This is the country school house where I went to school in the 1940s. It had two rooms but we only used the smaller of the two rooms, on the left. We had one teacher, Miss Beatrice Brown, who taught grades 1 through 8. After the 8th grade a child had "graduated" and it was the parents choice if the student would be allowed to go on to high school. We walked to school in all kinds of weather but high school students had to be carried to an adjoining town for high school classes. Not many kids went on to high school unless they thought they might want to go to college. In those days you had to have graduated from a high school before you could be accepted into a college. Not many kids went beyond the 8th grade because they were farmers and did not need what was then called a 'higher education.' The red brick school in the country had outside toilets. One for the girls and one for the boys. You can see the wooden fence behind the schoolhouse and on the left is the boy's toilet. Both toilets had two holes or seats but the boy's toilet also had a "V" channel of wood sloped toward the pit and boys were supposed to pee in that to avoid messing up the toilet seats. Older boys would pound on you if you were caught peeing in a toilet seat instead of the pee channel trough.
10 comments:
Very interesting to see ans old US, rural school. Many things look different (especially the bell "tower"), but I suspect that the outside toilets were much the same over her at the time.
That place was our sanctuary during World War II. Out in the county and nothing around. One teacher who taught all 8 grades. My 1944 school photo shows 23 students in all 8 grades. It took a unique kind of person to be able to handle all the grades in order. I do remember how I struggled to memorize the alphabet and would always get mixed up around l,m,o,p. Somebody, one of the kids, made the alphabet into a poem or sorts and that was how I was able to remember it.
My grandfather on my father's side was a teacher in that kind of school in the 20s and 30s. Sadly he died before I was born.
Thank you for the comment: The photo was shot in a so-called Black Box theatre, so I got some help there :-) .I used a Canon 7D with a Canon EF 24-105L lens. f4 and 1/125 and ISO 4000. The software was Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.
Very different from my old school. You have a god memory, I'm having a hard time remembering the name of my first grade teacher, or even how she looked.
I could never afford really expensive cameras but thought I had them in the 7D and I also had the Canon Lenses. Some cost more than the camera. I still have two of the Canons and several lenses.
This new camera is almost exactly like the one I used in Japan. A fixed focus camera without any mirrors. The shutter is a slide mechanism like the old film camera had and I just love it. Unfortunately, I have not taken a lot of photos with it yet because I am not able to get outside in this 6ยบ weather and snow.
I have been blessed with both "short-term memory" and "long-term memory." That means I can remember back as far as about age 2 and up to now and a few minutes ago. It must be in my dna.
Wow... isn't it great that we remember everything so clearly about our school days.
Like that picture and like the way you have described everything.
Following you.
A great photo of an old school. Not all early schools were one room school houses as your words confirm, Fine post! -- barbara
Thank you very much for the visit and comment. I try to remember too many things.
Our area of Ohio was laid out in square grids and each side was one mile long. Farmers in the area had children to send to school. So there would be a one room school, in red brick, on each one mile side -- 4 schools in the one-mile square. No child had farther to walk than one-half mile to a school that taught 1-8 grades by one teacher.
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