Multi-everything education
During the hiatus following my first year of formal education, I actually changed schools. Between a location one mile to the west and one mile to the east, there’s not a lot of difference… for an adult. For me, I went from a three room to a two room school. Still required getting a ride to and from with my father (except for a few, odd days when I walked home).
The education system was rather different from now. We purchased our own materials: scribblers and text books. The classroom was multi-age and multi-level. Five grades to a room, and the row wasn’t always single-grade. We paid attention, if only to know when to take out another subject from our desks and carry on with the individualized learning so important nowadays. Then, we just did it. No way that a teacher was going to address five different data streams simultaneously.
We were lucky. We had an indoor washroom. That wasn’t a given elsewhere. And there was a water tap in the back room, where you learned to drink from the sideways stream. A life skill. I can’t say how the room was heated, but we didn’t dress for winter inside. The desks came with lift-lids. I have a small scar from when my tooth went from inside to outside through my lower lip, after the person ahead of me leaned back at an inopportune moment.
I didn’t stress about school, because it was novel enough to be challenging. And getting your name as first of the class (in the newspapers) was reward enough in my tiny universe.
