Avonlea Schoolhouse is both Anne Shirley’s workplace and the setting of her development as a teacher: over two years, she learns through mistakes, earns her pupils’ affection, and comes to understand that the lessons exchanged there reach beyond the curriculum. Its opening and closing days frame a period of professional growth whose end is marked not by a routine dismissal, but by the children’s farewell and Anne’s difficult departure for further education.

Setting and School Routine

The schoolhouse belongs to the ordinary rhythms of life in Avonlea. At the close of one school year, Anne locks its door on a quiet yellow evening, puts the key in her pocket, and walks down the hill with flowers in a basket. She has been reengaged for the next year, though one parent, Mr. Harmon Andrews, thinks she ought to use the strap more often. For Anne, the end of term brings satisfaction and the promise of two months’ vacation; the locked door marks a pause in work she expects to resume.

When school opens again, Anne returns with fewer theories and more experience. Her pupils include six- and seven-year-olds encountering school for the first time, among them Davy and Dora. The children’s first-day arrangements—Davy seated beside Milty Boulter, Dora temporarily placed with Mirabel Cotton while her chosen seatmate is absent—show the schoolhouse as a social world as well as a place of instruction. Its desks and classroom groupings matter to pupils negotiating age, friendship, and the unfamiliar demands of sitting still.

Teaching and the Daily Life of the Classroom

The curriculum includes fractions and syntax, but the work of the schoolroom cannot be measured in lessons alone. Davy reports that sitting still is hard, though moving his legs under the desk helps; he delights in having boys to play with and notices the distinctions between the back seats and those where his feet can reach the floor. His account makes classroom discipline visible from a child’s perspective: the rules are real, but so are the small adjustments by which a young pupil learns to live with them.

The schoolroom also becomes a place where Anne’s influence circulates among the children. When Milty draws an unflattering picture of her on his slate, Davy considers retaliating with a drawing meant to hurt Milty, then remembers Anne’s teaching about other people’s feelings. He concludes that hurting someone emotionally is dreadful, even as his childish reasoning struggles to reconcile that lesson with the prospect of a fight. The episode shows Anne’s moral instruction taking hold imperfectly but concretely: Davy carries it into a playground dispute and uses it to reconsider what he might do.

Work, Weather, and Responsibility

The schoolhouse is exposed to the weather and to the practical demands it places on a teacher. On May 23, an unusually warm day, Anne and her pupils struggle through fractions and syntax in the heat. A hot breeze gives way after noon to heavy stillness; at half past three Anne hears thunder and dismisses the children so they can reach home before the storm. As the pupils leave for the playground, the sun is still shining, yet a dark, ominous cloud has unsettled the scene. The moment makes the classroom’s daily order provisional: Anne must read conditions beyond the lesson and act for the children’s safety.

This attentiveness belongs to the wider work of teaching that the novel attributes to her. Over two years, Anne makes mistakes and learns from them, while her pupils teach her tenderness, self-control, and an understanding of children’s hearts. The schoolhouse is where these exchanges become part of ordinary practice. Anne may not inspire extraordinary ambitions in every pupil, but her example teaches truth, courtesy, and kindness—lessons the children may retain after forgetting facts such as the capital of Afghanistan or the dates of the Wars of the Roses.

Farewell and Significance

At the end of Anne’s teaching period, the pupils pass a triumphant semi-annual examination and present her with an address and a writing desk. The farewell draws tears from the girls and women present, and even some of the boys, though the boys later deny having cried. Annetta Bell clings to Anne and tells her she will never love another teacher as much. Anne, alone afterward at her desk, looks wistfully toward the Lake of Shining Waters; for a moment, the prospect of college loses its appeal beside the pain of leaving her pupils.

Anne’s final reflection gives the schoolhouse’s significance its fullest measure. She believes she taught her scholars something, but that they taught her much more, and recognizes that the values they absorbed may outlast the formal knowledge of the classroom. Locking her desk, she thinks of another chapter closing. The schoolhouse has been the scene of her professional formation, but also a community of reciprocal care: leaving it for Redmond College is an advance in education that carries the cost of parting from children whose lives and character have become part of her own work.