I did.
Even after years, I remember a teacher who stood out in my school life. She was a pretty woman with a big smile, glasses, and red-painted nails. Mrs. Bennett, a science teacher, who, even when she was dissecting frogs, wore a large gold bracelet that her husband had given her. She always smelled of Formaldehyde. It was used on frogs and other small animals we dissected in the biology lab. However, it wasn’t the odor I recall. It was her kindness, patience, and understanding that not all her students would go on to have a career in science. She made sure those students, learned and enjoyed their experience in the classroom and laboratory and then came away with a basic knowledge of the subject.
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| This photo represents teachers and is not Mrs. Bennett |
Ten years, after I left that school, I was in a grocery store and a woman stood next to me and asked, “How are you doing?” It took me a second before I realized it was Mrs. Bennett. She was smiling at me and used my name. I was stunned that she remembered me and wanted to hear what I was doing. We had a pleasant conversation and Mrs. Bennett hugged me before she left. It was at that point, I understood how much teachers cared. Afterward, a memory of the day, my parents took me to visit a small museum came to me. It was a one-room schoolhouse. My dad explained how schools were back in the 1800s. The frontier school was generally a one-room building of sod or logs.
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| Sod School House 1882. Thank you, Denver Library |
It had a wood or coal-burning stove in the center. Since they were often the only “public buildings” on the frontier, schoolhouses were often the center of homesteaders” social life. During the 1870s and 1880s, community-wide spelling bees became the rage at schoolhouses all over the West, and schoolhouses frequently played host to debates, traveling lecturers and theater troupes, literary societies, and charitable organizations.
As per a PBS website, one-room schoolteachers often taught grades one through eight in their one-room, with class sizes ranging from three or four students to as many as fifty. Classes were generally taught in 10- to 15-minute sessions to each grade level, and the curriculum tended to focus on the basics: reading, spelling, penmanship, arithmetic, and history.
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| Schoolhouse |
Even with the low wages for women, hundreds of young women came in the 1850s to teach in the West. Teacher training, or “normal schools” -- the predecessors of today’s state universities -- began to open in numerous eastern states. In 1853, historian J.L. McConley noted that “a competent number of women have been found willing to give up the comforts of home for the benefit of the barbarous West.”
Married women were not permitted to teach. If they did marry, they had to resign from the job. As late as the 1930s, nearly 80% of American school districts employed only single women.
In 2001, approximately 250 one-room schools remained in the
United States. Of these, over 70 were located in Montana. In Canada, a few one-room schoolhouses are still standing, but they are operated
as museums or have been repurposed.
Many pioneer children learned to read and write thanks to the brave single women teachers who came West.
Please leave a comment below by clicking on comments. I'd love to hear about your favorite teacher or other topic.
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