I am sitting at a very large half circle teacher’s desk, blue and yellow, in a grade two classroom. It has a huge surface with lots of space for piling papers, organizing. I like it. The students sit at small rectangular desks and their little plastic blue chairs are of two sizes, depending on the size of the child. At night the kids turn their chairs upside down and put them on top of their desks, to help the caretaker do a quick sweep of the floor. 
The room is large with big windows on the east side but they have been covered completely by blue and green blinds. The school itself was built in 1954 and has ten classrooms plus, more recently, two portable or ‘relocatable’ ones. This particular school is very well funded with an active parents’ group that does casino fundraisers and other projects. It supports  third world school construction and has an artist in residence.

Commonly with the primary schools around the city, there is an area on the floor for kids to come and sit near the teacher for  storytime or discussion. Typically there is a big chair, often an older wooden one for the teacher, while the kids come and sit on the area carpet. The part of the day for these activities is often even called ‘carpet time’.  Some schools have a tweedy grey carpet while others have a blue one with even grid squares.  Teachers differ in how they organize this carpet. Some assign children to sit in each square and some have put masking tape on the carpet to create those squares. Other teachers have the kids sit around the edges with the central area empty. It is clear teachers are trying to make a place that discourages gigglers sitting on each other, lying down or wrestling.  A few schools have instead of the carpet, about 30 small carpet samples, and the kids pile them up when not using them. At this particular well funded school the individual carpets are blue and green frog theme mats. 

There is no blackboard. The south wall has a large white board  but not all of it gets used. It is broken up by a Smart Board and in fact every one of the ten classrooms has a Smart Board. Not all schools do. They cost a lot, from $1,000 to $3.000.  There is actually not much room on the whiteboards beside the SmartBoard  for a teacher to write on. Smart Boards are the new rage – allowing teachers to write on a screen, to display an Internet site, to show a video even, to scroll down instructions on screen replacing at one shot the overhead projector, the opaque projector, the TV and DVD player and the blackboard. They are clever innovations for sure.  I find they still are just one place to look though and I rather liked when teachers could write on several boards around the room and show a lot of kids’ work at once. Still, you can’t fight progress completely.

The other two walls, the ones without windows, have wide expanses for posters and displays of kids’ work. Teachers differ a lot in how many posters they put up. This one has a lot.  There are bookcases and cupboards on three walls, and an old wooden cupboard of shelves. This school has a well equipped playground and a two naturalization areas where students can study plant life.

 The two hundred students in this building have access to a cart, a floating lab of computers. Other larger schools have entire rooms, sometimes two rooms of  desktop computers and some schools have both options Some high schools let kids bring their own laptops and rules about use of tech devices no longer just ban them, as they did a few years ago, but restrict times when you can surf the Net or sites you can access.

When elementary students arrive at the school they have to remove their boots or ‘outdoor shoes’ to walk along the corridor without tracking in mud or snow. They take their coats and backpacks to hooks along the wall just outside the classroom and then enter the room, putting on their  ‘indoor shoes’ for the day.

This little shoe ritual is kind of cute. Some schools put the shoes in one big bucket, others line them along an upper shelf by the coats. Others have the kids put their shoes each night on the desk or on the legs of the upended desk. On entering you see dozens of little shoes upside down on the desk legs, patiently waiting for their owners.

Many schools in 2012, even the modern suburban ones, have cloakrooms, areas in each room where students hang their coats. It is not unlike those pioneer classrooms of old, and not without the same antics kids have probably always pulled..  One day as I lined students up from class to take them to the gym, I looked back for a quick scan of the room and discovered a reluctant child hiding in the cloakroom inside his coat, trying to look coat-like.  Another time a playful boy in grade one hooked the back of his coat onto the coat hook while he was still wearing the coat,  and pulled out from the wall just for fun to show he could attach to a wall. I imagine cloak rooms have always been thus. In fact I marvel at the pressure coat hooks have to take. I notice that in the big sandstone schools every coat hook is brass, is mounted on a wood beam and every single hook is attached with four, count em, four long screws. They are very sturdy.

I marvel sometimes at how the furnishings of the building have changed over the years. Any lino has to be high wear, any carpet stain resistant.

The same standards of sturdiness were there for the earliest schools, when desks were heavy and wood, some even with iron legs. The room had to be well lit for reading and warm enough even on a cold day, for comfort.

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A lot has changed and yet not. Early schools back in the east, in Ontario  in 1873 were often made of stone and rock but those things were lacking in Alberta. Ours were wood as was most of the furniture.  The desks, the window frame, the cupboards were made of wood, as were the benches and tables. The floor was made of lumber and in some schools the lumber was in forty foot lengths for this purpose

Early cloak rooms separated boys and girls but today’s do not.  The early ones had pegs along the wall and often a shelf on top for lunch pails. Today’s have the same though the kids hang their backpacks on the coat hooks along with the coats. The shelves are sometimes for ‘indoor shoes’.

Early schools had to have a lot of natural light because often there was  no other light source. Fortunately the Calgary area is a sunny one, with about 332 days of sunshine each year. In 1973  there was even a record set when the sun was up 16.2 hours  straight on June 26th. The art of building a school well then was to ‘let the sun shine in’.

Early schools eventually used other light sources too. Some put in  oil lamps mounted on walls. In 1914 when rural schools also served as evening community centres a few put in gas lamps. 

A lot of Canada did not get electricity rurally till after 1945 and even when it did become available, the school house was not always the first served.  Ironically back in 1908 an Edmonton school was built as state -of-the-art and it even had electric light, steam heat, water and ‘sewerage’ but no others schools could afford those.

The purpose of windows for light and on a sunny day for heat, was not the only purpose.  Windows also provided fresh air.  Though early schools did not always have screens on their windows, it was a common design of the big sandstone schools to have an opening at the top, accessible by a long pole that could twist a string and drop the pane to open slightly at the top,  angled it so the breeze went up not down. Ventilation was further provided by similar vents above the classroom doors, linking them to the hallway air.  The fresh air brought it what it always brings in – oxygen, moisture, cooling breeze, plus, alas, mosquitoes, bees, even the occasional bird.  Few early schools had screens on the windows.

Insulation of any of the pioneer buildings was minimal. Putting grass or tarpaper between cracks helped keep out the cold, wind and snow but  actual warmth on a cold day was at a premium.  Schools was hard to cancel when roads were impassable just because the teacher had no way of telling students not to come. So though kids may not turn up, the teachers had to go anyway, just in case. Sometimes the kids could get to the school but a midday storm made it hard to get back home.

In 1910 a blizzard during the day forced kids at several rural schools to stay overnight while during other storms kids sometimes had to relocate to the teacher’s house if she had heat there.  Cold did not let up as settlement grew. In 1906 the winter was so cold that 1000 area cattle froze.  Even as late as 1964 there was a record cold in the area on December 15th  counting wind chill of minus 55 degrees Centigrade.

The earliest way to heat a school room was with a fireplace and I have actually seen at Western Canada High school in 2012, the brick of a former fireplace, now sealed in.  A metal barrel was sometimes used as a wood stove in the earliest school,  the barrel put on its side and metal pipes connecting it to a chimney.

Wood stoves and big box stoves were hard to use as a heat source because they required an unending supply of wood.  Kids got good at lighting and maintaining a fire and I imagine the sound of a crackling fire and the sweet aroma of wood burning were pleasant.   Everyone soon learned that green wood creates more smoke and sizzles.  It’s odd to realize that nowadays we rarely trust children with matches or near fire but in one room rural schools they often arrived very knowledgeable from home at how to keep a wood stove burning.

In winter if the fire had not been kept going all night, the room was cold and it took a long time to heat it back up.  Some kids spent much of the morning still wearing coats and mittens as they worked.  It was not unlike sitting at a barbecue pit today or an open fireplace where if you get too close you can burn and if you are farther back you feel chills. The options were fry or freeze and some schools eventually set up traditions of  huddling around the stove at the start of the day and then putting up metal guards to keep kids from too intense heat later.

If coal was used for the stove it kept a nice warm glow. However it was hard to get this fire started and, once it was started,  vital to not let it go out.  There are stories of coal fires going out and someone having to get burning coals from a neighboring house to start up the school fire again.  Schools by design usually required a shed out back for storing wood or coal. On average a one room school might use twelve tons of coal and half a cord of wood per year. Over time soot and ash built up in the stove pipes too and those also had to be cleaned out from the stove and the pipes. It was messy work.

The big pipes snaking their route across the ceiling to the chimney hung there  with wires, and occasionally their hooks broke or the pipe links would detach and smoke would fill the classroom.  Teachers got adept at moving fast to evacuate the building and do makeshift repairs.  Kids got adept at pranks.

Venting whatever heat source you had was important, not just to ensure there was a draught to keep the fire alive but also to remove smoke.  Parents would bring often wood because supplying the school was contracted out.

When a pot belly stove was available, it was placed in the middle of the room, a heavy black iron contraption that kicked out considerable heat once the fire got going, but whose heat at a distance was small..  One brand was the Quebec heater which apparently heated up quite quickly. It was reputed to be able to  burn anything but ice cubes. The result was that you got very toasty warm near it and were still cold if seated far back.  There are many stories told of these pot belly stoves.  Usually a teacher, older student or hired community helper would arrive early to light the stove before the group arrived.   Students might arrive in the dead of winter so cold that their fingers were still numb as they tried to hold a pencil.

The Good cheer pot belly stove was popular and had draughts to open and close just right to keep the fire going. The trick was to add just enough air, not so much that the fire went out but enough to keep it going. If the fire did go out, you had to empty the ashes and haul them out, bring in cordwood that may have spiders in it and put back in some coal. You had to bank the wood and coal just right and there was always a small danger of an explosion.

By 1941 schools often set up contracts with nearby bidders to bring wood at $2 a cord  Bids were sought for those who would sweep and dust the school for ten cents at time, who would set up the morning stove at 15 cents a day or who would scrub the floors three times a year at $3 each time.

As time passed, larger stoves were available and these got more commonly placed at the back of the classroom. They were connected also to the chimney by large overhead stove pipes. The pipes themselves got a little warm and that also helped warm the room.

On very cold mornings, when the teacher got to school early, she may find that a lot of things had frozen, not just the water in the washbasin, not just the drinking water in the pail but also the ink in all the kids’ ink bottles and any little bottles of water they kids may have had at their desks to clean slates with.  If they brought their lunch to school on a winter day the food may also have frozen en route. The top of the little stove was therefore used a lot for thawing as class went on. The hope was always that needed items, such as lunch  would be thawed by noon.  Kids learned very quickly too that you had to take the lid off little bottles of ink if you were going to  thaw them, or they might explode.

Later, some schools built basements and put a coal furnace down there. Then a register was installed into the classroom to bring the hot air up.  Later versions used  oil to heat that furnace.  Other schools put a gas heater in the middle of the room.  The furnace in the basement was not without its challenges either, with noises it made, and the antics kids thought of to throw things into it.  Nowadays we take school custodians for granted but they have saved teachers a lot of stress. Sometimes an emergency might develop where the principal had to talk to the caretaker fast and at East Ward School and Victoria School  in 1907 speaking tubes were set up for that purpose between the office and the basement.

In 2012 we have vestiges of those early heating registers. The ones in the wooden floor  have mostly gone but stories are told of kids dropping marbles down them or mice crawling up through them.  The ones in the corners of walls, down by the floor, are often big metal grates. When the furnace was firing up, air would rush out but when it was just maintaining heat the air blast was not as intense. This shift in air though sometimes made little kids tell stories about someone being alive in the basement, maybe a ghost or monsters. If the furnace sucked in air, kids thought that magical and would write little notes on paper left on the floor wondering if the next morning they would have been sucked in by the creature.

The registers lining the walls of the 1950s classrooms still create heat and in some of our 100 year old schools you can see pipes across the ceiling and registers along the walls, a kind of historical tour of heating systems.  Kids however have not changed. There are still games they play with pieces of paper gently placed on vents and on occasion wafting around the room.

The sandstone schools in Calgary had a basement furnace that had to heat two or three storeys and to keep it going required a lot of work.  Caretakers often had to live right in the building to keep the fire going at night. Hillhurst school had an apartment for its caretaker and even early rural schools in some areas had a live-in janitor. He may have had a cat to keep out mice and gophers and one caretaker, at Hillhurst, was so beloved that there is a plaque to him still at the school entrance.

Early schools nearly all had to  have a picture of the ruler.. The day started with the song God Save the King and often the Union Jack was displayed. In the 1900s classrooms had pictures of Queen Victoria, King George V, Queen Mary.

Most early schools also had a clock though the ones in 1912 had an open face, not necessarily with glass cover and kids could easily as a prank move the hands. The clocks usually needed winding with a key. After 1927 most schools also got a plaque to commemorate  Confederation.

The teacher valued greatly wooden rulers and pointers. Occasionally for a gift she might get a handcrafted one at Christmas.

In rural areas though the child had likely never travelled far from home, settlers and teachers still felt it important to know about the bigger world. A wall map of Canada was standard and sometimes there was a wall map of the world.  Companies like the Neilson’s chocolate company were aware of this need and often supplied wall maps for schools, complete with little logos around the edges advertising chocolate.

The Neilson company supplied flat maps while others supplied ones on rollers that could be pulled down or released to roll back up.  When a globe became available this created for a time a sense of awe as students saw more graphically the roundness of the earth. However early globes often were made with a commercial glue which mice liked and it was sometimes discovered that a mouse had set up residence inside the globe.

As technology improved and you could show slides or even documentary movies in class, white screens became part of the equipment. Some of them stood on extendible metal tripod legs but some were built right into the classroom, put on rollers and you could pull them down or send them back onto the roller again as needed.  Many classrooms of 2012 still have these screens. Some are hard to pull down and you have to stand on a chair and try to get the roller working again. Others are hard to get back up and if you yank too hard the entire screen comes down.  A fairly common problem was and is screens that cannot stay down and for that many schools have installed a hook on the wall near the floor, and a makeshift tying system.  It is typical creativity of the schools. Teachers do whatever it takes.

Early schools had no rules for school wall height but over time standards developed. An early set of standards in Saskatchewan in the early 1900s  required an 11 foot ceiling with 15 square feet of floor space per student.  Considering that it cost  $10 to buy an entire homestead of 160 acres, asking taxpayers to give money for a school was asking a lot. A dollar had to go a long way.

Since books were  rare, to convey information teachers had to write it down and students copied it. The large writing surface of the blackboard was vital to any early classroom.  Some of these were just smooth boards, or gyproc painted black or dark green.

You could order slate boards by catalogue but they were expensive. The 1881 school in Edmonton called for someone to build a blackboard four feet by 23 feet.  Those measurements were large though. Other schools had one small board, or a few put together.  In 1912 the larger slate board for the teacher bought by catalogue cost $289.50 if three by four feet, $442.50 if four feet by six.  These prices were so high that many rural boards still made their own blackboards by hand.

As time passed the chalk boards got higher tech, used dustless chalk and in some of the grand old sandstone schools of Calgary, were on top of each other. A chalkboard on rollers could be brought down to hide or reveal other messages, test answers and sometimes there were two such boards on rollers, so three deep in all. These in effect could multiply significantly the writing surface available to the teacher.

Later chalkboards were made of porcelain, which was very hard wearing and could last 10-20 years. Chalk marks on porcelain boards were easy to erase using a felt pad eraser mounted on a board.  Green chalkboards of hylophite appeared in the 1950s with the belief that green was easier on the eyes. However if the some of the new chalkboards got wet, the chalk marks stayed much longer, a situation which led to advice to teachers in the 1970s  to not wash their blackboards. 

Eventually chalk was itself replaced, over concerns for dust and allergies. Its replacement, white boards, did not cause dust but the markers had other problems. If their lid was left off, they dried out, the colors they came in were cute but not always of high contrast to the white background so sometimes harder to read.  Some students did not like the smell of the markers and the result has been that in 2012 we see a bit of everything. Some classrooms still have chalkboards, some white boards and some have both. 

Teachers with Smartboards in the classroom sometimes are so enamoured of that technology that they do not use blackboards or white boards at all. The stylus markers for the white board however at first confused teachers and occasionally someone by mistake would use a whiteboard marker on the Smart board screen -with fairly permanent and sad results.

Paper was very rare in early times and students used their own little slates or mini-blackboards with a rag to wipe them with.  Once pens were available, children from about age 3 could be trusted to use real ink and quills for writing. Their desks then needed a hole to hold the little ink bottle.

The early desks for a teacher were hand made, doubtless with great care by a parent.  In some schools the teacher’s desk, at the front of the room, was elevated on a little platform, making it easier for her to see and be seen. It was also handy as a stage for the many occasions when the small school might be used by the community as a church or concert hall.  This elevated dais was usually an 18 inch wide platform.

Students at first sat on wooden benches without backs, doing their work on wooden tables in front of them. Some have said these looked like early church benches and they were apparently quite uncomfortable.  They were usually four feet long and two or three children could sit on each bench.  Typically boys sat on a different side of the room from girls and younger students sat closest to the front

By the 1900s more areas  built wooden desks not just benches and these were sometimes bolted to the floor. The 1881 Edmonton classroom has 12 desks made of spruce.  It was possible for wealthier districts to ask for bids for making desks and some were willing to pay $5.30 for a single desk and $7.37 for a double. The early desks typically had a small hole carved right into the wood to hold the ink bottle.  In those days all children were encouraged to be right handed, so that ink bottle hole was nearly always on the right.

Desks in 1910 were often wooden, but some were made on an iron frame, like the base of a treadle sewing machine. They were sturdy and heavy.

Early desks often seated two or three  people and their varnished wood may not have started out with a shaping for little bottoms but over time developed one.  The desks were heavy but one suspects that the kids still figured out ways to jiggle them around enough that designers eventually put on cast iron legs that could be bolted to the floor.  Desks may have sloping tops and there was sometimes a trough along the top for pencils.  Some desks had a shelf under the top, to be used as a storage area.

In 1907 as single wooden desks became more common some versions opened at the top so children could store supplies in an upper drawer. This option to open the desk created not just opportunity but potential for mayhem as what kids can open they can also close. These became places where a person could by accident or as a prank get a finger caught in the desk top, bring it down on a friend’s elbow, sweater or braid The later versions of desks that had a similar lift top design though metal, created a handy place to store trash too, or hide things.

Even if a wooden desk was just for one person, there was a sense of group about it for some designs were the seat of one desk attached to the front writing top of the one behind it. Those desks assembled nicely in rows .though one can imagine the pranks of just edging your chair farther and farther forward to make it harder and harder for the guy behind you to write. Hence, probably, the practice of welding desks to the floor.   Some desks of this style had a fold up seat.

The presence of an inkwell container on your desk created other opportunities too since there right in front of you was the back of the head of someone, and an available source of ink. Many tell stories of girls’ pigtails getting tipped in the inkwell.

Later desks were lighter, much easier to lift and much cheaper to make once wood got costly. There were desks made with wooden writing surface, back and seat  but sitting on a metal frame with metal legs. Having a desk too small was not just awkward for the tall person trying to sit down. It obliged the student to stretch their legs out into the aisle and other students even the teacher were known to trip over.

When iron became costly, desks all of wood returned, but this was usually highly polished now and efficiently shaped with a rectangular chair, a right hand ‘arm’ extending forward to the wooden writing surface. These desks cradled the student nicely and efficiently prevented squirming out the other side.

The chair often had under it a wooden drawer for storage and in the 1950s when each child in the room had his own desk, these desks felt nearly like private property for each child.  The seat of the wood desk was advertised as specially shaped for comfort, with an S indentation. However this also proved to be trough like and spills could collect there.

Then there  was the design of the metal desk, no wood at all,  with a full size writing table and sometimes a storage grill under the chair for books. By the 1960s and 70s most high school students in the city would have metal desks or metal blends with plastic.   The metal arm from the back to the writing surface made the desk one unit and, because they were no longer bolted to the floor, they were  liftable. Some kids in an idle moment might place their hands under the table part and strategically then lift it and twirl it in a complete circle while standing inside. A good trick though not encouraged. 

The single unit metal desk came in several sizes, hopefully one of them appropriate for the child. However, as happened with pioneer schools, sometimes a perfect fit was not immediately available. In earlier times little kids’ feet would dangle down from chair seats too tall. With the metal desks and teens at growth spurt stage, it was often necessary to get a larger desk for taller students. A large teen might momentarily get stuck in his desk while trying to get out, and be massively embarrassed before the teacher recognized a bigger desk must be found.

In the 1970s there was often a plastic chair with a small fibreboard writing table hooked onto the right or left side of the seat. The writing table of some of these desks even could be folded up to enable students to walk down a tight aisle to get to their place.

Many schools moved to high tech plastic and steel tubing exclusively, without wood or iron. Some students sat at tables with no drawers or shelves, and the chair the student was on was a high end polymer. These chairs moved easily. It was convenient to set up group work this way, to move desks closer together for sharing or farther apart for tests, or out of the way completely for plays, concerts, presentations. However secondary school students often found these desk tops tippy and not able to support their weight if they sat on the desktop as they may casually try to do.

Kids have always felt strongly about their desks for where they sit becomes a part of who they are, especially in the early grades.  Some teachers have the kids tape their nametag onto the writing surface, others tape it onto the chair behind, while  a few, well -heeled ones, have an individualized fabric book bag handing over the back of the chair. Sitting at someone else’s desk is a great privilege if invited and a huge offense if not. I suspect it was always thus.

Some classrooms later got rectangular or circular tables for the kids, some arranged not even facing the teacher.  The teaching philosophy that moved from teacher-centred to inquiry based is often reflected even by the furniture.

In 1930 some schools had a pump organ and occasionally mice would hide inside it. These organs were later replaced by an upright  piano. The culture at the time was much more oriented to choral singing, even at home as friends would gather around the piano after dinner.  Many teachers incorporated singing into their lessons, especially when the children were getting unruly and of course the piano was vital to preparation for big concerts.  

In 2012 many schools still have pianos, but very few in the classroom.  A few however have upright pianos around, in the music room, in the basement storage, off to  one side in a classroom. It is  one of the pleasures of my life in a free moment to ask students if anyone would like to play us a song. Many children can and some are very gifted.

The advent of the gramophone was a big change for early schools in 1924

The floors of wood were replaced with linoleum in schools built after the 1930s. The battleship pattern of polished brown was supposed to be easier to maintain than wood which needs polishing.

1950s schools moved to fluorescent lighting believing it was easier on the eyes though in 2012 many teachers turn out the lights when possible and prefer natural lighting once again. They open the blinds.

 I’ve noticed that in 2012 some teachers are using wood and wicker baskets again, dark panelled poster backing, earth tones.. The rooms are very relaxing with stones in glass jars, plants growing on the window sills. It is in a way a return to tradition.