Three weeks each year, the schoolmarm’s in charge

CRANSTON, R.I. – Silence is golden in the classroom of 19th-century Montana schoolmarm Miss Olsen, who somehow manages to transcend both time and space each year to teach some unforgettable lessons to fourth-graders at Chester Barrows Elementary School.

For years, she has been the stern presence presiding over teacher Nancy Sisti’s classroom for the last three weeks of school, sharpening her young charges’ skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic as well as spelling, elocution and manners.

From the top of her bun (held in place with a modest adornment of lace and ribbon) to the tip of her pointy black shoes, she is not to be trifled with. Students are not only expected to learn but to behave like ladies and gentlemen, not speaking out of turn and sitting with hands clasped politely on their laps or on their desks.

Those foolhardy enough to break the rules might find themselves writing a lesson – on the blackboard, 50 times – or standing in a corner.

The students love her.

“I still remember everything,” said Nicole Tella, 17, who recently returned to Chester Barrows to watch the latest crop of fourth-graders finish their end-of-the-school-year tenure as pioneer schoolchildren. “I’m pretty sure I can still name every state capital from my time with Miss Olsen. It was fun, but nobody dared do anything out of turn.”

Tella, who graduated from Cranston High School East this month, will start classes at Rhode Island College in the fall. She plans to be a teacher, and said she was largely inspired by her own fourth-grade experience with Sisti and Sisti’s alter ego, Miss Olsen.

Sisti, who unlike her counterpart smiles a lot and chats easily, said she began the practice of assuming the role of a frontier teacher about 14 years ago.

She was teaching fourth grade at the city’s Gladstone Elementary school, she said, when she came across a book on interactive learning based on simulation of life in a one-room schoolhouse. The project, which was intended to give students a sense of history, was called The Apple Valley School and laid out the parameters for a historical school scenario.

Sisti, who loves history, took the Apple Valley project and kept expanding on it until its current elaborate incarnation, she said.

In the months leading up to the spring, she tells students that she will be taking a vacation to the Caribbean near the end of the school year and that her cousin, Miss Olsen, will be coming to take her place for about three weeks.

Miss Olsen, she explains to the youngsters, is a no-nonsense 1870s teacher from Butte, Mont. The time gap doesn’t seem to pose any problems with the students, Sisti said, particularly when they meet the tight-lipped visitor garbed in high-collared jackets and long skirts.

Sisti said she has spent much time researching the historical details of old-time education and sews many of the modest schoolteacher outfits herself. On nice days, Miss Olsen can be seen strolling the schoolyard with a calico bonnet or a pastel parasol to shield her from the sun.

She equips the classroom to her liking, having students get rid of all modern supplies and giving them rulers and pencils. She hangs an old penmanship guide across the front of the room along with a large map of the United States circa the 1870s. A quill pen and faded primers are on her desk and she often reads aloud from the small books, speaking in crisp diction with no present-day colloquialisms.

Sisti even goes as far as giving each child a new name and new identity complete with their father’s profession, their siblings and their economical status in a prairie town.

It’s hard work having Miss Olsen come to town because the class must finish all its regular lessons ahead of schedule and than tackle the more traditional tutelage of their substitute teacher. Aside from the emphasis on good behavior, it is all meant to make learning more fun.

Both Sisti and Tella said that even though the facade is maintained for three weeks (until Sisti returns as herself for the last day of school), the fourth-graders remain captivated and their imaginations make room for the dual worlds. “In a way, you kind of know it’s really Mrs. Sisti, but no one wants to admit it, and she never steps out of character,” Tella recalled. “We loved it.”