Our great Lawrence County teachers will appreciate this.
Did you know that Lawrence County teachers have been attending teacher in-service programs for well over a century?
And that they used to occur on Saturday mornings?
And that they often required teachers to read hundreds of pages in textbooks in preparation for group discussion?
And all of that was on top of the regular work required by their course-loads, which for most of them involved teaching multiple grades in one room.
This article from the February 28, 1912 edition of the Lawrence ‘Democrat’ describes what was planned for a March 1912 meeting of the Lawrence County Teachers Association. The Teachers Association at that time was reading through the books of the Teachers Reading Circle Course.
The Teachers Reading Circle was a professional development organization which provided teachers with the opportunity to continue learning about the latest developments in their field.
For that March 1912 meeting, high school teachers were scheduled to arrive at the courthouse at 8:30 on a Saturday morning to discuss readings from books about high school education. Primary school teachers were scheduled to meet at 10:00 that morning to discuss the first five chapters of a book called ‘Standards of Education With Some Consideration of their Relation to Industrial Training’ by Arthur Henry Chamberlain.
In the 1908 edition of Chamberlain’s book, the first five chapters were 129 pages long, and they were entitled:
“The Aim of Education”
“The Elementary Curriculum: Its Motive and Content”
“Industrial Training: Its Aim and Scope”
“The Meaning of Correlation”
“The Basis of Ethical Training”
For the full 1908 edition of this book, please follow this link:
While the meeting was not mandatory for all teachers, as modern in-service days are, the superintendent at the time “urged” all teachers to attend, and I find it hard to believe that he wasn’t keeping track of those who chose not to attend.
From the Lawrence ‘Democrat.’
Lawrence County History Trivia 