Iole Appugliese

Iole Appugliese was a Grade 1 teacher in a poor district of Montréal at the Royal Arthur School. For more than 30 years, she taught the young beginners and, gradually over the years, the successes in life of so many of her students began to catch the attention of observers. In the low socio-economic standards of the community in which she worked, no one was expected to reach high levels of achievement in the wider community. However, in this case, when school records were examined, the findings regarding Iole Appugliese’s students were startling. Intelligence quotients, those common measures of ability that normally change by small amounts in the course of the elementary years of schooling, had jumped by abnormally high percentages between Grades 1 and 6. One of her former students became President of McGill University and he was the one who investigated the growth in IQs and had the results published in the Harvard Educational Review.

In her 34 years at this one high-poverty school, “Miss A” taught about 1,200 students. While researchers were unable to follow up on all of these students, the cohorts they did study showed such consistent patterns that we can be sure she had an immeasurable effect on countless lives, which could easily have gone nowhere due to such unfavourable beginnings.

Iole Appugliese died in 1971. She was inducted into the Academy of Great Montrealers in the Social category in 1978 and was named a Commander of the Ordre de Montréal in 2016.