In exceptional instances, residential school children did not even spend a half day in the classroom. The boy who had the distinction of holding the number I at Pelican Lake Anglican School near Sioux Lookout, Ontario, recalled that he was only in class during the first two of his eight years' attendance. After that, he claimed, 'I didn't go to school at all.' He was an unpaid, full-time worker around the school for six years.

     Perhaps it was just as well to be in class only half the time if much of classroom experience was unintelligible. For many Indian and Inuit children, the language barrier they faced when they went off to residential school meant that weeks, months, perhaps in some cases even years of academic instruction were wasted.

      The language problem was only a subset of the larger difficulty of cross-cultural challenges. Missionaries often did not know what to make of unaccustomed difficulties, such as 'the Blackfoot conception of propriety' that held it was wrong 'to have a man teaching the girls,' or the requirement on the Northwest Coast that deference be shown to the offspring of high-born families in the caste-ordered societies of the region. Inasmuch as the purpose of residential schooling was to eradicate the student's Aboriginal identity and replace it with a Euro-Canadian one, intolerance of Native languages was comprehensible. However, the campaign of linguistic repression often proved to be futile, and the means used to suppress the rise of Indian languages unnecessarily cruel. More to the point for present purposes, the school system's failure to show any sensitivity to the language barrier that Native students were encountering in the classroom compounded the learning disadvantage faced by students who were there for only half the day at best.