I think the kindergarten teacher is by far the most important. She, and she should be a she, should be a loving motherly type who plays the piano and who gets the children to love her and love school AND TO LOVE LEARNING!
It really is not the school or the teacher who matters as much as how much the kid himself puts into learning. From K to 8 I went to a large city school with an auditorium, gym and wood shop. No cafeteria. We went home for lunch. No buses. We walked. After New Year’s in 8th grade I went to a 2 room country school in Ca and my teacher was the principal and taught grades 5, 6, 7 and 8. The other teacher in the other room had grades 1 through 4. No gym. No auditorium. No buses. We walked on the shoulder of Hy 99. We had a modern lavatory but it was in a separate little building. 9th grade was in a huge campus type H S with going from building to building and it was like a college with a dean of boys and a dean of girls, grass and trees and two of us ate sandwiches under a nice tree at noon. Grades 10 to 12 in an old fashioned H S in NJ so overcrowded we had half days but, know what? We who wanted to learn did and they who didn’t care didn’t learn.
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