If you got this through a window, Jeff, that's pretty good shootin'. Many of the teachers who were in charge of these one-room schools were barely out of school themselves, usually lived with a local family, and had firm restrictions on their social life (no men!). In 1920, nineteen-year old Dolly Holiday from Chicago, IL, arrived in tiny St. Anthony, ND, to teach in a school that hadn't operated for the last year. Upon arriving at the school the next day, in the snow (and on a horse-drawn sleigh), she looked through the window and, to her horror, discovered that the pot-bellied stove had burned a hole in the floor and only the top of the stove and the severed smokestack were poking out of the hole. Such were the travails of the one-room prairie schoolhouse. An educational submission, Jeff. I particularly enjoyed the grammar and sentence structure of the list on the blackboard.

-Nik