伊万·盖尔福德·布雷克/Evan Guilfore-Blake
My first school was the storied one-room schoolhouse. An old whitewashed building with a red roof and a vane on the peak, it sat at the top of an unpaved hill surrounded by farmland.including a barn rife with livestock.in a then-unin-corporated area of Urbana, Ilinois. The school housed all six primary grades and, as I recall, there were about thirty-five of us, mostly very young, although we ranged in age, of course, up to twelve or thirteen.
The year was 1953，and I was six years old, a first grader, and the son of a Ph. D.student at the University of Ilinois. My peers and the upper graders were farm kids or children of undergrads taking advantage of the GI Bill. Some were just too poor to live in the city, which would have qualified them for a city school. I suspect my parents dismissed the relevance of first grade, since most of my education came at home, at their hands, anyway.
The sole teacher in that school was as classic as the building itself. Mrs. Knapp was a schoolmarm by profession and she’d been doing it, she said, all her life. By then, I’d guess, that meant thirty-five or forty years on the job. She had to have been in her sixties：white hair in perfect array. Petite;memory puts her at barely five feet, perhaps one hundred pounds. Bony, with tightly drawn skin and sharp features. Prominent knuckles. Perfect teeth. She brushed after lunch and made sure we did, too.
She handled our diverse intellects with perfect aplomb, guiding those of us who could read well through the pleasures of Stevenson’s poetry and Mr. Popper and those who struggled with reading through the joys of Dick and Jane. If every grade was a different country, Mrs. Knapp was fluent in the six languages we spoke, always having appropriate conversation to offer on whatever subject-academic and not-that our curiosity was heir to. She knew, for example, more about baseball and its history than my father did and was always ready to argue the merits of Pee Wee Reese（her favorite shortstop）against Chico Carrasquel（mine）.The one Mrs. Knapp incident that will always remain engraved in my memory didn’t happen at school, however. It happened on a deserted country road that divided corn-fields on the afternoon of the last day of that, my first full-fledged school year. To celebrate the beautiful weather, she’d taken us on a field trip, literally, through the bright yellow and green of corn and wheat stalks that were taller than I was（and than she was, too（but still two or three months shy of their harvest.