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Illinois,
Lambda State Organization
Founded
March 16th, 1935, in Chicago, Illinois
Founder
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Miss
Pearl M. Tiley
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Supervisor of Kindergarten and Primary Schools, Belleville, Illinois.
In 1936 Miss Tiley organized and became a charter member of Delta
Chapter where she remained a loyal member until her death in 1955.
Miss Tiley began her teaching career at the age of nineteen in Marissa,
Illinois, with grade two. Her first salary was thirty dollars a month
for the eight month school term. After another summer at Illinois
State Normal University, Miss Tiley launched into a thirteen year
career of teaching first grade tots in Belleville. Only twenty years
of age, slight of feature, and quite feminine, she had the zeal of
a crusader or pioneer. With only one year of experience and still
too young to vote, she taught sixty-one first graders, managing "extra
curricular" activities such as keeping a fire going in a pot-bellied
stove, superintending the drinking at the old school well where a
tin cup was chained to the pump, propping the windows open with sticks,
supervising the outdoor toilets, preparing the fire clay by washing
and grinding it to make it pliable for little fingers, ironing and
storing for art work wrapping paper which the pupils saved, ruling
both sides of sixty-one slates with a horse shoe nail, and sharpening
sixty-one slate pencils daily. She did not weaken under this heavy
load. On the contrary she loved her job and continued to teach beginners
until the first students she had taught were of university age.
During the next thirty-one years, she completed work at several universities,
and until her retirement, she was Kindergarten and Primary Supervisor
in the Belleville, Illinois, school system. She completed her Bachelor
of Philosophy Degree at the University of Illinois in 1926.
In 1927 Miss Tiley organized the Primary Council, to which all primary
teachers belonged. This was the beginning of what later became the
Belleville Branch of the Association for Childhood Education. In the
Belleville Public Library there is a section devoted to the Belleville
Branch of A.C.E. The only shelf honoring an individual has a marker
inscribed to Pearl M. Tiley, and each year educational books are added
to the shelf in her honor.
Deceased, 1955. (Condensed from a biography written by Helen Hunsinger,
Alpha Zeta.)
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Last
update:
06/03/08
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