Thursday, January 15, 2004

A lesson from my first school principal

Aubrey Brown died earlier this week at age 86. His obituary is among these in the Bristol paper. When I started school, he was the principal at Abingdon Elementary.

When I was in the second grade, someone at the school took the notion that I might skip the third grade. As part of this consideration, I had to read part of a book for Mr. Brown. The book was about Jefferson and his home, the name of which Mr. Brown informed me was pronounced, "Mon-ti-chello." Well, I was hooked on phonics, even before there was such a thing, and I knew he could not possibly be right about that. (By the way, Mom and Dad vetoed skipping the third grade.)

Thirty-some years later, I'm still trying to figure out how to avoid the same kind of mistake I made when reading to Mr. Brown.

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