What Do You Remember About the Schools You Attended?

Jan Bushfield, P.H.Ec., London, Ontario

Long before smartboards, Wi-Fi, and standardized classrooms, Ontario students learned in spaces shaped as much by community as curriculum. In this reflective piece, Jan Bushfield, P.H.Ec., a retired Home Economics/Family Studies teacher based in London, Ontario, shares vivid memories of the schools that shaped her early education - from one-room schoolhouses to university lecture halls, and everything in between. ​

My parents both attended a one-room school, located within walking distance of both of their homes, where one teacher taught grades 1 to 8. In rural areas, where most kids lived on farms, many had a rather long walk to school. My father started first grade a year late because the walk for him was so long.

By the time I started school in 1953 at the age of six, there had been some reorganization of the schools. Kindergarten didn’t yet exist in rural areas, but busing had been introduced, and since this made longer travel possible, some of the old one-room schools had been closed or repurposed.
The first school I attended, Caesarea Public School, was one of the original one-room schools but by then only served grades one to three. It was about a ten-mile bus ride from our house, and three or four yellow school buses picked up all the students from the entire township and delivered them to each school.

At my school, grade one pupils filled one row, about eight of us. We sat in stand-alone desks arranged in neat rows, each desk with a drawer beneath the seat to hold books and papers, and a hole in the upper right corner of the desktop to hold an ink bottle. Grade one pupils learned to print with fat pencils, so we had no use for ink.

At the front of the room, behind the teacher’s desk, were wall-sized chalkboards made of smooth black slate. Wiping them off at the end of the day with a chalkboard eraser was a prized assignment. Displayed above the chalkboards were large cards illustrating the correct way to print the letters of the alphabet, and on one wall was a map of the world that could be pulled up and down like a window shade.

Fun fact: by repeatedly studying the alphabet cards backwards, I eventually learned to repeat the alphabet in reverse, inspired by a senior student on my bus who liked to show off that impressive skill.
Heat was provided by a wood-burning furnace in the cellar, with radiators along the sides of the room where we would spread our wet hats and mittens during the snowy season, creating the very distinctive aroma of wet wool. There was also a wood-burning stove in the middle of the room where, on very cold days, our teacher, Mrs. Venning, would prepare a large pot of either hot chocolate or chicken noodle soup to supplement the cold lunches we brought from home.

We carried our lunches in rectangular tin lunch boxes, often decorated with some of the heroes of the day. Mine displayed The Lone Ranger. I wasn’t the Cinderella type. Just inside the front door were cloakrooms - girls on the right, boys on the left - with benches, coat hooks, and a shelf for our lunch boxes. The “washroom” was an outbuilding behind the school, divided for boys and girls, and accessed by going out the front door and following a path around back. It featured a wooden bench seat with a hole sized to fit a small bottom. There was no running water or electricity. There were spiders, though.

Caesarea School was permanently closed at the end of that year, and in September all elementary students in the township attended a large, newly built school in the village of Blackstock: Cartwright Central Public School. It had several classrooms, a teacher for each grade, a gymnasium-auditorium, an office for the principal (where the strap was sometimes administered to the hands of misbehaving boys), and modern washrooms. I attended grades two through six there.

Meanwhile, just around the corner, the “old” one-room Blackstock elementary school remained in use for senior grades until an addition to the new school could be built. I considered it an exciting privilege to spend grades seven and eight there, isolated from all the “little kids,” though that did mean a downgrade to less-than-modern washrooms.
One of the fun benefits was a large table located at the front of the classroom where an ongoing lunchtime Monopoly or Clue game could continue, hotly contested, all week. There was also a piano where a friend and I alternated playing O Canada and God Save the Queen at the beginning of each school day.

Our high school, just a little further down the street, was old and small - one of the smallest high schools in the province. It served a student population of about 100, with one classroom for each of grades nine to thirteen. Classrooms were assigned according to size and enrollment, and we remained in the same room for most of the day while teachers rotated between classes.

There were only thirteen of us in grade thirteen, so we were assigned to a small classroom that also served as the library. For many staff members, this was not their dream job, and many stayed only until they found a less demanding assignment in a larger school. Two notable exceptions were our principal, who spent his entire career there while also teaching French, and our math teacher, who taught all math and science to all grades until his retirement.

I spent five fun and busy years there. Student council roles, glee club, drama productions, school outings to the Royal Winter Fair and Toronto theatre, and community events like Commencement and the annual “At Home” prom filled our days. In a small community, everyone knows everyone, and school events doubled as social gatherings for the wider community.
Our school didn’t have an auditorium or gymnasium large enough for everyone, so we used the village Recreation Centre. Imagine phys. ed. class: change into gym clothes, walk to the Rec Centre, play basketball, walk back, and change again - all in a 60-minute period.

In 1965, I graduated from high school, delivered the Valedictory Address, and headed off to the University of Guelph to explore the wider world, acquire the education that would shape my future career, and meet the man I would spend the next 58 years with.

I was a student at MacDonald Institute, an all-female college that, along with Ontario Agricultural College and Ontario Veterinary College, amalgamated in 1964 to form the University of Guelph. Mac offered a four-year Honours degree in Household Science. For the first three years, we studied a common core curriculum that included sciences, humanities, and home economics. In year four, we selected a major; mine was clothing and textiles.
All first-year students were required to live on campus in gender-segregated residences. Mac students lived in MacDonald Hall, adjacent to our classes and across the street from Creelman Hall Cafeteria. We wore skirts to classes at Mac, had curfews, and signed in and out each evening. Males were not allowed beyond the common room unless they were enterprising enough to climb through a window.
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Four years later, as a graduate of Mac ’69 with an Honours Bachelor of Household Science degree and a new husband, we moved to London, where I completed a year of teacher training at Althouse College of Education. What was meant to be a temporary stop became a lifelong home. We both enjoyed long teaching careers and long retirements here, and with luck, London will remain my home for many years to come.