Full Text:

Back In Time To A Day In The One-Room School

(with photos)

BY MICHELE HOGAN

Boys on this side, girls on that side, now repeat after me, demanded the

all-business schoolmarm, Susan Webb.

"Now Recite: `B-A ba, B-E be, ba, be, bi, bo, bu.'"

The children dutifully repeated the sounds, their voices filling the small

one-room school house at Middle Gate School, much as children's voices might

have sounded in Colonial times.

Part of a unit on Colonial life, children from Head O'Meadow School visited

the one room schoolhouse to learn their letters from a "traveling schoolmarm."

Mrs Webb brought history to life as she took on the persona of a school marm

and demonstrated teaching in early American schools.

She told the second graders that children of all ages attended the early

school houses together, and that the teacher was often as young as age 16. She

said that, "If you could read and write, you were qualified to be the

teacher."

The teacher would have the youngest children, the ABCers, on benches near the

wood stove reciting their letters. The children who knew their alphabet sat on

the bench with the writing table that ran around the perimeter of the room.

With very little to write on, children had to recite what they were learning.

With children at all different levels, this meant they were often reciting

different things. The kids tried it, and understood why the early schools were

known as "blab schools."

In the early days paper was so scarce that a classroom would have little more

than the Bible and a few horn books for the children to use when learning to

read.

One HOM second grade boy put on a "horn book" around his neck. A horn book was

made from a piece of paper (with the alphabet, a prayer and a saying printed

on it) that was attached to a flat piece of wood. It was varnished with melted

cow's horn to protect the paper and a string would let the child wear it.

Boys and girls were encouraged to practice their alphabet through reciting,

and also through using a "sewing horn book." A sewing horn book was a piece of

wood with lettered holes, in alphabetical order. As children sewed from letter

to letter, they also learned their alphabet. (Sewing was important for

everybody. Girls might sew-up household linens and clothing, while boys

repaired horse harnesses.)

Mrs Webb enthusiastically showed the children a little book that was among the

first textbooks used in New England called The New England Primer . It was

published in 1840.

The second graders correctly surmised that the first text books had tiny

writing and were so small because paper was so hard to get back then.

Children learned to spell by reciting. The second graders spelled "spider"

using the format of a spelling bee. They said, "Spider. S-P-I, spi; D-E-R,

der, spider."

Mrs Webb said that in the one-room school house the child who won Friday's

spelling bee would be the most important person in the class, at least until

the next Friday's spelling bee.

As slates became available, children were given a hard chalk "pencil" that

they could use to practice letters on the slate. Later, as paper became more

readily available, children were given "copy books" in which to practice their

writing.

The children were amazed to see the elegant and attractive script in a 130-

year-old copy book. It was done by a boy of about 12, using homemade ink

applied with a feather pen (or perhaps an early fountain pen). The ink was

hard to work with. Children would have to walk to the teacher's desk, dip

their feather in the ink well, make it back to the bench, try not to jiggle

the bench as they got back in their seat, and carefully script a few letters,

then go back for more ink. Most children had an ink doll, a small fabric doll

which they could use to blot up excess ink in their copy books.

After about half an hour, the HOM children were starting to squirm on the hard

wooden benches. Mrs Webb had them stand up and recite an old rhyme about a sly

little spider in the meadow.

She showed them a painting of a little girl in a one room school house with a

little lamb, and told the children that Mary Had a Little Lamb was based on a

true story of a little girl from Massachusetts, called Mary, who did have a

little lamb that liked to follow her around. She explained that lots of

children cared for young animals in earlier times.

By this point the children had an idea of how children learned in a one-room

school house, but what about things like the bathroom and the drinking

fountain?

Mrs Webb told them that "the necessary" or "privy," as it was sometimes

called, was simply a tiny wood building. Not every school had one. With some

schools, a remote tree served the purpose.

For a drinking fountain, an older child would be sent to the well or a nearby

creek to get a bucket of water, and place it by the back door. Children would

dip the cup in it to drink.

Mrs Webb said that colonial people led very difficult lives. She said, "We owe

them a lot."

Mrs Webb, a certified and veteran teacher, lives in Brookfield and brings her

program "School Days with the Traveling Schoolmarm" to area schools. She can

be reached at 203/775-2155 for further information.