Interview with Nick Ochotta 2.3

Segment Synopsis: At that time, the nearest hospital was in Athabasca, which was 22 miles from town (Boyle) and 26 1/2 miles from the Ochotta farm. If you got the flu, you stayed in bed and drank tea with lemon and honey. Iodine was used to treat cuts. Some people used honey, as it is antibacterial. Honey has been considered antibacterial since the times of Egypt and Greece. If something was serious, you would have to load them into a horse drawn wagon and drive to Athabasca where you would hope you could find a doctor in his office or in the hospital sometimes. These were very serious situations. He tells the story of one day when his mother locked her jaw and he had to find the local merchant to drive her to the hospital. When he was born, his dad was the midwife, he had read up on midwifery. If something were to have gone wrong during a home birth, there would have been nothing they could have done, especially in winter.

Subjects: conventional medicine; folk medicine; hospitals

Segment Synopsis: He started attending school in 1933. He was 7 years old. School started at 9:00 and went until 4:00 and they had an hour for lunch. A typical day in those days was very atypical, especially in the winter time when you had a heater to heat the school and some neighbour that lived not too far away would come and start a fire. It was supposed to be warm by 9:00 but it often wasn't. The school had 40 students in eight grades and only one teacher. They would all be sitting in one classroom, with the blackboard behind the teacher. She would talk to different grades at different times of the day. There was a lot of homework and a lot of tests and exams. They always made good grades. In grade one you were learning "a, b, c's and 1, 2, 3's". His English was fluent when he started school, because of his older siblings. He spoke Ukrainian to his parents but spoke English to his siblings. You could be penalized or spanked for speaking Ukrainian during school hours. Everyone was learning English. Everyone in the district was Ukrainian, Romanian, Bessarabian, etc. At the start of the school day they would come in and drop their lunches somewhere and then go outside and play ball. The teacher would show up and would ring the bell. Everyone went in and sat in their assigned seat. They would sing O Canada and God Save the King. They probably started with the Lord's Prayer. The teacher would take one grade or another and would start teaching. You would do yesterday's homework again while you waited. As the grades progressed the work got harder. There was reading, writing, and arithmetic, history, a second language after grade 10, geometry later on. They did projects in partners (aviation, coal mining, Japan, as topic examples). Would research and study and find out everything you could about the topic, get samples, build models, and then you would come in and lecture to the students. He reminisces that he and a friend did aviation as their topic, and then they both became pilots. The payoff came in grade 9 when you had to take a departmental exam. The exam came from the department. It was on literature, mathematics, history, social studies. You came to write the exam on that day and the envelope was sealed. You had two hours to write the exam. It was a good gauge of what you had learned in the previous nine years.

Subjects: elementary education; exam weeks; one-room schoolhouses; secondary education