University Place

cc >> Today we are pleased to introduce Susan Apps-Bodilly as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or museum's employees. Susan Apps-Bodilly has been an elementary and middle school teacher for more than 20 years. Susan is also the author of the recent Wisconsin Historical Society Press publication

One Room Schools

Stories From the Days of One Room, One Teacher, Eight Grades. Here today to share stories from Wisconsin's early country schools, please join me in welcoming Susan.

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One Room Schools

>> Thanks. Thanks, Jenny. I was really excited that you all came out today. This is a really nice group. And a couple kids and some people that, from what I understand already, attended one room schools or taught, at least briefly, in one room schools. So that's really exciting. So, my name, like she said, is Susan Apps-Bodilly, and I wrote this nonfiction book about one room schools. And it was intended when we were writing it for young readers, maybe fourth grade through eighth grade. However, I've been really excited that lots of ages have been buying this book and enjoying it and sharing it with their younger family members and grandchildren as a way to sort of start talking about how things were in the past. So it's really not just for younger readers. I really encourage all ages to read it and enjoy it. And I love the title because it says Stories From the Days of One Room, One Teacher, Eight Grades, but it's not fiction. It's nonfiction, and, in my mind, history is full of stories. It's not just facts and dates. It really involves the stories from real people in real places, and that's a really interesting way for kids to connect to history. So today in my talk I'm going to share a little bit about why I wrote the book and how I did the research to get the information for the book. And I'll tell you a little bit about what a day was like in a one room school. And then we're also going to pretend, at the end I'm going to put you to work, we're going to pretend at the end that there's a history lesson of the day, and I'll see how sharp your brains are today. There's two lessons. One for older students, and one for younger students. So you can pretend which age you'd like to be when you answer the questions, and then there should be some time for questions or comments at the end. I'd love to hear your stories briefly at the end. Just again, I'd love to know who you are. Raise your hand if you taught in a one room school, even briefly. So I knew there was at least one. Raise your hand if you attended a one room school. So that's a great, so you already know a lot about one room schools. So you can share brief comments at the end. That's just great. I find everywhere I go people are so interested in what life was like if you were there or even if you weren't. Raise your hand if you are a teacher or a retired teacher. So lots of teachers here. It's summer. We like summer. Raise your hand if you go to school today, if you're a student. So I know I have couple students here. So everybody can really engage with this topic. It seems to be something that everybody's interested in in some way. So, why did I write the book? Well, I was really interested in one room schools, being that I am a teacher, and I did not attend a one room school, actually. This is where I went to elementary school.

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One Room Schools

I'm a city girl. I went to Midvale Elementary. I'm proud to say that I'm a graduate of the Madison Public Schools. I went to Midvale and Cherokee Middle School and West High School. So why does a city girl want to get to know about what happened in the country? Well, that's pretty easy because all of my grandparents lived in the country. So I spent a lot of time in the country growing up. And this particular building in Waushara County is the Chain O'Lakes School. And it was situated, it still is situated in between where my family's cabin is and my grandparent's home farm. So anytime we traveled from the cabin to the home farm, I went past this school. My whole life growing up, it has since long closed and it's a private home. This, in fact, is my son standing there because it was for sale for a bit, and I just had to go peek in the windows and see what it was like. So we walked up there and peeked in the windows. But my whole life I looked in that building thinking, gosh, that's just one room. And then when I went to school to learn how to be a teacher, I just kept wondering how did she do that or how did he do that with all those grades. And I just couldn't figure it out. It was almost like I had to know. So part of finding out about history is asking questions and finding out the answers, of course. So this is a picture of my dad who attended that one room school. And this is actually the picture that I had taped to my desk the whole time I was writing because I wanted the voices of those kids in my head, and I kept them in mind. My two uncles, my twin uncles, are in the front. Donald and Darrell. And my father is the one who is second in the row on the left. So he's got lots and lots of stories about attending a one room school. And my mother also attended a one room school near Westby. This is a picture of her on her farm. So she's got stories from the one room school. And this is another picture of my mom's one room school. And my grandmother Olson was just a meticulous scrapbooker, even before it was popular to scrapbook, and she's got all the kids numbered and all their names are on the back. So I know exactly who it is, and my mom is number 12. So, to do the research, I started gathering stories from people. I figured that people who taught there would be the best resource to start with. So I went to this museum in Rhinelander and just walked in without making an appointment or anything, and there was a lady there. This is Lily, who happened to be volunteering at the museum that day. And three and a half hours later, we were done. I said, Lily, I should probably go and get home because she just talked and talked. Very clear and sharp memory of so many students and so many things and exactly how she had things running and just so many, so many stories. And I put several of her stories in the book. She was just a great resource. This is a picture. She sent me some of her personal pictures to include in the book. This is a picture of her shoveling when her name was Lily Wolf, actually. So then, also, history is the study of people and events that took place in the past, and as I teach my students today, I like to tell them that being a historian is like being a detective. That you think of questions that you're interested in, and then you investigate the sources and try to gather lots of evidence to go with your sources. So local historical societies, I'm sure you already know this, are just full of resources. This happens to be just half of the Oregon School District's map. They've done a beautiful map of where all the schools were. And they have been a lot of help to me in answering questions. So, where were schools located? This is another one in Waukesha County, and they were usually either wood or brick. So this is a really beautiful brick building. So when you're using resources, there's another wood one, and I like this one because they're sitting out on the fence and all lined up for a photo. But the road is dirt. Dirt road and mud. So we use secondary sources. I read all I could find on one room schools. And this was a map that was already published with a typical one room schoolhouse plan. So then, also, the Historical Society image archives, if you haven't had a chance to look through their website, just hundreds of pictures of the insides and outsides of children at school. So this is a picture from the Historical Society. And we like this one because the flag doesn't have 50 stars. But this is a great picture to show kind of how the students were sitting together and working and how the room looked. This is a picture of the Dopp School in Portage County. And the Dopp School was the school that my father's school, it was their sort of rival for softball every spring. And the joke for that school was that their softball field was in a cow pasture, so when they went there they felt like they were at a disadvantage because they had to watch where they were running.

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One Room Schools

So besides lots of secondary sources, my favorite, of course, is using primary sources, which are real letters and journals and talking to real people. So just for you to practice, if you could think like a historian, and I showed this picture out of my book to my class and I asked them, what do you think the red building was for? Does anybody want to take a guess? >> Outhouse. >> Outhouse is a typical guess. >> Woodshed. >> Woodshed. >> Wood storage. >> Wood storage. >> Horse barn. >> Or a horse barn. Okay, so you're right. It was a woodshed. My class said it was for recess equipment.

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One Room Schools

Or they said that's where people store their bikes. And I said, no, it was a woodshed because they didn't know that there was no indoor plumbing or indoor heat. So you can see where you have to be thinking about what was happening at the time in order to think like a historian. So this was the woodshed, and they also kept the long boards. They stored the boards there that they used for the Christmas program, the ones that you put on top of the sawhorses to make a stage. So those were stored in the woodshed also. I did have a woman, I did a talk and a woman said that they did have a horse barn. She was from South Dakota and she went to a one room school and she did ride her horse and there was a barn next to the school. So it could have been a barn, but, in this case, this one was a woodshed. So most children, when you start talking about one room schools, if you say there was a wood stove, they want to know about the wood stove. So this is the one at the Raspberry School at Old World Wisconsin. It's a real nice wood stove and the wood box is there. And that was a typical job for students to go gather the wood. Here's another picture of the wood box. And where do you go to the bathroom then? Young kids are not different from kids in the past. When they get to school the first day of school, they want to know where's the bathroom, where can I get a drink, and when is lunch. So those are the primary concerns. So it's funny when you tell kids about outhouses. They just shudder. I don't know what's so scary about it.

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One Room Schools

My cabin always had an outhouse. >> I know where those are. >> You do? >> Yep. >> Okay. >> It's Halfway Prairie School. >> It is. You're right. >> And those aren't original. >> They're there because it's a museum now. >> I work for the Dane County Parks Department, and those were built probably, maybe 30 years ago or 40 years ago. >> Good for you. That's exactly right. >> And that's the new old Halfway Prairie School. There's an old Halfway Prairie School closer to Highway 12. >> That's a beautiful museum there. I have some pictures in my book of that one too. This is the outhouse behind the general store at Old World Wisconsin. It's a nice outhouse too. And here's the inside. I showed this at a talk and a little girl covered her eyes like she couldn't bear to look.

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One Room Schools

She couldn't bear to look at the outhouse. And most kids think they're going to fall in. And I said no, the hole is not big enough. You would not fall in.

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One Room Schools

There are still pit toilets out at the School Forest. So when I take my kids to the School Forest, that's a big, big thing to be brave enough to go to the pit toilet at the School Forest. All right. So, this is another, this picture is to describe the water source, of course, was a pump, and there was no indoor water either. Yes, ma'am? >> Was that a two-seater? >> Excuse me? >> Was that one a two-seater? >> Oh, yes. That outhouse? Should we go back to that? Yes it was. So there's one lid up, one lid down.

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One Room Schools

All right. So there's a wood, and here's at the Raspberry School where they're showing washing up in a basin. And here's a picture of the Redwing water cooler at the Reed School in Neillsville. And so once they decided it was unsanitary to share a common dipper, then Redwing has some pretty fancy drinking fountains. So, teachers went to the normal school for two years. They still were trained. This is a normal school in Viroqua. Here's a picture of a graduate class of teachers. Interestingly, I found out in this picture that the men in the picture didn't survive because they were called off to war after this picture. So my favorite primary source of all is that my family saved the treasurer's book from the Chain O'Lakes School. So from the time that the school opened to the time it closed, I know what they paid every single month. And when they got electricity, what they paid the teachers, what they paid for books. What a fantastic source of information for my book. So this is interesting because in the fall of 1939 when my dad was in first grade and started school, somebody got hurt because there's broken bones. They were paid for $4. I don't know if someone got hurt fixing up the school and getting it ready. But there was labor on the building and cleaning out the school before school started and $20 for wood to put in the woodshed and some building materials. And Ms. Peowski got $85 for her first month salary in 1939. So that's just a portion picture of the treasurer's book. And this is my dad's first grade report card. So this is a great example of a primary source that gives clues about the past. And I think it's interesting that he really only got letter grades in reading in first grade. In my mind, that says that reading was really important in first grade. He wasn't given a letter grade for the other subjects. So, to start the day at school, the teacher would ring the bell and you had a certain amount of time to get there before you were late. And here's a picture at the Rhinelander School Museum of a coatroom. They've obviously decorated it up with posters for today, but typically, kids would come in and put their lunch buckets and coats in a back room. And they have a flag raising ceremony. If you were an eighth grader and very responsible, you got to help raise the flag and take it down every day. So here's what I really wanted to know. Here's a typical schedule of a day and how a teacher ran her day. And this is on the chalkboard at the Rhinelander Museum. So it looks to me like there were classes by grade, and she would call them to the front and took 10 or 15 minutes for each grade to do a little lesson. And my question I asked Lily was, what was everybody else doing then? And she just looked at me like, why would you even ask that? She said, they were working. And I said, what were they working on? And she said, oh, any assignment I gave them, penmanship, reading books, arithmetic. And she just said they were very busy, but there was no fooling around. If you weren't working, you were in trouble. And she talked about it just being to the minute and very organized, and she must have just had her plans all ready to go so she could call the kids up because there's extra transition time. That's what we call it now at school. There's no transition time to get from group to group to group. It must have been sort of like clockwork. But I just talked to someone in Neillsville this past weekend, and she came up to tell me she thinks the key to this plan is that while you were working, you were listening. Right? So you were listening to everybody else every single year. So you weren't just getting your lessons, you were getting everybody else's lessons, younger than you and older than you. And what a great way to learn. If you didn't quite understand something, you could hear it again, and you could listen up. You were listening to everybody reading stories that were above your level but you were still hearing it and you were learning geography and civics and everything else the older kids were learning. So she says that she really thinks that was the key to why it was so successful. And then Lily also said that in her room she had older kids tutoring younger kids all the time if they needed help. So it really wasn't one teacher. So that answers my question. You really had a lot of teachers helping each other. It was very much a community from what I understand. Here's typical word families, which we still do, word families. Here's just a little table at Rhinelander, like maybe a reading table, and they've put some things out to show you. So this is the grade three, part two, first week of school for spelling. Raise you hand if you were in a spelling bee. Lined up, spelled words. So apparently there as often a spelling bee on Fridays, so there were ways to make learning lots of fun. She's calling it a spell down. And here's Jerry Apps' first grade reading certificate. Does that look familiar? >> Yeah. >> At the Chain O'Lakes school, and it says the little stories that he read that year. And I still give reading certificates to kids when they reach a reading goal. And we still have pull down maps in my classroom. And these are fun to look at because the world has changed at so much that these are fun to look at in the Rhinelander Museum. And some schools, did your school have a sandbox? Yeah? So this one was not really a play sandbox even though it's got little toys in it. But apparently in several schools, there was a box that was used for science. If you want to study erosion, you could pile all the sand in one end and pour water on it and watch how the erosion went down. Or they used it maybe as collecting nature, things like pine cones and leaves and all sorts of things. So it wasn't a play sandbox. It was for science. Here's lunch. This is my dad and his brothers getting ready for lunch with their lunch buckets. And I did one talk and a friend of mine from school was there, and she said, I was wondering why you had that paint can up there. And I said it's not a paint can. It's a Karo syrup can. So for lunch you might have had a cheese sandwich in wax paper. So I've got my little cheese sandwich here. Not to make you hungry; you know it's lunchtime. And some homemade sugar cookies and maybe an apple in season. And then apparently it was a real treat to have hard-boiled egg and maybe some salt and pepper wrapped up in wax paper to bring along. So it was something in season in your bucket. And another lady told me she used a honey bucket instead of a syrup bucket for lunch. It's not real big, but you can get a nice lunch in there. Here's a picture of the school in Grant County. And they're holding some lunch buckets. There are some more lunch buckets. You can tell which ones are earlier and which ones are older. So this is recess. An hour at lunchtime. I imagine the one room schoolteacher needed a break too. So often it sounds like the older kids were in charge of the younger kids in leading games. And this is an interesting picture because the Historical Society had this image, and then I was driving my son somewhere and I saw the building. This is how it looks today. So it's the same building. Here's the recess picture with the kids outside of it. It's privately owned, but I just stopped on the road and took a picture. It looks real nice today still. >>

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One Room Schools

>> Yeah, have you driven past that? Here's a picture of kids playing at recess and messing around with ropes. We don't really mess around with ropes today.

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One Room Schools

Jump ropes maybe, but not rope ropes. He looks like he's lassoing. We discourage lassoing.

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One Room Schools

Christmas program. I know you remember the Christmas program. So this sounds like it was just wonderful. Lily spent a long time talking to me about the Christmas program and the fact that if you could put on a good Christmas show for the community then you were a good teacher. So she planned it a long time ahead of time, and right after Thanksgiving, spent a little bit of time in the afternoon of every day getting kids ready for their program and what they were going to recite. So even the very youngest students had to do something, had to recite something in front of a large crowd because everybody in the community came, not just your family. Everybody who lived in the whole area came, and it was a pretty big deal. Here's another little picture of some kids at a Christmas program. >> They look like spiders. >> I think it's supposed to be Hawaii or poinsettias or something. I was talking at Old World in the gift shop about the Christmas program, and a man that was there was looking at my book and then I said, do you remember your Christmas program? He started singing "I'm a Little Teapot" right in the gift shop in front of everybody and acted the whole thing out.

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One Room Schools

And his wife looked at him and said I didn't even know you could sing.

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One Room Schools

He was singing loud and clear in the gift shop, but he remembered doing that as a very young student in his school. So lots of fun in the spring at Arbor Day. Here's a picture. My Aunt Marilyn said after they cleaned up the yard in Arbor Day they got to have a cookout like these kids are doing where they got to roast hot dogs on a stick to celebrate cleaning up the whole schoolyard. And there were other sorts of parties in the one room school. It wasn't all work. I imagine there were ways to celebrate and moms coming in and bringing food just like we do today. This is an inside picture of the Chain O'Lakes School at a party. At the end of the year, lots of people told me about the end of the year picnic and softball game and that it was one of the few times that the fathers came and you got to see your fathers play because they were so busy. So what a grand way to end the school year, to have a big softball game with the school board bringing ice cream in insulated coolers and lots of chocolate cake. So I asked people what their favorite thing was at a party, and people always mentioned chocolate cake with thick frosting. It must have been a real treat in the spring. This is actually my grandpa's souvenir from Wautoma. Typically at the end of the year, teachers gave out a little souvenir card, and inside has a list of all the students that were there. And you can tell that you were in the same room with your cousins and brothers and sisters. And one other thing Lily said was that if you had to stay after school because you were in trouble, then your brothers and sisters ran right home and told your parents that you had to stay after school.

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One Room Schools

So not only were you missing doing you chores because you had to stay after school, but there was no way you were going to get away with that because your family knew immediately because you were in the room with your brothers and sisters so they saw it all happen. So that's why there's so many names the same because you were in school with your family. So, what happened? This is a publication from the University of Wisconsin Extension about questioning whether the rural schools were keeping pace with modern times. So, there was a pamphlet sort of saying that rural schools were not keeping pace with progress. >> They were ahead. >> What's that? >> They were ahead.

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One Room Schools

>> Right? Oops, sorry. And then is another pamphlet that was sort of questioning, what should we do? And I have to agree with you that the more people I talk to, no one, every single person I have talked to says that their education was phenomenal and they felt like it was one of the best educations around, that they ended up being a productive member of their town, they ended up going on to school, or, if not, they still felt like they received an excellent education. So, unfortunately, they did mostly close by the '60s. And in Wisconsin, there were over 6,000 one room schools at one time, and most of them were sold or the land was given back to the farmer where the school originally was or they were sold into private homes. So this is the Chain O'Lakes School. The woman under the globe in the back is my grandma. So my dad's mother. And she actually didn't graduate from eighth grade. She left school in seventh grade to go work as a maid. But I love it that I still have a picture of her at school. And the Chain O'Lakes School closed in 1955, and Faith Jenks, actually is my great aunt, was a teacher there. So, unfortunately, they did close. But you can still go visit one room schools and see what they were like. I have an appendix in the back of my book that has a list of just a few of museums that are in Wisconsin. There are very, very, very many museums to go visit and places to see. This is one at the Old World Wisconsin's Raspberry School. And there's the inside. If you go in there, a docent will tell you about the school. And here's another lady that was there a different day that I was there, being the teacher. This one is at Cassville at Stone Field Village. That's a nice one room school also. And there's the inside of that one. And this is the Reed School up in Neillsville.

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"All that you do Do with you might Things done by halves Are never done right" That's on the chalkboard up at the Reed School. So I guess I want to encourage you to, if you are a young person, I want you to talk to someone who's older and ask them what their life was like when they were young. What was their favorite recess game? What did they do for lunch? Because even though I'm not that old, it's surprising to me how much things have changed. And when I'm talking to my class and I mention, oh, it's like a typewriter, and they just look at me like, what's a typewriter? They just don't know what I'm talking about. So things change quickly, and I think my message is to you that your story is really next, the next generation's history. So in my family, we really encourage each other to keep a journal even if it's just a few lines a day because keeping a journal is really what people are going to be interested in reading in the future. They want to know what everyday life was like. So if you have time, write a few thoughts down every day about what your life was like or, even more, write down some stories that you remember from one room school days and share it with somebody younger. I think it's important for students to realize that history is happening now. That your story is your history. So, lesson of the day. Let's see. Oh, this is my asking an older adult about the past picture. And think about what has changed and what has stayed the same. In research for the book, I really was pleasantly surprised to find that not that much is different about education. The building is different and the teachers are different, but really the teaching is not that much different. Okay, lesson of the day. Let's see. It's going to be Wisconsin geography. Are you feeling good about that?

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And this poem

So obviously, in my own classroom, it's kind of like a transition today. I have a chalkboard still with chalk, and I have dry erase board on one wall that they put up over the chalkboard. So I have chalk and chalkboard erasers, and I have dry erase markers and dry erase erasers. And on the other way is a Promethean board, which is like a SMART Board, with a projector on my computer. So I feel like the room is an example of how things are changing. So obviously, you wouldn't use a PowerPoint show in a one room school, but I have asked enough people that they might have done this type of geography work. So, let's see how you do. Name the states that border Wisconsin. Anybody want to give it a try? >>

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And this poem

>> Sounds like you got it. Okay. Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, and Iowa. So you can give yourself a little private point if you got that right. Name the waterways that form natural boundaries of our state. >> Mississippi River...

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And this poem

>> These guys are good. Yeah, you've got it. It's interesting when you start teaching kids about maps, they didn't realize that, oh, that's why Wisconsin has a crooked edge because it's the Mississippi. And you look at Colorado and it's all straight lines, and then they're like, oh. So it seems, when you look at a map, if you start talking about how states were formed, it's interesting. So Mississippi and the St. Croix Rivers are to the west. Lake Superior is to the north and Lake Michigan to the east. So we are surrounded by water. So in Wisconsin history, obviously water has a big part to our history. It was the main waterways. What's the longest river in the state? >>

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And this poem

>> Yep. Wisconsin River. Flows south and west for 430 miles before reaching the Mississippi at Prairie du Chien. Which river, see if you get this one, which river was joined with the Wisconsin River by a canal in the city of Portage? >> Fox. >> You guys all are doing so good. Yep, so this is interesting to teach kids that this was Wisconsin's highway by boat before we had even plank roads. So cargo could be shipped from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi and beyond. Okay, Wisconsin's largest inland lake? >> Winnebago. >> Lake Winnebago. Not very deep, though. 28 miles long and 10 miles wide. Okay, we know this one. We live in Madison. But all kids in Madison know this landform, and I talk to my nephews in Colorado and they're like, what's an isthmus? So we know this living in Madison. Okay, so that was the harder ones. So you'll do really one on the easy one, I can tell. So the symbols of the state of Wisconsin. State bird. >> Robin. >> Robin. State tree. >> Maple. >> Sugar maple. >> Sugar maple. We're doing great. State flower. >> Violet. >> Violet. Okay. Wood violet. State animal. >> Badger. >> Badger. And we know that has to do with mining, right? >> Yes. >> All right. Any questions?

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And this poem

She was just a honey, the lady working at Old World Wisconsin. Thank you to my husband for the fancy PowerPoint because he helped me with the little pop-ups. So, thank you so much.

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