Elementary School Books

At St. Vincent de Paul elementary school in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, and later at Immaculate Conception in Tucson, and still later at St. Mary's elementary in Chandler (my family moved a lot), we spent the last couple of days of the school year erasing our pencil marks and repairing the pages of our textbooks with transparent tape. Then we spent the first day of the next school year making book covers from brown paper bags for the erased and repaired books given to us by the class we'd moved up into. Those books I used in the forties, recycled from year to year, sometimes had copyright dates from the twenties. For English we wouldn't have been reading anything more recent than "In Flanders Fields" anyway, and arithmetic didn't change that much from year to year before the New Math and other teaching fads. Even geography's changes could be easily dealt with by coloring everything from mid-Germany to China red. Those schools were run on a shoestring and taught by nuns who were essentially doing missionary work, whether they had taken vows of poverty or not. But we learned stuff.