On November 4, 2015, our speaker Millie Morton, told us about a book she has written which details her mother’s experiences teaching in rural Ontario.
Grace: a teacher’s life, one-room schools and a century of change in Ontario is a book about the life of Millie Morton’s mother Grace (1907-2008) in southern Ontario. It’s also social history – stories about how it was to grow up on a farm, teach in one-room schools, and live in small rural communities. It illustrates how much Ontario has changed – and education, too.
As a married mother of four working as a schoolteacher in rural Ontario in the 1950s, Grace Morton sometimes had to innovate to do everything she was expected to do. She was the first person in her family to go to teachers’ college, which was called ‘normal school’ back then,” Millie Morton reminisced. “She was the first married woman with children in our community to accept a full-time job.”
Grace Morton — who died in 2008 at age 101 — had been, in many ways, a pioneer and a role model for future teachers.
