Teacher, Teacher, I Declare!
Third grade class of Mrs. Bucklin in 1945. Loris Bucklin is the girl in the middle with the bangs.
There are a lot of teachers in my family. I just discovered one this week, but that is for another time. Right now I want to focus once again on my maternal grandmother Myrtle Sylvia Phenice Bucklin. It seems like most of the people knew her from her days of teaching at Hathaway School in Hathaway, Louisiana. Either that or from her singing at church. Or both.
I got this photo from Aunt Loris almost a year ago. It is her third grade year of school at Hathaway when she had Grandma as her teacher. I don’t know the names of any of the other kids in the class, but maybe some of you know them.
Teaching Certificate from 1928
Grandma got her high school diploma in 1925, then proceeded to continue her education at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette. On March 19, 1928, she received her Professional Elementary Certificate from SLI that was “Valid For Life.” She was not married at the time, so the name on the certificate was Myrtle Sylvia Phenice. It looks like she added Bucklin later so she wouldn’t confuse her little third grade children.
She continued to further her education and received her B. A. from McNeese State College in 1957.
She then taught in Calcasieu Parish schools for two years until her marriage in 1930. She didn’t teach during the time that she was having children and rearing them. I’m sure she was teaching her children many wonderful things, but she wasn’t teaching in the school system. She returned to the school system to teach at the Hathaway School in 1945. The info from her memorial says that she returned in 1946, but it must have meant the school year ending in 1946. You can see in the photo that it was the third grade class and the school year is 1945-1946.
She got back just in time to be aunt Loris’s teacher. I wonder how that happened? Did she prefer third graders? Did Loris beg her to start teaching and be her teacher? Why didn’t she teach older students? Aunt Alma was in the fifth grade, mom was in the 7th, and Sylvia was probably in the 8th. She could have taught them all if she picked a higher grade.
But third it was. And that’s how a lot of people knew her – Mrs. Bucklin, the 3rd grade teacher at Hathaway. She was just Grandma to me.