Attendance was just 59 percent. Forget Trapper Keepers and gel pens. In the 19th and earlyth centuries, students made do with just a slate and some chalk [ PDF ]. In the monitorial or Lancasterian system , the older, stronger students learned lessons directly from the teacher, then taught the younger, weaker students.
Teachers taught subjects including reading, writing, arithmetic, history, grammar, rhetoric, and geography you can see some 19th century textbooks here. One Wisconsin teacher wrote of boarding with families in ,. A part of the places where I boarded I had flannel sheets to sleep in; and the others cotton.
But the most unpleasant part was being obliged to walk through the snow and water. I suffered much from colds and a cough. Schoolchildren would write in class on miniature blackboards, called slates. To do math problems or write out answers, students used slates during class. These were like mini handheld blackboards. Kids would write on them with chalk and then wipe off the slates for the next lesson. Quills and ink were used instead of pens. For big exams or to practice handwriting, paper and pens would be used, but the pens back then were very different.
They were often made out of quills from birds and were dipped in pots of ink in order to write. That could lead to things getting messy! Ink spills and stains can really mess up a test! Even using pencils was tricky — the pencils had to be sharpened with knives! Monitors were responsible for almost every aspect of classroom management—catching up kids who had missed class, examining students and promoting them to different classes, taking care of classroom materials, even monitoring the other monitors.
Schools ranged in size from a few students to thousands. Monitors had heavy workloads, but aside from a few special privileges and some serious rank within their classrooms, they were unpaid. In smaller schools, students might simply gather around the monitor and learn the lesson by ear. Once they had memorized their rote lesson or completed the assigned written work on a slate, class members would demonstrate it for the monitor.
A new lesson would be assigned to the monitors and the school day would continue. Monitors rose to their rank after acing special exams and were given special privileges. Some wore special badges and the position was a mark of pride.
There were other reasons to be proud in a monitorial classroom. However, moving down a class—being demoted because of poor scholarship—was regarded as a humiliation. After the harvesting had been done, the boys then attended the Winter session and the girls helped out with chores around the house.
Pioneer Children Doing Chores pinterest. Boys were learning to farm so they could one day provide for their own families. Everyone in the family pitched in to do whatever was necessary. The Great March Blizzard of highlandscurrent. Back in the s, there was no public transportation provided for students so many actually walked through high snow and other bad weather, sometimes for a few miles, to get to school during and even after pioneer times.
Teachers were often very young, themselves, with no additional training other than their own schoolhouse education.
They were not paid very much and usually boarded with the family of one of their students, sometimes even having to share a bed with them. They also had some strict rules to abide by, some of which are listed below:. Male teachers, however, were permitted to court a woman;.
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