"She Went to School All Her Life"

A woman who taught for 50 years at the school she herself attended was honored by her fellow teachers at dinner last evening. Miss Susan Hardie, who retired in 1936 after half a century of teaching at the Mohawk Institute on the Six Nations Indian reserve at Brantford, was one of eight teachers who received honorary certificates given by the Federation of Women Teachers' Association of Ontario at the annual dinner at the Royal York Hotel.

The certificates each year honor teachers who have "served the cause of Canadian education with honor and dignity and have brought prestige to bear on the teaching profession by their good works."

Now living in Toronto in an apartment chosen for her by a sister-in-law of the celebrated Indian poet Pauline Johnson, Miss Hardie, in all her years of teaching the Indian children on the reserve, was the only Indian teacher on the staff of the Institute. She graduated from the Model School in Brantford in 1886 after she finished the Brantford Collegiate course, and then went on to take her teacher's certificate at the Normal School here in Toronto.

When she first went to the institute which was run for many years by the New England company, a missionary society in England (which still pays her a pension for her long years of service), she was one of only two teachers. She was expected to take care of the girls in the residential school as well and on Sundays taught Sunday school.

Indian lore is not taught at the school, Miss Hardie said. She understands Mohawk herself, but does not speak it. She tells of the time the reserve school was visited by the (then) Prince of Wales. She learned an Indian hymn from one of the men and taught it to the children. Few of them knew the words they were singing.

When she finished with her teaching, Miss Hardie decided she must get away from the school so she would not be tempted to "visit" occasionally. She went to the west coast and visited one of her pupils who insisted she stay with her. She spent some time in Florida and California and Virginia as well.

Her most satisfying memories are of the pupils who come to tell her they remember her, and of the presents she has received from them in gratitude for her teachings. "And I was strict with them, too," she laughed.

Others who were named for the honorary certificates were Miss Lyle Beatty who started teaching in 1897, and retired in 1945 from a Pembroke school; Miss Minnie Z. Bennett, who spent almost 40 years at Acton Public School as a teacher then principal; Mrs. Bessie Falconer, who retired in 1947 after 27 years of teaching and who has continued her work as a permanent staff member of the School For Retarded Children in Toronto; Miss Elizabeth Hoppin, who missed only two meetings of the Women Teachers' Association in Kingston from 1912, when they organized, to 1938, when she retired; Miss Eve Langley, who taught school in Fort William for 34 years and was forced to retire in 1947 because of approaching blindness; Miss Katherine McKellar, who was a primary teacher at Wilkinson School in Toronto until last year when she retired, and Miss Mabel Sabine, who taught school for nearly 45 years, mostly in Hamilton, where she was principal's assistant at the Strathcona Model School and on the critic staff of the Hamilton Normal School.