Early Arizona Women Teachers :: Essays Papers

Early azimuth Women Teachers At the end of the 19th century, genus Arizona was not a state, merely a territory, with a fledgling(prenominal) g all overnment and an even more rudimentary enlighten system. Great distances disordered people and often the eight children required to start a school and hire a teacher could not be gathered in an area. When they could, however, the teacher was often in for a surprise. Holding school in old saloons, carrying water to the schoolhouse every day, having to use turned over barrels for desks, and being the sole caretaker of the schoolhouse were just a fewer of the hardships faced by teachers. For women teachers, there were still more being paying less than male teachers, even though they were the majority, being unable to foreclose her job if she married, and not being able to attain higher positions such(prenominal) as superintendent or principal. Despite these conditions, women actively and ably move careers in program line, and oft en went beyond the call of duty for their students and their community. By set about many obstacles and overcoming them, the early women teachers of Arizona greatly improved the status of Arizona schools and that of women everywhere. In this period, the dowry of teachers was a much more expanded contribution in the community than that of present-day teachers. Many teachers had to become translators when faced with the line of teaching children who knew little or no English. In the book, Portrait of a Teacher bloody shame Elizabeth Post and Something of the Times in Which She Lived, Ruth Leedy Gordon explains that Mary Elizabeth Post, an early schoolteacher in Yuma,learned Spanish simply to communicate with her students (10). She similarly wrote recipes for her pupils mothers in Spanish and went to their homes to show them how to cook new dishes (76). In their sight of stories from the pioneer days in Arizona, Dust in Our Desks Territory geezerhood to the Present in Arizo na Schools, Alleen Pace, Margaret Ferry and L.J. Evans recorded that in an Arizona town called Morenci, teachers taught night classes for those who wanted to learn English, as well as those who wanted to learn Spanish (29). The language barrier created a lot more work for Arizona teachers, work that was not written in their contracts, but they took on the task of learning another language and teaching English to others without complaint.