Have Your Say: Re: Back when teachers were teachers – February 27, 2020

To the Editors,

Being only slightly older than the gentleman from Dunnville who attended a one-room schoolhouse in Rainham, his memories mirror mine in Oneida township. I recall the same lack of amenities. I especially remember dipping pens with scratchy nibs into inkwells with slow-drying blue ink that made my left-handed penmanship more resemble a Rorschach test than a literary masterpiece.

While these distant memories are rosier than living them actually was, I would not for one minute try to correlate them with the realities of society and education today. If we somehow were tele-transported from our 1950s schoolrooms directly into the future that is today, we would not fare well. We would not qualify for admittance to any high school in 2020. There is almost no job we could fill. We farm boys, approaching a modern farm tractor with more onboard computing power than any space flight to the moon, would be lucky to get it moving.

The most forward thinking 1950s teachers never could have prepared us for what daily life requires of us in 2020. As carefree children, we had no sense of what challenges our mid-20th century teachers endured, beyond what we provided daily.