A child's memory of school, foreign service style

I was a quiet kid, the oldest of five children. Unlike my two brothers and my two sisters, I had a room to myself. I was the oldest; thus, I was given the honor of sitting on the right side of my father at one end of the dinner table. My mother sat at the other end.

After serving in the U.S. Army in World War II, my father went to college on the GI Bill, against the wishes of his father, an English immigrant who believed that staying in their hometown of Wilton, New Hampshire, and taking "a good job" at one of the Sam Abbott-owned mills in town was the way to support his growing family.

• As an aside, the Abbott family was one of the wealthy business families who supported hundreds of European immigrant families in southern New Hampshire to work in the textile industry. My paternal grandparents both worked in the Abbott Worsted Mill that made fancy men's fabric (for customers such as Brooks Brothers) and my maternal grandparents worked in the Abbott Machine Shop.

After developing a successful career as a teacher - he started in a one-room schoolhouse in Greenfield, New Hampshire - and eventually working his way up to vice-principal, principal, assistant superintendent, then superintendent of various school districts while completing a Masters degree from Boston University and being accepted into Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, he went to work for the U.S. State Department in what was first the International Cooperation Administration's Operations Mission in Amman, Jordan, in 1959. Two years later, ICA's Operations Missions combined with other U.S. governmental foreign assistance organizations to become the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, under President John F. Kennedy, whose international visions and outreach created USAID and the Peace Corps.

My Dad completed his doctoral work at Harvard while working on creating a university system for teachers in Jordan where there had been none before. The reason my Dad stayed in Jordan as long as he did - normal tours would be four years, two, 2-year tours - was at King Hussein's specific request to the U. S. Secretary of State.

Being a youngster growing up and going to elementary school in Amman, Jordan, was an interesting time of my life. At first, there was no formal 'schoolhouse,' as such. The young students, all children of Embassy personnel, were schooled in a vacant house rented by the government. The teachers were wives of the Embassy men; some were trained teachers, most were not, and all used the Calvert System for texts and lesson plans.

Every Monday, the students would go to school and find their Calvert boxes on the tables. These boxes contained the week's assignments and materials, including any new textbooks, the dreaded 'blue books' - those little books in which our assignments and homework were written to be returned to Calvert for recording and grading (Calvert was an approved school based in Maryland, near the nation's capital in Washington, D.C., and was geared to American students in remote countries around the world long before distance-learning schools became popular.) The boxes included everything we needed as students and teachers, including scratch paper, pencils, and rulers.

I still have a clear memory of the excitement of opening my "Calvert box," as they were known.