Some 1965-66 Nova Elementary School Memories, Part 3

As I continue on with memories of my fourth grade experiences at Nova Elementary (in Davie, Florida) in 1965-66, I'll present the rest of them anecdotally, in no particular order of chronology or importance...

--My first physical education class at Nova was unforgettable...most likely because it was one of my first classes there with a teacher actually teaching something.  My teacher/coach was Mr. Tilton, an amiable jock type who, for some reason known only to himself, decided to take advantage of this groundbreaking event to give the class a clinic on how to punt a football.  I took his lesson to heart and am still a pretty damned good punter.  Only a couple of things, though...(1) He didn't bother to actually explain the rules of football, which in 1965 I didn't know, and (2) To this day, I have NEVER punted a football in any game on any level...

--One of our first science projects was to take seeds of a plant and grow them under different conditions and observe and record the results.  My assigned plant was given the adequate water and soil...only it was kept in darkness, in one of the lab's cabinets...and grew wildly with a sickly pale color...

--In that same lab, led by Mrs. Bethune, I went though the fifth grade textbook and performed experiments.  For much of the time I worked with Jill (who, like me, went all the way through the Nova system) as a lab partner.  We had lab report sheets we had to fill out for each experiment, with spaces for PURPOSE, MATERIALS, PROCEDURE, OBSERVATIONS, and CONCLUSIONS.  At the time, I felt that filling these sheets was tedious, to say the least, but now I realize their value, and not just for science.  When you undertake anything, you need to determine why you're doing it, what you need in order to do it, how to do it, what happened when you did it, and what are you going to do with what happened...

--At the beginning of the school day, we would meet in our respective home "bases" where students could order supplies they needed (there was a designated student who would then go down to the "bookstore" down the hallway to get them).  One item always in great demand was a box of "gummed reinforcements", those doughnut-shaped stickers we'd lick and then place on papers so that they wouldn't rip out of notebooks.  Back then they were necessary because we'd have to poke papers without holes punched into them  into binders, and the gummed reinforcements would keep them from ripping apart. But ever since the Nova Elementary School experience, I have never used a gummed reinforcement...

--The five classrooms in our Suite C were connected to each other by movable partitions, a new innovation in schools that would quickly spread throughout the school system and become a standard feature.  This way, the teachers could at times hold assemblies just by pulling back the walls.  I never could get the knack of closing them...

--Since Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School in 1965-66 was the debut of elementary education into the experimental Nova system (there was already Nova Junior and Senior High School, which my sister Anita attended), from time to time during certain school days we could look out of our classroom windows into the hallway (our school was completely enclosed in one building) and see well-dressed visitors looking in on us, apparently being on tours as part of whatever educational, business, or political groups they were associated with.  These visitors always made me feel a bit uneasy, as if I were some kind of zoo animal on exhibit...

--There was musical instruction given this year in Suite C, first for those wanting to learn how to play the recorder, and then, with the acquisition of an electric organ (with headphones) for those wishing to play that instrument.  I never did take to either of these, although I loved music and have always had a high degree of manual dexterity...

--In Nova, they were very proud of the innovation they introduced as the "LAP", an acronym for "learning activity package"...in common parlance, you and I would call it a "lesson" or "unit"...always in the form of some papers stapled together and handed out to the students by the teacher.  We would get these LAPs, which always seemed to be overly pretentious as to what exactly they were trying to say, and then be expected to just automatically take off on our own initiative in doing them.  Although LAPs were a common feature of Nova, I cannot, to this day, remember any of them, in any subject.  In my judgment, looking back more objectively on it all, they were designed to replace the teacher as the driving force in our education...in fact, it was uncommon to have classes then where teachers actually stood up in front of the class and taught lessons.  In all of my years at Nova, I cannot remember one single time when any teacher ever took it upon his or herself to sit down with me and discuss a LAP.  The burden of communication was always on the student, as if we kids automatically knew how to educate ourselves.  What folly...

Stay tuned, there are plenty more random memories of this period in my student life to come...