Metcalf, Margaret

              ORAL HISTORY OF MARGARET METCALF
Interviewer Unknown
September 2001

	 
[Note: This was a cassette tape from the Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association dated September 2001.  It is unknown who the interviewer is or where this took place.]

Ms. Metcalf: When I began teaching in Ohio, you only had to go to school two years. At that time, you would receive a certificate. The year I got my certificate, they passed a law that said from then on everybody had to have a degree. A lot of us spent our summers going back to school to finish up the extra two years. It was during the war. 
	One summer, a friend of mine was having a baby. She could not find anyone to help her and so she asked me if I would help her instead of going to school. I did. The next year, I went back to finish my degree. That was the year that Dr. B [Blankenship] came to our campus-recruiting teachers for Oak Ridge. He called me from the placement office and asked me if I would be interested in going to talk with him. I said I would. He said it was in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which I had never heard of. I was on my way up to this interview and I thought, “Why did I ever say I would do this? Down in the mountains, it was probably some mission school. I don’t want to go there.” I was on my way and I did say I would meet him, and so I did.
	Soon as he began to talk about the place, I realized that it was something that I very much wanted to do. Since I was getting my degree, I stayed home until commencement was over; I arrived in Oak Ridge a week later than all the other teachers and started to work at workshop. 
Interviewer: What year was this Margaret?
Ms. Metcalf: This was 1944. I had never heard of workshop. All of the teachers, at that time, spent two weeks before school began. They worked on plans for the year and what they were going to do. 
	I came down and I had never been very far away from home before. I was on the train from Cincinnati. They started calling out towns like Winchester. I realized that was in Virginia, so I thought, “Oh dear, am I on the wrong train? Where am I going?” We finally got to Knoxville at about three o’clock in the morning. I was so sleepy that I curled up on a bench in the ladies lounge at the L&N Station. I slept a while. Then I got up and I don’t know how I knew I had to get the bus, but somehow I knew. I asked the way to the bus station and they told me. If you have ever walked down Gay Street at six o’clock on Sunday Morning, all I could think about was this man who had written about what a terrible place Knoxville was. (Laughter) He was certainly right. I went to the bus station, and I got a ticket for Oak Ridge. The bus station was an experience. Finally, I found that you had to go down the stairs to get to the buses. There were all these signs for the buses for places other than Oak Ridge. I stood there and stood there. There was an army school bus looking-sort-of-thing. It kept pulling out people and people would get on and leave.  This kept happening and finally I said, “Are you going to Oak Ridge?” And of course they were.
	I was still sleepy so I never did understand how we got thorough Knoxville to Oak Ridge.  We came out to Elza Gate. A guard got on the bus. Everyone needed a pass. I did not have one, so I had to get off and go to a little building that was there. Then I went in and they said, “You are late. You were supposed to be here last week.”  He gave me a pass and I went on the the bus station down in Oak Ridge. Then I had to find out how to get to the Superintendent’s office. They directed me up the hill to what was the old high school, which was the Superintendent’s office too. I got up there and I knew this building did not look like a high school. I saw all these doors and windows. I did not think that looked like an entrance, so I walked around the building trying to find the front door. Finally, I decided to that it must be the front door. 
	I went in and I asked the custodian, “Where is the Superintendent?” Well, of course, on Sunday morning he was not there. I am sure this was not a new experience because he went and called him right away and said, “You have a new teacher here.” Dr. B came and he took me to get a room in a dormitory. As soon as I got in that room, I went to take a real nap. 
Interviewer: Where did they put you?
Ms. Metcalf: They put me in West Village 24. They gave it another name, but I cannot seem to recall it. They were across from the Garden Apartments.  I went up the next morning to the week of workshop. Then I was assigned to Robertsville Elementary School. It was on the site of what was now Robertsville Junior High School.
Interviewer: Robertsville Middle School, today.
Ms. Metcalf: Yeah, and they kept adding on to it. They would build a wing here or a wing there. It ended up to be wings that added to wings. The room I was going to be in had not been built yet, so for two or three weeks, I worked with my class in one room and another teachers’ class in the same room. I am not sure how we got along, but some way we did. Then they told me my room was ready. We moved over there and they put in blackboards, some windows, and a place to hang coats on. After we were there, we tried to have school every day in this room. 
Interviewer: What grade was that?
Ms. Metcalf: I taught first grade. 
Interviewer: How many students did you have then? 
Ms. Metcalf: I received up to 36 students before they split and went on shifts. The shifts were quite an experience because two teachers had to share a room. They had some come early in the morning. Since I was not a morning person, I took an afternoon shift which meant I was supposed to be at work at 10 o’clock in the morning. We spent that time in preparation until noon. Some came early in the morning, but my kids came at noon. We stayed until close to five o’clock.
	There was one thing that happened down there that was just about the worst experience I ever had with children. The first day of school, they went out to get on the buses to go home. Each child had a luggage tag pinned on them that had his address. It was not a street and number, but a plot number in the trailer camps. Of course, I had no idea where they were. There must have been ten buses lined up. The children did not know where they lived. They were first graders. I didn’t know where to go. These numbers were meaningless to me.
Interviewer: I bet the bus driver didn’t know much more.
Ms. Metcalf: The bus driver did not know at first, but they had a guard. I guess I should say that there had been school a part of a year in the ’43-’44 school year. Some people knew a little more about what was going on than I did. This guard helped me. I will never forget what the teacher who said (We called the guard, “Grandpa”), “Grandpa, help this new teacher get her children on the buses.” That was my friend forever after. And stand in front of their buses. The children would find their bus driver. I heard things were hectic in the bus drivers missed a day, but I had never felt so absolutely helpless with a group of children as I did when I brought those children out that day.
Interviewer: Now Margaret, how old were you at this time?	
Ms. Metcalf: I was 27. That was one thing I got to thinking about. Some of the technical things about the school, there was a lot I didn’t know anything about. One thing is that our paychecks came from Anderson County Schools, instead of Oak Ridge Schools. Another thing I am pretty sure is that they were hiring only experienced teachers at that point. I do not remember anyone I ever knew that was a beginning teacher. I also got to thinking, how did we know what we were doing? We spent a lot of the first year writing the course of study. This finally emerged in a booklet about a couple of inches thick that was full of mimeographed pages. I also remember spending Sunday afternoon working with a committee on something for the first grade course of study. I just don’t imagine that very many teachers nowadays would approach it with the dedication we had. We were all so interested in what we were doing and wanted to do it right. It was all such an adventure. We did all kinds of things that were above and beyond the call of duty, but only we thought it was the call of duty at the time. 
Interviewer: In retrospect Margaret, how did you feel about the workshops in those early years?
Ms. Metcalf: My feeling about workshop is that I enjoyed it. It was professionally enriching. People did get tired of it. They got tired of getting up Saturday morning, but I only thought that I had been enlightened to some extent. 
Interviewer: Who conducted the workshops?
Ms. Metcalf: The teachers did. The workshops were divided into grade level groups, so that all the first grade teachers from the system were together. They had a chairman and learned to work together. They also had an interest level. This was more a group that would cover all the grades. There was a task or an assignment that the group had to consider. Building the curriculum was one of those tasks. Then, when the war was over, a lot of people were leaving and reorganizing. They were closing Robertsville as an elementary school and that’s when they turned it into a junior high. They sent me to Elm Grove. I had second grade and stayed until the spring of 1949. I then quit for a while. By the time I had gone back, I had gone to UT and gotten my library certification. I went back as a librarian and not as a teacher. 
Interviewer: Where were you a librarian at?
Ms. Metcalf: I was the librarian at Scarboro. I was there from 1963 until they closed it. They closed this school in 1967. 
Interviewer: What were some of the things you did with the Scarboro children as the librarian? 
Ms. Metcalf: The Junior Great Books were very much like the Senior Great Books, which were a selected group of books. I had training in Great Books, and we tried it. We had encouraged the best readers to try it. It was reading the books then discussing them. Then the Playhouse was doing a play of “The Christmas Carol”, and we took that group to see the play. I don’t think very many of them had been to the Playhouse production before.
Interviewer: How was your supply of books? Did you have a good supply?	
Ms. Metcalf: The book budget for Scarboro was the same as all the other schools. I have forgotten, but it was about $2 per pupil or some amount like that. You could choose. Several older books had been given to them. I had made someone real mad one time. They wanted to donate some books, and I did not think we would use them. We had a book budget like everyone else and I didn’t think we needed those at the time. She was not very happy about it, but I was not going to let her force those things on me that were not what you would choose by any sort of criteria. I didn’t think we would need them. On that aspect, Scarboro was treated as well as the other schools except due to it being a smaller school, we did receive less money to get books. It had the same amount of books per pupil.
Interviewer: Are there not collections of for examples short stories for different levels in the Great Books curriculum. Did you use those? 
Ms. Metcalf: Well, the Great Books were not geared particularly toward schools. It’s a collection that has been put together by the Great Books Foundation. I’m not really sure who they expect to use it. It’s not geared toward schools or libraries. It’s just a collection of books, anybody could read them. I don’t remember the titles, but they were classics. 
Interviewer: So we are talking whole books then?
Ms. Metcalf: They were whole books. The term “Great Books” was used in several different ways. I am not sure really how great the pupils thought it was. I can’t remember the name of the man who started them. They were sets of books for each grade level. They would read short sections and discuss them. They were used quite a bit in all the schools.
Interviewer: Were the books provided for each child? 
Ms. Metcalf: You know I don’t remember exactly how each student got one. 
Interviewer: Margaret, when you were at Robertsville, did you have problems with transient children coming and going? It seems like that would be a problem?
Ms. Metcalf: I was thinking about, in the last couple of days, some of those things. When I was at Robertsville, the children I had were mostly from the trailer camps, which meant that they were transient. Their father’s would be builders, come build whatever and move on. It meant that they were traveling. I tried to think about the first graders I had. There were new people coming in all the time, but I don’t remember so many of them leaving at that point. That first year I had first grade and at the end of the year, I held back six children. I often think about those six children, and sometimes think about all of the first graders. It was a big change for them to come here as it was for me to come to a place like this and teach them. This place was so different. The parents used to talk about going to the bathrooms with their children. They could not just send a child by themselves. The parent’s felt they had to take the children. It was not a very desirable situation in a lot of ways. The trailers contained construction people within those trailers. They were not important enough to have individual bathrooms. They had a bathhouse for a set of trailers. That is why the parents had to go with their children to the bathroom. They didn’t feel that Oak Ridge was a safe place for children to grow up. In the trailer camps, that probably was not the case. Your children went to one of the three schools in town, Elm Grove, Cedar Hill, and Pine Valley. The outlying districts were not in town. (Laughter) Those were the three schools that served the cemesto houses. Those were the professionals. This was a very class-conscious society. A certain job with a certain status meant you got a certain house. It was true. When I was first married, we lived in one of those apartments above Grove Center; you saw the kind of people who lived there. It was amazing. There was a lot of different kind of people. 
Interviewer: Did you have very much contact with the parents of the children?  And if so, did they express any resentment concerning whether they did or did not live in a cemesto? 
Ms. Metcalf: When I was at Robertsville, all the children were in trailers. When I was at Elm Grove, all my children were in cemesto houses. I didn’t really have a chance to hear. There was an equal amount of supplies and good teachers in each school. There was a school made into a school for blacks, which was a white school the first couple of years. There was no housing for black families. Only single black people. No children.  Black women and men were separated and lived in hutments. 
 	I have thought in the last couple of days, how more relaxed teachers were back then. For instance, we did not think the class had to read a first reader on the first day of school. It was a different sort of expectation. We had sand tables and easels. I don’t think first graders have those things anymore. We had kindergarten. The teachers were afraid of the kids that could read a little bit. They were afraid they were getting ahead of themselves. These children only had a half of a day. 
	Later on, I had an opportunity at the preschool. The preschool staff was buying books and I thought if they had books, they should be arranged, as a library should be. I did that along with the media center. It was completely separate from the media center, but I did that also. It was important they were processed, circulated, and arranged in a way they could find them. I did not work with the children, but I did it so the teachers would have them. That is the 1970’s. I retired in the 1980’s. 
	After I left Scarboro, I was the media person at the Central Office. The media center was already there. It was a library for teachers. It contained professional books. The professional library has been there since the very beginning of the school system. There had always been a librarian. At first, there was a librarian who did nothing else. Then as time went on and money got tighter, they cut back on the librarian’s time. When I first went there, I was there only two days a week. The library was always open. Someone could go in and check a book out for themselves. As far as support for professional books for teachers who were taking a UT course needed books. When Stacey Clinton retired, I started using media materials. The film library was at the high school. This man was retiring, and wondered what should they do with the film library? It was the time when there was a big push saying, “It is not a library, it is a media center.” So I do not know who first said we could do it here. So we inherited the film center. Then they started the processing center for the books. In the early years, there was a person who was just the audiovisual center. This was a full time job.  
	Throughout the years, I felt like there was a change in philosophy. I noticed it after Sputnik. I taught first and second grade, as I have told you. The year I had a child of my own in first grade and one in second grade, I ended up in the hospital with high blood pressure. They were in such a hurry. We used to bring old men’s shirts, and cut the sleeves out for the children to paint on the easels. The teacher said, “No need to bring paint shirts, because we will not have time to paint.” They were in such a hurry to catch up with the Russians. It must have been probably such a knee jerk sort-of-thing. It was a time when children went to school only to learn and not to play. It was a down era in the Oak Ridge Schools. Some of the children were slower bloomers as a result of this. I think today they have modified this. We got a feeling that a lot of kids did not want to play anymore. They had had this so often throughout daycare and preschool. By the time they got to Kindergarten, this was old stuff to them. Years before they would come in and the stuff was brand new and exciting.  It was difficult for teachers to know what to include and leave for kids to use because some of them might think it is baby stuff. That was unfortunate. It was about this time that these things were available for kids to get in their homes. The kids were much more sophisticated. The kids try to grow up faster. Could the children from the trailers, who were not very sophisticated, be compared with later children? Elm Grove in some ways there was sort of a mixture; some of the children could be compared. One thing about Elm Grove, and I wonder if some teachers in Oak Ridge felt the same way, all of us had grown up in a sort of community. All of us had already taught. I had children at Elm Grove who had more natural ability than other children I had worked with. It took me a while to realize that I was working with someone who was different on that score than I had normally worked with. It was my job to realize how much farther these children could go. It could have been their parents or genetics. As an example one time, I had a group of children and we were taking apart a card catalog. I would read a book title and I wanted whoever was near that drawer to take the author card and title card and put them together in sets. We were sending the books from Scarboro when it closed. I would go to one of the children and read the author and one child would get the title. Then I had another group and I would read the author and the title, and the children knew what to do. It was a great difference in initiative. I guess I would compare the groups of children that you mentioned that the children in the trailer camps had more experience with the world because they had moved around a lot. The children of the professionals reflected their intellectual background. They had information of a different type. They had not been exposed to as much of the world as the children of the trailer camps. Books in the homes made a big different. They had been encouraged.
Interviewer: How large were the schools of Elm Grove, Pine Valley, and Cedar Hill?
Ms. Metcalf:	There were about three to four classes for each grade. At Robertsville, there were 20 first grades. There were probably 30 students in each class. There were times when they had 45 first graders in each class in Scarboro. Mr. Coffey thinks small classes don’t matter, but that is too many. He is showing his thoughts statistically. Discipline problems are greater now. It is hard to have big classes. There was not such a thing as “ADD”. I do not know why this is now. I think parents today have expectations of the kids need to learn. We have achievement tests and scores matter. There used to be standardized test for each grade level. This was helpful to see what the children are not learning. Some children get so tired of taking tests that they just merely play games. It is hard for the younger kids to even follow the answer sheet. The kids were not physically set up for that yet. Print handwriting was taught in first and second grades and cursive was taught in third grade. Do you remember the “Palmer method”? I will never forget I was one of the kids in my fifth grade class that did not get the Palmer method pin. 
Interviewer: Do you think that the teaching of handwriting has changed or the teaching of composition? 
Ms. Metcalf: This is beginning very early now. Kindergarten now is where writing is being taught. The idea of expression is being taught. It was at this time the “excellent standard” began. Teachers worked the students much harder. Fourth graders were taken on a trip to the Story Telling Festival. They loved it.
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