Rambunctious kids found new teacher tough but fair

By Victor Daradick – High Level, Alta.

Can you imagine the poor teachers who had to try teaching these children? We really weren’t that bad – just bad enough to drive several teachers to near nervous breakdown!

We all liked Mr. Russell because he played ball with us. If we made enough noise and he couldn’t hear the factory whistle blow at one o’clock from four miles away, we could play an extra inning.

He taught us about outer space and exciting things like that and he also told us we’d live to see man walk on the moon. The only problem was these things were not on the teaching curriculum, and the school board fired him because he wasn’t teaching us the proper curriculum.

It didn’t matter that we learned more from him than any other teacher. We didn’t even get to say goodbye to him. Later on we heard he became a railroad engineer.

Came to Canada for love

We really gave the next teacher a hard time to let the school board know how unhappy we were. We drove a couple of poor young teachers bonkers and they quit before the year was over. Then we got an old Irish teacher.

When you’re a kid, anyone over 40 is old. She was right from Ireland and the only way they would let her into the country was if she would teach for a year. They gave her the toughest school they had.

Let me tell you, she was a tough teacher and we all hated her. But, she was also fair, and by spring she had the respect of everyone in school.

She’d told us the only reason she wanted to come to Canada was because she met a soldier during the war and they had corresponded for years after the war. Once her teaching hitch was up, she could get married.

We all missed her very much and I wish that I could remember her name, but that was more than 70 years ago.