Leola TRABERT, longtime area teacher, sees many changes - 2008

TRABERT

Posted By: Joey Stark
Date: 12/15/2008 at 13:59:37

"The Fairfield Ledger", Wednesday, December 10, 2008, Pages 2 and 3
Lifestyles Section
by Sara Rhum, Ledger Lifestyles editor

Former teacher observes changes

Not much is the same as it was 60 years ago, including the area's education.

"There was more down-home authority and parenting involvement," Leola TRABERT, a former school teacher, said. Each school would have programs and presentations every year in which all the students took part. As an act of support, people from surrounding schools in the township would attend each others' performances.

TRABERT had numerous children in her classroom spanning the 34 years she was a teacher and can remember a time when schools were much different than they are today.

TRABERT began teaching almost immediately after graduating from Fairfield High School in 1944. Her high school class was the first one to spend all four years in the new high school after a fire burned the old one down. During her years at Fairfield High School, she was boarded in town because buses were not available yet to take children to school from their rural homes each day.

World War II was raging in Europe while she was in high school, and she recalls the school PA system announcing the bombing of Pearl Harbor the Monday following the incident. Because of the war, TRABERT was able to begin teaching right out of high school.

In 1944, it was not required for new teachers to attend college before going into the classroom. TRABERT took teaching classes during high school on top of her required courses and passed a state test to get her normal teaching certificate. Normally, she would have had to wait until she turned 18 to receive the certificate, but WWII left the country in short supply of teachers. To get more teachers into the field immediately, young high school graduates could be issued a temporary teaching certificate. A teaching certificate, temporary or otherwise, issued right out of high school was in effect for two years before the teacher needed to begin taking college courses.

TRABERT's first six years were spent in one-room schoolhouses in Walnut Township in Jefferson County and also in Washington County. In the one-room schoolhouses, TRABERT had a maximum of 16 students in grades kindergarten through eight.

"You just worked with all of them," she said. Every day she had to prepare for each subject in each grade and have enough classwork to keep students busy all day since only a fraction of the day could be allotted for each grade level. TRABERT said the classes did not get out of control even though students had individual class work for the majority of the day.

"For the most part, they were there to learn," she said, "and Mom and Dad were behind you usually."

At that time, the counties were split up into townships. The townships also had a number of schools in each. TRABERT taught for her first two years at Walnut No. 2 School. Each small school had a director in charge of it who took care of the school.

"It was a great deal more close-knit," she said. Other than the individual school directors, the teachers also reported to the director-at-large for the entire township and the superintendent of rural schools. The differences in separation of authority were due to the fact that one-room schoolhouses were still quite common during the 1940s. Shortly thereafter, though, the smaller schools began to be abandoned in favor of absorbing the students into larger school, such as the Fairfield elementary schools and high school. Although TRABERT taught junior high school in Washington after her six years of rural teaching, she still recalls the events of her first few years in the classroom.

One memory TRABERT recalled from her one-room schoolhouse days was an incident occurring between 1944 and 1946. She had been working late at the schoolhouse putting up decorations on the walls with clear tape for the school program scheduled two days later. When she finished, she went down to the basement to bank the fire to have enough coals the following morning to get the fire going quickly. The next day when she returned, heat blasted out of the door as she unlocked and opened it. The room was so hot that the tape holding up the decorations had been weakened, and the decorations had fallen all over the floor. She went down to the basement and quickly established that someone had been present overnight adding wood and corn cobs to the fire for hours.

TRABERT contacted the school director immediately, who arrived at the school and investigated the basement with her.

"There's been a tramp in her," he said after a moment of looking. Sure enough, the corn cobs had been matted down from someone laying in them, and the window had been forced open. Whoever it was had stoked the fire all night to keep warm and left early in the morning. What the visitor did not realize was that since heat rises, stoking the fire enough to keep someone warm in the basement meant the upstairs schoolroom

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would be a great deal hotter. That fact did not bother TRABERT as much as the thought of the individual checking out the school as she worked late.

"He could've been watching me as I left and got into my car," she said. She had no future problems with people breaking into the schoolhouse, but she was more cautious afterward.

Other than changes in the types of schools used, TRABERT also recalls changes in the way curriculum was taught.

"Education is always changing," she said. "They try this and then they try that."

One example of a constantly changing educational method is the way reading is taught.

"My older sister learned phonetics, but when I got to school they wanted me to just memorize the words," she said. "I still think it affected my spelling."

When TRABERT began teaching, the phonetics method was back in practice. She found it helpful even to herself to learn how to sound words out. The method stayed in common practice until the 1990s when word association became the more accepted way to teach reading.

She has also seen changes in the inhabitants of schools over the generations and noted that children in current times have many more distractions from school. TRABERT also mentioned the increase of women in school administration from when she started in the 1940s.

TRABERT eventually received her bachelors and masters degrees in education from a combination of Parsons College and Iowa Wesleyan College. She retired in 1987 to run the house and farm near Birmingham after her husband died, but still stays in touch with the education system through her daughter who also teaches.

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Pictures associated with this story ~

Leora TRABERT looks through her old school pictures from the country schools. TRABERT taught a total of 34 years and retired in 1987. http://iagenweb.org/jefferson/General_Interest/2008/Pictures/Trabert1.jpg

In this picture, Leola TRABERT, back center, poses with her class for the yearly picture. The building behind the class is Walnut No. 2, where TRABERT taught 1944-1946. http://iagenweb.org/jefferson/General_Interest/2008/Pictures/Trabert2.jpg

In this picture, the inside of a one-room schoolhouse is shown as students sit at their desks. http://iagenweb.org/jefferson/General_Interest/2008/Pictures/Trabert3.jpg

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*Transcribed for genealogy purposes; I have no relation to the person(s) mentioned.