I Love to Learn

Last week I wrote about the work ethic I began learning in 3rd and 4th grade. This week I want to tell you about the educational part of my life at that age. My teacher for both grades was Miss Moore. She was an excellent teacher who had taught for many, many years. (I heard people call her an old maid, but I didn't care because I liked her class.) School has always been a highlight of my life because I dearly love to learn new things, but I think these years are when that love developed.

I wanted to sit in the front of the room so that I could see everything Miss Moore wrote on the blackboard. If I couldn't read it, I asked someone to tell me because I didn't want to miss anything. What Miss Moore soon realized was that I needed glasses. My mother said that she had also noticed my needing to be very close to the TV. Naturally, my observant classmates called me "four eyes" when I sported new glasses, but again I didn't care because I could see many things that I had missed before. Unfortunately, my pug nose doesn't hold glasses up too well so my mom and teachers were always telling me, "Push your glasses up".

These were the years when my voracious appetite for books developed. I remember being so excited when our classroom library got new books. I pored through them all. Whenever mom went to town, I would beg her to drop me off at the town library so that I could check out books. Since I had read most of the books at my grade level, the librarian would tell me when a new shipment was coming in. If anyone was ever looking for me, they knew they would find me holed up somewhere devouring a good book.

As far as strictly fun activities, I had those too. When I was 8, I joined the Leib 4-H Club. I took sewing and cooking as my projects and entered things in the county fair for the first time. At age 9, my parents started spending some summer weekends at Grand Lake. We soon bought a 16-foot aluminum boat with a 50-horsepower outboard motor, and I learned to water ski. Other weekends in the summer we went to rodeos with the Edna Round-Up Club. In our turquoise shirts, white silk scarves, white cowboy hats, and golden orange white-trimmed chaps, we definitely stood out in the downtown parades and the rodeo grand entries.