The school had long surrendered the militarylike line of wooden desks in favor of round tables. These days, microwave ovens warmed the lunches the children brought from home. No longer did the teacher make lunch in a large cauldron with whatever the parents had sent to school that day-beans, potatoes, or perhaps a bit of chicken, venison, or elk. Central heat had long replaced the potbellied stove that had squatted for decades in the middle of the room, though the burn marks from its three legs were still discernible on the hardwood floor. Gone were the days when children arrived shoeless and on horseback. When he took over Battle Rock in 1993, the school was country, heart and soul, but it had traveled miles in its sensibilities. But someone had to orchestrate this symphony of learning, which sometimes looked and sounded chaotic, and Battle Rock’s conductor was Stephen Hanson. When they weren’t on-site, and when Hanson was on the telephone or working intensely with a student, the older kids helped their younger classmates-the theory being that children had a language all their own and no adult could speak it. Battle Rock boasted several part-time instructors who taught math, science, Spanish, music, and art. Hanson made teaching in a multi-grade classroom look deceptively easy, but he had help. At the end of the day, he sometimes even helped the janitor clean up. He served as accountant, paying Battle Rock’s bills. Hanson answered the phone, he responded to e-mail, and he greeted visiting parents. While they worked on their assignments, he tested older students on reading comprehension. The teacher launched the younger kids on reading or grammar lessons. The children pursued different lessons at different times of the day. In about an hour, 26 students in kindergarten through 6th grade were scheduled to take their places at the half-dozen tables that served as their desks.īecause I had already visited the school a year earlier, I knew what to expect that first day. I helped Hanson unload his Explorer and then stood back and watched him work hurriedly on paperwork. Then, driving through the empty streets of the shuttered town, I started the 30-mile trip to Battle Rock. I woke up early that morning and stopped at the Texaco Amigo Mart in Cortez, the nearest town to McElmo Canyon, to buy a brown-bag lunch. When teacher Stephen Hanson arrived that first day of school, I was already there. In 1999, Celis observed the “struggle” between old and new residents from the vantage point of what was then an 84-year-old school, which, as described below, was a world unto itself. Problem was, the just-arrived didn’t want to give up all the amenities of so-called civilization. Traditional demographics-generations of farm families accustomed to outhouses and unpaved roads-were giving way to hordes of urban transplants who had left city life behind “for the tranquility of a small town.” That’s how William Celis, a former New York Times reporter, puts it in his new book, Battle Rock: The Struggle Over a One-Room School in America’s Vanishing West (PublicAffairs). McElmo Canyon, in the southwestern corner of Colorado, was not much different from the rest of rural America in the 1990s.
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