FINNS: An Oral History- You Were In Finn Town Here - Kevin Corriveau
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Kevin Corriveau
I graduated from college in ‘71. I started teaching at Mascenic a couple of years later. Before I even saw any students, I was told by the principal who hired me about the conservative Finnish community. I was trained to teach high school. And because of the job situation when I graduated from college, I went back and took courses to get certified in elementary and middle-school education. I was to be hired to teach fifth- and sixth-grade Language Arts and interviewed at the old Sacred Heart Elementary School in Greenville. That’s where I thought the job was.
So on the first day of school, I drove there: it was a public school even though it was still called Sacred Heart. I walked in and said, “Well, where’s my room?” and the staff didn’t know. They directed me to New Ipswich where Bob Johnson, principal of Mascenic Middle School, was, and he said, “Where have you been? You’re late your first day on the job.” And he showed me to my learning area. This was five miles up the road from Sacred Heart in a brand-new, “open-concept” building that I soon saw was populated by many tow-headed, fair-skinned students: the Finns of New Ipswich.
He said, “I’ve got to tell you something. You really should think twice about using any audiotapes or slides because there will be a significant number of students who, when you do that, will leave the room and go to a designated area.” And I looked at him and thought he was joking, so I started laughing. And he said, “No, I kid you not!”
He took me out of my classroom, actually a wall-less “learning area,” to the little hole-in-the wall office he had and told me basically what I needed to know to survive the first week at that place, particularly with Greenville students and Finnish students, who he said were told not to like each other. They also forgot to tell me that I was teaching five classes of fifth- and sixth-grade Language Arts combined per period. He said, “And, oh, by the way, we don’t have any books.”
So the first year I taught using a mimeograph machine quite extensively and the second year I had a set of 35 textbooks for teaching 337 students. This was because the year that I came there, the school board made a decision to try to do its best to traditionalize the education in the middle school high school. Open concept, but they stuck to teaching only the basics and going to a six- or seven period day school-wide grades five through 12. I hadn’t been informed of that in the interview. I had done my homework; I knew about the open concept. I had even visited Mascenic when taking college courses in Methods and Principles of Education, so I was one of the crew that had just been traipsed through there: this wonder of American education. And I wrote a paper, much to the disgruntlement of my professor, on how it was doomed to failure. Little did I think I’d end up teaching there.
While, over the years the faces have changed, family names have remained consistent: Aho, Ilomaki, Kangas, Maki, Murto, Paavola, Pekkala, Salokangas, Somero. All tow-headed and cookie cutter perfect. Even the school boards have had contingents of Finno-American members. I don’t know if it’s planned, but looking over various school boards that I have worked under, I wouldn’t dispute the point that at least one Finn is always on the school board to protect certain interests: conservative Finnish interests. I know that when Finnish school board members do get on that it is to “caretake” and “protect” what the values are of that section of the community.
Yet, at the same time, I admire these people very much because there is something very, very spiritual and unconventional about them. And there is something else: they are survivors. They endure what life has to offer and protect those they care about and things they care about in that context. Perhaps, like the peasant stock of their forebears, their ability to endure without recourse to a higher earthly authority is what sustains them. Certainly their cultural cohesiveness and own brand of faith does. Spiritual authority seems vested in each one: just ask ‘em!
Both my parents served on the school board at different times during the Mascenic era. I was gone by then, having graduated from Appleton in '67. Mascenic was a budget cutter's dream and proved the old saying–"You get what you pay for". Two of my younger siblings were packed off to boarding school rather experience Mascenic. One of the worst aspects of life in New Ipswich was—and is—conservative distrust of and lack of support for public education.