Teaching in the Titanic Era!

The B.C Legislature has passed a bill to stop the teachers strike.Here’s the article in the Globe and Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/bc-politics/bc-legislature-passes-bill-to-end-teachers-strike/article2370908/

That, I guess, is good news for me, as my Threshold Girl Story, Threshold Girl

about a College Girl in 1911/1912 Quebec, and my Tighsolas website are used primarily by classrooms in BC. Go figure!  OISE (the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education) has printed out a copy for their stacks,because the girl, Flora Nicholson, is studying to be a teacher at Macdonald Teachers College, in Ste.Anne de Bellevue (McGill Normal School.) This story is ALL about teaching! They still used slates back then. Today they use iPads! Think about the changes that teaching has gone through. Marion Nicholson, Flora’s older sister who is already teaching in Montreal in 1911, went on to head the Montreal Teacher’s Union during the war! I’m writing her story, too, as a follow up.

Anyway, I am an education writer, or was one, and I dug us this little piece I wrote about 10 years ago, in support of teachers. I was a writer (a PAID writer) for a new online venture called Moms Online, which got folded into Oprah’s Oxygen Network and then dissolved.

What Makes a Great Teacher?

What makes a great teacher? We all have our opinions. Some say great
teachers are born, that it’s “in the blood,” while others assert great
teachers are made — that teachers enter the profession with little knowledge
and experience and require a great deal of practice and mentoring by more
experienced teachers to be successful.

An active parent-volunteer once told me that the only reason she began
volunteering in her son’s school was to keep an eye on things and to make
sure he got the best teachers.

We’ve all been there; we’ve all heard it: parents gossip about how great one
teacher is, and how bad another is.

I’ve always tended to leave the decision of where to place my child with the
principal, who once told me that it’s more important to match a child’s
temperament and learning style with a teacher’s temperament and teaching
style than for any child to get “the most popular” teacher.

Still, working on another assignment last summer, I had the privilege of
interviewing some terrific teachers as well as the parents and principals who
admired them. Despite the fact that these teachers represented many
different grades and levels of experience and came from a wide range of
geographical locations, they tended to exhibit many of the same qualities:

- empathy and enthusiasm;
- dedication to the profession and a love of children;
- the ability to see each child as an individual and to bring out the best in
each child;
- the ability to challenge the children;
- a firm but fair teaching style;
- and the wherewithal to bring parents into the process, communicating early
and often, before major problems arise.

It seemed that good teachers exhibit many of the same qualities as good
parents: I was humbled, I tell you, hearing about these gifted
professionals. I decided to investigate a little deeper…

I phoned a representative of the National Teacher of the Year organization
who agreed: past National Teachers of the Year tended to have these very
qualities, cited above. I looked up the web site of the Prime Minister’s
Awards for Teaching Excellence, in Canada, our equivalent of National Teacher
of the Year. The web site claimed that teachers were selected on the basis
of their ability to “achieve outstanding results with students; to inspire to
learn and continue to learn; to equip them with the knowledge, attitudes and
abilities that they will need to succeed in tomorrow’s society and economy.”

Esther, a poster on the Moms Online Education Board, offers this opinion:
“My kids have had all kinds of teachers. The best ones had two things in
common: they knew and treated each child like an individual, and they could
see The Big Picture.”

Kelly, another poster, agrees. “I personally like a teacher who can teach to
the individual… a very difficult thing when there are 25 students in one
room.” Kelly prefers teachers who are organized and who can communicate
openly with parents. She doesn’t think teachers, necessarily, have to invite
parents into the classroom as volunteers.

Moms Online member Shelly claims that a good teacher is one who understands
the needs of the individual students, who is up-to-date on teaching
techniques and curriculum, and who sets reasonable and appropriate goals for
students and communicates these to the students and their families.

LDRS MOM Tea, Education Board volunteer host, says, “The best teacher my son
had called up every parent during the first week of school and asked them
what they thought were their children’s strengths, weaknesses, and needs. I
felt included from Day One.”

As with last month’s query “What is the purpose of education?,” the answer to
“What makes a good teacher?” is far from simple or clear-cut.

Granted, the teaching profession has changed over the years and is still
changing: What it takes to be a great teacher today is quite different from
what it took forty years or even twenty years ago. More is required of
teachers today. In the past, a teacher’s job was to “lecture” and make sure
the kids learned the subjects; today a teacher must also be an empathetic,
caring individual… sometimes to the extent of being a social worker. Older
teachers point out that kids have changed dramatically too — they don’t
respect authority as much.

One aspect related to teaching, however, hasn’t changed and is not likely to
in the future: ALL teachers (master teachers or not, award-winning or not)
have the power to turn lives around — and that is an awesome power indeed.

Dorothy Nixon is a Montreal-based freelance journalist and longtime Moms
Online contributor who got her start as a hack penning 30-second radio ads to
impossibly tight deadlines. She got her “online” break right here at Moms
Online many, many moons ago. Today, Dorothy writes about many cultural and
social issues, focusing more and more on education. She edited an education
quarterly in Quebec for 4 years in the ’90s and just completed a 4-year stint
on the board of the Center for Literacy, a Montreal-based think tank and
training center for treachers. Dorothy studied Communications at McGill in
the ’70′s. Her favorite book in high school was Brave New World — and that
probably explains more about why she is writing this column than anything
else.

The More Things Change..

Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services.

Today, I saw that Montreal’s Police Force was coming under fire for being soft on organized crime.  It came up on my Google News as it is set for “Quebec” (automatically I guess) but it’s a Vancouver Sun article reprint of a Postmedia article by Henry Aubin. According to Aubin Montreal has a huge police force that is very ineffective, against all crime.

Hmm. That’s what they said in 1927 with the Coderre Report. It’s all in my play MIlk and Water  -about Montreal in the Jazz Age, where I have my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services have a talk with my husband’s grandfather, Thomas Wells, Westmount Businessman.

Anyway, another article in the same box is from the Montreal Gazette: Best Treated Minority? Think Again. Apparently, an economic think tank has come out with figures showing that Angl0-Quebeckers are underfunded. Surprise! I have written before how virtually all projects focusing on Anglo Arts are funded by ONE government agency, Heritage Canada that also funds French outside of Quebec and since we’re ‘a minority within a minority’ we get short shrift. I’ve given up on ever getting any funding for my projects, which don’t fit the bill anyway. They are big into funding projects to do with the Military these days.  It’s all a scam, let’s face it. It’s all about Control.

But this article, by Don MacPherson discusses a report that compared Provincial funding across Canada for minorities and apparently, Quebec came out dead last for funding for minority language by far.

How is this a surprise, tho?

It’s sad that Anglo schools are poorly funded though. As I have written elsewhere, in the 1960′s the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal was the best performing in North America.

And so many of these students went on to brilliant careers, mostly in Ontario.

I was thinking of this last night. Sometimes I play this game, where I try to invoke a ‘new’ childhood memory… It seldom works.. But last night I remembered my grade six play. I won the lead, the Princess.  I recalled going to the audition, wearing this old purple sweater I had.  We wore tunics in those days, uniforms, but there were still opportunities to show off nice clothes. I had none. (My mother had grown up rich as my play Milk and Water shows, and didn’t know how  to manage a family on a middle class budget.

Anyway, I went to the audition after school and the director was not a school teacher, but some ‘older’ woman who looked like Agnes Moorehead – who we knew as Samatha’s mother on Bewitched. Everyone made fun of that, and then they made fun of my sweater (can’t recall the context, I think because it was “royal” purple and our play as about Royalty. It had a Prince Charming. A spinning wheel. I guess it was Cinderella/Rapunzel.

So, as I said, I won the lead, perhaps because of my sad sweater (maybe Agnes Moorehead was sorry for me)… Then again, at the performance, (I recall being scared to death and HATING being on stage), my Dad said I was the only one who articulated properly.

Anyway, Prince Charming was a guy called Lorne Abugov and he refused to kiss me, (as 11 years olds tend to do) which was traumatizing enough. I think (although not 100 percent sure) that Lorne’s brother is Jeff, a man who went on to write for Hollywood, and on top shows. Cheers the Golden Girls, producer Roseanne and now he’s producer of Two and a Half Men.

Well,  maybe not a typical career of a former ango-Montrealer, but an example.

 

As it happens, I’m getting to work on Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about two teachers in 1910, (Edith and Marion Nicholson) the follow up to Threshold Girl and I am contemplating that angle, wondering exactly how classrooms ran in those days. Probably not unlike the way they ran in my day. Marion left behind a diary during her first year of teaching, but it’s all about her boyfriends and her activities at the skating rink. No shop talk. (Well, I guess diaries for teachers are considered an invasion of privacy. Tell that to What’s his name, Gervais Gervase Phinn, the guy who writes his experiences about North Yorkshire schools.) Or maybe they don’t have time to keep work diaries. Marion didn’t have time with her 50 ‘very bad’ students. Or maybe teachers, as a rule, are ‘action=oriented’ not introspective. Marion was totally action-oriented. That’s why she became a union leader during the War.)

I know a diary exists at Harvard, of a more serious girl who did no dating….

Apparently teachers who were interested in getting boyfriends (the majority) didn’t mention that they were teachers. A teacher was not a profession that attracted the boys. So it goes. Marion was an exception and this makes Edith jealous (in my story).

Everyone Hates the Normal

Marion, second from left, in Normal School photo.

Well, I was able to find a newspaper description of the 1927 Macdonald Normal School Graduation and the 1907 Mcgill Normal School Graduation, so that I can probably mesh the two and describe what likely happened at Flo’s graduation in 1911. Prayer to start, some choir singing (Flora was in the choir), lots of important people attending, some giving speeches. Prizes awarded.

I am pretty sure, a few years ago as I embarked on this research for Flora in the City, I read that Macdonald only absorbed the Mcgill Normal School reluctantly. Where did I read this?

I have puzzled together something about it from Gazette reports. In 1905, Macdonald (the Tobacco benefactor) said that his new school would not be absorbing the McGill Normal School (despite the fact that many assumed it would, that it was a natural thing.)

Then suddenly they are absorbing it…Political wrangling I guess. I’m assuming Principal Robins was against the move, as he resigned or lost his job when the transfer occurred, while all the other teachers moved to Macdonald, literally.

In 1906, the Normal School is saying it is looking for ways to create residences for women students, a big problem that keeps rural women from applying. (The Nicholson letters describe the huge problems young had getting places to live in Montreal.)

John Ferguson Snell’s book on Macdonald College states Macdonald absorbed the Normal School because in 1906, an educational official did a survey and figured out that Women Teaching Students had difficulty finding places to live in Montreal.

(Marion’s letters from Normal School reveal this. She stayed at the Y and hated it. Too many rules! I think I will have her talking to this official in 1906. Maybe she did! The Y rooms were cold, it seems, from Marion’s letters. Also, there’s an interesting bit in her letters about a Gazette letter that claims the Y, situated near the Windsor, is too good a location for teaching students, proving that women, alone in the city, were looked down upon.

One of Marion’s fellow students is writing a reply to the letter.)

I also found an article that showed that there was some kind of smear campaign agains the Normal School and its teachers in 1907 that went all the way to the Legislative Assembly and then the Head Instructor, a Miss Peebles, took an extended vacation to Europe.

And Dr. Robins, long time Principal of the Normal School, resigned when Macdonald took over the Normal School and he said, enigmatically, in his last speech during the graduation ceremonies that Macdonald had ‘wider connections.’

The fact is, I think, Macdonald always expected to have a teaching school, but one that taught manual training and nature study to rural candidates who would go back to the country to teach. In other words, they wanted to fill the void.

Neither Macdonald nor Robertson gave a hoot about city students, whose parents ‘herded to the city.’

And yet, that’s who they ended up helping. Teachers like Flora Nicholson didn’t want to teach in boring, ill-equipped rural schools, where there was no chance to find a husband. Not if they could help it.

The short of it is, Marion’s experiences in 1905/1906 at the Normal School, influenced the decision to have the Normal School put at Macdonald, where there were state of the art residences, new building, excellent ventilation, clean water and electricity!

(Apparently, the Belmont classrooms of the Normal School had terrible ventilation. A student passed out from gas poisoning or something. This is an interesting fact, if you consider the ‘health concerns’ of the era, tuberculosis, etc. )

Somehow I have to get this all in the novel…A little in the Flo novel, a lot in the Marion novel.

Merit Pay for Teachers, 100 years perspective

Royal Arthur School in Little Burgundy. A la Magritte. If I had time, I’d have Marion floating Mary Poppins like in the sky.

I am still trying to find exact information about 1910 demographics for Royal Arthur, where Marion taught. I just found out that Prince Albert School served Saint Henry, which was its own city at the time.

Well, they are debating merit pay for teachers, right now, and it’s been widely commented on in the News.

Seems a BC Liberal Leadership Candidate, Kevin Falcon, has promised to establish such a program, if elected.

And, of course, it’s being painted as a Right/Left issue, as everything always becomes, nowadays, at least in the National Post which declares that unions hate the idea because they like to pay terrible teachers the same as good teachers.

I know that teachers on the Montreal Board got bonuses back in 1910, because Marion earned one. She wrote about it in a letter. She used the money, 60 dollars, I believe, to help pay off one of her family’s many debts. She made about 600. a year, so it’s 10 percent.

Anyway, I just happened to find a relevant tidbit in that Quebec Education Report from 1893.

They gave bonuses back then, too.

It seems that the bonus was judged on classroom performance on standardized end-of-year exams.

(How else? Because without standardized exams, teachers might be inclined to inflate marks, like the prof did in the movie A Serious Man, or my grade 11 English teacher did for me, because I was one of the few kids who didn’t apply to transfer out of her class at the beginning of the year.)

In the 1893 Report of Protestant Education in Quebec, the recipients and their class averages are listed.

But, apparently, four teachers who merited a bonus ‘were too lazy’ to send in the class exams, (a criteria), so they didn’t get a bonus.

So what do we have here? Lazy, master teachers. Seems a bit of a contradiction in terms.

Now, salaries for teachers were pretty good in the Montreal Protestant system in 1910 (see below for 1893) but still it was hard to get by after paying room and board and after investing in that fashionable big hat.

All female teachers were single, and most teachers by far were female.

Could it be that these terrific teachers were so burned out that they just couldn’t gather up the exams and post them, or whatever?

Could it be that they lied about the results. (I’m not sure what fail safes were employed here.)

Or could it be that they were independently wealthy… Not likely, though.

Or maybe they were lefty union types who didn’t beleive in merit pay.

Marion Nicholson, as I have written, went on to lead the PAPT union and fight for higher salaries for women teachers and even pensions. She also was given the Award of Merit in 1946, by the School Board. She didn’t see any contradiction in accepting bonuses for merit and fighting for the collective good.

Are You As Smart as a Fifth Grader, (Victorian Edition)

I have posted some of my essays and articles online on my http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website and one of the most popular is YouTube and Yams www.tigsholas.ca/page479.html.

That’s because it’s about Bunga of Malaya, the first character study in the social studies book Visits in Other Lands, which was a staple of Protestant Schools across North American from the 1940′s to the 1970′s.

Lots of people (Boomers, I assume) enter the keywords “Bunga” + “Yams” into Google or whatever search engine because they are feeling nostalgic for Grade Four Geography. A Canadian poet, Carl Leggo, even wrote a poem called Grade Four Geography about Bunga and the other characters in the book.

In short, Canadian children in middle of the 20th century grew up with a standardized curriculum, sea-to-sea, which promoted a common worldview, as well as a rather narrow view of Malaysians and other Third World Societies.

In my case, this was especially odd as my father was born in Kuala Lumpur, the son of a rubber planter, and his mother, a librarian and Changi survivor www.tighsolas.ca/page745.html still lived there.

I’m writing this because this morning I went back and re-read two reports about Protestant Education in Quebec available online at archives.org.

One report was from 1893-95, the other from 1914-16.

The war-time report was of especial interest. Flo and Edith Nicholson were teaching in that era and were listed as attending Teachers’ Convention. Flora lived at 281 Old Orchard (with sister Marion).

It was an era of war, curriculum reform, and standardization of textbooks, although the new Royal Crown Readers were hard to come by, as they were from Britain.

The report also mentioned the 1914 Lachute Summer Teaching School that Edith attended. She must have got a provisional diploma to be able to teach at St. Francis College in Richmond.

Many articles printed here are extremely interesting in relation to the social issues of the day: I’ll discuss them in future blogs.

But the earlier report had something that I might actually weave into Flo in the City: a list of examination questions for first and second year model school, the 4th and fifth grades. Edith and Marion and Herb would have studied this same curriculum -and likely Flora too a few years later.

So, here goes: Are you as smart as a Victorian Age Canadian Fifth Grader?

The Nicholsons 1893 or 4.

What is a proper noun? A common noun? And give an example of each.

What was the nature of the religion of the early Britons? When did it give place to Christianity?

Queen Victoria? Whom did she succeed? What relation was she to him?

Derive the following words and form two others from each of the roots: subterranean, aqueducts, contributes, radiate, adequate, tenacious.

Translate. Je ne l’ai pas. Jean, tu es bien ennuyeux aujourd’hui. Va t’essuyer les mains, Baptiste.

Write out the subjunctive present of savoir and etre.

Translate: Incolae Britanniae aunt agricoloe. Magister agentum peuro dat. Graecia valles augustas habet.

Kuala Lumpur in 1964, the year I learned about Bunga. When my grandmother visited us in 1967 for Expo, Montreal must have seemed like a provincial backwater compared to bustling, multicultural Kuala Lumpur.

Of course, had the curriculum contained information on Rubber Estates in Malaya, they could have shown us a picture of Tamil women tappers working with their children on European owned and run plantations. And then we could have learned about the economics of Imperialism.)

Marion’s Multicultural School

Well, I am exploring the 1910 Montreal Jewish community for my book, Flo in the City, about a girl coming of age in that pivotal era, when I came across a 1910 Gazette article that combines information about the Jewish Community with information about Marion’s school board.

A back to school HEADLINE in September 1910 says that 30 percent of the students in the Protestant System are Jewish.

The article says that there is a 2000 pupil increase in the Protestant Board in 1910 due to annexation of two wards.

The article says that there is a shuffling of male Principals in four schools, and they are still looking for a Principal for William Lunn, although a senior woman teacher is filling in for the interim. (BIG SIC). Flora goes to teach there in 1912 and that school certainly has male principal at that time, although, he is Canadian and NOT ENGLISH, as in British, which makes Margaret, Flora’s mom, very happy.

Luckily, few teachers in the board have resigned in 1910. Well, Marion sure didn’t. Marion’s school, Royal Arthur, partially burned down in 1909, but luckily the new building was ready for 1910. Still, there was overcrowding in some schools as new buildings were being finished.

Apparently, many Protestant students were bussed a long way into the city.

And I’m going to quote this last bit, even though Google news archives says no copying.. but it’s too good to paraphrase, so I have gone to McGill and looked it up myself on the microfilm…Phew that was a tiring trip and those machines at McGill, so antiquated, but as an alumus, I am allowed to use the library.

“The Montreal schools, judging from impressions gained from the principals, on the opening day yesterday will this year be even more cosmopolitain than ever. The percentage of Hebrew children in the schools will be more than thirty, some of the schools in the poorer districts, such as Dufferin containing few of any other creed. The children at the schools are of many races and a pleasing feature is the eagerness shown by Montreal’s new citizens to place their children where they could get as fair a start in life as childen of the others. Many of the children who applied for admittance could scarcely speak English,and the teachers had in some cases a difficult task, hardly knowing how to deal with these foreign youngsters.”

Well, I like this paragraph. It reads like a March of Time, without the pictures.
But it paints a picture of a 1910 Montreal filling up with immigrants (despite what the Immigration Officials told the NYT.)

Here’s a link to the Google archive page, so you don’t have to go downtown to the McLennan Library at McGill.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=MokjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=-YQFAAAAIBAJ&dq=royal%20arthur%20school&pg=6624%2C602353

And this 30 percent number is why, at this time, there’s a controversy going on regarding school board representation. I have to read up more, but it seems to me that Board were changing over from an appointed Board to an elected Board and many people didn’t want the Jewish Parents to participate. Stay tuned.

A STREETCAR NAMED HOPE-31st installment

A Montreal Streetcar in 1910 era. Park and Prince Arthur. North of where Marion was rooming in 1909, but she would eventually move to this area, in 1913, before getting married. (This is near McGill and looks pretty much the same, sans streetcar and shirtwaist suits, of course. It’s sad, there are some films of Boston, New York, San Francisco and UK cities of the era, by Edison and ilk, but none of Montreal, from what I can see.)

Herb had hardly made an appearance at Christmas. He had shown up for Christmas dinner with the family, and poked at the turkey, but left before the coffee and cake to go curling on the river. He had not attended Christmas service with the family either. The only time Flora saw him for any length of time was at the Hills’ holiday social, where he engaged, glass of warm punch in hand, in heated discussions with all the local men and ignored everyone else. (Flora and the other women at the a party danced among themselves to the Merry Widow Waltz on the Hills’ new Victrola.) Flo hardly knew her brother anymore, her big brother who could be so charming (he had had, at one time ‘best girls’ all across Richmond County) seemed aloof and fidgety the few times he did return to Richmond.

This Christmas he seemed to leave as soon as he had arrived, citing important work to catch up on at his Cowansville bank, where he had been transferred two weeks before.

And, he never spoke once to Marion the entire Christmas dinner, Flora noticed. There was some kind of dark empty very secret space between them. Not so secret, actually. DeBullion Street!

Then Marion, too, returned to Montreal, and then there was a fire in her school in Little Burgundy, damaging some classrooms. It was written up in the newspapers. Mother Margaret fielded phone calls all day, asking if this were indeed Marion’s School. Oddly enough, Margaret wasn’t certain – and she felt somewhat embarrassed about the fact. Marion, at times, could be as secretive as Herb. Except she was always there when needed. And Edith was always there to keep Margaret up to date on what was happening, with Marion, in Montreal.

Edith returned with mixed feelings to her work at the Crepeaus, but, unlike sister Marion, famous for her iron-willed focus, she was ambivalent about most aspects of her life. When she returned she found a new young resident, Claudille LaChance, 16, sent by the nuns.

Margaret wrote Marion who replied saying, Yes, it was her school, Royal Arthur that burned down. Thank Goodness, before school opened! A furnace fire. ” I still have work. By the way, I’ve received my assessment for the first term from the School Inspector. I got an 87!” New teachers, it seemed, were graded too. ‘Maybe they will let me stay, after all,” she joked.

And Margaret replied, that day. “Congratulations for getting such high marks.

Did I tell you that Jim Smith has applied to Parliament for a divorce. Father thinks he may claim his marriage is illegal, anyway.”

That piece of information was Margaret’s gift to Marion, a reminder that marriage, although desirable, was not always a bed of roses and that there was much to be said for being an independent woman.

Flora read this line and thought “Edith would enjoy this piece of news, not Marion,” and she added a line of congratulations at the bottom. “Ma Big Siss a gosh darn good school marm with cleanest class in Quebec.”

She imagined Marion taking her three streetcars to her school in Little Burgundy beside the biscuit factory and then standing tall, well taller than herself anyway,in her new but modest shirtwaist suit, in front of her 50 ill-groomed street urchins, leading them in a counting exercise, their dear but dirty little hands fanned out in front of them, filling their weary, sad inner city hearts with hope for the future. She was very proud of her big sister, at that moment, very proud: but how could she ever measure up?

BUT DO THEY GET PAID? 25th installment

Marion and Floss 1910 era.

“Speak to Mr. Jackson and ask him to spend more time on the subjects Flora is failing,” wrote Norman to Margaret in early September. Flora, of course, was not surprised.

As usual, her father was acting as if she were the only student in the school. Flora was reading the words for herself now. She passed the letter back to her Mom somewhat sheepishly.

“I an inclined to think,” Margaret said slyly. ” that you are the one I should talk to.”

“I will do better this year, I promise. I have incentive. After my trip to Boston, I know that I do not want to be a nurse. So I must get into teacher’s college.”

“Why not nursing?” Margaret asked.

“Because nursing seems not much different from mothering. Nurses must clean sick rooms and lavatories, have a knowledge of dietetics and food preparation, of hygiene and heating and ventilation, and of the dispensing of drugs. They tend people with scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid and pneumonia, sometimes a combination of these. See?”

“I see your point,” replied Margaret who had done all these things in the past and would likely continue to in the future. ” And for this they get paid?”

“Well, yes.”
“Then there is your difference.”

Flora had learned all this from the nurses at Newton, only one of whom was a surgical nurse, with very special training in operating room techniques.

The others, for all their three years of training,including anatomy and bacteriology and physiology, were glorified cooks and maids, for all she could see. No, nursing was not a profession she would want to pursue, although the women were nice enough. And they certainly enjoyed their off- time.

At Jetties Beach they had swum in the ocean and collected sea-shells. And rated the fashion sense of the ‘superior’ women who strolled the wooden walkways down to the water under parasols in their summer frocks, enduring the 90 degree heat radiating off the plush carpet of sand around their feet with a demure stoicism.

Flora had brought a handful of shells home and they were amassed on the sill in her bedroom, a charming, pearly reminder of her all too short trip to Massachusetts.

For a souvenir, Flora also had a thick advertisement filled program from the Boston Theatre Stock Company, and that Wellesleyan Magazine.

On the train trip home, her nose peeling from too much sun and surf, she had read an especially interesting article out to May. It was titled The Old Order Changeth.

“Yesterday, the struggle was for the higher education of women; to-day,the struggle is for the opportunity to have a voice in moulding educational,social and industrial conditions through the one medium which makes this possible, viz: the right to vote for measures and for men. The new struggle rests upon the same fundamental principle upon which the demand for educational opportunity rested, the right of women as individuals to individuality of action, their right to full equality of opportunity with the other half of the human race. Resting upon the same principles of right and justice as did the demand for higher education, it is bound to meet with the same triumphant success. By all the signs, that success is not far distant. Never before have the position, the rights, the demands of women so occupied the center of the world’s stage. Where, even three years ago, there was one article or editorial dealing with the subject, to-day, there are a hundred such articles in the various periodicals ; and, one after another, these periodicals are joining in the demand that women be given their full and free share in moulding conditions in city, state and nation. The old order is changing so rapidly that one scarcely dares to make a statement setting forth the precise status of women civilly and politically lest tomorrow’s dispatches bring word of change.”

It all seemed so exciting to Flora. She saw herself in her mind’s eye travelling with the suffragists, town to town, giving speeches in front of large enthusiastic crowds. Except she was not a Wellesley woman, who were generally well-heeled and could purchase the furs and fine silks advertised in the pages in front of her. If lucky, she would like her sister Marion before, have to scrimp and save her way through teacher’s college. Except she wouldn’t live at the Y, because the Normal School had just moved to Ste. Anne de Bellevue, on the Macdonald Campus. May was expecting to go there next year, and share a dorm room with her friend Alice Dresser, a bright and vivacious girl, whose father had been Principal of St. Francis College.

Margaret, who was now folding and flattening linen place mats at the kitchen table, spoke again. “If you don’t like the idea of nursing, and I don’t blame you, then teaching is your destiny, and for that you will have to pass French and Latin. But don’t feel too badly. A person who has struggled herself at school is bound to be a more sympathetic teacher. She was offering Flora encouragement. Just like her. So, why wasn’t it working?

For Our Safety…

Marion’s Children 1912. Well, some of these children very likely were children in the catchment area of her school. This picture is taken from a 1912 brochure for a charity camp at Mont Chapleau in the Laurentians for deprived children of the city and their moms. No boys over 8.

Boys in this age group were no doubt working in the summer, anyway, as they did during the school year. 1912 saw a record tide of immigration, more immigrants came to Canada that year in relation to the population than ever before and ever since. 475,000 people. 400,000 came in 1913. Most came to Montreal to work in the city, others went out West.

Western Canada was begging for families with strong boys to farm, but the Canadian establishment preferred American immigrants over those other people, like Eastern Europeans.

Marion, and later Flo, were trained as teachers because teachers were sorely in need of them in the city. Marion taught in Little Burgundy and Flo in Griffintown. Poor areas.

I found a document online The Educational Record of the Province of Quebec for 1914, in which both Flora and Edith are named as teachers attending teacher’s convention. More interesting, it compares the state of teaching in 1903 to 1913. www.tighsolas.ca/page806.html. This is basically the story of Tighsolas (or Flo in the City, my novel based on Tighsolas)in statistical form.

Here’s a bit from a speech, given in the Canadian House of Commons in 1907.

House of Commons Committee Room 34
Ottawa, Wednesday, April 3, 1907
Robertson speech about Movement for Rural Education.

“Some of the problems we Canadians have to face and solve for ourselves are common to all self-governing nations, but others of them are peculiar to us. For instance, there are special problems due to our youth; to our size; to the character, vastness and potential values of our undeveloped resources; and to the large amount of foreign blood pouring into our citizenship. The large inflow of foreigners who come to mix with our people adds difficulties to the ordinary problems of agriculture and education. These people bring in not merely different methods of doing things but different social standards and ideals. The traditions they have inherited, the conditions under which they have been brought up, their outlook on life, these are all different from ours. For our safety and their welfare it is necessary that these people should be educated, so led and so guided by competent leaders that they will be inclined to live on the land and not to herd to the cities; that they will be able to live on the land with profit and contentment to themselves and thus join our own people in making our civilization progressive and wholesome for the whole of us.

CIHM Document

Pretty as a Picture

Edith, young and formally attired. Yes, for evenings women did bare their shoulders.

So, in summer 1908, Marion is busy preparing for her exciting new life in the city. She has lived there before, in 1905, when she was a student at McGill Normal School. She lived at the YWCA on Dorchester, downtown, but in 1908, she hopes to find a rooming house as the Y had ‘too many rules.’

Finding a comfortable place to live will be a problem for Marion for the next few years. She is one young woman who does not like to be bossed around, and, yet, as an unmarried woman, her life is not her own.

Edith,too, will find it difficult, when she moves to Westmount. She is able to stay in one room, on Greene, but she hates the fact she cannot go out alone, to a lecture, for instance.

Luckily, the two women will have each other, as well as a network of family friends, former Richmond residents.

First though, I will write about July, when Marion has something to look forward to, a new job in a new place. Flo will be looking forward to her trip to Massachusetts and Margaret to her trip, in late July to La Tuque where her husband works, and to Quebec, where they both will participate in the Tercentary celebrations. Edith, in July, has no job, no beau. Nothing to look forward to.