Fourth Grade

Fourth grade was taught by Miss (Juanita?) Johnson. I have a somewhat clearer picture of her than of Mrs. Wood or Miss Geddes. Miss Johnson was a short, stocky person with dark, somewhat curly hair.

I can remember only one incident directly related to fourth grade. One of the teaching devices that Miss Johnson used on teaching arithmetic was a contest between students to see who would do some problem correctly the fastest. In some cases at least this contest was done at the blackboard in the front of the classroom and with two contestants only. The rest of the class simply watched. On one occasion I was competing with another boy in the class, Bill Jones, and it was a close contest but I prevailed.

Bill was the oldest child of a sort of shiftless farmer and though he kept up with our class (he was in our graduating class) he did not have any further schooling beyond high school. What would have happened to him with a more auspicious upbringing I have sometimes wondered. I think he ended up in some sort of trucking business and had died before the time of our 50th class reunion in 1988.

Blackboards were an indispensable part of all the classrooms in the Gowrie school, including the high school assembly hall. They were the old-fashioned slate boards and were black, not the present day green color. Frequently the class instruction would be at the blackboard, perhaps to conserve paper or maybe the teacher could sort of combine her instruction with her grading process.

I seem to recall that there were some housekeeping functions connected with the blackboards that the pupils took care of — such as taking the erasers outside the building and knocking them together to get the chalk dust out of them, or staying after school to wash the blackboards.