For my final blog post, I decided to interview my grandma, Lavonne Morrison. She was born in Zanesville, Ohio in November of 1939. She grew up right outside of Zanesville in a little collection of houses referred to as Stringtown with her mom, dad, two sisters, and baby brother. Grandma says some of her first memories are of her mother, watching her hustle and bustle around the kitchen. Great-grandma was an amazing cook and baker and people would come from all over to buy her pies every season. They had a small orchard tree farm and one of grandma’s first chores as a child was to help gather the fruit from the orchard with her brothers and sisters every season. After the pies were made and sold, great-grandma would can the fruit and make jams and jellies to give away as gifts. When asked about factors such as the Great Depression and WWII and how those events affected her family, she claims that they didn’t really because her parents were so resourceful. There was never a time when she and her siblings had to go without food or proper attire. According to grandma, the only hardship she faced as a child was having to use the outhouse in the middle of winter until she was about 10 years old because her dad believed it was unsanitary to build a bathroom in the house. Her mom, who was very pregnant at the time, won the battle by forcing her dad to follow her to the outhouse every time she needed to use it. Including in the middle of the night.
Gram talks a lot about the holidays when she was a child. Especially Christmas. In early December, some of her family would drive in from out of state and stay through the new year. She and her cousins would spend the weeks up until Christmas finding ways to earn money so they could buy and make gifts for their parents and one another. She says they would shovel snow, shine shoes, recycle bottles, whatever it took to make some money. And then, a few days before Christmas the whole family would pile into the car and head to town to Christmas shop.
She also talks about Christmas cards and how big of a deal they were back then. Especially to her mom who handmade all of her cards. Great-grandma’s whole family lived out of state and long-distance phone calls were expensive. So, correspondence through the mail was how she communicated with her family and she took great pride in decorating the Christmas cards she sent to them. Great-grandma and her sister would spend weeks sketching, painting, and detailing beautiful winter scenes on parchment paper before filling them out and sending them to friends and family. The kids weren’t allowed in the kitchen when they were working on Christmas cards but every once in a while, they would let Gram sneak in and quietly watch them work at the table.
When talking about her childhood, Gram also likes to bring up Green Stamps and the year they went without a radio…
Allow me to elaborate.
S&H Green Stamps was a program that ran from the 1930s until the 1980s. Essentially, how it worked was after you made a purchase from a store, you were issued a certain allotment of stamps depending on the amount of your purchase. The stamps were basically currency that you used to order items from a catalog that was issued by the S&H company. The catalog contained EVERYTHING from housewares to horseshoes. Items like a radio or a nice set of drinking glasses were considered somewhat of an expense back then, so it made more sense to save up for them using Green Stamps.
Speaking of radios, let me get back to my point. Gram absolutely loved the radio when she was young. Her dad didn’t buy a television until she was around 10 or so (about the same time he built the indoor bathroom) so she spent lots of time listening to shows and music on the radio. She says that one day after school, while she and her sister were lying on the floor listening to a program, her ginger tabby cat Tommy ran across the table the radio was sitting on and knocked it over and broke it. And while they weren’t poor, her dad didn’t have the money to just go buy a new one. So, after months and months of no radio, her mom told her that they could save up their stamps and order a new one from the S&H catalog. The only problem was that Gram’s parents didn’t go to town very often on account of how resourceful they were in growing their own food, so stamps were hard to come by. Finally, Gram and her sister got so desperate they started writing family members, including their out of state aunt, asking for unwanted stamps. Christmas was coming and they were bummed out about not being able to listen to holiday music during the season. Eventually, an elderly friend of great-grandma’s caught wind of what the girls were doing and gave them a whole stack of stamp filled booklets that she’d been saving. Gram said that there were more than enough stamps to order the radio and that when they tried to return the leftover stamps to the friend, she insisted that they keep them. So, Gram and her sister combined all the stamps they had collected while saving up for the radio with the leftover stamps they were given and ordered a brand new set of matching dishes from the catalog and gave them to their mom for Christmas. Great-grandma had been wanting new dishes for years before that and was elated on Christmas morning when she opened her gift.
Learning to recognize and confront conscious and unconscious bias in myself and in my classroom is what has left a lasting impact on me after taking this course. What stuck with me is that no matter how tolerant or diverse a person may seem; EVERYONE harbors unconscious biases. Even the most dedicated and well-meaning teacher holds stereotypes and beliefs that affect their students. These biases and preferences can influence students’ interactions with peers in the classroom as well as educators’ selection of books, materials, and other classroom resources. What we are about in education is preparing children for the future; giving them what they need to be successful. We need to give children a critical perspective and appropriate tools. In order to do so, we have to confront our own personal biases to ensure that our students are received an enrichingly diverse education.
