Sixth Grade, the County Tests, and John Woodard

Eva Arndt was my sixth grade teacher and physically she was similar to Miss Rice of my first grade experience — rather thin and perhaps a bit above average in height.

As in grades 3, 4, and 5 the students faced the blackboard on the north wall, with the windows on the left side on the west. I sat near the back in the row of desks nearest the inner wall. Adjacent to me, front of back I really don’t remember, was Lawrence Larson. He was a country boy and his father had died and his mother had remarried so be lived as a stepchild in part. From his comments I sensed that his mother’s second marriage was a comedown from her first. His father may have been a veteran of WWI and it seemed that his mother had some income from a pension, perhaps disability.

During the time I was in the elementary grade, country children were allowed an absence of two weeks each fall during corn-picking to aid in the harvest. Lawrence had to help his father in this respect, and I think he mildly resented being taken out of school. I only remember him in sixth grade, perhaps his father was a tenant farmer and was in the Gowrie district only the one year.

At the time I was in sixth grade, and actually extending into the years we were on the Peterson farm, corn-picking was in the transition from being a hand operation to a mechanical one. My Uncle Carl had had a mechanical picker (two-row mounted on his Farmall tractor) for some time before we moved to the farm and during the time we were on the farm I was exposed to manual corn-picking only the year when the wind had blown so many ears off the stalks that mechanical picking would miss too many ears. That was the year my cousin Leonard helped my uncle with corn-picking. During the years we were on the farm most of the neighboring farmers were still picking corn by hand. One winter my father picked corn for one of them and used what he earned to pay his church pledge for the year — a commitment that few people would have made.

Another memory I have of sixth grade is when Miss Arndt thought one of my English compositions was worthy of note. Whether she read it to the class or I did I can’t remember.

In sixth grade we had the first of the so-called county tests, the test in this case being in geography. I’m not sure why we took this test at that time as I not geography listed as a subject on one of my junior high report cards. These tests, administered by the county board of education, were the official criterion of whether the material in the first eight grades had been satisfactorily mastered. They were a carryover from the days of country schools when some uniform standard of achievement was in order. How long they continued to be used in the Gowrie school I don’t know but I took the full complement of them by the time I finished eight grade.

I have a few copies of these tests administered around the turn of the century (they were in some papers my Uncle Carl had saved) and I would have been hard-pressed to pass them when I was in school to say nothing of the present. I’d venture to say that few students leaving elementary grades nowadays could pass them. For all that country schools suffered from physical limitations and in teacher attention, the education provided certainly could be favorably compared to that currently given. Somewhere I heard, perhaps secondhand that my cousin Clifford who went to country school once commented that the instruction he received well equipped him to pass the county tests

An interesting case developed relative to the county tests for my classmate John Woodard. When we knew the Woodard boys (three of them) their parents had both died and their aunt, Annie Lines, who lived across the road from us when we were in the Peterson farmhouse, was providing a home for them. Actually I had known John a little when they, and we, were living in Gowrie; that was before their mother died — their father had been already dead for some time.

The house that Annie and Will, her husband, had was rather small, but the two of them, the three Woodard children, and old A.B. Woodard, the boys’ grandfather, made out in it.

John was a year older than I which meant that since he was in my grade in junior high he had been retained once to repeat a grade. John had apparently passed all the county tests and, by the rules, was certifiably in completion of the elementary grades. But Mrs. Knapp the junior high principal was of the opinion he should be kept back for a second year in eighth grade. Annie was incensed by this and proceeded to raise a fuss, the outcome of which was that John was allowed to start high school with my class.

I looked at my eight-grade report recently and the promotion, usually signed by the teacher, was in this case by direction of the Board of Education. There had been an erasure, presumable of Mrs. Knapp’s signature and the new phrase put in. Though John wasn’t a really good student he proceeded through high school all right and went to Fort Dodge Junior College at least one year, the first year I attended there. After that I think he drifted off to live with a half-sister in Michigan and I think I only saw him once more. After WWII he came driving out to California and I saw him when I was living in Berkeley. He didn’t “like” California and turner around and went back east after a brief stay.