Grace Christie

     I began teaching in Halifax, NS in a poorer area of the

city down near the docks.  I had originally been offered a

grade 3 position, but was told about a week before school

began that I would have a grade 6 C stream.  The average

IQ was about 80. 
     As a new teacher fresh out of university, I was scared to

death on the first day of school.  A more experienced teacher

put her head into my room before school started and gave me

one piece of advise….”A little love goes a long way with these children”.  It was true.  The children responded to caring and kindness, but they had difficulty learning. 
     I remember trying to teach them about the provinces of Canada.  We got stuck on how to spell Saskatchewan.  I decided we would study closer to home…..Halifax.

     One young man sticks in my memory.  His name was John and he was 14 years old in Grade 6.  He couldn’t read or write very well.  His family was large and very poor.  I walked by his desk one day and raised my hand to rub my head.  John cringed in his seat!!. 

Another day, when we all had our heads bowed for the Lord’s Prayer, John got out of his front row seat, walked up behind my desk, raised his foot to shoulder level and banged the wall.  He explained he was just killing a cockroach for me!!  He really was!!

There wasn’t much money in John’s home, but he often had small trinkets which he showed me, stolen from Woolworth’s probably.  I don’t remember that I actually taught him much, but he came regularly and we got along well.  I worried a lot about him, but felt helpless to do much for him with his family background and 24 others in class.

     Many years later when I was living in Quebec City I read in the Montreal Gazette, weekend magazine, about a Halifax soldier who joined the American army, Green Berets, and was killed in Viet Nam.  The American army had returned his body to Halifax to bury him.  The article was a bit snide about the army not being prepared for a Halifax winter and the fact that it was a Canadian fighting for the American army.  When I turned the page there was a picture and the name of the soldier.  It was my John from my first class.

John apparently had tried to join the Canadian Army, but couldn’t read well enough to pass the entrance tests.  The Green Berets did take him, trained him, and sent him to Viet Nam where he was killed.  I shed a few tears over my John and his fate.

​

                                                Ray Morrison...Halloween

I have 3 Halloween memories I would like to share.

     The first 18 years of my teaching career were in high school,

so I never had to arrange a Halloween party.

     However, after transferring to a grade 4 classroom, I was

quite excited to arrange a Halloween party. I told my class that I

would be bringing apples and "ants on a log"

(celery sticks with peanut butter and raisins).

I tried to hang the apples from strings tied to the fluorescent  light fixtures, but as they pulled out the stems, I resorted to having the kids "bob" for them in a container of water. The students of course brought all sorts of cookies, cupcakes etc.  except for one boy who rather embarrassedly handed me a cello bag of carrots, saying "My mom said I had to bring something healthy". The carrots were all peeled and washed and cut into sticks and the bag must have been a 5-pounder. We all had a good time playing games and eating all the goodies. At the end of the afternoon, the boy who had brought the carrots said, "The carrots are all gone!" I answered," Yes, Terry, they were the first things to disappear - so your mom made a good choice!" "Yeah", he replied, "but I wouldn't have minded taking a few home!"

Fast forward a few years, same school, but a grade 5/6 class. Every year at Halloween, my students coaxed and pleaded for a haunted house in the coatroom, and I had always said no. But this time the students kept promising there would be no mess, so I said, " yes". Two students were in charge of putting the haunted house together at noon hour the day of the Halloween party. I was on playground supervision that noon hour, so I very foolishly left them unsupervised to do the work. At the end of the afternoon, I discovered that the red paint that they had used to decorate their haunted house had also been tossed on the walls, floor and cupboards of the coatroom. The two students who had made the mess were bus students , so they conveniently disappeared at the dismissal bell. I began trying to clean up the mess. The lady who worked as a housekeeper from 3:00 to 5:00 saw me cleaning, looked at the mess and said, "I'm phoning my other school (where she worked from 5:00 to 7:00) and let them know I'll have to stay here to help with clean-up". So the custodian, housekeeper and I had a major clean-up job on our hands.

Fast forward again, four or five years, different school, grade 6 class. I was suffering a recurrence of lower back problems at the time, spending about 90 minutes at the end of each day lying on the carpeted floor of the reading resource room with my feet on a chair until I was able to move outside to my car and home. It was a small class and we did have a very enjoyable Halloween party. I went to see my doctor after school that day and he recommended that I buy and take Robaxacet. Well, the next day I was so relaxed that I was almost completely "out of it". The day after Halloween parties is a "high sugar day" for students who overindulged on Halloween treats the day before and during that day. After school, the teacher in the next classroom said to me, "Boy, the students were sure wild today, weren't they?" My answer? "Oh, really? I didn't even notice!"
Needless to say, that was the one and only Robaxacet capsule I ever took!