Week 37: Back to School! One Hundred Years Ago and Sometime Last Week

Grace as a young woman

 

In this case, being late to the prompt just puts me in line with the rest of the world.  The consequences of COVID have complicated the start of school all over the U.S.  Some districts around the countryhave tried in-person classes, some online, some a hybrid of the two but all of these approaches have their downsides.  My granddaughter in Maryland is in 5th grade and completely online for now which is a little sad since she lives across the street from her school!  But kids (and their parents) are learning and adapting and we are all going to look back on this time with astonishment one day.

So, for school, I was thinking about my grandmother, Grace McDuff, who taught in a one-room schoolroom in eastern Washington state for a year before she married Melvin Belknap.  I did try very hard to get Grandma to talk about this experience but the most she would say was that she boarded in a farmer's house, and that when the snow was deep the farmer lent her a horse to get to school.  It is probably worth noting that Grace was just about five feet tall.   I have her contract and her test scores that qualified her to teach:  she herself only had a high school education but that was enough to let her run a rural classroom.  She did express some embarrassment about her spelling score of 80%:  Grandma was a lover of language and words and this lapse was most uncharacteristic.

I cannot at the moment lay my hands on her teaching contract though I seem to remember that she was being paid $60/month in Yakima County around 1915, and of course she got room and board as well.  Things have certainly changed!  (Update:  I think I've found the box these papers must be in!  I just keep stopping to read everything that's piled on top of them first . . .)