The Teacher Was Supreme - Toivo Kangas
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.
Toivo Kangas
On his first day at the Number One school, Mrs. Corthell showed my brother Ralph a picture of a cat and asked, “What is this animal?”
My brother answered in Finnish, “Se on kissa siinä,” [That is a cat.]
Mrs. Corthell—oh, did she get mad. She told him, “Don’t use that language with me! You speak English! Don’t you come back here until you can speak English!” My brother could understand English, but he couldn’t describe the picture in English. He came home and stayed out of school for another year. What could you expect? Finnish was all we spoke. It’s like the French kids in Greenville: they spoke French but they had a Catholic school. They had French teachers—nuns—that they could communicate with.
At age 6 I could only speak English although I understood some Finnish and some French. My mother was Catholic and sent me to school in Greenville. It was like being in a foreign country with large penguins as teachers. We weren't allowed to speak to each other in English from 9AM-noon but could answer the teacher in English in class . Most students and the teacher were bilingual. Fortunately the teaching was done in English with a French accent. I sometimes answered the teacher in Finnish with language that my mother would not have approved of. The nuns were good teachers and there was discipline in the classroom. Discipline was measured with a 1 ft wooden ruler. There was also a lot of homework. By the time I got to the 8th grade I was somewhat bilingual, but not as bilingual as the Greenville kids.
I am sorry to read what Mrs. Corthell said to Ralph. My Mom was the teacher at the Number 6 school in Finn Country. All of her students spoke Fiinnish . She never turned anyone away. As times went on they all spoke English.