Miss Hallie Emory was our fifth grade teacher. I learned later that she never finished her college degree. In the early days, teachers went to the Normal School (in Normal Illinois) for a year and often taught in one-room country schools. My mother did that but slowly earned her degree at Augustana College in Rock Island, later a master's at the University of Illinois. She often talked about teaching all grades in a one-room country school.
Miss Emory loved kids and also made them behave. She was proud of how she looked at a student once and made me choke on the candy he was trying to eat furtively. One basilisk stare from Miss Emory was enough to turn all of us into jelly.
