My father’s fifth grade report card (1909), dated two years after his arrival on the Montana prairie from the Nebraska plains, records his grades in reading, penmanship, arithmetic, spelling, grammar, geography, and history. The family home was two miles south of the one room school house. I expect he and his two brothers had the use of a single horse to make their way to and from.
These children spoke Danish at home but their parents pushed for them to do well in English. In the early years, the churches did still have Danish worship services once a month or so but they didn’t see clinging to the language from their childhoods as being a virtuous thing.
Here’s a link to a previously published post that you might enjoy, which covers the expectations that Danes put on themselves as they made their way westward across the Atlantic. http://mailboxesandoldbarns.com/2011/04/01/immigrationcirca-1911/ .
Item 37 on the list of 100 tips for Danish immigrants prepared by Holger Rosenberg in 100 nyttige Raad for Udvandrere was simply this:
Sign up for a class in English immediately.
~~Daisy trail ahead~~
The country church in which I grew up was not yet built when he was in fifth grade.
The 5th of August, 1907, the Congregation held its first business meeting…It was decided to accept Pastor J’s generous gift of ten acres of land to be used to buy a cemetery, on which to build a parsonage and eventually a church. After a sudden death in the Congregation, the group gathered to “fence in” two acres for a cemetery.
But times change and people’s minds also–on November 10, 1909, M. N. , not a member of our Congregation, donated ten acres to the Congregation with the understanding it must build a church upon it. This property was located located one mile north and one mile east of the original site. This new property was considered more centrally located for all our people…[so] on August 21st, 1910, … a portion of the donated ten acres [was dedicated] for a church yard where a basement was to be built.
In the meantime several deaths had occurred and the remains had been interred in the former cemetery. These remains were removed to the new cemetery in December 1910. The former property then automatically reverted to the donor.
The cornerstone of the church was laid in November of 1911 when they had the basement completed. After three years of meeting for worship in the one room school house, previously constructed by the same men who would build the church, now they began meeting in the basement.
The names in the cemeteries, on the church rolls, the builders of the old school house, the builders of the church and the names on the lists of those who served on school boards through the decades are interchangeable—all drawn from the same group of people—about thirty pioneer families.
In 1926, about fifteen years after this report card was issued, my father was serving on jury duty at the county seat and sent a letter to my mother, his future bride, in which he reports that some of his neighbors were in town as well:
Ole Olsen and Oscar Jensen were in Wolf Point today to see about some school business, so we had a chat with them.
These men, Dad’s peers, were always there.
About 1905, they had built the school.
About 1912, they had built the church.
In 1926 they had served on the school board.
Thirty-six years later, in 1962, Oscar Jensen sat in his usual pew at my father’s funeral service and fell sound asleep, snoring loudly.
Does it makes sense to you that it was ok (the church was jammed with perhaps 153.52 people) that Oscar felt relaxed enough to snooze soundly in the process of saying goodbye to his friend?
Well…back to the business of Dad’s report cards and the community’s pursuit of English.
A grade of 75 was considered poor; 85 good; 90 or over was excellent. Grades were noted for each month.
Dad had a 75 in penmanship in April of that year.
I wonder if he was anxious to get out in the fields and work with the plow horses a little more as the snow melted off and the seeding was under way? He had an 85 in both reading and grammar.
His skills with language and love of reading were lifelong. As a result of questions he asked of the guides at Gettysburg Battle Field in 1951 they spoke with him privately following the tour, wanting to know if he was perhaps a history professor. Apparently he had kept his hat on for the tour and had a long-sleeved shirt on or his farmer tan would have prevented them ever having such a suspicion.
Every month in fifth grade, he has a 90 in spelling. It appears the teacher was sort of locked in the “every five on the scale” grading.
In the second report card, from 1912 when he was in seventh grade, all of the same classes are listed in addition to physiology, drawing and civics. This 1912 report card shows grades ranging between 89 and 97 in all classes. Maude Kelly, the 7th grade teacher, apparently was fearless about grading in detail, and didn’t feel compelled to stick with the “every-five” pattern.
His deportment is still marked at 94, slightly improved from the 90 of fifth grade, but apparently there was still something in his days that helped him avoid being a complete paragon of virtue.
The links below provide examples of the kind of textbooks they were working from and samples of problems used for teaching.
The second one I found particularly interesting: Philosophy and the Fun of Algebra.
If some of you want to examine the contents of that one and enlighten us in a comment, I’d be in your debt. I wanted to understand what aspect of philosophy they were addressing in the title and see how they linked it to the math, but didn’t get it worked out because of time constraints. Perhaps it’s a different application of the term.
http://mcguffeyreaders.com/penmanship.htm
http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/95/philosophy-and-fun-of-algebra/1639/chapter-1-from-arithmetic-to-algebra/
http://archive.org/stream/completearithme00smitgoog#page/n8/mode/2up
http://books.google.com/books?id=rtsyAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
I suspected that I had overlooked some of Dad’s courtship letters to Mom (in past months when I was working with them) and had not gotten all of them transcribed. So this week, I have spent some hours re-opening every single envelope, checking dates, checking my blog to see what’s there and what’s not. I discovered about ten more letters to transcribe and add to that precious stash.
Among the letters, I found an envelope with the two report cards (described above) in it, each over 100 years old. I didn’t know they existed.
So that’s the lesson for the week.
You never know what you’re going to find in your stuff
