Isn't it funny how you can still remember the names of teachers you had in elementary school but you can't remember the name of a person you met last week?
I went to Cloverdale Elementary from Grade 1 to 7. Back in those days kindergarten was not part of the school curriculum, though it came in while I was in Grade 7 and those 5 year olds came in for half a day.
Cloverdale Elementary school still stands at 17857 - 56th Avenue but was renamed Cloverdale Traditional School in 2003 with a different curriculum than when I attended.
Grade one and two my teachers were Mrs Bell and Mrs Stewart, though I'm a little foggy on who was which grade. I think Bell was Grade 1 and Stewart Grade 2.
Grade 3 was Mrs Klassen.
The three lower grades were on the first floor of Cloverdale Elementary and nothing memorable about those 3 teachers stands out for me.
Grade 4 was more interesting when we got to attend class in the annex, a building that has since been torn down. The ground level was a cement play area when it was raining, boys on one side, girls on the other. Washrooms were also down here. Mrs. Bonner was our Grade 4 teacher. She was probably the first hippy I ever met with long hair nearly to her knees. I saw her husband occasionally picking her up after school in their VW Beetle. He also had long hair, not to his knees, but well past his shoulders and a big beard.
Grade 5, 6, and 7 were held on the second floor of the main school. Here things became a little more convoluted as this was when we began switching off teachers for various subjects. The first 4 grades one teacher taught us everything but now we had a teacher for home room who would probably also be our English teacher - or language arts I believe it was called back then.
Mrs. Carter was our Grade 5 teacher and she was probably the only really horrible teacher I had during elementary school. She also doubled as the art teacher for the upper 3 grades. She used to walk around the room looking at the student's art work and yell out "EEEUUWWW" or say something nasty to humiliate the student: "What is THAT?" One time one of my classmates had enough of her humiliation and cursed her out. It was pretty ugly and she ended up in tears and the kid got tossed out of our class. She also taught social studies but that might have only been to our home room class. I don't recall having her for social studies other than that one year.
Grade 6 teacher was Mr. Mountain. He also taught social studies and science and I think math. He was a tough teacher and could be a bit mean with the kids but nowhere near the scale of meanness as Mrs. Carter. When we went on field trips he was actually kind of fun. Oddly enough when I was at University of Victoria I ran into his niece in one of my classes and sadly he was dying from cancer.
Our Grade 7 teacher was Mr Bryan or maybe it was Mr. O'Bryan, I really don't recall which. He played the piano and was also the music teacher for the upper grades. Everyone liked him. He was a fun man. I remember we finished our Grade 7 math curriculum ahead of schedule, several weeks before school ended for the summer. So he taught us how to play bridge for that half hour or however long the class was. I remember the Grade 7 students in other classes were quite envious of our class playing cards while they were sweating away with their studies.
So there's the run down on my teachers. Maybe you remember some of them too.
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