Our One-Room Country School

Ridgeway #2 stood atop a hill some distance from our farm home in North Dakota. It was a little one-room school attended by the children of four farm families. In any given year, about 12 to 14 children attended classes there. I received my first three years (1941–1944) of formal education there, and I dearly loved that school.

One teacher taught the pupils in all eight grades. Desks were on runners. When a class was called, pupils in that class left their desks and went to the front of the room, where they sat on the backless “recitation bench.”

Subjects taught were reading, penmanship, arithmetic, language