The first-graders tried their hand at those games after eating their lunches from pails they carried to school.

But the youngsters weren't exactly experts at the activities. Jacks, for example, turned into a contest to see who could grab the biggest number of metal trinkets before the ball bounced twice.

"I play video games," Arthur Stys said. "I play 'Lord of the Rings.' I can get to the next level."

When lunch was over, the students returned to their desks, removed their "I Can Read" binders and began their lessons like their grandparents would have.

"We're going to practice just as they did long ago," Brooks told them. "We're all going to read aloud together."

Brooks informed her students that such an approach to education is now called a "blab school," and when students were called on as individuals to spell words, she reminded them to stand beside their desks while speaking.

"I hear a voice," Brooks said. "I hope somebody doesn't have to sit in a corner."

Brooks told the students that decades ago, students who spoke out of turn, as well as any other troublemakers, were made to sit in the corner of the classroom and wear a dunce cap.

She noted, smiling, that many of the grandparents' letters mentioned the strictness of their teachers.