This week’s submission from the Collingwood museum for the Sunday morning Remember This feature for CollingwoodToday.ca may be a photo from 1911, but it brought back memories for me.
The photo is of the cornerstone laying ceremony at King George School, which served as an elementary school for Collingwood children from 1912 to 1971.
I too attended elementary school in an old brick schoolhouse, but in the late 1980s.
I was homeschooled from Kindergarten to Grade 8, and when I started school, my family lived in a renovated school house just outside of Woodstock, Ontario. My classroom was in the attic. The property was amazing - one full acre on a country road. My dad put a red steel roof on the yellow brick building. The bell had been removed before we got there, and the tower was covered over.
I’m probably one of very few millennials who attended a one-room schoolhouse.
Eventually, I did attend public school. My family moved to the Collingwood area in the mid 1990s, and I attended high school at Collingwood Collegiate Institute.
My first day of Grade 9 was my first day of public school, but there was no social media back then, so it was easier to slip into things unnoticed and stumble along, making friends along the way. I remember one of the first things I did was attend tryouts for the basketball team, assuming my height would make me a natural.
After catching the ball with my face – not once, but three times – I cut myself from the team and didn’t go back for a second day. I stuck to cross country and track and field … no balls.
Through a combination of after-school specials, careful observation and trial-and-error I learned nobody really “fits in” during those awkward teen years so I might as well accept it and be grateful there isn’t more photographic evidence of an unreasonably large turtleneck shirt collection.
In Grade 10 I had the privilege of being in Mr. Mark Spencer’s English class. He has since passed away, but not without inspiring many students in English and music. I knew him from concert and jazz band and from my music class, so it wasn’t surprising to see him bring his ivory electric guitar and amp to our English class. He would play guitar leads while we read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or the short story called The Portable Phonograph, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. In Mr. Spencer’s class I wrote my first newspaper article and submitted it to the Collingwood Connection. I started to understand literature and writing and I really loved it.
I stayed in science, believing I’d choose a career in medicine, but a Grade 12 Writer’s Craft class with Mr. Alan Coukell sealed my fate as an arts student. Hundreds of essays later, I’m still trying to “show” instead of “tell” in the words I write.
I’m glad to be back in Collingwood as a community journalist, I hope it shows.
