The Lansdowne Letters: On the Horns of a Dilemma

Not everyone has the opportunity to have a parent as a teacher,
but I was fortunate to have both of mine for a number years.

Some students, especially in high school, would shudder
at the thought of facing a parent in the classroom;
but I counted myself lucky because I had both during my high school years.

My Parents on Their Honeymoon

Sandy Cove, Nova Scotia, Canada, 1948

© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue

All Rights Reserved

My parents were excellent teachers, among the best I encountered
from kindergarten through my Masters in Education.

In the end the siren call of teaching lured me from the Oil Patch into the classroom,
where I spent the majority of my working years as an elementary teacher.
It was a choice I never regretted because I consider the education
of children among the most critical responsibilities of any society. 

My parents were in my heart and mind as I taught,
for the most important lessons I learned about teaching
occurred not in university but in my parents' classrooms
during the times I was their student.

Solving an Introductory Multiplication Problem

My Classroom

 Aurora, Colorado, USA

© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue

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My father in particular influenced my teaching
because he also taught me while I was in elementary school.
I landed in his classroom for the first time in Lansdowne House
for the last half of grade five.

The contrast between him and my previous teachers was striking.
Yes, my father was well-educated, brilliant, and organized,
but his greatest teaching gifts were his ability to build rapport with his students
and his skill in adapting the curriculum to meet the needs of his individual students.

My father was decades ahead of his time. 
Almost forty years later in my Diverse Learners Masters Program in Denver, 
I was learning teaching strategies my father had taught me in Lansdowne House
in the remote wilderness of the Hudson Bay Lowlands in 1961.  

You might think that a ten-turning-eleven year old
would not be thinking about how teachers teach,
but you would be mistaken.

Counting my father,
I followed the calling of seven consecutive generations
of teachers in the MacBeath line.
Teaching was in my blood.

My Father During His Undergraduate Years

Acadia University

Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada

© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue

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My father discussed many aspects of teaching First Nations students
in his unpublished handbook "The Northern School Teacher."
I'll share just one here.

My father wrote:
"Another difficulty faced by the Indian teacher is that of text books
and the subject matter of the text books,
especially for the readers in grades one to five.
The children just had no way of relating these books to their personal lives. 

"Pleasant Street," which I think lead from "Funny, funny Sally's house,"
to "the little store on Pleasant Street,"
had absolutely no resemblance to the narrow woodland trail
which meandered along the shore of the lake from the one-room shack
where Speared Turtle and his twelve children lived
to the Hudson's Bay Company Store
which is usually the only commercial outlet
with which the children ever came in contact.

And Gilbert Thunder of Kasabonika Lake
couldn't care less, and certainly couldn't understand
how "funny, funny Spot, fluffy, fluffy Puff, and pretty, pretty Sally
play and run down, down, down."

From an Unknown Dick and Jane Reader

Back to Front:  Dick, Jane, Puff (cat), Spot (dog), Tim (teddybear) and Sally

Google

It is uninteresting to poor Gilbert,
for Gilbert Thunder is twelve years old,
and even though he is only in grade one,
it's not because he is stupid.
Actually he is quite bright.

The reason he is only in grade one is because
there has been a school in Kasabonika for only the last two years.

And the idea of Spot and Sally running and playing together
is utterly incomprehensible to poor Gilbert,
for his dog is named Kitche Schikeg (Big Skunk)
and is a big brute of unsavory appearance, questionable ancestry,
and deplorable deportment.

Kitche Schikeg is not a fluffy little, long-eared pet
with whom the children romp and play.
Kitche Schikeg is a mangy looking, half-starved beast of burden
whom you do not approach unless you are armed with a large stick
and who would bite your hand off if you tried to pet him.

Basilisk & Ginger at Main Base / photograph by Xavier Mertz/ cropped by M. Louise Barbour

Format: Glass negative Notes: First Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914

 From the collections of the Mitchell Library

State Library of New South Wales www.sl.nsw.gov.au

Flickr ~ No Known Copyright Restrictions

 Usage  

I will admit that the Indian Affairs Branch
is on the horns of a dilemma.

The primary purpose or goal of all Indian education
is the ultimate integration of the Indian population
with the white population,
and the teacher has to familiarize her charges
with the white man's way of doing things.

But surely there must be a better way to familiarize poor Gilbert
than boring him and baffling him with this inane drivel
about "funny, funny Puff" and "pretty, pretty Sally.

I think that the suitability or non-suitability of the textbooks notwithstanding,
a partial solution to the problem depends to a large extent on the individual teacher.

The success of the teacher's efforts depends upon his ability or inability
to adapt the textbooks and curriculum to the pupils and the situation.

I remember going to the school at Pikangikum once to inspect the school.
The grade four reading lesson that day was about school safety patrols and traffic signals.
To illustrate the lesson the teacher and the pupils had built a beautiful working model
of a traffic light powered by four flashlight batteries.

This would have been a wonderful teaching aid for outside
but it was of no earthly good to children
who never have and most likely will never see a car or street
and whose only conception of traffic
was canoes on the lake in the summertime
and dog teams on the ice in the winter.

Learning the White Man's Way

Dunking for Apples on Halloween

Lansdowne House, Northern Ontario, Canada

© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue

All Rights Reserved

I do not want to blow my own horn too much,
but by way of illustration,
I want to tell about how I handled the identical lesson 
when I was teaching at Lansdowne House.

I briefly explained about traffic and the necessity
of having stop lights, school safety patrols, and safety rules.

Then I got the children discussing things in or about Lansdowne House
which might need regulatory measures in the manner of safety rules.

We started off by drawing up a set of safety rules for canoes,
rules such as never standing up in a canoe situation. 
and always making sure the canoe is drawn up out of the water
and tied whenever you stop on an island for dinner or for the night.

Wikipedia

We got so enthusiastic about safety rules
that we drew up two more sets of rules:
one for safety on the ice during freeze-up and break-up,
and one for safety around aeroplanes.

A Norseman on Skis

Flickr ~ NOAA:  Rear Admiral Harley D. Nygren   License 

  
This last set of rules might seem strange for children
who have never seen an automobile,
but not when you consider that they are very familiar
with the bush planes which bring in all the mail,
take a great many of the families to and from their winter traplines,
and which always bring the government officials on their periodic visits.

Before we left this particular lesson for good,
we also drew up sets of rules for the care and maintenance of canoes,
the care and maintenance of kickers (outboard motors),
and the care and maintenance of snowshoes." 

Lansdowne House

Members of the Fort Hope Band watching a floatplane arrive

at the dock at Lansdowne House at Treaty Time, June 1956.

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When I was a student in my father's class in Lansdowne House,
I experienced him using many strategies,
that I was later trained in during my teaching career,
strategies such as making learning relevant to his students
adapting lessons to meet the needs of individual students,
and designing lessons with visual, auditory, and kinesthetic components.

I think back to that place and time, 
and I am in awe of all that my father accomplished as a teacher.
I saw him continue to do so when I was in high school.

My mother may have been one of the best teachers I ever had,
but my father was the best.

Till next time ~
Fundy Blue

Crossing Petite Passage
Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia
Photo by Roy MacBeath 
© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue
All Rights Reserved

For Map Lovers Like Me:

Location of Lansdowne House

Known Today as Neskantaga

Hudson Bay Lowlands (green)

Wikipedia

Location of Northern Communities

Wikimedia