Jeanette McCrie

Growing up on a farm in southern Saskatchewan in the early 1940s, Jeanette McCrie never dreamed of spending her life as a teacher far from the prairies. Instead her interests revolved around horses. She learned to ride at an early age and at the age of eight she started driving herself and her five-year-old brother three miles to school in a pony cart.

Being a fierce competitor at horse shows, and later on a rodeo barrel racer, occupied all her spare time, until the late 50s when her father took up pony chuck wagon racing and she and her brother supported the family as it traveled to races across western Canada and the northern United States. 

Jeanette graduated from high school in 1961. She attended the University of Saskatchewan. Her mother and both of her grandfathers had been teachers so Education seemed a natural choice. A new two-year program had replaced the old “normal” school training. At the end of the second year, students were sent on a three-week practicum. Jeanette chose La Ronge in northern Saskatchewan. It was the beginning of a love affair with the North. The trees, the huge lake, and the lives of people living on the land were all fascinating.

Jeanette accepted a teaching position in Buffalo Narrows for the following year before her practicum ended. This became her home for the next three years. Her worldly goods consisted of two battered suitcases and two large cardboard boxes tightly tied up with binder twine by her father. Her wage was $2350.00, which included a northern allowance. Her rent for a basement suite in the principal’s house was $50.00 a month based on sharing with another teacher.

Jeanette survived her first year—40 Grade One students, half of whom spoke little English and many who had spent several years in Grade One already. Supplies were nonexistent: one pad of paper for an ancient Gestetner, one box of colored pegs for math and 20 workbooks that had already been used and erased several times.

Having gone to school for eight years in a one-room school, Jeanette took a positive approach. She created her own workbooks and collected articles in nature for math materials. She asked her mother to send her childhood books for a small library.

In Buffalo Narrows, Jeanette learned to love flying and took impromptu lessons in a two-seater stick-controlled Aronka Champ. She shot a moose, learned to curl, and bought one of the first snow machines in the area. Over the next few years she won several racing events at winter carnivals.

In 1966, Jeanette moved to La Ronge to teach an experimental reading program called ita, which was based on the International Alphabet. It used 44 symbols instead of 26. After one year, the program expanded and Jeanette went to Ile à la Crosse to introduce it there. She and a fellow teacher also took on a community program working with young adults who were often in conflict with the law. They organized a meeting spot in the basement of the hospital where they had games nights, musical entertainment and planned skating parties, sleigh rides and variety nights. At the end of the year, they received an RCMP commendation for a significant reduction of crime in the community.

Moving back to La Ronge in 1968, Jeanette became the K-8 curriculum consultant for the eastern and far northern area of the province.

This role involved hundreds of miles of travel by plane as most of the fifteen schools were in roadless communities. There were plenty of challenges traveling by planes on skis or floats, such as weather, especially high winds or freezing rain. During a visit to Black Lake the road to Stony Rapids was blocked by a storm so Jeanette hired a local dog team driver to make the trip but the travel took longer than expected and the DC-3 was already at the end of the airstrip revving up its engines when they arrived. The dog team driver took the initiative and drove straight down the middle of the airstrip toward the plane with his tardy cargo. Expense account item—$25.00 ‘taxi” to airport.

Jeanette spent several summers during the 60s travelling abroad—a summer in Scotland and Europe, one in India with her CUSO brother and another as a student of grassland ecology in East Africa with Columbia University.

The lure of the north continued and in 1971, Jeanette decided to return to teaching in the Arctic community of Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories.

Once again she was piloting new teaching programs in both reading and math. As the school was built on the beach, the west wind blew almost constantly off the Beaufort Sea. A tunnel had to be dug down to access the local curling rink.

Tuktoyaktuk had a small local radio station, thanks to the efforts of the local Catholic priest. It offered short broadcasts three times a day. Jeanette was persuaded to do a children’s program, several times a week, which consisted of reading stories and playing recorded songs.

Other new experiences were going to drum dances, running the projector for local movie night and baking hundreds of cupcakes to sell in support of the school food program.

In 1972, Jeanette moved to Inuvik and returned to a supervisor’s job in the region’s ten communities, During the summers of 1972 and 1973, Jeanette co-planned and taught classroom assistant courses in Fort Smith. In 1974, she delivered another session in Frobisher Bay, followed by one in Goose Bay, Labrador, in 1979.

In September of 1973, Jeanette received a call that she was seconded to the newly formed Teacher Education Program (TEP) in Fort Smith. With the help of Carole Lane, a consultant colleague, she undertook the development and the instruction of a very different approach to teacher training. She remembers little time for sleep as they wrote the program at night and then went to class to teach it the next day.

Teaching adults was a demanding job—education levels ranged from Grade 4 to Grade 12 and ages varied from 17 to 45. Many had children. The only requirements were that they could speak their own native language and that they had experience as a classroom assistant. The TEP program had two years to make them into classroom teachers. A combination of methods classes in math, language arts and second language instruction were interspersed with life skills activities such as reading and writing upgrading, public speaking, first aid and driver training and money management.

In the second year, the Fort Smith students were joined by the Eastern Arctic students who had received their first year in Chesterfield Inlet. The local school also provided supervised classroom practice.

Most of the twenty-four students graduated in Fort Smith after having attended their last class given at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Campus life was both an exciting and a fearful experience for many of the students who had never been to a large southern city. It was designed to introduce them to the process that would eventually lead to a B.Ed.

After two exhausting years, Jeanette took some time off and then returned to University in Saskatoon where she studied cross-cultural education. As she was writing spring term exams in l977, she received a call from the Yukon Department of Education asking if she would consider a contract for the Primary Supervisor’s position. She thought she would only stay long enough to fund more university studies but like it has for so many others, the “spell of the Yukon” changed those plans forever.

Jeanette loved her work in the Yukon. She worked with teachers in every school in every community in the Yukon. Over the next 37 years she got to know literally hundreds of teachers and thousands of students.

Working in the Yukon for an extended period of time gave her an opportunity to build a network of support among teachers and principals, which enabled long-term program development. Some examples of that were: the formation of a Primary Advisory Committee to select and pilot new program materials and disseminate new teaching methods; a collaborative time bank that provided time to individual schools for teacher consultation; summer teacher institutes and student literacy camps; and, the creation of more than one hundred theme boxes which enabled differentiated learning using a variety of resources on high interest topics.

One of the most far reaching and effective student supports was the introduction of Reading Recovery. It involved extensive teacher training and one-on-one instruction for students struggling with literacy in Grade One. As a board member of the Canadian Institute for Reading Recovery, Jeanette was able to not only guide the introduction but, together with the expertise of Yukon Teacher Leaders, was able to provide the research and professional development support required for a successful implementation. Reading Recovery has remained an established student support for more than twenty-five years.

A literacy project called Books for Babies that was introduced in 1996 has also continued. A package containing a book and some information on early learning milestones is provided to each new born in the territory at the Whitehorse General Hospital. Following her retirement, Jeanette has continued to acquire the books, pack them and deliver the packages to the hospital. More than 10,000 packages have been distributed since the program began in 1996.

 One of the later literacy innovations Jeanette was involved in was the production of the Northwind Books in collaboration with the First Nations Program Branch at the Department of Education. This series consisted of twenty titles and a teacher guide developed between 2005 and 2012 based on Yukon First Nations culture in various Yukon communities. Jeanette photographed several of the books and worked with Sharon Shadow to edit and produce all the titles.

Jeanette’s passion for photography was also combined with her love of bird watching. She took many photos locally and enjoyed numerous trips with the Yukon Bird Club. For many years, she mounted a display at the Department of Education prior to the spring Birdathon to help raise funds for the club.                

Jeanette was well-known for her long-time attachment to her car—a green-gold 1968 Buick Skylark affectionately called Esmeralda. Jeanette had purchased it new and it had seen some tough northern roads in Northern Saskatchewan and later in Fort Smith, NWT, before making its way to the Yukon in 1977. When Jeanette retired in 2014, she bought a new vehicle but kept the 50 plus classic, which is still in running order and has been partially refurbished.

Jeanette retired after 37 years in the Yukon and 12 elsewhere. She had been given several awards and exciting opportunities over the years: Innovations in Teaching Award (1998), Alice Elston YTA Award (2013), Canadian Reading Recovery Founders Award (2013). She was also grateful for the opportunity to act as a Yukon representative at a Circumpolar Education Conference in Moscow (1991) and to be a speaker at the International Reading Conferences in both San Antonio and Los Angeles during the 90s.

Jeanette has always felt that the real rewards have been the opportunity to work with so many interesting and talented educators who dedicated themselves to teaching.

Finally, many of the opportunities offered through a long career would not have been possible if it were not for the opportunity to work in the North. Independence, creativity and collaborative endeavour in a challenging and stimulating environment transformed a Saskatchewan farm girl into a resourceful sourdough teacher and a committed Yukoner.