Returning to School Fifty Years Ago

Fifty years ago society regarded single support and unwed mothers as pariahs.  The welfare system was almost non-existent, and most people did not even consider applying because of the stigma.  Universal health care was unheard of.  Few young women raising children alone had the necessary skills to get jobs that would cover the cost of daycare and bus fare.  And there were no adult high schools with daycare facilities on-site to make it easier to get the pieces of paper necessary to enter or re-enter the work force. 

These were the bad old days before women's liberation began to demand some measure of equality for women, before such luxuries as maternity leave and equal pay for equal work were in place.  Women in Quebec did not receive the right to vote until 1949, so it is really not surprising that women teachers did not receive equal pay until the 1961-62 school year.  When I went to court in Montreal for the custody hearing in 1959, a judge towered above me in a public hearing and chastised me at length for leaving my marriage.  no one chastised my husband for being unable to keep up his end of things.  It was illegal to buy contraceptives in Quebec until the late sixties, and the trade in back alley abortions flourished, and killed sexually active women.  It was not a good time or place to be  female.

In a society that made it all but impossible for women to rise once they had fallen, I was luckier than most.  My father provided a roof over our heads and put food in our bellies.  My grandmother provided daycare.  Because she was in her late seventies, there were conditions attached, and it was not a completely worry-free situation, but she was there when I needed her.  I was able to finish high school, the first step to becoming self sufficient.

But there were conditions there too.

Three years before, I had flounced out of the John Rennie office, sure that I was on my way to better things than a high school could provide. Now I was the girl who spent her evenings spelling words with the neighbours in order to keep her brain alive. Cap in hand, I pleaded for re- admittance.  I was lucky.  Even though they remembered the mouthy sixteen year old who had thought about nothing but boys and skipped most classes, they gave me another chance. 

I had to sign an agreement that stated that I would not cause any trouble and that I would not date any of the students.  It took no deliberation at all to sign it.  After all I was there for one reason only.  I wanted to get that piece of paper.  I wanted to learn.  The thought of dating pimply-faced sixteen year old boys struck me as funny, and I certainly had no intention of breaking any school rules.

I was behind, of course, because I had missed the first term, and I knew I would be playing catch-up all year, but I also knew I could do it if they just gave me a chance.

People who go back to school now are given truncated courses, special conditions,  and lots of support and leeway, because educators recognize that adults have responsibilities that kids don't have to deal with.  They know that it makes good sense to fast track adults so that they can get into post-secondary programmes that will prepare them for the work force. Fifty years ago you went back to regular high school if you went back at all. 

I took ten subjects, just like everyone else.  In June I would sit for ten examinations: English Literature, English Composition, French written and oral, History, Geometry, Algebra, Chemistry, North American Literature, and Geography.  A lot of catching up, a lot of remembering, and a lot of homework for a woman with two children, one of whom was still in diapers.

For a while I despaired of ever learning Geometry.  I am left brained and this subject made demands I found daunting.  In addition there were great holes in my background.  I was now doing Book 4 without having done Book 3 ... and this on a leaky foundation from three years before when I did Book 2 without Book 1.  In addition, the only class with room for me was an enriched class in which the teacher could whiz through explanations and go on to more challenging problems.  I found myself sitting in the front seat listening hard, and, in the middle of working on a problem, by using common sense, I would see how to solve it, but find I was missing the reference.  I would turn around to ask if there was a proposition to prove that angle A was equal to Angle B, and the bright,  nerdy sixteen year old boy behind me would furnish the proof  I needed to continue. 

The School Board worried about me dating my fellow students ... contaminating them with my sexual experience. In fact,  my interest in these boys had far more to do with what was in their heads than in their trousers;  they were the ones with the valuable experience.  In June, I passed the geometry exam with a mark in the eighties.

French presented a different kind of problem.  I was years behind people educated in Quebec when I came from Nova Scotia at fifteen, and, even with tutoring,  had barely scraped a pass in Grade 10.  In grade 11,  I was placed in the class of the scariest teacher in the school, Ray Bolla.  I couldn't do anything right, it seemed.  When I skipped his classes in order to avoid the misery, he reported me, so I began skipping school completely. 

Mr. Rouse, my French teacher when I returned to school, was not at all frightening --  simply incompetent.  I realized I needed better teaching if I hoped to pass, so I went to Mr. Bolla and asked for tutoring.  I didn't pass French with flying colours, but, thanks to his help, I managed a decent pass in each of the French exams.

My own French teacher almost had me kicked out of school shortly before graduation.  A paper was being circulated for yearbook write-ups.  I asked the person who passed it to me what it was and  Mr. Rowse gave me a detention for talking.  After class, I told him it was impossible for me to serve the detention; that I had to get home to my children.  He made no comment and I assumed that he understood.  The next day my home room teacher kept me behind for a few minutes to tell me that they were thinking of expelling me for not attending the detention.  I explained, and  Mr. Howse told me to go to Mr. Rowse and offer to serve the detention at noon.  I did this, but when I went to the French classroom, the door was locked and he never showed up.  The following morning I told Mr. Howse what had occurred and asked what I should do now.  He said, very succinctly, that I should consider the detention served.  I never heard anything else, and I assume he took care of it.

When I returned to John Rennie, I discovered that I had several guardian angels besides Ray Bolla who gave of his time, and John Howse who stood up for me against injustice.  In the weeks before the June exams were written, my geography teacher, John Jared, was preparing to move to the Arctic with twin babies and the rest of his young family.  I realized after he'd packed everything away that I had missed learning about aerial photography and that one of the compulsory questions would be on that first term work.  I met him at the shopping centre on a Saturday.  I had the babies with me, and he offered me a lift home in the van he had just had detailed before leaving.  I mentioned the aerial photographs.  Then one of my children got car sick, messily, all over his back seat.  I forgot all about aerial photographs in my embarrassed efforts to clean up the mess.  John Jared, however, remembered.   On Monday he presented me with the photographs and study notes he'd dug out over the weekend.

The woman who taught me English three years before, Dr. Alanna Smith, called me in to her office to apologize for not having done more to help me stay in school.  I assured her that nothing she could have done, not even giving me a part in the school play, the failure she was regretting, would have changed my headstrong resolve to quit school and get married.

My English teacher when I returned was one of the best in the department.  Michael Witham was Cambridge educated, knowledgeable and strict ... and he liked me because I loved his subject.  His guardianship was to extend beyond high school, as was that of the vice principal, Lloyd Patch.

I decided to become a teacher because of Mr. Patch's advice, but it was the teachers I encountered when I returned to school who were the real reason I decided to join their ranks.

But college is another story.