Little Red School House

The past few days I’ve been thinking of my two-room grade school and it's teachers. And marveling.

Their pay had to be meager and their tasks Herculean. Their job included banking the coal stove at night and keeping it going during the day, sweeping the oiled floors, emptying the wastepaper baskets, clapping the erasers, washing the blackboards,  - and that’s just the bare-boned maintenance of the building. In addition they needed reasonable four-grade mastery of at least five subjects – spelling, reading, arithmetic, history, geography and an occasional art class thrown in. They needed to be able to sing and it helped to be able to play the rickety out-of-tune piano for opening rituals each day. Bathrooms were privies way far beyond the school at the back of the playground. Water was carried from a neighbor’s pump  to a blue and beige striped cooler resting at the back of the classroom near the hooks for outdoor clothing. But beyond all these basics, they had to keep order with a bunch of overgrown, sweaty, boisterous farm boys on the make! Our teacher in the upper grades had a leather strap that she often carried with her and used with alacrity on offending hands.  She must have had school board muscle behind her and in those days, authoritative bodies still had the respect of the community so no one in my eight years ever got too far out of line.

But all of the above aside, what I am most grateful to my “upper” grades teacher is her understanding that one of the most priceless gifts she could give us, was the time she set aside for reading aloud to us – mind you, we may have gotten short-changed academically, but our literary imaginations were generously stoked. The books I can remember are the entire Little House series – from Little House in the Big Woods to these Happy Golden Years ; White Fang and Call of the Wild; The Moffats; The White Stag, The Singing Tree and the Good Master – and these are only ones I can remember!

School ran from just after Labor Day until early May – to get the farm children back home to help with the spring crops.

I have to think, our teachers had some crops of their own to tend to by that time!