Lessons and life as kid at the old Helmville School

The old Helmville school house was an imposing structure. It was two stories high, with a bell tower, and sat on the highest point in town. It was probably built in the late 1800's, and still serves as the county shop, having been moved in the last part of the 1950's, when the new one was built in its place.

It had two classrooms – an upstairs and a downstairs. When I started school in 1953, only the lower room was used. World War Two had caused a drop in the birth rate, and there weren't enough children to warrant two classrooms.

The bottom room had floor tile and was painted, but the upper room still had oiled pine floors, and the paint was years old and yellowed. It wasn't until the middle of the 50's, when the baby boomers began arriving that they opened the upstairs and hired another teacher.

The older kids studied on the upper floor (we had a "big room" and a "little room,") and the younger grades had classes on the lower. I don't think there were ever more than thirty some students in all, but eight grades in one room is too much work for any teacher.

There was little protocol and no explicit rules. The rules were tacit and demanded only that a child behaved him or herself. I don't remember any serious behavioral problems from anyone. There was no dress code or anything like that. The biggest part of our student body were all related, although some blood ties were four generations old. Even some of the teachers were related to all of us in one fashion or another.

There was a commonality in our little student body because, with the exception of only a few, all of our families were part of ranching. There were always a number children from families that worked on the various ranches in the valley, but there was no social stratification in our student society.

We didn't study a lot of subjects. As I remember, we had classes in math, English, spelling, and geography. That was all we needed. As I age I think that we were forced to learn too many hard "facts" in school and not enough living philosophy. After all, knowing that E=MC2 has never made any of us happier or wealthier.

We had two recesses of 15 minutes each, and an hour for lunch. There was no playground supervision, as usually the teacher would use the idle time for a cigarette in the back room. In the early years, it was common that the teacher would go home for lunch, leaving us to our own devices for the entire hour. We respected the teachers, and never approached their desks or belongings while they were gone.

When the weather was -40 we stayed inside, and one of my earliest teachers instituted the practice that we dance with each other during those times. She taught us the schottish and some waltzes, but as we got older we moved to more popular music played from a small collection of scratched records. When we got to high school, the Helmville students were all known as good dancers. Through life, that has done us as well as knowing Einstein's theory of energy and mass.

The "town kids" walked home for their noon meal, but we brought our lunches, usually bologna or last night's left over roast on white bread, with a tablespoon of mayonaise. If not these, it was egg salad. Our thermoses held lukewarm milk or Kool Aid.

Having a number of grades in the same room facilitated our progress in academics. The teacher would call a certain class up to the front, where they went over their different subjects. The younger students couldn't help but hear the instruction, and the topics were absorbed to some degree and stuck with them.

We never had any homework that I remember. We were left to our own academic devices during a good part of the day, so most assignments were done during that time. It was a rustic system, but it seemed to work. None of us suffered much difficulty with our studies as we went through high school and some on to college.

A couple teachers used the last half hour of the day to read to us from a work of fiction. I think that it was the favorite part of school for most, if not all, of us. It made us appreciate literature and gave us the knowledge that reading wasn't drudgery, it was a pleasure.

Helmville still has a two-room school, but the number of students is declining due to changes the labor involved in ranching and society itself.

The school has indoor plumbing, of course, so the students of today will never get the pleasure of locking someone in an outhouse and throwing rocks at it. That's a loss.