I trust that you will bear with me as a take a nostalgic trip into my old school days. This morning I went to our congregational school at nine o’clock to have devotions with the students and teachers. The thoughts I shared began with nostalgia for the good old days. I told them that this month it is 75 years since I started school and that was before their parents were born, even before most of their grandparents were born. I had to put in that little qualifier because my youngest grandson is still in school, just starting Grade Seven.

I told them about the old one-room schools that were once all over Saskatchewan, built close enough together so that the farthest any child would have to walk to school would be four miles. I had just over a mile, going down the road a short distance then following the fence line between a wheat field and a pasture for a mile. I began making that walk twice a day when I was six years old. We lived in the Coteau Hills of southwestern Saskatchewan, but it wasn’t uphill both ways, just a couple of gentle ups and downs.

These schools had one teacher for 20 to 30 children in eight grades. The teacher was probably a young lady who had finished high school and taken a two week summer school course to qualify as a teacher. And they were excellent teachers. I remember those first few years in a one room school as my favourite time in school.

I could read before I started school, so I had a head start. I could easily do my Grade One work and at the same time absorb much of what the teacher was teaching the Grade Two students. The next year I was listening to the Grade Three work, and so on.

These schools were heated by a wood stove in winter time. The community provided a stack of firewood and it was the teachers job to get to school early in the morning, carry in wood and light the fire so the school would be warm when the children arrived. Sometimes a single young farmer in the neighbourhood would take it upon himself to carry the wood in and get the fire started before the teacher got there. This happened to my cousin Julia, 19 years older than me. Of course I have no personal recollection of any of this, I just remember that she told me that a young man named Ed Ludke made a practice of starting the fire for her when she taught in on of those schools. She was 21 when she married Ed and 22 when their first child was born.

Shortly after I started Grade Five we moved close to a large town and I attended a school with two grades to a classroom. This school was heated by a coal fired boiler in the basement and had a full time employee to manage the heating, maintenance and janitorial work.

Both schools had bare wooden floors and the smell of Dustbane is part of the nostalgia of the old school days. Just taking a broom to those wood floors would do little more than redistribute the dust tracked into the school each day. Dustbane was made of sawdust mixed with other ingredients and had a pronounced pine smell. The teacher or janitor would spread a line of it across one end of the room and sweep towards the other. It would pick up all the dust, leaving a clean floor for the next day. I shouldn’t speak of Dustbane in the past tense, it is still available, I just haven’t seen it for years.

Those were the days when blackboards were black, chalk was white, and schools stressed the teaching of reading, writing, grammar, spelling and all the elements of math. I am very thankful to have gone to school at such a time as that.