Because the family moved around so much, Norman went to a lot of different schools. In Toronto, they would be large and well-organized, but in many of the towns they were probably just one classroom where all the grades were taught by a single teacher.
We don’t know how Norman did at school, but a lot of the time he probably wished he were outdoors or examining bones. In any case, he did all right and graduated from Owen Sound Collegiate in 1907. The first thing he did was take a job in the wilderness at a logging camp.
One-room schoolhouses like this one, where several grades learned together, were a way of life in small communities well into the twentieth century.
In a rural schoolhouse at the turn of the century, every grade would be present in one room, and one teacher would teach them all. Sometimes, if the class were large, the older children would help teach the younger ones, but mostly each grade did its own work. When you finished the work of one grade, you simply moved on to the work of the next grade, even if it was in the middle of a year. Summer holidays were long so that the children would have time at home to help around the farm at the busiest time.