I am in a grade 4 classroom at a well funded southwest elementary school in 2012.  This school is a French and Spanish immersion school now, serving some very well heeled communities including Signal Hill, Spruce Cliff, Discovery Ridge, Scarboro, Springbank Hill. It has nearly 700 students. They all bring backpacks and some even cart them along on rollers like you do airline luggage. Somehow I often think of turtles with shells as I see all the little kids heft the backpack to go home each night.

The backpacks are for their  lunch and snacks, some notices to go home or come from home and for extra clothes.  There is also an ‘agenda’ that goes back and forth each night, a kind of written messaging system for children to learn to record what happened that day and parents and teachers to send each other messages .

The school will provide most of the school supplies kids need at the elementary level. Each child needs a plastic pencil case and a pencil sharpener, eraser,  HB pencils, both wax and colored pencil crayons, a pair of scissors, a glue stick and a ruler.  Most elementary classrooms put the scissors, crayons and glue sticks into buckets to be shared in the classroom as needed.  It is quite a routine for a child to request a new eraser or pencil, and usually the child has to prove the old one is worn out. Then the teacher goes off to the stash in the cupboard.  By the end of the year the teacher may be cutting erasers in two so they ‘stretch’ till June.

A few elementary schools have other specially ordered supplies of magnets, felt letters, stickers, math blocks, and for older kids  electronic circuit making material, lab jars and chemicals for experiments. Lots of schools have play kitchens with plastic food, telephones, pots and pans, stuffed animals and toy cradles. They have Lego blocks and wooden planks, highly sanded for creating forts and even sand tables and water tables for play in the kindergarten.  Modern elementary classrooms, especially kindergartens are often a feast of color.

In the classroom are also sharpies, fine-tipped markers, thick tipped markers, bingo markers and counting cubes.  There are soft bound paper workbooks, some lined, some half lined for the kids to write and draw on. There are duotangs, often color coded per subject, one for each child for each subject, to receive worksheets and other exercises, and often stored against the wall in containers for easy access.  The schools usually have only a small budget for books but the photocopy room is very active. With copyright permission schools often just make a class set of an exercise and yet warnings are often all around the staff room photocopier about saving paper.  There are signs about how the machine knows when you are in a hurry and will shut down, about how you should just sit back and watch the blinking lights. Yet many are the times when kids get a reading that is printed on misnumbered pages, stapled on the wrong side or with a few key words missing on a margin. Ah, such is technology.

There are often artbooks too, coil fancy ones for artistic creations and there are cupboards with heavier craft paper, of many colors and sizes..The elementary classrooms usually have an electric pencil sharpener though some children bring their own small plastic one and the school often supplies a tube like one per child.   The school supplies erasers but most kids have often brought their own  highly colored heavier ones in cute patterns.

At the higher levels kids have to bring most of these items themselves since  after about grade  7 the school does not provide them.  In September kids arrive with binders all clean with fresh paper, all zippers and springs working on the backpacks and as the year progresses, the toll it on binders thrown into lockers or dropped onto playgrounds is clearly visible.

At the start of the year schools issue to parents a list of recommended supplies. A big junior high for instance may require that students bring two binders, dividers, white out, lined 3 hole paper, unlined 3 hole paper, duotangs, a geometry set, a calculator, pens, pencils, erases, a 30 cm ruler, glue stick, scissors, highlighter, pencil crayons and felt pens. Senior high students provide their own paper and binders too but nowadays often come in with laptops as well, or their smartphones and Blackberries. They think little of this multimedia access which to an early pioneer would be stunning.

However, teaching at the senior high is often like stepping back in time for the senior highs still are generally in older buildings. They often still have the hand-crank pencil sharpener on the wall, some old wooden compasses and protractors hidden in the cupboards.    There is less color, there are fewer posters in most rooms.  A few stand out as super decorated, with mobiles and art work. Earlier schools did not even really have that option.  Much has changed. But not everything.

The irony of the use of school supplies on the prairies is not just that some things we have now had not been invented, but that in the east things that had been invented may have not been sent out west yet.

What has not changed is that kids are kids.  When they are asked to take things home, they sometimes forget. When asked to bring things from home or do homework, well, it may arrive intact, coins nicely in envelopes, forms fully filled out, or it may just not arrive. “The dog ate it”. A new excuse is that the work is in the computer and the printer was not working.

Kids still have to remember things, and if they do remember, to want to do them.  If they are sharing supplies, they still have to learn how to do that fairly. Pioneer teachers had to deal with the same learning curve today’s teachers do.  I  have a feeling the walls still echo with “Waste not. Take what you need. Use what you take”.

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Many early schools considered paper a luxury. You might get books from home or a few textbooks at the school, newspapers or Sears or Eaton’s catalogues but paper itself was not handed out in reams. Kids used the recycling strategy of the 1900s,  an erasable slate.  The small slate surface,  sometimes with a wood frame, was marked with a slate pencil and could be erased with a rag and possibly a water bottle.  Calgary got its first newspapers in 1883 and 1886.

Because children could not write down new information in any notebook, a common way to teach was for the teacher to write the material on the blackboard and have the children copy it onto the slate.

When blank paper was available it commonly was folded into pages and sewn together as a notebook.  Brown paper wrapping might be used as a cover and if ruled paper was needed, sometimes the lines were drawn on by hand.  Early paper was tan not white.

Paper was a privilege and in 1906 it was the kids in the upper grades who first got to use the five cent scribblers.  As late as 1916 the department of education was not supplying all the scribblers however.  As late as 1936 schools were still often short of specialty paper like construction paper and some teachers would just provide it from their own paycheque.

Early pencils were cut from soft grades of slate, chalk  or soapstone, so kids could make marks on the harder type of slate of the slate board.  Slate pencils usually came wrapped in colored paper or encased in wood.   The slate boards could be purchased in 1916 from the Eaton’s catalogue for twenty cents and a box of slate pencils cost ten cents.

When graphite pencils were created, and more important, when they were made available and affordable to prairie schools, they were of several colors but in 1890 the most common color was yellow.  The pencils had a  thin wooden cylinder bonded around the core of graphite and clay mix.  A lot of people think these are made of lead and even call them lead pencils but they are in fact not lead. In 1812 they were first made in the US in Massachusetts, and came in hexagon and octagon shaped wood shells around the graphite. In England they were made with a square edged tube in 1860.

By 1900 the  yellow ‘lead’ pencil was very common, often made from cedar wood since that did not splinter much when sharpened.   There were grades of hardness of the graphite with H meaning hard and HHH for very hard. There were also ranks for how darkly it printed or its blackness with B for black . An HB pencil which today is still required for many computer -scored exams, is therefore hard and dark.

Pencils could be purchased by parents too and in 1912 some Calgary schools asked the children to bring their own pencils and notebooks. Over time the requirement to bring items was questionnned and a clearer obligation was set out for elementary schools to provide these as basic.

The irony of thinking the pencil was dangerous because it was made of lead, was not quite wrong though.  The outside was sometimes painted with a lead-based paint. Until 1950 if people sucked or chewed on the pencil, it was the paint that was dangerous.   A few pencils were even made, when no graphite was around, from melted bullets lengthened, sharpened and put in a wood case.

Instead of having to sharpen the ‘lead’, designers later created pencils that enclosed their own supply of sharpened leads.

The pencil still has an impressive history. Thomas Edison used 3 inch long very thick pencils made with soft graphite.  John Steinbeck wrote the novel East of Eden entirely in pencil and it took apparently 300 pencils to do so. Roald Dahl wrote his books in pencil and set out 6 newly sharpened ones each day before he sat down to write.  When astronauts in the early 60s had trouble figuring out how to make pen ink flow in a weightless environment, it was a child who suggested- why not a pencil?  Even more recently US talk show host Johnny Carson played with pencils on air when filming The Tonight Show on TV. However he had those pencils specially made with erasers at both ends so there would not be any accidents.

Pencils are still used by kids, larger fat ones for the youngest and then thinner ones as kids get older and more dexterous.  A pencil maker, Faber -Castell made a 20 meter high pencil outside its headquarters a few years ago but even that was not the biggest pencil ever made. In 2007 Ashrita Furman made a birthday gift for his teacher Sri Chinmoy. That pencil is 23 metres long and weighs 8200 kg.

In 1918 teachers could buy through a catalogue pencil boxes for the children, usually made of wood with a sliding top. Later versions even were double decker with two sliding drawers.

The first way to sharpen a pencil was with a knife, to whittle down the point.  This requires a skill  since it could result in cuts but pioneer boys often brought to class a pocket knife and were adept at whittling. Sharpening a pencil was uh, child’s play. A hand crank  or mechanical pencil sharpener was created in 1847 and became widely used in early schools.  The more modern adaptations of it had several sizes of holes for pencils of different widths.  Electric pencil sharpeners were made by 1917 but were not seen in schools for some years after that.  The most modern ones do not need to be plugged in and operate on batteries.  I recently saw a student using his own personal electronic pencil sharpener, quite small, but it did take 5 batteries.

Most kids are attracted to color and the idea of making lots of colored marks is not new. Early people  mixed beeswax with pigments from boiled berries to make paint.  In 1495 Leonardo da Vinci used a material made from charcoal and oil, shaped into a cylinder and drew with it.  In 1828 Joseph Lemercier in France experimented with ways of mixing oil and charcoal while other artists used wax to strengthen the tubed material or crayon.  By 1891 a company in the US was making wax crayons for school children, in boxes of 6, 12 and 18 colors.  Those early crayons had wood outsides but later versions were all wax but wrapped in paper.

One inventor who made leather goods wanted something to mark them with and tried taking clumps of colored wax, shaping them to look like pencils about five inches long.  He started selling them in 1902. Other companies did the same and by 1902 they offered about 15 colors of these wax crayons. One company took its name from  the word for ‘chalk’ (craie) and the name of the wax it used  ‘oleaginous” and became “Crayola”.

Later pencils were made of colored graphite or wax, surrounded by wood and  to be ‘colored pencils’ or ‘pencil crayons’. For small children having crayons has always been very special for it taps into their creativity.  The fact the material was wax was often handy for other art projects too, since the wax could be smeared for special effects.

When kids wrote on slates, they could just wipe a rag over a mistake and do the question over. Erasers the teacher might use on her big slate board might be rags too, a piece of sheepskin with the wool side out, or a piece of felt.

 Once they used paper though, they had to figure out a way to remove that mark. 

 Rubber or wax had long been used to take off such marks from paper but if they didn’t have either of those, pioneers found that bread with no crusts on it also worked.

 A child who was hungry might even nibble on the bread a bit before using it as an eraser. 

Joseph Priestley discovered a gummy substance from vegetables and named it ‘rubber’ since he found it could be rubbed on pencil marks and they disappeared. But both bread and pure rubber rotted over time. It was not till 1839 that Charles Goodyear figured out a way to treat the rubber so it would not rot. The process was called vulcanization and once rubber was treated that way for car tires or erasers, they did not ‘go bad’.  In 1858 people were putting these new erasers on the ends of some pencils.

Erasers were made in many shapes, often blocks, pink or white, or sometimes in cones for the end of pencils.  Later designs even had a container of erasers, shaped like a pencil and called a ‘click eraser’. The material used there was not usually rubber though but soft vinyl.

In 1951 a liquid was found to make a nice white mark over an error and then to dry quickly. This correction fluid got named white out in some countries.  It was very precise and did not leave grey erase marks on paper or risk ripping the paper as erasers sometimes did. However once exposed to air the liquid hardened, which was what you wanted on the paper, but if you left the lid off the whole bottle of fluid hardened and became unusable. The ingredients if breathed in could also be harmful to health in large doses so some brands added an unpleasant smell so the fluid was not overused. 

Correction pens were created, containing the fluid in pen form and correction tape helped students just roll a strip over an error.  Students often found that this way of making corrections gave a nice clean copy, except that the white spot sometimes showed.  For those who made an error on top of another error,  the result approached sculpture. Kids also liked to, in an idle moment, paint their fingernails with it.

More recently companies have made lots of novelty erasers in many shapes and colors with  comic or holiday designs. They are however not usually good at erasing. They are often made of hard vinyl and cause smears.

With spell check and computer technology, it is now possible to not print a document until you have already corrected most errors. But we will likely never see the day when kids make no mistakes.

From early history people knew how to use ink to make marks that last.  At first people used stiff pieces of grass or reeds and colored liquid from berries. A slit was made in the narrow end of a long reed to soak up the ink and then apply it.  These were ‘reed pens’. But they were not as easy to make on the prairies since we have few reeds.

 Here people noticed that quills from goose feathers were very sharp and could be used, with ink, to make nice lines.  They discovered that if you take on too much ink, you make blobs on the paper and that to control the flow it helps to cut the nib of the quill a certain way.  Later when metal was available, it was cut into fine ends or nibs this way  too.  It was sometimes the teacher’s job to ‘whittle pens’ to the individual needs of each student.

In 1905 students used pens with steel nibs and  drew ink up in them out of little glass bottles.  Ink was at first made with an ink powder and water. If you did not have ink powder you could use boiled walnut, vinegar, salt and soot from a lit candle. On the prairies ink was sometimes made from boiled maple bark.

The nib pen (or dip pen) had a metal nib with little channels cut it it and it was mounted on a wooden handle. It had no ink stored in it and you had to dip the pen every few strokes into the ink bottle.  Some types of ink were more watery than others and you had to get just the right thickness. If it was too thin, it did not make a dark or permanent enough mark on the paper. If it was too thick, it might clog in the nib and not flow.

Pioneers also figured out how to use hair or feathers to draw with. You’d take the hair of a weasel, rabbit, deer, chicken, duck, goat or pig and attach this hair in a little clump to a wood or metal base.  In ancient times it is said that sometimes in China people would even take the hair of a newborn baby and use it to make a little pen for the child when the child grew up.

In 1910 students used what was called a straight pen with their bottled ink. Later versions of the pen had a little container built inside for its own ink. The ‘reservoir’ could be refilled in some versions while others were just disposable and you put in a new one every so often as a cartridge.

To make sure that the ink dried before they closed the scribbler, kids used blotting paper. By 1918 it was available by catalogue in blue, green, grey and white and merchants did not miss a trick. They often put ads on the blotting paper.

In 1938 the ballpoint pen was invented.  An inventor put a little chamber inside a pen with a tiny ball rolling around just at the hole. The ball was too big to come out the end but small enough that it would roll around so when ink came down the tube, the little ball helped roll the ink out smoothly. This ‘ballpoint pen’ was  very popular especially after 1943.  In 1979 ballpoint  pens were sometimes even made with erasable ink and by 2000 they were also retractable so that the part that sticks out could be clicked back in for storage. By 2005 the most popular pen in the US was the retractable ballpoint pen.

Kids being kids, it was not unheard of that a child had accidentally while chewing on the end of the pen swallowed its plastic end. This could become a medical crisis preventing air passage and though most kids survived the experience, the companies making such pens often then inserted an air hole on the tip, just in case.

There were other developments later too.   By the 1960s a pen was made with ink that came out to a felt tip and the tip could be made pointed, or broad, wide or narrow and used for making posters.  Other versions used ink you could see through and were called highlighters, or ink that could be erased and they were called dry-erase markers.

Though people had known for a long time how to make sharp knives and how to put two blades together to make scissors, they were not widely manufactured by factories until about 1760.  Hardened and polished cast steel was the most popular material and the early versions were made one at a time, with a forge to melt and shape the metal and a hammer to create the shape. To make the rings in the handles, a hole was punched in the steel and then made larger with the pointed end of an anvil.      It was costly to have them though and not common for each student to have a pair. Blunt scissors, child size scissors, scissors with rippled edges and plastic handles, left handed scissors all came later.

To measure things in ancient times people used available material as a comparison. They used the length of an adult foot to be called ‘foot’ or the length of the first joint of the thumb to be called an inch, or the distance from the nose to the outstretched hand to be called a yard. It was quickly noticed that people’s foot, hand and arm lengths differed though so a standard length was sought.  Wooden rulers were marked in regular intervals, at first in Canada in inches and only more recently in centimetres. Children as late as the 1950s in Calgary schools used wooden rulers, sometimes with little metal inserts to keep the often-used edge from wearing out. The fold-up ruler seemed a big advancement when it was invented in 1851.

We have since seen plastic and metal rulers, metre sticks not yardsticks  but the early wood ones have character. They often have worn edges, possible chew marks from idle  students deep in thought and were in the 1940s and 50s often covered with ads from local stores.

The classroom had to have other basics too- a waste basket, alphabet letters for the chalkboard.  In 1912 you could buy charts of the alphabet AaBbCc to attach along the top of the chalkboard. They cost 80 cents a set. A wire wastebasket cost a dollar. 
The school handbell in 1912 could be purchased by catalogue too. It was commonly a brass bell with a handle made of walnut and a clapper of wire hooked to a metal nut.  Early schools often improvised when this sturdy bell cracked, when the wire broke or the clapper got lost.  A more reliable bell might be the large one in the tower above the school.  It was quite an ordeal to purchase this bell, to bring it by wagon and hoist it by ropes to the tower. Several Calgary schools were built with a bell tower on the top, but never did get a bell for them.

When the teacher or the students had to attach papers to each other, they used a kind of glue.  Prairie natives already knew that you could get a sticky gel material from the boiled  hooves of animals. In the US a glue factory opened in 1899 and some types of animal glue were used to hold pages of early books together.  It was a common joke to say a horse was old and had to be sold to the ‘glue factory’.  Another material though, gelatin, was found to be very useful. It has an edible form too and is today used to make marshmallows and jellied desserts. 

Mucilage was made from plants, and people  figured out how to collect it from leaves or from algae in the soil. It was put in glass bottles and sold in the 1940s and it was not poisonous but it did not taste good.  Often mucilage which is thick, was mixed with water to put on the back of stamps or labels or envelopes.

In 1930 an adhesive tape was invented.  One company that made it was criticized though for not making it sticky enough. The 3M company had a customer who wrote them angry note once, saying he disliked the product because it did not stick well and he was sending it back to your “stingy Scotch bosses’ . He them to put more adhesive on it and from that time onward the tape got called ‘Scotch tape’.  The name is actually the official name of only one type of tape, and is a trademark but a lot of people call any adhesive tape by that name. It was not till 1969 that the glue stick was invented in Germany and by 1971 it was available in many countries.  Today most classrooms have gluesticks, often dozens of them.

Early books were few on the prairies.  In 1890 Calgary got its first library for the school in the town hall. The cost of all the books there was $193.72.  In 1897 you could order books though through mail order catalogues but few people could afford more than a few and what you had you often read and reread. At home the children may have a few and the teacher may have ordered some too – fables, fairy tales, Jules Verne, Little Women, Uncle Tom’ s Cabin, Robinson Crusoe, Last of the Mohicans. By 1906 Calgary had four bookstores.  In 1909 it was common for people to pass around any magazines and newspapers from house to house.

In 1912 the official curriculum of the province included tales of Greece and Rome and even Bible stories for grades 2-4. The early readers on the prairies featured characters Dick and Jane.   In 1908 a popular book set for the schools was the  Alexandra Series, with prairie stories about belling the cat, dogs in mangers, country and city mice, the goose and golden eggs, the little red hen, the boy who cried wolf, the ugly duckling.

Older students read more classical material. In 1914 some of their material was by Jane Austen, Byron, Robert Louis Stevenson, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Longfellow, Milton, Tennyson.  In fact though the students were in a new community and living primitively they were often studying classical British material sometimes about lives of opulence.

In 1934 though the city could not afford to give each school a big library collection, it could buy a good collection and take it to the schools. The problem was lack of variety. Even by 1949 a small rural school may have only about 24 books.  In 1940 it was a very big deal it someone purchased and donated an entire set of encyclopedias to a school.

Textbooks were very special, were passed on from year to year and children covered them with book covers to keep them clean. In1940 merchants often sold these heavy paper covers to be folded around the text’s edges, and displayed their own logos on the paper.

Calgary set up travelling libraries and by 1943 the circulating library had 5596 volumes. It had also started collecting films and slides.

Teachers in 1900 knew that real objects helped kids understand math and they often  had a wood block to demonstrate volume and the cubic foot.  There were even tin cups to demonstrate the pint, quart and gallon and their relationship.  Some districts even had local carpenters made one hundred one inch cubes for each student to learn counting.

Teachers sometimes used a wood bead frame with rows of beads on wires, to represent numbers up to 100.  The basic abacus is still available in some toy stores and in 2012 is making a comeback for its simplicity and the fact it has no losable parts.

Along the way though, schools did try out other ways to show math. A device was created in levels in 1859 to show a lot of math operations along one line by sliding parts to line up. This ‘slide rule’ from France came to North America by 1881.  Its use spread to the prairies eventually and it was very common in the 1950s classroom. The rocket scientist Wernher von Braun never used any other pocket calculating devices than it  to estimate movements of rockets in space.  There were even emergency slide rules available to the onboard scientists on five Apollo space missions.  Canada went metric in 1970 and all the earlier props for feet, yards, inches or quarts gradually had to be changed. Yardsticks disappeared as meter sticks entered, with a transition period where one scale was printed on one side and the other on the other. When the metric system entered, small plastic cubes were used in kindergartens, and named ‘manipulables’ so kids could visually count up 10, make blocks of 10 by 10, make squares and cubes.

In 1934 some teachers in Calgary were using a mimeograph, a new technology to have a gelatin mix soak up ink and create a template for further copies of the same document.  The gelatin mix often made purple ink copies. Some people called it a hectograph and teachers enjoyed not having to copy a document by hand several times. If the rural school did not supply one, some teachers were so keen to have it that they brought their own. The same master sheet could even be used several times if a writer handwrote between the lines of where she wrote last time.  The writer Stephen King and his brother used a hectograph to make their own early newspaper.  Some tattoo artists in 2012 still use hectograph technology, pencilling a design onto special paper and then transferring it on to the customer’s skin.

In 1884 another process was invented for making copies, the mimeograph.  A heavy paper was typed on with a special process to make holes in the paper the shape of each letter. Then when the stencil was wrapped around a drum, ink went through the holes and made marks on a copy.  The ink was odorless and black and could make more copies than the hectograph did- but if you cut the stencil wrong by making a typing error, the error also showed on the copy.

In 1910 a spirit duplicator was invented (ditto machine). You could write, draw or even type on the top copy and underneath the second sheet of colored wax transferred wax to the back of the top copy.  Then when you put the second copy on a drum, it could make copy after copy like the original.  The second copy dye could be purple or other colors and teachers could make a document in several colors at once. However the copies also tended to fade in the sunlight.

The photocopier was invented in 1937 but schools did not see them for a while. Once they did, photocopy machines became big expenses for the budget and rural schools rarely had access to them. Once scanners and laser printers were invented, copies could be made from the computer without using the photocopier although such printer cartridges were expensive.

Teachers today spend a lot of their own money on school supplies and they did that in rural schools too. When they left, they often left some of those behind, as a gift. This happens even in the big city schools and binders of lesson plans stocked up drawers for future teachers. It is kind of a gift of carry-it-forward.  At Hillhurst school during the teaching of a unit on geology, in 2011 the class had reason to use a collection of stones put together in a large wooden home-made case. It was left at the school as a gift from a teacher and his science class 60 years earlier. Every stone is carefully labelled, its slot clearly marked, and probably thousands of tiny hands have learned about geology from that gift.

Many classrooms I teach in have similar legacies, though not usually labelled. They are in the fine woodwork of the door, the careful shaping of the sandstone, the graceful arch of the stairwell. I see the touches of earlier teachers and students in the home-made wooden bookcases against the wall, the painstakingly well made foldable wooden magazine shelf with a latch, in the wooden easel that we still hang artwork on, in handmade posters.

It feels like it not only takes a village to raise a child, but sometimes the villagers of earlier eras are still helping us teach, though they moved on some time ago.