The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy

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Topical Guide 103

peterleroy.substack.com
A Topical Guide to the Personal History

Topical Guide 103

Mark Dorset

Eric Kraft
Oct 5, 2021
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Topical Guide 103

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pershistitlesmall.jpg

School
Education: Early Childhood, Benefits of

     My mother worried about me. In consultation with the other mothers in our neighborhood, she decided that I had serious intellectual deficiencies that should be corrected before I began kindergarten.

Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam”

According to the National Education Association (NEA):

Research shows that providing a high-quality education for children before they turn five yields significant medium- and long-term benefits for students. Children in early childhood education programs are:
• less likely to repeat a grade
• less likely to be identified as having special needs
• more prepared academically for later grades
• more likely to graduate from high school
• higher earners in the workforce.
But providing high-quality education for young children is also about racial and social justice. Access to effective, diverse programs breaks down structural barriers that have prevented all children—particularly children of color and children from disadvantaged families—from achieving their full potential.

National Education Association, “Early Childhood Education”

Will the Misses Leighton’s nursery school yield “significant medium- and long-term benefits” for Peter and Matthew? We shall see.

Classical Statuary, Replicas of
Bouzouki
Personality Traits, Distinctive

     The school was conducted within the Misses Leighton’s house, a large and comfortable frame house where the two women—Emily and Louisa—had for some twenty years attended their ailing mother. When she had died at last, the daughters, released from their responsibility well into middle age, had spent their small inheritance on a trip to Greece, where they acquired an enormous number of fascinating miniature plaster replicas of classical statuary, and where Emily learned to play the bouzouki, though not well.

Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam,”

If the example of the Misses Leighton and the research reported by the NEA has inspired you to open a nursery school of your own, you can, if you like, emulate their decorating scheme with reproductions “using real crushed stone bonded with durable designer resin,” for example:

Hebe The Goddess of Youth Greek Garden Statue, Large 32 Inch

Coincidentally, I tried to learn to play the bouzouki when I was thirty-six. Well, not the bouzouki. The violin. I discovered, after two or three lessons, that I was completely inept. I’ve come to accept that as a personality trait: not a flaw, but a distinction.

A Bouzouki (by Villanueva, from the Hungarian-Language Wikipedia)

Note to self: A topic for The Topical Autobiography of Mark Dorset (hereafter TTAoMD): Potential Destructive Effect of Art. While I was reviewing this TG entry and the corresponding passage from The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (hereafter TPHAE&OoPL), I realized that I don’t remember anything of my own nursery school experience. Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s as if the Misses Leighton’s Nursery School has completely obliterated the nursery school that I attended. Wow. Develop this.

[more to come on Wednesday, October 6, 2021]

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

  • You can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

  • You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

  • At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” and “The Static of the Spheres,” the first four novellas in Little Follies.

  • You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

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The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
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Topical Guide 103

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