<Begin Segment 11>

JA: You'd put on some plays and stuff with your kids?

MS: Oh, yes. We put on plays quite often.

JA: What kinds of things?

MS: Well, we'd do historical plays, of course, we'd, during the Westward Movement we would act out what was going on. This was the time of progressive education full force. So we made up stories and plays and so on. And then once a year, they had a performance of the, on the stage at the, in one of the firebreaks. And each, each class would, would have a performance, and I taught a bunch of my boys to play the tonette, and so we all dressed 'em up as pirates, and they were taught a little pirate dance, and they went out and they had their little song, and they did this pirate dance. And somebody was intrigued by the seventh grade that put on a Betsy Ross program and the making of the American flag. And you had all these little Japanese kids dressed up like George Washington, etcetera, and making the American flag and displaying it. That's when there were forty-eight states.

JA: That's good. So they had their own way, each of them, of learning about American history.

MS: Yes. You know, you taught the same thing. The thing is, these children, now, had forgotten things like what is a grocery store, what is a streetcar, what are stop signs. And yet you tried to introduce these things to 'em, too, because eventually they would be leaving the camp, and they had to learn how to interact with things of this nature that they had lost out on.

[Interruption]

JA: How was your classroom divided between one class...

AL: Between your class and the classroom next to it, like the nursery school, what was the divider between them?

MS: Well, in the beginning, there was a sheet, but eventually they got a regular plasterboard wall up.

JA: Between what and what?

MS: My class and, well, they had a nursery school on one side. These were when the classrooms were fairly new, and I did not teach in the elementary block. I was out by myself in what was known as the Japanese section, in this barrack out there. And there were the three of us, there was the primary group, my fourth grade, and a fifth grade taught by a Japanese girl by the name of Mariko Hoshiyama. And I had just this sheet and every once in a while you'd see these little kids crawling in under it, so we'd just ship 'em back. They were really cute. It was only in, in the nursery school were they allowed to speak Japanese in the schools. From then on, English only.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.