I started to school in the first grade at a one room country school. It was named Mt. View Dist. #61. It was so named because it sat on a tall hill. Country schools never had Kindergarten class at that time. My daddy went to school at the very same location in a different school building called Florence. The Florence school building burned down and a new structure was built and renamed Mt. View. School always started on the first Monday of September no matter what the date was.
When school started, we immediately started off with penmanship, and cursive writing. Printing was secondary. I am still not the best printer, but better than most my age. Emphasis was placed on making letters that looked exactly like the ones in our Penmanship book and like the header that was on our long blackboard that stretched from one end of the back wall to the other. Our teacher sat at his desk on the podium just in front of the blackboard. A recitation bench sat to the front side of the teacher's desk. We sat there when our class was in session. When the other 7 classes recited, we sat at our desks and studied.
We learned a lot from the other classes from just listening to them. Penmanship was early in the morning after we recited the Flag Salute and Lord's Prayer. Penmanship consisted of copying as exact as we could, the letters that were in our penmanship book and black board. Sometimes we had broken letter guide lines. We practiced writing the letters of the alphabet in our Big Chief Tablets. It became very boring after writing the letters over and over after a while. I had a flair for art and did not like the way some of the Capital letters were shaped, especially the F's, I's, L's and T's. I did it their way until I wrote on my own.
We also practiced our push and pulls and Ovals on our lined tablets. Mr. Yarnell would walk by often to see if we were using our wrists correctly, flat and not resting on the paper. That made it much harder, but taught better control. He was very particular as to the slant of our work. He always made nice comments on my letter slants. Each push and pull was started off with a tail. I still cannot see any reasoning for the tail, even today. The push/pulls and Ovals could be any size, but they were expected to be consistent. The broad lined paper was a good guide line. I always admired Mr. Yarnell's handwriting and tried hard to mimic his style of writing. Today, I write very much like he did back then.