Retrospect: spirit duplicator copies

Self-tutoring about people and events from the past: the tutor mentions the tradition of the spirit duplicator.

I started elementary school in 1975. My kindergarten year, we didn’t do much work at our seats, as I recall. In grade one, in a school on a military base, we did. We started to get what were called “worksheets.”

The teacher would walk into the classroom with a neat stack of papers under her arm which she would hand to the nearest student. “Take one, pass them on,” was the phrase she, then each student in turn, repeated: the worksheets worked their way through the columns of desks, passed along by each student who took one.

The paper was thin and bright white. The ink was blue-purple. None of us knew, but those pages had just been run off by the teacher using the spirit duplicator. It’s the light, grainy, purple-blue writing on the page that’s the tell.

Such pages never had any illustrations – just text, almost always hand-written. Typically you’d write the answers on the sheet.

Spirit-duplicated worksheets ruled in the classrooms I inhabited until the mid-80s. By then, we got less worksheets, anyway. The last spirit-duplicated sheet I saw might have been in ’87. By then, I rarely saw them; they were a nostalgic surprise when I did.

One wonders what must have become of all those spirit duplicators. Are they in warehouses, or on surplus shelves? Does anyone yet use them? In their time, they seemed great:)

Source:

for.gov.bc.ca