Remote learning would have been a tall order in my day growing up in East St. Louis

Remote learning, or home school, would have been an interesting experience in my childhood home.

Sure, that was a long time ago, when we didn’t worry about a virus because mercurochrome, salt water, prunes or Vicks VapoRub cured everything.

School was school. Home was home. The two worlds didn’t intersect often, except for homework on Sunday nights or a phone call to Mom from a frustrated teacher.

Yes, I daydreamed often. I could calculate Vada Pinson’s batting average after last night’s game but couldn’t keep up with the new math.

Our home in midtown East St. Louis was like most homes in the 1960s. Small. Framed. Big awnings over front windows. I didn’t know there were much larger, fancier homes because we didn’t leave our neighborhood often.

Carport on the side of the house.

Burn barrel for trash on the concrete slab.

There was nothing virtual about our world. No computers, laptops, tablets, or cell phones. Our technology was a plastic abacus that we used for arithmetic to help us count. I got lost at fractions and never recovered. Our remote learning was when the book mobile from the East St. Louis Public Library came to St. Philip’s Catholic Grade School. We had 10 minutes to choose a book. I chose the same sports books over and over again. Nothing else interested me.

Mom and Dad worked. Aunt Marie would have found time to help us with remote learning even though she was a school teacher in Cahokia. Definitely, she would have guaranteed that we had snacks. Aunt Marie had a soft spot for us three boys. All we had to do was act like we were unhappy. She’d rush out for a cheeseburger and milk shake because we looked hungry. We looked like a lot of things. We never looked hungry.

Our old house on Terrace Drive in East St. Louis didn’t have additional space for an office or classroom. It was a little box of a house. You could stand in the hall and put your arm into each room. The kitchen table would have been our classroom, desk, cafeteria and office. The tiny bathroom, or lavatory for school purposes, was in the middle of the house. You could hear every noise from the lavatory, from every room.

“You OK in there?” someone would joke. “Sounds like a bomb went off.”

The disagreements would have been relatively calm if you didn’t consider an occasional insult, fat lip or hurt feelings. We didn’t, of course, unless we wanted pity and Aunt Marie to drop off some extra Moon Pies, Chuckles and small bottles of Coke.

Masks, hand washing, ‘social distancing’

I figure once we had lunch, school was over for the day. No bell needed. Mom, Dad or Aunt Marie would have been holding the door wide open for us to get lost for awhile.

“Get outside. Blow the stink off,” I can hear them say.

We would have worn masks if told to wear masks. They would have been homemade, probably. A handkerchief, rag or cut-up sock and a rubber band or used shoestring.

We would have washed our hands when a grown-up was watching. Soap, sometimes. It wasn’t uncommon for our bar of soap to have teeth marks. Say a bad word? Get your mouth washed out with soap.

Six feet apart? It would have been a tight squeeze in our old house.

There would have been natural distractions to disrupt our remote learning at home.

What some of our ‘scenery’ consisted of growing up

Like the big picture window in the living room, from where we’d stare at the big empty sandlot across the street from our home. When the big tractor showed up to cut grass, we knew that a few lost baseballs, bats and gloves had been found by the loud crunch in the tractor.

Neighbors hung their laundry on a clothes line in their backyards. Shirts, socks, pajamas, Towels. Underwear was always a hoot.

How would home schooling or remote learning have gone in my old childhood home?

For many reasons, we are blessed that it never came to that.

Somehow, someway, we would have made it work.

We always did.