The admissions files / Nineteenth-century teaching · memoirs, 1908 and 1917
The teacher is staying for dinner
When teachers boarded with school families, dismissal did not necessarily mean goodbye.
In many nineteenth-century American country schools, the teacher could go home with a pupil and stay. The custom was boarding round, or boarding around: the teacher lodged with pupils’ families, often changing houses weekly. It also meant the town paid less out of pocket. For the teacher, it could be a trial.
A parent-teacher conference has the great advantage of ending. Everyone stands up, thanks everyone else, and recovers an ordinary speaking voice on the way home. A teacher who lives in your house offers no such exit. You need a second topic, perhaps a third, and meanwhile your child has access to both parties and may wish to correct the record.
Sylvester Barbour, in his 1908 Reminiscences, recalled boarding around for his first three terms of teaching, and being “royally entertained” as far as his hosts’ means allowed.
He also remembered Stanley Weed, an ardent, lifelong Democrat, at whose house he spent a few nights. Barbour, then a Whig boy, had “pleasant, instructive arguments” with him. A household could do worse than a guest who argues pleasantly.
One boarding-around memory stuck with him: a fireless spare room on a cold winter night, and icy sheets that, he says, did as much for sleep as a cold-water bath. While composing himself, he sometimes wondered whether the room’s last occupant was still living, and he calls himself “senselessly spookish” about such things.
The person in charge all day could become considerably less authoritative after the lights went out. Most guests bring a bag; Barbour also brought an imagination.
Eli J. Cox, in a letter dated February 8, 1917, printed in an Indiana township history, remembered his first teacher, Mary Ann Taylor, later Mrs. Morrow. She boarded around a week at a place. The children were glad when her turn came at their house, and jealous of each other for fear she would stay longer elsewhere. Hosting had a scoreboard.
Cox’s letter also records punishments. For misdemeanors, he says, she once made him stand on the stove beside a girl and another time put him on the floor in a dunce cap. Even so, he remembered her with affection and respect, in a way he did not for any other early teacher.
Mary A. Morrow, in her own recollection printed earlier in the same book, mentions Eli too. She says she does not recall those two punishments. “Poor little man,” she would say now. She hoped he had forgiven her, though she supposed the punishment was not unjust.
Any parent who has heard the child’s Tuesday at supper and the teacher’s at pickup knows the feeling: two accounts that do not quite meet.