Beryl on the Margins: A Memoir of Teaching "Under Disadvantages"

Abstract

Beryl Curtis (1891–1991) taught elementary schools in marginal mining, milling, and cross- roads agricultural settlements in eastern Ontario, Canada, from 1911 to 1927. In this memoir, I situate her career within the dramatic changes that swept through the occupation of teaching in the first three decades of twentieth-century Ontario. A childhood illness cost Beryl most of her hearing, but she succeeded as a rural teacher, earning the active support and respect of her main school inspector. She excelled in print culture and had a reputation as an “excellent disciplinarian.” She attempted to manage her hearing difficulties by learning to read lips, and she tried to escape backwoods sections. But she was expelled from normal school and refused permanent teaching status. When attendance at a normal school or a college of education be- came a requirement for elementary school teaching in the later 1920s, Beryl was one of many hundreds of rural teachers policed out of the occupation. Her hearing difficulties became a disqualifying disability.