Photo by Bill Stokes
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that during a recent visit to youthful haunts the keeper, retraced the mile and a half of country roads that he and his sister and brother walked to the one-room country school up in Barron County.
The retracing was done by car in the company of Phyllis, Mike and Sarah as verifying witnesses, and it prompted the keeper to suggest that in place of embracing AI and high tech devices as educational techniques, every student be required to walk a mile and a half of country road–up and down hills, past pastures and woods, along weed-filled ditches where the “golden rod is yellow” and past fields where “the corn is turning brown.”
It is a fair question to pose as to whether the keeper learned more sitting in the little white schoolhouse or in walking to and from it on that ever-changing country road?
How else would he have learned the ways of the now expatriated jack rabbit, the humble muskrat’s travel plans and the life of the stray dog behind the vacated barn?
Now in these days at the start of a new school term, the keeper invites everyone to make the old country road walk with him. You could be late for classes but you might learn that “the trees in the apple orchard with fruit are bending down,” and many other things.
