Herstory lesson

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This article was published 19/01/2017 (2651 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of the stories Isabella Dryden tells from her days teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in 1937 is about a little boy who had red hair and freckles just like her.

He ran inside crying one day because the other kids were calling him “a turkey egg.” Imagine being called a turkey egg! Turkey eggs are reddish-tinged with brown speckles.

“He was being bullied,” the 99-year-old Dryden recalled this week. “And I did something you wouldn’t dare do today. I picked him up, sat him on my knee and gave him a hug.”

Then she asked the boy — his name was William — what her hair colour was?

“He said, ‘It’s the same as mine.’ I said, ‘What’s on my face?’ He said, ‘Little brown dots.’ I said you just go back out there — I’ll be along shortly — and tell the students Miss Dryden is a turkey egg, too.”

Teaching has never left “Miss Dryden,” who still teaches today at age 99. On March 23, there will be a formal celebration for all she’s done for education in this province over nearly eight decades.

Dryden, looking back on her lengthy career in education, understands why there are rules against that sort of hug therapy in schools now, but says “that’s one of the things that bothers me today. You’re not supposed to show any affection for these young people.”

She teaches three times a week to seniors at Creative Retirement Manitoba. She’s been volunteer teaching for 34 years, ever since she retired after 42 years in education. Her courses are Level 1 and 2 introductory computer courses, of all things for a 99-year-old to be teaching.

Dryden still hops on a bus — “hops” may be too energetic a word — and even has to transfer to get to Creative Retirement on Portage Avenue. Fortunately, she gets a ride to work now and only has to bus home. The classes are two hours a day, three days a week, for nine weeks.

Richard Denesiuk, operations executive director of Creative Retirement, simply calls her “the amazing Isabella Dryden.” She’s a poster child — if that’s the right metaphor at her age — for Creative Retirement and its promotion of active living.

Denesiuk tells of the time Dryden broke her arm. She was busing to work and had to get off at Portage Place to transfer. There was a thin sheen of snow covering some ice and her feet went out from under her.

She knew she’d broken her wrist, but still managed to get to her feet on her own. She couldn’t get on the bus with only one arm, and she doesn’t carry a cellphone. So she walked to Sherbrook Street, where the Creative Retirement building was until recently, to make her class.

“Even after that, she still kept coming in to teach,” Denesiuk said. “She’s the iron lady.”

To explain how she got into teaching about computers you might as well start from the beginning.

She was raised on a mixed farm near Lenore, north of Virden. She was the oldest of five children; her father died when she was 12. She took on the responsibility of raising the family, along with her oldest brother and their mother.

She attended Normal School in Winnipeg to get her teaching certificate and got her first job in 1937 at Errol School, near Lenore, teaching grades 1-9.

She boarded with a family and used their Shetland pony and buggy to travel to school three kilometres away. Next, they let her use a giant Clydesdale pulling a racing cart. She eventually decided she’d rather walk, and followed the fence line to school, clambering under two barbed wire fences each way and shaved a kilometre off the distance.

They were typical one-room schoolhouses with outhouses, a pail of water and basin for the kids to wash, and a wood stove for warmth and for the teacher to make soup for the children at lunch time. The teacher was also required to throw a couple dances a year for area families, with local musicians playing old-time tunes. “The school was the social centre,” she said.

She had 45 kids at her next one-room schoolhouse in Sinclair and she burned out. Dryden moved to Windsor, Ont., to work in the office of a manufacturing firm, and took business courses on the side. But the call to teach brought her back five years later and she taught at Two Creeks, then Virden Public School, then was drafted to teach business at Virden Collegiate.

“She was absolutely no-nonsense but she was very kind,” said Hardo Bewer, a former student of Dryden’s at Virden Collegiate, who reconnected with her at Creative Retirement. “People never had trouble finding a job if they could say they’d taken courses with her.”

Among her students was Jim Treliving, Boston Pizza magnate and star of CBC’s Dragons’ Den. “He was quite a nice young man,” Dryden said. “His father was a barber in Virden, I curled with his mother and I taught their three children.”

Like a parent, however, she won’t play favourites.

“I’m proud of all the students who have gone through my hands. Many have done good things in life.”

Her reputation spread as far as Winnipeg. In 1967, she was asked to be supervisor of business education for Manitoba. She would spend the rest of her career running the business education curriculum for the province’s public schools.

That’s where Dryden eventually got her computer training, initially on computers that were about the size of a residential bedroom.

“You’d input punch cards, and long sheets of paper with data would come out,” she recalled. Gradually, keypads replaced punch cards and computers started to shrink. She kept up her training on computers after she retired in 1983.

At Creative Retirement, she’s taught most every operating system: Windows 97, and Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1. “Now we’re into the glorified Windows 10. It has a lot of problems.”

An interview with Dryden shows her to be serious about imparting information, but with a teacherly warmth. Her eyes smiled when this interviewer grasped what she was saying.

As she explained, teaching isn’t just lecturing, rote learning, rewarding certain behaviour and the right answers. The essence of teaching is an act of creativity, she said.

“You have to be creative every minute of every hour of every day when you’re a teacher. You have to arouse the interest of students and hold their interest, or there’s very little learning going on.”

And for those people who find that creativity, and the constant challenge to be creative, very fulfilling, then teaching is a calling, she said.

As for computers, they help people stay young by keeping their minds active and keeping them in touch with others. Never married — female teachers weren’t allowed to marry when she began her career — the computer helps Dryden keep in touch with nieces and nephews, grand nieces and grand nephews, and “grand grands,” she said, laughing.

But there are downsides. Riding the bus regularly has shown her that.

Today, people will get on the bus, whip out their cellphones, which are really portals to the Internet, and not look up for the whole ride. “They don’t see if someone needs a seat. They’ve lost touch with humanity,” she said.

 

“It amazes me how life has changed. We’ve become less conscious of the world around us.”

— Isabella Dryden

 

She has a laptop and a desktop computer at home. But she doesn’t spend hour after hour surfing the web. In fact, as much as she’s about facilitating people’s use of computers, it’s important not to become sedentary. “Get out. Don’t sit in your suite. You deteriorate mentally, physically and spiritually,” she said.

She has volunteered at many teaching positions over the years and has been awarded the highest honours for volunteerism. From 1984-96, she volunteered at teaching computer keyboarding to Grade 4 students at Salisbury Morse Place School in East Kildonan.

“I would walk into the computer lab, and the students would run to me with their arms outstretched,” she recalled.

Oh, hell. She wasn’t going to fight it. “I just opened my arms and let them hug me.”

The celebration of Dryden and her career put on by friends is March 23 at the Manitoba Teachers Society. Registration is from 4:30-5:30, followed by a dinner and speeches. Everyone is invited, including friends, colleagues and former students. Tickets are $35, and will be available at ebitmb.org starting Jan. 20.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca