TOOLS FOR THE CLASSROOM
What Do You Remember?

 Those who have attended Shanghai reunions, read books about the Shanghai ghetto, or clicked on the Rickshaw Website, have already seen photographs of refugee students, young and older, in the classroom, or as a group in the schoolyards. Many, however, have not seen, since their departure from Shanghai, the composition books we used for our lessons. The following notebooks, the way I remember them, and illustrated in this report, were used at Kadoorie School, Freysinger School, and Seymour Road School. A notebook was not, as currently defined, a lap top computer, but instead a small flimsy composition book, with grainy pages. Figure one shows the front cover of one such notebook, while figure two illustrates the back outside cover. A second notebook is illustrated in figure three, while figure four also shows the back outside cover. A third notebook is seen in figure five.

Yours truly remembers vividly those days when my dear father had to scrounge for money to buy at “Union", the "universal store" “, located at 32 Chusan Road, the supplies I needed for school.

Today, as I walk through a modern stationery store, as for example “Staples” or “Office Depot “, I will always reach for a classic, hard bound composition book, with pages made of quality paper, while thinking back to the days in Shanghai when such a piece of stationery would have been considered a treasure.   
 

 Thanks to Andrew Heinsius for presenting the three composition books. Andrew was a student at S.JYA School. He currently lives in Los Angeles, and is happily retired.