The photo was taken a couple of years later, when the school actually had our own school building , and the teacher (me) actually had a desk. It does show me busy at night preparing work for the next day.
Despite the small number of students I had, I quickly discovered it was almost an overwhelming job to teach in a one-room school. Since I could only spend time with one grade at a time, I had to create work for all the other grades; something that they could work on independently, and could finish without a lot of help from me, and I had to supply enough work for all the different grades to do to keep them occupied for 5 hours every day.
I didn’t have any workbooks, or even a mimeograph machine (an old technology that allowed one to crank out (literally) duplicate copies of worksheets from a typed-up or drawn stencil). Before photocopiers, mimeograph machines were the workhorse for most teachers at the time.
Most teachers also had access to already prepared worksheets that they could use, unfortunately, but because of the remoteness and isolation of the school, no such timesavers were available to me, I had to create my own from scratch. I had no teacher's guides to help me digest topics, give me directions on what points to stress, or to provide me with additional problems for the students to solve.
In all of the schools I had ever been in, all of the answers to the problems would have been there in a Teacher’s Manual, but unfortunately, since I hadn’t been supplied with any Teachers Manuals, when it came time for me to check the work that the class had done, I had to first, calculate all of the answers myself, before I could spend the time checking their papers.
Everything was left up to me. I had to read all of the material, and think up all of the work exercises for the various grade levels, because I had no teachers guide to help me. Once I figured out what I would do, I had to make the worksheet by typing it out, if I needed more than one copy, I had to type layers of carbon paper (another old technology)and correct all the layers manually, if I made a mistake. I typed all the worksheets sheets out on the portable typewriter I had fortunately brought with me from Indiana.
I found myself busily preparing late into the night, striving to come up with enough appropriate activities for all the different age groups. I quickly discovered that if I wasn’t really well prepared and supplied with a lot of work, things quickly turned to chaos in our school, because the students got done and then started messing around.
While quick learning is generally considered a positive thing in the classroom, I was always dismayed to discover just how quickly my students were able to complete the worksheets and assignments that had taken me so many long hours to create the night before.
You can view my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
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