CANAAN — Linda Landry’s 50th year as a teacher at Canaan Elementary School will look a little different than what she has seen before.
But the third- and fourth-grade teacher is no stranger to educating students in nontraditional settings: After a portion of Canaan Elementary burned down in 1980, she taught kids in a concrete warehouse.
“Even though the kids weren’t there for the fire … it was very traumatic. One day they were in school, and the next day it was gone,” the 70-year-old Landry recalled last week in her classroom at Canaan Elementary School.
“This is tough. COVID is tough,” she said. “I thought this was going to be my last year, but I don’t want to go out on this note.”
But she learned a lot from helping her students 40 years ago through the traumatic experience of their school being destroyed, and she’s more than prepared to help her 17 incoming students this year this year cope with the pandemic.
“We’ll see how things work out. At least we’re back. It’s going to be interesting to see how much they lost, how much they maintained,” Landry said. “These children are spread all over the place. They miss that socialization terribly.”
In March, as the coronavirus spread across the country and schools switched to remote instruction, Landry quickly pivoted to online teaching, along with her colleagues throughout the Upper Valley.
But the transition wasn’t always smooth. She would need to put together activity packets for students who had faulty internet connections, and sometimes her own internet would stop working if she was on the phone helping a student or parent.
“Everything was really great the first month, but when things started opening up and the parents went back to work and the kids didn’t have that support, they were running out of steam,” Landry said. “It was tough. About 90% of the time of COVID was supporting parents, telling them not to be too hard on themselves.”
Landry still lives on the Dorchester farm where she grew up. In addition to attending Canaan Elementary, she was part of the Mascoma Valley Regional High School class of 1967, the first to complete all four high school years at what was then a new school.
She started teaching at the school in downtown Canaan in 1971, at the age of 20, after graduating from Plymouth State College.
“I’ve never wanted to be anyplace else,” she said.
In her career, Landry has taught second through fourth grades at the school. Currently, she is on a loop: She teaches third grade one year and fourth grade the next, following the same group of students.
“I love the progress the second- and third-graders make, but I love the sense of humor of the fourth-graders,” she said. “They’re mini-adults. You can have a lot of fun with them.”
Landry was the first in her family to get a college degree. Her mother never finished high school, and her father spent some time at an aeronautical school in Chicago before the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre led him to leave the city and return to New England.
“They both highly valued education,” Landry said.
After she graduated from Plymouth State in 1971, Landry landed a job teaching second grade in Canaan, where she worked alongside teachers she had as an elementary school student. The principal at the time was a retired Marine sergeant and had blunt instructions about the 22 students Landry was set to teach.
“He said, ‘I don’t care if you teach those kids anything, but if you can’t get them under control, they’re all going to reform school for third grade,’ ” Landry recalled. “I’ll always remember that class and how much we got done.”
None of them ended up going to reform school.
“During that first year, you think you’re going to change the world,” Landry said. “I think that’s the biggest letdown, because you realize you can’t change the world for them.”
There are too many outside factors teachers can’t control, she said, including what life is like for kids once they leave the classroom.
“I made up my mind that I was going to make sure that when they were with me,” they could see that, “there was a different life, a better life and I could show them love,” Landry said.
“I’m always here. Here was always the same.”
Landry’s starting salary was initially $6,000 per year (about $38,000 in today’s dollars), but it dropped to $5,700 due to a wage freeze before being restored.
“I bought my first new car,” she said. “We had no music, no art, no physical education, so we did everything.”
The dress code forbade women from wearing pants, which made outdoor duties like recess and gym challenging. The teachers found a way around it though.
“That was when pantsuits were coming in,” she recalled. The pants were often paired with a long tunic. If a member of the School Board stopped by, “you had to take those (pants) off so the tunic would be a dress.”
In 1980, Landry watched the school burn from the upstairs of the nearby Canaan Town Library where she was taking square dance lessons with her husband.
“I literally watched the curtains in my classroom fall,” she recalled. “My whole library, all the furniture my father had made” was lost to the flames. (The fire was attributed to arson.)
The next day, teachers gathered at a staff member’s nearby house to discuss what to do.
“We knew it was important to get the kids back to school as fast as possible,” Landry said. “We were totally distraught.”
They quickly worked to find spots for each grade throughout Canaan Village. Businesses offered spaces, including a warehouse that was then behind a grocery store that is now Canaan Village Pizza.
“The kids were out five days,” she said.
It took a couple years for the school to be rebuilt, as it was tied to a bond for building Indian River School in West Canaan. During that time, Landry gave birth to her son in March 1981 and went on maternity leave, with plans to return the following January.
“When September rolled around and I wasn’t going to school, I knew it wasn’t going to work for me,” she said. “I substituted. I started a math program.”
The biggest technology change was when copiers were introduced.
“I was in seventh heaven. I thought that was the greatest thing ever,” she said.
Her first computer was next, a Commodore 64, the clunky desktops introduced in the 1980s with only 64 KB of memory. Her favorite addition, which came years later, was the Smartboard, a wall-mounted interactive whiteboard.
Among the things she’s most proud of at the school was Canaan’s push to add all-day kindergarten, which made it easier for working families who struggled to find child care.
And there are only two children she ever refused to teach: her son and her granddaughter, because she said she’s too close to them to have an effective student/teacher relationship.
As she gets ready for the start of the school year, Landry is hopeful that teachers and students will make the best of a tough situation.
“I know it’s going to be different, but every year is,” she said. “That’s what I like about it.”
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
