My Mother, The Teacher

I always thought one-room schoolhouses disappeared in about 1920. Until, that is, I was working on this project and happened to ask my mother if she knew anything about one-room schools.

“Oh my goodness, yes,” she exclaimed. “Why, I taught in one!”

“You did WHAT?” I asked. “Where? When? How old were you?”

“Oh, I was eighteen,” she said. “I finished high school and they were so short of teachers in Ontario – this would have been around 1951 – that I took a summer course and earned a certificate. I was really lucky, too – I sang in the choir at church, and someone from one of the schools heard me sing a solo. They wanted someone who could teach the children music and games as well as the subjects, so I got hired.”

“The first year, I had fourteen students in seven grades. The second year, we had so many students they had to hire another teacher, and I taught four grades in the morning, then we all went home, and the other teacher taught the other four grades in the afternoon.”

My own mother, a teacher in a one-room school for two years! But I was in for more shocks.....

Driving Out the Teacher?

I went to the library in my home town of Flesherton, Ontario (population 600 on a good day), and asked for books about one-room schools. Georgina, the librarian and older sister of a school friend of mine, smiled. “We don’t have many books,” she said, “but I went to a one-room school. Most of the schools around here were one-room until the 1960s, when you moved here. You just missed them by a year!”

It turned out that everyone in the library had gone to a one-room school but me.

My high-school boyfriend’s older brother told me that when he went to a one-room school, they drove out the teacher in a matter of months.

“How did you do that?” I asked, fascinated.

“Well,” he said, starting to laugh, “we realized that if we went up into our tree house at lunch, she couldn’t make us come down. So we didn’t go to school in the afternoon. And then we took snakes in with us, and frogs, and mice, and well.... you know.”

No, actually, I didn’t. That poor teacher! The new teacher tamed them, though.

"It was winter when she came," said Oliver, "and every time we acted up, she sent us outside to play snowshoe baseball. We thought it was great to be sent out to play during lessons, but you try playing baseball on snowshoes and doing a few face-plants -- falling flat on your face -- whenever the snowshoes cross and trip you up. That teacher never had any difficulty with discipline – we were too tired!"

One-room schoolhouses were phased out in Prince Edward Island by the mid-1970s, so lots of teachers and students can probably still remember the days when they went to a one-room school. Try asking your friends and neighbours for their memories.

Tryon Consolidated School
PARO, Acc2667/135