Schoolhouse Desks

If you look around the room, you’ll notice there are 25ish (Note from author: please double-check this number, thanks) desks in this room. This means this teacher had to teach at least 25 children ranging from 1st Grade to 8th Grade, for roughly 150ish days every year. On a sidenote, most students in rural areas often attended less school due to working the fields or difficulty getting to school or any number of reasons. Comparatively to modern teachers, they will only teach one or two grade levels at a time with an average of 15 to 16 per class, some of these teachers during the 1910s could have taught up to 40 students in one class.

All the desks are placed in single file rows, a common practice at the time, if you look to the south of the room you’ll notice that there is a row of smaller desks where the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders will go, everyone else would sit at the larger desks. On each desk there is a blackboard writing slate with a clearing rack, and contains a with an indentation on the desk to hold the chalk. The circular hole where the ink container for a foundation pen would go, which meant that everyone would have to learn to write right-handed to avoid smudging the ink. There is a cubby under the desktop to hold Slates and slate pencils, Textbooks and paper (if there were luck, as paper was still expensive at this time), Quill pens and ink, Crayons, and Lunch boxes or any bulk item would go under the desk.