Mom as an adult gave the caption “Older Girls Tallman School 1920” to this photo.

Mom (Florence McClain) is on the left. I don’t have identification for any others. If this was taken in fall 1920, Florence was 10 years old and starting fifth grade. “Older girls” may have been girls in grades five through eight.

There seems to be something more going on here, though. Each girl in the back row has her hand on the shoulder of the girl in front of her. The girls in back appear (on the whole) to be younger than the girls in front. I’m going out on a limb here, but maybe the girls in back are new fifth graders who are being initiated into the “older girls” society.

You who are teachers know far better than I, but it seems reasonable that if you are teaching thirty to forty students in grades one through eight in one room, you would want to enlist the help of the older students (especially older girls, in terms of maturity) to help maintain order and even help teach the younger students. So I wonder whether that was the purpose of identifying these “older girls” to the point that they would have their own group photo taken and maybe even their own initiation ceremony. But maybe I’m reading too much into this.

Note: The diagonal bottom and right edges of the photo in the image above once again reflect my attempt to level a photo that was definitely not level as printed.