Grandma McCorquodale’s Story

I started teaching first about the time the nineteenth century rolled into the twentieth, found 1900, and it has occurred to me that there probably aren’t many teachers of that vintage still in circulation. We must be getting about as rare as whooping cranes, except that our breed shows no sign of becoming extinct. Teachers go on and on, and how they do go on, increasing in wisdom and stature and ? with man at least. For years now they have been underpaid. Still with all the unionizing the situation is still not ideal, the dedication natural. In introducing new marvels into a nice comfortable world man have never learnt to count the cost. So we have automobiles, but we also have dull election days. In the old days too

In those dark ages, 60 or 70 years ago which are held in such scam (?), the mistral stays towards a teachers certificate, after the usual collegiate qualifications was by way of the model school a four month course in teacher training entitled the graduates to a teaching permit, good for three years. After that came the 6-month normal school course for a permanent certificate. The procedure has its value. The Model school graduate knew in the course of 2 or 3 years whether he or she had any aptitude or liking for teaching. If not the girls took to marriage as some such retreat which would assure them of no contact with children, and the boys chose careers to their liking. At any rate the temporary nature of the Model school certificate tended to weed out the less capable teachers.

My first job was as junior teacher in a 2-room school on the outskirts of the city. The children were a mixture of the product of quiet rural homes and the unfortunate children from tough factory workers. It wasn’t too easy and I earned the $195 a year, which was my princely reward. It has always rankled with me that I can remember why I wasn’t paid $200. That missing $5 has nettled my memory in vain.

My debut as a teacher was most unfortunate. I had secured room and board with an old couple near the school, and to assure me of the best they had given me a room off the “parlor”. This parlor was manned by a big coal stove which glowed locally (?) in its best moments, but alas most of the isinglass (?) was broken, and in the night I roused to the nausea and misery of coal gas. The complete evacuation which ensued was a ? ? ultimately, but I must have been a pitiful sight as I dragged my enfeebled frame to face the fifty or sixty expectant pupils. Worst of all, lined up at the back of the room, were the three bearded trustees, waiting grimly to see if I could cope. I felt sure, I was doomed but can recall only they mercifully withdrew after warning me to “use the strap and use it good”.

They were a nice old couple, the old man gay and frolicsome (?) and the old lady stern and unbending. People used to say that he was perpetually tight on his hard cider and that she was in about the same shape, though it hit them differently. Hard cider was our noon beverage and it was a hardy drink. But it could be a pitfall. Brashly one day I took the second glass, and felt wonderfully kind to glowing until I found I could scarcely get through the door. If ever a woman made a masterful job of “pulling herself together” I was that woman. Slowly, experimentally I navigated the boardwalk to the school, putting my feet down on one crack in the centre with grim concentration. I made it and probably no one was the wiser but myself. I learned that the second drink of hard cider was not for me. My first lesson in moderation.

Another little oddity of that boarding house was the broken biscuits which we consumed in volume - these broken biscuits of plain and fancy nature could be picked up by the barrel at the back of a biscuit factory in the city. They were the father and mother of many a meal, and I think my mother was a little uneasy because she really overfed me over weekends - every Friday evening the fragrance of newly baked bread and buns hovered in the kitchen at home.

School life went on without too much trouble. At first prompted by the administration of the trustees I had recourse to the strap as an easy way out. But after while, I realized the folly of that type of discipline - the normal child didn’t need such drastic punishment and to the hardened ones, a session with strap was no more than a love tap. In those days we learned only through experience that the strap has uses, as a deterrent but is rarely the cure. So like other teachers, I learned quite soon devious methods of correction involving no physical force. With experience I learned to dread the using of the strap.

I don’t think any educational strides were made in that first year of teaching, not by the children at any rate. For myself I learned a great deal. At first, in order to win favor in the sight of my board trustees I followed their advice to use the strap and use it good. I resorted to this means, corporal punishment with more zeal than judgment. But soon it dawned on me that results weren’t what they were thought to have been. For the sensitive little beginners it was a shattering induction into school life, and for the tough guys who were the victims, the strap was no more than a love tap. It fell far short of the rough treatment, which they were accustomed to at home. So my first step toward more effective teaching was to exercise guile and wile on thinking up devices which would cure the offenders without throwing the whole school out of ??. Happily the devices worked and before long school became a happier spot.

On the whole I don’t suppose I was worth much more than the $195 I was paid for my first years work. It doesn’t sound affluent but I have no memory of financial stringency. ? Of course was only $1.25 for 5 days of the week, but I paid for vocal lessons and guitar lessons, both a great waste of money, had lots of fun and a nice diversity of boy friends with rubber tire buggies and fast horses. For preliminary courtship’s or just a nice evening one couldn’t beat a long ribbon of road in bright moonlight with the fragrance of ripening corn fields enriching the air.

At my next school I was still a junior teacher in a two room rural school but my salary was $225. Here there were few problems of discipline as actual progress was made especially in multiplication tables in which pupils began to outrank teacher in speed and accuracy. ?????

I added one valuable bit of knowledge in that second year of teaching. A 19-year-old teacher was naturally an object of interest to the older boys, who were about her age and twice the size, in the senior class and could be made quite unhappy by the little impertinence. So I sleuthed round a bit, getting a line on the biggest most influential boys in the senior room. I found out which ones had older brothers in open market, made my choice and then made a play for the most congenial brother. It worked beautifully; I was his girl, getting full protection against “remarks” on school ground or in the halls of learning. It was very similar to the present system of “going steady”, with no lamentation when we parted. We’d had a pleasant companionship, and I had had nothing to fear from the schoolboys. That shouldn’t be regarded too lightly.

After two years it was decided that I had sufficient aptitude for teaching to warrant my going to Normal, and how exhilarating it was to be merely a student again. Shedding all the dignity and restriction of having to be on teacher behaviour.

A Normal certificate commanded bigger schools, better salary. The school I took brought the respective annual wage of $325. But enrollment my winter months swelled to over 100 when the hay boys attended, with some in every grade from primary to take departmental examinations. The first departmental was high school entrance and the second was Public School ?? and was roughly first year high school. That was a two-year stretch of incredible work. Strangely enough almost all the pupils writing the two “departmentals” passed examinations very creditably. Industrious students>

It would be nonsense to say that all classes received the same amount of attention. The little primary class fared well but the eight to ten years old were caught in the squeeze. Much of their drill work was carried out by responsible older students, and for a great part of the time there were two classes in progress at the same time; one at the rear of the room being drilled in reading, spelling and arithmetic by a senior, while another was conducted at the front by the teacher.

There was certainly no question of discipline in that school. Everyone was too busy.

Whatever the faults of the much decried one room school it developed a great sense of responsibility - the older pupils had to see to the welfare of the little folk in the school yard and for safe conduct home. In school games if a window should be broken, it was the boys themselves who replaced the glass and puttied it in, without a word to trustees. Everyone entered heartily into clean up (arba?) day in the spring and the appearance of the bleak schoolyard was another school responsibility. There was an indoor janitor, but stove stoking and such were school business.

Another incidental of the one room school was that the junior grades gathered many a crumb of learning from the older classes assembled before the teacher’s desk. They learned fragments of history, of reading, spelling, and geography going on “up front” when they’re own deskwork lost its appeal. That aptitude varied greatly amongst the children, but few of them moved up to a higher grade without a glimmering of advance preparation.

It was endlessly fascinating to a teacher to have several members of one family under her eye at one time and to note the diversity as between children of the same parents brought up in exactly the same environment.

Although the school room in those far off days was the embodiment of “life is real, life is earnest” we had our relaxing moments. We did a great deal of singing, not to be confused with a music period but just singing for a few minutes as a pleasant break. And no prescribed songs, but the popular bits of the day, the old standbys - like Clementine, I’m Just a Poor Cowboy and other folk songs - we sang with gusto and nothing else.

Another diversion, tried and proven was reading of storybooks and story telling. Reading was a powerful weapon for preserving law and order, and a most effective reward for a good day’s work. Naturally the tastes of a 14 year old were vastly different from a 7 year old so we dipped into them all a week about Water Babes, Kingly ?), Brie Rabbit, Kiplings “Never, Never Land” and next week Treasure Island, Ernest Thompson Seton’s (?) stories, Swiss Family Robinson, Twain, even bits from Mr. Peckwick and David Harum (?).

At no time did I meet a child whose attention could not be held by a story. It was work - no library in the school, I recall neither supplementary reader nor library in the school, and not many homes boasted any library of books. One can’t think of anything today which would be comparable.

Other variations were over Friday afternoon relaxation were spelling bees, bees in geography, history, and arithmetic. We acted out some lesson from a school reader, had marches and calisthenics exercises and generally ended the week on a happy note.

One great virtue of the story telling and reading was that it diverted our minds from the horrors of the old Ontario readers. If the children’s liking for reading had depended on the ? ? by the way of the old readers, the outlook would have been thin indeed. Never was there such a welter (?) of untimely deaths as was assembled between the covers of that “authorized” collection of horrors rivaling in pregnancy the worst that modern T.V. can produce. Mostly children were the victims, and it was little wonder if the impressionable minds of children of that period came to look on life as a chancy business, with much better prospects of them being nipped off suddenly and undeservedly in some mischance by law of sea.

Initiation came by way of Babes in ? on the second reader, and move on reader by reader and page by pages through unmanageable disasters. And so much of it was poetry, the rhyming adding to the progeny (?) “Oh Mary go and call the cattle home, across the sands - and never home came she,”; Mabel little Mabel with her face against the pane, darkens out across the night.... two bodies stark and white, oh so ghastly in the light with sea weed in their hair; Six of us in the church yard lie - the last to go was little Jane and how she moaning lay, till God released her of her pain and then she went away; For Willis daughter where the waters wild went over the child and he was left lamenting; the May Queen “I thought to pass away before but still alive I am (?)”; “Into the (?) of the wh(?) washed walls where the ? and dying ay; “wounded? Nay I’m killed sire, and smiling the body fell dead.”

It would be interesting to learn the sadistic characters that authorized the selections. Scarcely a bright gleam in all that gloom. Page after page same ingenious twist of death and the grave.

And another torture was the stress on oral reading, so the tender hearted children were obliged to stand in the aisle and read “with nice expression” these messages of doom. Little girls were particularly susceptible and sobbed and suffered their way from reader to reader always with nice expression. What a contrast to the lithesome, rollicking readers of the present day.

Very small chance and living till 21. There was really no lesson in the boy (?) - no art of disobedience or conscious wickedness, they just lay on beds of pain and died lingering deaths.

Has history recorded the man who led the revolt against these readers - If not, a grave bene(?) overlooked. No moral purpose served in these dire disasters which overtook adolescents and infants. They have not been guilty of disobedience, rebellion or delinquency if they mature. In fact too often it was obedience to parents which ???

In all the horror pictures ? to modern parents at least there are usually good guys and bag guys and the bad bite the dust.

Then there were mottoes on the will. Schoolrooms were sparsely furnished but the motto salesman must have done a nice trade with trustees because so many schools were well equipped. An honest man’s the noblest work of God; Waste not want not; To thine own self be true; Thou God seest me; Honesty I do not mention. “Honesty is the best policy” because that smacks too much of the modern smart guy who gets ahead on policy no principals. Wherever the eye turneth these noble inspirations came within range, and perhaps they register more than one realizes. For myself I know that some of those old mottoes have loomed up at most inconvenient moments through my life. They were standards at any rate by which many people tried to live and extremely different from the wicked old readers.

Well there were two good years of accomplishment. I still hear occasionally from some of those bright-eyed eager children although by now they are grandparents.

I take that clock with me all over Alberta and is still ticking out the time, ?? Heralds as the children who presented it tearfully to me over 57 years ago.

No PTA’s - Home & School.

Despite the fact that the pupils in that school were as eager, industrious and able as one could wish, the sheer load of it was too much for a young lightweight teacher. After two years of the wear and tear, my mother took a stand, and was induced reluctantly to consent to my returning to the wilds of the west. Father collected maps with great enthusiasm and studied western Canada. The trustees offered $375 annual salary if I’d remain, but even that was not sufficient inducement. So we parted tearfully, but cheerfully, and the clock with which they presented me today still ticking as truly and steadily as in its magnificent youth.

The call of the west had been increasingly insistent amongst eastern teachers in those first years of the century. Salaries sounded fabulous, $50 or $60 a month. Agencies linking teachers with school districts advertised widely in eastern papers. The demand for teachers far exceeded the supply, and trustees, masters of being the lordly omnipotent masters that they were in the east, were demoted to proper status. The schools were a mere handful of ten to thirty children. By 1906 quite a number of girls had gone out to teach in the west, returning home unsullied by the experience but full of the rigorous spirit of the new country.

So in early March 1906 three of us girls set forth for Alberta. We kept clear of agencies through good efforts of a relative who located three schools for us in the vicinity of Camrose.

Even the four day train trip out west was adventure. We traveled tourist as befitted our station in life. In those days it was the custom for the lowly tourist to take with him a full supply of food to carry him through, so we were loaded with an infinity of satchels, suitcases. Our boxes, mostly filled with enough food to outfit an army - roast chicken, jams, jellies, pickles, the choices gifts from the top shelf and front end of fruit cupboards. As we assembled at Toronto for the big take off our barrage of luggage was a formidable sight. Some of our friends from Toronto University were there to wish us God speed and in all the confusion they stole some of our food supplies. It was a black mark against them which we didn’t forget, but the poor kids were living mostly on conflakes in those days and their necessity was greater than ours - the wonderful new cornflakes had just come in the market, and was staple diet for many of the country boys at University. They took high standing on such diet, or in spite of it. At any rate they profited by their trip to see us heading westward.

Those tourist cars were filled to capacity all passengers loaded with food supplies. It was a good-natured bedlam of highly communal nature and our every experience was new.

Finally we arrived at the infant town of Camrose, where we discovered there were 100 young bachelors in the town and one eligible unmarried girl. But we didn’t capture one of those nice boys, though we had gay times together. Our relative, true to his trust, has lined up schools for us, and the first evening gave us our initial thrill in dealing with trustees. The one trustee who showed up to make his choice of teacher was a nice mild soul with gold teeth, which flashed vividly. But he was our first experiment in how to deal with western trustees. Coldly we examined him, and then drew matches to decide which teacher would take him. The one who drew him would be cast away by herself on the banks of Battle River, 25 miles from the other two whose schools were just 4 miles apart. When the girl who drew the short match, stepped forward to say she was his, his golden smile welcomed her, and later the news reached us that he said she was the one he would have chosen if he had been given the chance. So it all wound up pleasantly.

My school district to which I was “hauled” the next day (they always”hauled” teachers hither and yon) was a Scandinavian settlement, my first contact with people who were not racially from the British Isles. For the most part they had come from Europe to the Midwestern states, then on to the new land of Alberta, and their command of English was very limited. But it was an enlightening experience for me, and I came to have highest regard for these immigrants and their value as Canadian settlers. Their family life, high intelligence and progressive outlook were illuminating. I recall one day returning from school to find the woman of the house weeping, downfallen as she ground out coffee beans for the inevitable coffee. She had just heard that Isbean had died, and there was real sorrow in all Norwegian families. I wondered if there was any in the Anglo Saxon world whose death would have roused such genuine emotion.

For a young woman who had come west to live an easy life, my first venture was not too promising. The school was 3 miles from my boarding house (not many of these first home in the district for teacher space). There were no fences and the trails were wandering threads through brush country, splitting and wandering off without rhyme or reason. I had no sense of direction and was forever wandering off into side trails. Besides there were the cattle running at large, an abiding source of terror. Besides it was a very wet spring, and the grass grew high along the trail. So day after day I would start off in the rain, hampered by my heavy top skirt reaching to my ankles, and two or three petticoats underneath. By the time I reached school I would be soaked to my knees, and then this to be done all over again to get home. Before long we acquired a pinto pony which we named Trouble, so I managed to get to school fairly dry. Then of course the rains stopped. Trouble had a will of steel. She would crawl the 3 miles to get to school, at slower than walking pace, but once her nose was pointed homeward she would speed up to a purposeful gallop and I’d be home in no time. We won a lot of races with her from challengers who didn’t know her whims, and had only seen her action outward bound.

The school numbered about twenty youngsters struggling to learn English. It was slow going, and I think the only thing I did teach them which may have taken root was that they were living in Alberta, Canada, not in North’ Dakota. We had quite a dustup because they celebrated July 4 with a big picnic, flags and all, completely ignoring July 1. But my friend and adviser, Mr. Olsberg, advised me not to take it too seriously. He said if there was any fault, it was the fault of native Canadians in the country and the government. In United States, he explained even in the few years they had lived there, Independence day on July 4 had become one of the big events of the year, with celebration of special nature in newcomer settlements. Big speakers with a gift for rousing response from affluent nationalists are guests at huge picnics, lauding the greatness of the USA and the honor of becoming a citizen.

Newcomers from the outset are made to feel part of that great country. In Alberta, said Mr. Olsberg, there was no similar effort to explain the meaning of July 1, speakers from the Government or the district, no big scale pride in Canadianism. What he saw was so true that it seemed quite reasonable. People lie picnics, feasting and dancing so they celebrate on July 4, without any conscious affront to their new citizenship in Canada.

Mr. Olsberg himself was firmly loyal to “Yon Bull”. He was forever telling me what yon bull required in the way of ? school actions and such “Vot Yon Bull asks me, I do” he would say. He seemed more vague about what Canada expected of him.

We had been hired for four month term and on August 1 we headed off to Calgary eager for the more abundant life, and to get new schools. We had a month of idleness ahead and ? along the way. For instance we dropped off at Ponoka to explore possibilities, but it was there that one of our number lost her bustle on the town streets. It wasn’t one of those inflated bustles that belonged to an earlier period, a much more modest appendage - to correct certain natural deficiencies. But unfortunately it had the name of the owner beautifully embroidered on it. So we got out of town on the next train before anyone would identify us and restore our property. There is no educational value in their recollection. It merely proves that even in those far off days of safety and sanctity, accidents could happen.

It was also on that train trip south that I boasted that I could hop off the train at any sizable town and in the few minutes the train halted could pick out a trustee and get a school. The other girls naturally scoffed, but they gave me the promising town of Red Deer for a try. It was an easy matter to pick out trustees, they were usually fortyish, wore mustaches, were dressed in their second END OF THE PAPER.