Vintage Learning

I dressed up as the School Marm for the first "class" at the Pony School yesterday. The newspaper photo shows how we started with a Recitation exercise of "Old Ironsides"--featuring the elocution skills of the local Superintendant, YWCA director, and a Commerce Bank trust officer. Then I saddled the newspaper editor with spelling lists to practice at the board whilst I was giving a geography lesson from an 1822 map. He grumbled plenty. My current events questions about the upcoming election seemed to perplex everyone, until they realized the date written on the board was January 3, 1860. Lastly, the banker was stumped with an interest rate word problem until a retired CPA came to the rescue and pounded out the long division (by hand, not with a calculator). The excitement in the room was palpable, and the pace was dizzying. But it was only a 30-minute peek into the curriculum we will offer to full-day and half-day visitors at our Prairie School exhibit.