From one-room schoolhouse to…one-room schoolhouse

Published on Facebook September 8, 2020

Today was my daughter’s first day of kindergarten. A few months ago I never would have thought that this auspicious day would take place at home, in our living room. Or that this desk, an artifact from an educational time gone by, would be pressed back into service.

When I started kindergarten at the Cross Village schoolhouse, in 1980, these desks were in the process of being replaced to make way for something more contemporary. Kids were still learning Latin when this desk was produced (in the 1930s?). But now maple was out, and plastic was in. My mom, a young teacher, loved their charm and craftsmanship, and so she brought one home for my bedroom. I wrote my first scribbles on that surface, personalized it with stickers, and stashed valuable matchbox cars in the drawer. Another artifact, an old Underwood typewriter, sat on the desktop for a while. I pretended to be a writer.

Later the desk took up residence in my sister’s room and we made a mock schoolhouse, where I pretended to be a professor to her and her little friends. When my sister and I had grown and left the house, my parents moved the desk into the basement next to the washing machine. There it sat for about 20 years, a convenient table for laundry baskets. The basement occasionally flooded and the little desk got funky.

When I moved back home with my daughter, after a career teaching Greek & Latin, I saw that little desk and remembered how perfect it was — just the right size for little people, so functional and so beautiful. I brought it out of the basement, sanded it, stained it, and put on a coat of polyurethane. The maple gleamed with a brightness that made it seem vibrant and alive.

But it was Alice who truly brought the desk back to life. It became the locus of her activities — her drawing station, table for afternoon snacks, display for unicorn stickers. And now it’s just the right size for her iPad, with which she will communicate with her teacher. Our pandemic schoolhouse.

With its perfectly shaped seat, smooth angled desktop, and pencil groove it has been inviting little minds and grownups to imagine the possibilities of education for generations. I watch my daughter expectantly, to see what she will pretend to be. Is the little desk just a piece of furniture? Or is it alive?