There are a lot of course options in 2012 for Calgary students.  You have to take the basics of reading, writing, social studies, science,  math of course but schools are giving a lot of variety to kids and very young.  Some elementary schools have artists in residence, professional painters who walk them through an art project, teach them to work with clay or how to sketch.  Physical education is a daily requirement and some elementary schools even have kids do yoga or zumba dance.  Music may be choral singing but many schools also offer handbells and rhythm instruments. A few teach kids to play recorders and I was at an elementary school not long ago where a guest African drummer taught the kids drumming.

Science lessons often even in elementary involve a few field trips, by school bus, to a wetlands area or farm.  A social studies class might take a field trip to Heritage Park, a science class to the Glenbow museum or the new Telus spark science center. When the Dalai Lama was in town a few years ago, thousands of elementary school students took buses down to see him at the Stampede Corral.

In secondary school, the variety gets even wider. The core subjects are then often broken up into specialty areas. In grades 10-12 students can take biology, chemistry or physics or even a class called integrated science.  They can take history, Canadian studies, world history and can choose pure or applied higher level math. They can not only take physical education but also sports medicine and sports performance.

Everyone must take a high school course about career choices and budgeting, called Career and Life Management but students can take it in a live class or online. It is nicknamed CALM and it teaches how to handle life stresses.

Students can take music, instrumental or vocal and even by junior high bands are in the building practising at 7:30 AM when I arrive. The  music wafts through the halls and sounds wonderful.  In the high schools students take instrumental music, jazz music, concert choir, chamber choir or even vocal jazz. There are often options in several of the arts -photography, animation, video production, dance, drama, technical theatre, advanced acting. Most secondary schools put on theatre plays each year, some even staging musicals.

There are classes in many aspects of computers including website design and  classes in financial management, accounting, legal studies, marketing and tourism. There are classes in painting, pastels, soapstone sculpture in elementary and the high schools offer advanced drawing and painting. When I walk the hallways of big high schools the displayed art is often stunning and professional level.  

There are even trade and occupational routes, with auto shop, wood shop. There are classes in cooking, nutrition, sewing and fashion design, open to both sexes.

There are many options for language. There is not much Latin taught any more but you can access courses in Spanish, French, German and Mandarin as second languages or at schools that offer immersion or bilingual instruction. Some schools offer both Cantonese and Mandarin classes. There is pressure to set up an Arabic school in 2012 and there are enough students wanting it and there is just a problem of finding enough teachers.

Students can take English as a second language and move through skills to become fluent and literate in English before they integrate to regular classes. They can take  general psychoiogy, experimental psychology or sociology. There are even courses in how to study well and classes in leadership.

There is credit given for a paid job too, for hours put into that career world commitment some secondary students make, in programs called ‘work experience” and registered apprenticeship programs.

Many classes are taught in classrooms but some  are also in science labs, theatres, state of the art gyms with weightlifting equipment, dance rooms with special wood flooring, home ec rooms with model kitchens.. Calgary high schools try to meet a wide range of student interests and still give the core subjects needed for ‘credit’ to graduate.

Students still arrive at the trade courses with backpacks, sit at desks or around tables, learn the lessons with written questions to understand some manual skills but there is a lot of hands-on learning.  The experience of discovering how things work, through labs, through crafts and manipulating objects is considered a great teacher and computers are being used more and more to review and test what was learned.  Teachers at the elementary level have to have wide experience in a lot of areas, much like pioneer teachers had to do. Secondary teachers often specialize and have to lead students to national competency levels.

Pioneer teachers had a lot to teach, the broad range of subjects, plus nearly all grades up to grade 8.  They even had to supervise some higher level courses by correspondence.  It would be unfair to say either today’s teacher or pioneer teachers have it harder. It has always been challenging.

It is very costly now, to provide all the material and equipment. It has always been costly, but relative to the community of the time. What is taught and how it is taught, have changed a little, but not completely. Some subjects have fallen by the wayside. Some ways to teach are gone.  A few are time-honored and still work very well.

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In 1879 missionary schools taught the 3 Rs and their mandate included teaching Bible history.  North West Territory officials created a less religion- based curriculum in 1883 requiring  writing, reading, grammar, geography and mental arithmetic. In 1891 for upper grades subjects included grammar, history, bookkeeping, drawing, algebra, geometry, agriculture, physiology, hygiene, botany, Latin and chemistry.  The list may surprise the reader.  One might have thought the subjects for pioneers would be agricultural science or  focus on Canada not Europe.  That was however not the case, at least not at first.

Teachers had to be very creative with few resources.  One teacher in 1906 gave each child a paper and a straight pin and asked them for art to perforate the paper in the outline of an elephant.

In 1892 Calgary schools often offered military training for young men.  In 2012 if  you hear of a person in the school with a rifle, there is automatically an emergency call made to police, a school lockdown and a major crisis. In 1892 however kids were even taught riflery at the school.  In 1895 a Royal North West Mounted Police Sergeant was paid $15 a month to train school boys four times a week, half an hour at a time, in the skills of riflery.  It was the first boy’s cadet corps in Alberta.

 By 1898  Calgary had a cadet corps of 24 mounted troops and 24 infantry.  What had happened was that after the American civil war and Fenian raids into Canada, some people in the east were concerned that Canada must learn to defend itself. Students were taught how to march, how to handle guns, how to shoot.  By 1912 there were so many enthusiastic students in cadet training that a boys’ brigade took part in the Stampede Parade.   The Department of Defence provided the weapons and ammunition while local school boards provided the uniforms.

Boys aged 12-19 had to take cadet training in 1920, and this meant that from about grades 5-8 students regularly were carrying rifles for drill, even if the student was only slightly shorter at 54 inches tall, than the rifle.

Training was based on principles taught to over 3000 teachers across Canada and those teachers who took the training got up to a $200 bonus in 1913.  The purpose of the training was also physical development, respect for order, discipline and patriotism.  Lessons included signalling, military drill, first aid drill, and marching- form four, re-form two deep, about turn, left wheel, right wheel. The class was usually for one hour per week.

One uniform was a brown tunic, with red cuffs and khaki shorts, a pillbox hat and white belt. Another version had a brown tunic, Stetson hat. Cadets at Connaught wore yellow canvas uniforms with brass buttons and a bras buckle.  The rifles were usually Ross .22 or Ross .303 rifles.  Students learned to lie down at an angle to the target, legs apart, heels down, rifles ready for the order to fire.

At Hillhurst school the long hall of the basement was the shooting gallery.  Some schools used the gym for lining students up in prone position to shoot at targets. The school armory stored the rifles and munitions.

In 1914 there were contests for accuracy and several top marksmen, aged 16, went on join the war effort. A few were killed in action just months later.   In fact in 1914 Alberta sent 4 squadrons of soldiers to the war and many had been trained in the schools. In 1916 soldiers took over the 3rd floor of King Edward school for their training and did exercises on the playground. They were told to march out of rhythm up and down the staircases to not ruin the staircase. By 1916, 587 Calgary cadets and ex-cadets had enlisted to fight in the war.   Students stored the rifles at the school. 

After the war was over, several parents’ groups wanted to end cadet training at the schools  and particularly objected to bayonet training as imperialist. The programs were  made voluntary and gradually phased out. In 1929 the cadet corps that met at Riverside school practised  just Saturdays and holidays. The shooting gallery was ripped out of Connaught in 1930. However in 1932 King Edward students were still practising riflery. They were restricted by the rule that indoors they should only use..22 calibre weapons. The .303s were for outdoors..  Some of the cadet training ended in 1932, but when war loomed, started up again.

In 1943 cadet training returned, as an option and involved high school boys taking military drill, listening to army lectures and doing target practice. The student got two high school credits for taking the course. Captain Ferguson taught cadets at Crescent Heights, Central and Western in 1940 and the students learned not only drill and rifle practice but signalling, map reading and what to do during a gas attack.   School credits were given for these courses, counting them as physical education and health training.  In 1941 more cadet corps were set up because of the second world war and rifle ranges again appeared at some schools.  They were discontinued after the war but students who attended high schools from rural areas often in the 1960s still might have a rifle in the back of their truck and think little of it as a risk. In the 1990s people repairing roofs of early sandstone schools found strange holes in the cupolas. They realized that in earlier times the field around the school had been open prairie and these were bullet holes from practise shoots.

Athletics was deemed vital but girls were not allowed to play some of the games.  In 1882 only boys could play baseball, have foot races or race ponies. Because they had to wear skirts to school, girls were not allowed to climb fences. When girls were permitted to have their own baseball team even in 1935 they were allowed to wear bloomers to play but had to walk to and from the game in skirts.  Competitions for track and field were popular even in 1920 and included broad jump, high jump, 75 yard dash, pole value, hop skip and jump. Basketball was also competitive.  Physical education class might include use of clubs and dumbbells, rhythmic exercises and folk dancing.

Physical education often involved drill routines. In 1905 a girls’ team had a public display of how to swing clubs.  At King George in 1913 students played table tennis in the hallway.

The 3 R’s were of course the core curriculum of all early schools but even in 1887 the curriculum also included geography and history and grammar. At the younger levels the history and literature taught were mostly about Britain or early Canada. In 1911 the lives of distinguished men were examined as role models- Columbus, Cartier, Champlain, Sir John A. MacDonald and Cromwell, Pitt, Nelson, Wellington.

Penmanship was taught in 1900 with pages to copy on spiral linked pages. In 1920 there were even prizes at the Calgary Stampede for handwriting. Most children learned to practise every letter by rewriting in cursive letters “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”.  Spelling was taught by rules of phonics and there were many spelling bees to practise and test skills.  Some spelling bees were in teams, some were survival games of last one standing. Some operated by baseball rules –  3 strikes and you’re out.

Many facts were learned just as facts, to be memorized – dates, times tables, memory device poems, formulas.  In 1905 geography students were encouraged to learn to draw the shapes of the continents freehand.  A typical geography game was to have a student stand by a world map, choose a place on it and have students name the place he chose.

Even though there was a lot of memorizing, much of it was made a game. A way to practice the multiplication tables for instance was to have two teams line up in rows. It was called ‘head and toe’. If you got the answer right you stayed at the head of the line but if you got it wrong, you went to the back.

Reading aloud was encouraged and was graded in 1911. Impromptu and  planned speech making  were highly valued skills and in 1916 literary societies at the schools debated topics like giving women the vote, the oil boom, Canada’s role in the war, moving picture shows.  Reciting poems was required though some students were more adept at others. It was common in 1937 to have to learn In Flanders Fields, or The North Wind Doth Blow, Daffodils, Sea Fever, The Lady of Shalot or The Highwayman.  One boy in 1930 was asked to learn by heart the poem Trees. When time came to recite it he stopped after the title,  hesitated and said “The rest of it is in the book”.

Though the early prairie schools had few musical instruments, they often had wood blocks, tambourines, triangles and castanets, some homemade.  Students learned to play along with the teacher on the piano.  For choir practice the teacher often had a pitch pipe or tuning fork to keep them all on key.

The schools also considered a key part of their instruction to be about morals and character. In 1912 the curriculum guide told teachers to instil proper posture, good eating and sleeping habits and to provide lots of fresh air and sunshine.

In 1912 some schools offered domestic science courses and manual training, especially for students who in higher grades did not want the academic route.In 1919 Calgary expanded this range of courses and opened schools for woodworking and electrical work. It built kitchens and sewing rooms for girls.  In 1921 a typical school fair displayed not just student writing and art but also bug collections, cooking, wood work and seed exhibits.

There was always a debate about if teachers should be able to invent lessons to match what students were interested in, or if they should have to always teach the same basic course content in all schools.  In 1920 the curriculum was rigid and detailed. The art lessons were prescribed in such fine detail that tree drawing was in September, pencil landscape in October and color charts came in November.  The desire to standardize what was taught appealed to Premier Aberhart  in the 1930s and he was minister of education.

In the 1930s schools tried out other teaching strategies.  In 1936 the province set up radio shows for the schools through educational broadcasts for part of an hour, five days a week.  Teachers tried out ways to help students apply what they learned and make crafts about it. In 1936 students studying the middle ages made a mud ditch.  In 1937 the Western Canada Institute tried to help teachers by sending out pre-packaged lesson plans but school inspectors told teachers not to use them much but to encourage creativity instead.

In rural schools the theory of more and more creative teaching was harder to apply given that funding and supplies rarely followed it. In many rural schools teachers were still struggling in one room to handle several grades. While the teacher read to one group, others would work on assignments and then she’d switch, several times a day.  Yet creativity flourished. In 1937 one teacher at Alexandra school had her grade 6 students studying the Middle Ages hand craft wooden swords ad shields.  Other classes studying earlier Fort Calgary, in 1937 made a scale model of it out of willow sticks.

Some changes in education met with resistance. In the 1930s teachers were concerned that if you did try to combine health, language, science and social studies into a new ‘enterprise’ inquiry program, that some of the rigors of the other fields would be lost.

When in the 1950s teachers were asked to let students choose what to study and direct more of their own goals, many experienced teachers balked at the new ‘progressive’ approach, saying that children are not always in a position to even know what was logical to study next.

However the child-centered focus won out in many schools in Calgary and memorizing spelling rules, or even times tables was de-emphasized. It kept sneaking back though, for it was handy. “I before e except after c. or when sounded like ay as in neighbor and weigh”.  If you did not give kids mnemonics, they often invented their own but less efficiently.

In 1954 educational TV programs had 45 minute broadcasts across Alberta and in 1957 after Sputnik, there was wider experimentation in science labs.  The 1960s saw team teaching and less emphasis on grades.  Open area classrooms were tried out and some of the new schools of the time, ones still operating, had few walls between the classes.    The noise level was high however and most of the schools of that design, still actively used in Calgary, have partitions now between classrooms. A typical design was to have the library as the focal point and classrooms around it in pinwheel style. The partitions reduce noise but easy access to the library is maintained.