Stories From Home Economists
What Do You Remember About the Schools You Attended?
January 2026
Thank you to Jan Bushfiled, P.H.Ec., a London-based retired Home Economics teacher and wonderful story-teller who has shared the following memories of the Ontario schools she attended.
January 2026
Thank you to Jan Bushfiled, P.H.Ec., a London-based retired Home Economics teacher and wonderful story-teller who has shared the following memories of the Ontario schools she attended.
My parents both attended a one-room school, located within walking distance of both of their homes, where one teacher taught grades 1-8. 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 6 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 8 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 top of the chalkboards were large cards illustrating the correct way to print the letters of the alphabet, and on one wall, 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. There was heat 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 in the snowy season, creating the very distinctive aroma of wet wool. There was 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 lunchboxes. The ‘washroom’ was an outbuilding behind the school, divided for boys and girls, and accessed by going out the front door of the school and following a path around back. It featured a wooden bench seat with a hole in it sized to fit a small bottom. There was no running water or electricity out there. 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 7 and 8 there, isolated from all the ‘little kids’. However, that did mean a downgrade to less-than-modern washrooms! One of the fun benefits was the large table located at the front of the classroom where an ongoing lunchtime Monopoly or Clue game could continue, hotly contested, all week. And there was 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 the grades 9 to 13. Classrooms were assigned according to the size of the room and the number of students enrolled in each grade, and we remained in the same classroom for most of the day, with the teachers of each subject rotating to each class. There were only 13 of us in grade 13, so we were assigned to a small classroom that also served as the library. For many of the staff members, this was not their dream job, and many stayed just until they found a less demanding teaching assignment in a larger school. Two very dedicated and notable exceptions were our principal who spent his entire career there, administering the school as well as teaching French, and our math teacher who taught all of the math and science to all of the grades and persevered until he retired.
I spent five fun and busy years there. There were student council positions (grade representative, treasurer, social director, president), glee club and drama presentations (actor, director, piano player), school outings (Royal Winter Fair, theatre in Toronto), as well as school events like Commencement (Graduation) and the annual ‘At Home’ prom that were enjoyed by the wider community. In a small community everyone knows everyone and school events provide both entertainment and an evening out for all interested parties. Our school didn’t have an auditorium or gymnasium where the entire student body could gather, so instead we used the village Recreation Centre located at the other end of the village. Just imagine phys. ed. class…change into gym clothes, walk to the Rec Centre, play basketball, walk back, 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, which, along with Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) and Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) amalgamated in 1964 to form the University of Guelph. The addition of the new Wellington College provided degrees in arts and sciences. ‘Mac’ offered a four-year honours degree in Household Science. For the first three years we studied a common core curriculum with a few opportunities to choose electives. Our required subjects included sciences (physics, organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, biology, physiology, microbiology), humanities (English literature, sociology, psychology, child development, art history) as well as home economics (food and nutrition, clothing and textiles, home management, housing). In year four we selected a major—my choice was clothing and textiles, which allowed me to study flat pattern design, draping, tailoring, textile chemistry, and historic costume.
All first-year students were required to live on campus in gender-segregated residences—co-ed residences were not yet commonplace on university campuses. Mac students lived in MacDonald Hall, conveniently located next door to MacDonald Institute where our home economics classes were taught, and just across the street from Creelman Hall Cafeteria where we ate all of our meals. I was fortunate to live in a double room in the annex, a two-story addition that had been added to the main building. (That year, in order to accommodate an increased enrollment, the original gymnasium had been converted into several rooms with bunk beds for four. The gym had a high ceiling but the newly installed partitions were just a standard eight feet tall, so it created a rather noisy place to live.) We were required to wear skirts for classes in Mac, although the dress code was more relaxed for our classes elsewhere on campus. Our residence had a curfew, and the desk in the front lobby was always staffed with someone who made sure we signed out and back in again in the evening. Males were not allowed beyond the common room (unless they were enterprising enough to climb through a window).
Four years later, a graduate of Mac ‘69, with an Honours Bachelor of Household Science degree (B.H.Sc.), and a new husband, we moved to an apartment in London, Ontario so that I could attend Althouse College of Education for a one-year program of teacher training, thus completing my 17 years as a student. Our long-term plan had always been to relocate further east in Ontario in order to avoid the traffic challenges presented by Toronto, and to be closer to family. But conditions and events conspired to keep us in London. We both enjoyed long teaching careers and long retirement years here. And if luck prevails, London will remain my home for many more years to come.
Jan Burshfiled, P.H.Ec.
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 7 and 8 there, isolated from all the ‘little kids’. However, that did mean a downgrade to less-than-modern washrooms! One of the fun benefits was the large table located at the front of the classroom where an ongoing lunchtime Monopoly or Clue game could continue, hotly contested, all week. And there was 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 the grades 9 to 13. Classrooms were assigned according to the size of the room and the number of students enrolled in each grade, and we remained in the same classroom for most of the day, with the teachers of each subject rotating to each class. There were only 13 of us in grade 13, so we were assigned to a small classroom that also served as the library. For many of the staff members, this was not their dream job, and many stayed just until they found a less demanding teaching assignment in a larger school. Two very dedicated and notable exceptions were our principal who spent his entire career there, administering the school as well as teaching French, and our math teacher who taught all of the math and science to all of the grades and persevered until he retired.
I spent five fun and busy years there. There were student council positions (grade representative, treasurer, social director, president), glee club and drama presentations (actor, director, piano player), school outings (Royal Winter Fair, theatre in Toronto), as well as school events like Commencement (Graduation) and the annual ‘At Home’ prom that were enjoyed by the wider community. In a small community everyone knows everyone and school events provide both entertainment and an evening out for all interested parties. Our school didn’t have an auditorium or gymnasium where the entire student body could gather, so instead we used the village Recreation Centre located at the other end of the village. Just imagine phys. ed. class…change into gym clothes, walk to the Rec Centre, play basketball, walk back, 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, which, along with Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) and Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) amalgamated in 1964 to form the University of Guelph. The addition of the new Wellington College provided degrees in arts and sciences. ‘Mac’ offered a four-year honours degree in Household Science. For the first three years we studied a common core curriculum with a few opportunities to choose electives. Our required subjects included sciences (physics, organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, biology, physiology, microbiology), humanities (English literature, sociology, psychology, child development, art history) as well as home economics (food and nutrition, clothing and textiles, home management, housing). In year four we selected a major—my choice was clothing and textiles, which allowed me to study flat pattern design, draping, tailoring, textile chemistry, and historic costume.
All first-year students were required to live on campus in gender-segregated residences—co-ed residences were not yet commonplace on university campuses. Mac students lived in MacDonald Hall, conveniently located next door to MacDonald Institute where our home economics classes were taught, and just across the street from Creelman Hall Cafeteria where we ate all of our meals. I was fortunate to live in a double room in the annex, a two-story addition that had been added to the main building. (That year, in order to accommodate an increased enrollment, the original gymnasium had been converted into several rooms with bunk beds for four. The gym had a high ceiling but the newly installed partitions were just a standard eight feet tall, so it created a rather noisy place to live.) We were required to wear skirts for classes in Mac, although the dress code was more relaxed for our classes elsewhere on campus. Our residence had a curfew, and the desk in the front lobby was always staffed with someone who made sure we signed out and back in again in the evening. Males were not allowed beyond the common room (unless they were enterprising enough to climb through a window).
Four years later, a graduate of Mac ‘69, with an Honours Bachelor of Household Science degree (B.H.Sc.), and a new husband, we moved to an apartment in London, Ontario so that I could attend Althouse College of Education for a one-year program of teacher training, thus completing my 17 years as a student. Our long-term plan had always been to relocate further east in Ontario in order to avoid the traffic challenges presented by Toronto, and to be closer to family. But conditions and events conspired to keep us in London. We both enjoyed long teaching careers and long retirement years here. And if luck prevails, London will remain my home for many more years to come.
Jan Burshfiled, P.H.Ec.