The country school teacher did many things.

Friday, September 08, 2000

The country school teacher did many things. He – or usually she – primarily was an educator, but the duties of the teacher didn’t stop there. There was the stove to be lit, water to be drawn, coal and wood to carry in and ashes to carry out. There were lunches to heat up, posters to be drawn, projects to be made. And there was recess, of course.

To be a country school teacher one had to graduate high school and attend one year of normal training. In Austin, normal training took place on the top floor of the high school.

"I always thought it strange," former country school teacher Polly Jelinek said. "You would go to normal training for one year and teach eight grades, or college for two years to teach one grade."

For Jelinek, the years she taught country school from 1952 to 1960 were some of the best in her career.

"It was just so fun," she said. "I taught, but the kids helped each other, too, especially the older ones with the younger students. The parents were really involved. We did plays, held basket socials … there was a lot of community activity around the school."

Teaching at a country school could be tricky. With eight grades in one room, a teacher had to be well-organized – it was her job to make sure they were all learning, even when she was working with other students.

So, each morning Jelinek would put work on the board for the older students to do, while she was doing the oral lessons with the younger students. Then, when the younger students were done and had been assigned written work to do, she would sit with the older students. If a student hadn’t quite mastered something in the third grade, or had forgotten it over the past year, it wasn’t a big problem. He would certainly hear it again, when the teacher went over the lesson with the class behind.

"I don’t think many country school students were held back," Jelinek said. "They had a lot of opportunities to learn."

The subjects, while not as many as today’s schools offer, covered the basics and then some. Each teacher was supposed to instruct students at the correct level – in reading, social studies, literature and grammar, math, spelling, penmanship, music, science and health, physical education, citizenship and creative art.

Jelinek also pointed out that the schools had a "hot lunch program" – kids could set their jars of soup on top of the warming plate on the stove and presto, lunch was hot.

Country schools were in Minnesota from the beginning, when the plan was that there be one school for every 36 sections of land. They flourished and then, as consolidation of schools became the rage, declined. In 1958, there were only 11 rural schools left in Mower County. In 1965, the state Legislature passed an act that any school district not maintaining a "classified school" within the district may be attached to or consolidated with an adjoining district maintaining a classified elementary or secondary school.

Although some still dot the landscape, they are museums now or shops. Most of the men and women who taught in the one-room schoolhouses are retired now, or no longer living.

By the time Jelinek started teaching, some things had changed, but if you happened to look at the superintendent’s notes from 1901, you would notice a lot of names preceded by the title of "Miss." That’s because only spinsters (unmarried women) and men could teach. If a woman got married, she had to stop teaching and let the job go to a woman who didn’t have a man to earn the daily bread.

Geneva Pedersen Johnson was a rural school teacher for two years in the 1930s, a student of the same school for eight years before that, and a member of the Mothers’ Club for several years afterward.

"If the teacher could play the organ, she found the pupils very enthusiastic," Johnson wrote in "A Teacher’s Memories of the Rural School." "Morning exercises started the school day and consisted of singing, memorizing and quoting ‘Memory Gems,’ listening to the teacher read from a book and contests, such as identifying birds from the bird cards put out by the Arm and Hammer Soda Co."

According to Johnson, numbers of students varied from only a few – she had only three students her first year of teaching – to more than 30 and all eight grades.

"Somewhere in between the two extremes would have been much more desirable," she wrote.

An anonymous poet penned a poem in honor of the rural school teacher:

The teacher in high school works hard we all know, But the poor rural teacher – Oh! Oh!

She must know how to sing and to paint and to dance,

To make a bookcase and to raise lovely plants,

To weave a good basket and make things of clay,

To write a fair poem, to put on a play,

To umpire a ball game, to run a track meet,

To be yard police, a regular beat.

She must see that each pupil is healthy and fed,

And examine for vermin each untidy head,

And of course she must teach them to read and to spell …