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A LEARNING HEART & MIND  
 

 

By Cornella Hill M.A. 
Soft Cover 6 x 9   319 pages 
 ISBN 1888106220   

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Introduction   Preface  Chapter One   Last Chapter  Table of Contents  

Other books about her family:  Erastus Snow   George Washington Hill

 Henry Eyring & Mary Bommeli  Reuben Lorenzo Hill & Theresa Snow 

Note: We received word that Cornella passed away in 2003.

Introduction

This book is about my career, which began in the 1930s and continued through the 1970s. It is my second book to publish during 1996. The first one was Our Family Legacy, which is the story of my personal life, from birth to age eighty.

This book will focus on the events that occurred during my career. You see, in college I majored in Child Development, a completely new field. After the death from leukemia of my husband, Lee Packer—when I still had two tiny children—I decided to go back to school and obtain my master’s degree in Early Childhood Development.

This decision took my children and I to the University of Minnesota. (The full story of my courtship and marriage to Lee, and our few short years together, then widowhood, is found in Our Family Legacy.)

The Depression was in full bloom. Money was hard, if not impossible, to come by. Fortunately, insurance left me by my husband provided just enough to get through school—if I was very careful.

Child Development was a subject near and dear to my heart. I had grown up with a mother who involved herself in helping others with their developmentally challenged children (See Our Family Legacy). My heart was touched as I watched the daily hardships and struggles of these families. Also, several of my own family members struggled with learning disabilities in the midst of two parents, and other siblings, who were academically talented. The wounded souls of those who struggled in this way caused me to want to help in some way.

When my mother’s health began to lag as she gave birth to more children, I became a substitute mother to my younger siblings. Having started school very young, and then being moved quickly to more advanced classes, I entered college at age sixteen. I learned much about the child development concepts they taught. I had a natural laboratory at home and was able to practice on my own siblings, and watch their responses.

When I returned to school to obtain my master’s degree, I was a grieving widow. I had spent two very difficult years dealing with my husband’s declining health. So I poured myself into this new endeavor.

The following stories are various incidents and experiences that were meaningful to me as I tried to take my desire to help others into marriage, then classrooms and work environments where such opportunities were available.

Preface 

When I started writing this book in the 1960s, I was still Cornella Hill Novak, Child Development Specialist, living and working in Portland, Oregon.

Thirty years before that, I was the young wife of Lee Packer and we lived in Utah, California, and Idaho—but he soon died of leukemia.

When Mac Novak died in Portland of lung and brain cancer, I moved to Logan, Utah, to be near my daughters. For three years I did voluntary work for my church.

Then I met Herb White on a cruise to Israel. After a short, but very interesting, courtship we were married.

Chapter One

I only weighed four pounds when I was six weeks old. Mother started teaching my brother, Reuben, his letters when he was only three and soon had him reading. I wanted so much to read, but I was four before I actually could. Starting to read that early had a marked effect upon my school life. It didn’t seem to bother Reuben so much; he was always very self-sufficient.

When I went to school the first grade, I stayed there half a day; then they moved me to second grade. I stayed there another half day when they moved me to third grade for the rest of the year. So since my birthday is in December, I was six and one half when I started school.

The school we attended was a very poor public school. We had mostly Swiss immigrant children who couldn’t speak English. The teacher didn’t seem to recognize the enormity of their language problems and she would whack the heads of the boys when they made many mistakes and then ridicule them by pointing at me as the bright little girl. That didn’t help me at all! And it was quite unfair to the Swiss immigrants.

My folks decided to send us to the BYC. . .

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Last Chapter

The Worth Of Adversity

Adversity causes some people to break

and others to break records.

  Many years ago I was working as a Child Development Specialist in the Health Department of Clackamas County, Oregon. My job was to evaluate children as to their potential. They had been rejected by the schools as too retarded to go to school. Yet when I gave them Developmental Tests, I often found them with normal IQ’s and often, above normal.
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Our staff pediatrician had been elected president of the Oregon Medical Association, but he didn’t take office until the next year. Meanwhile, he tried to get help to cover some of the children’s medical needs. He had heard of a very fine neurologist who had recently had a paralyzing stroke. The man was partially blind and paralyzed on one side. I don’t know who brought him to our Clinic, but when he was there, his full attention would be given to the handicapped children we were testing. His finely-tuned fingers felt up and down the arms of cerebral palsied children and he could tell just which nerves had been damaged and if we could help them.

One of the little boys was not badly palsied but had been refused schooling because he was considered hopelessly retarded. The doctor studied him for sometime. He asked the child the kind of questions where he could answer by nodding or shaking his head. His answers were all correct.

We started giving him exercises on the trampoline. We held his hands as he jumped and gave him enough support that he could enjoy the jumps. His parents invested in a small trampoline and his father held the boy and jumped with him. As they drove around the rural part of the county, his mother would ask him, "Is that a horse in the field? Is that a herd of cows?" He would laugh and laugh if they were all cows and no horses. His parents had been so threatened by the diagnosis that they hadn’t given themselves credit for really knowing their child far better than the doctor or psychologist who tested him.

The boy knew words but simply couldn’t speak them. A good speech therapist began working with him and he started talking. He was soon accepted into the Oswego, Oregon (it borders Portland) schools, and could keep up with the reading. He could spell orally now but he had a hard time writing and reading fast enough to keep up. He gradually improved. Lake Oswego was an upper middle class neighborhood and had good schools. That little boy is long since an adult, and I’m sure he is able to function pretty well.

How many lives did this doctor save? I drove him home every day and we talked and talked. I learned some invaluable lessons from that man. He felt useful for the last few months of his life, and I gained invaluable knowledge from a wonderful man.

Think of the adversity of the Black woman in the early days of this century. The only work they could get was either as domestic workers or earlier, slaves. Their men were devalued and often deserted their families and went north, but the women held on and raised their children. The free public system made it possible for many children to get an education, and they began to show that color is not a barrier to progress—if society doesn’t allow it to be.

I worked in Head Start with Black women as aides. At that time they couldn’t be teachers. We had White teachers that had received their training in the WPA days to run Day Care Centers that were needed. I inherited those teachers when I supervised the Nursery Schools that were funded by the government to be for the supervision of the children of parents working in the shipyard industry. Portland and Vancouver, Washington, were the centers for building the Liberty Ships, freighters for carrying needed war cargo to England and later to the Pacific area where the fighting and dying in the Philippines occurred. I found that those WPA teachers did a better job of both teaching and supervising that the two Head Teachers I had hired because they had Master’s Degrees. I found both of them may have passed their academic tests, but they did not know how to supervise others and, what’s more, they didn’t really understand children.

I had two aides in Head Start that I could match for many of our Head Teachers. One was an older woman whose husband had died of a heart attack but had been employed by the railroad as a cook. Then their son was killed. He was just sitting with two friends after a movie. The two friends got in an argument and the one fellow went and got his gun, but the one he had been fighting with ran away and left this woman’s son there. The fellow shot and killed him. The killer was never prosecuted for it. It was just one of those fights the Blacks got into. So now my aide was a widow and had lost her only son, who could have been her help and support.

The other was a young woman who was married and had child in the Nursery School, and a baby. She was a talented artist but had never been taught to sew, so she bought all the children’s clothes at Goodwill Industries. The children were well dressed. She did all of our drawings with chalk on the blackboard and they were outstanding both in design and in the ideas she portrayed.

I transferred to the Vancouver Schools because they had a very good Community College and had trained many young people to be teachers. I had several women who had been on welfare who I discovered were very talented, capable people with just two years of Child Development. They made fine teachers. One woman had three years of college before marriage and at that time was capable of being a very good Social Worker, but she had twelve children by a man who became an alcoholic and didn’t support them. She had to go on welfare to have any help, but the amount she was given would at best give them food for four children, not twelve. Her kids were not supposed to work, but of course they had to.

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Table of Contents

My Schooling Began Early
A Very Progressive Mother
Attitudes About Birth In 1930
Leukemia!
Graduate School at University of Minnesota
Nature vs. Nurture?
Memories
Fergus Falls, Minnesota
A Job at Cornell University
Single Parenting and A Career
Making A Difference
Surviving The System
Going To Portland, Oregon
World War II Child Care
Kaiser Child Care Centers
Exhaustion and More Challenges
The War Ends!
Childbirth In 1945
Foster Care vs Adoption
Pre-Spock And Post-Spock
Cooperative Nursery Schools
G.I. Bill and Teaching College
Needed!! Good Day Care Centers
Pre-School for Handicapped Children
My Cooperative Nursery School And Handicapped Children
Greater Awareness Of Learning Disabilities
Pushing Children Too Rapidly
Oregon City’s Child Development Clinic
Case Studies
Where Is The Damage?
A New Era In Testing Children
Educating The Community
About Retardation
Cycles Of Deprivation
Clinic Politics
Preventing Learning Problems
A Teacher’s Influence
Head Start A Real Help
Everybody’s Children
Vancouver, Washington Head Start
Raw Courage
Funding—A Constant Problem
Day Care In The College
The Future Of Child Development Centers
Learning Disabilities: Genetic Or Environmental
Balancing Career And Home
Real Medicine For Children —Freckles
Micki, My Companion For Retirement
Painting Is A Joy
My Most Interesting Travels
Eruption Of Mt. St. Helens
 Writing As A Way To Continue Your Career
What My Three Husbands Have Meant To Me
The Worth Of Adversity—To Laugh Or To Cry—
The Uses Of Adversity

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