ifignow wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/education/19WYOM.html

Shirley the opposite extreme would be a "one student school" in Japan.
There is bound to be one somewhere, I've read about at least 10 schools
with fewer than 10 students. What is the smallest school in Japan? On an
island in the setonaikai p'raps?

Oh and the article for those without a subscription would be sumthin
like this.....

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In Some Schools, It's One Teacher, One Student
By SAM DILLON

Published: January 19, 2004

ROCK RIVER, Wyo. -- Tucked high up in the snow-swept Laramie Mountains
sits a public school with just one young teacher, Rebecca Rodgers, and
her lone student, Joe Kennedy, a seventh grader.

Cozy Hollow Elementary is the best way Wyoming authorities have found to
educate Joe, whose family owns a hardscrabble cattle ranch. The nearest
larger school lies 40 miles down a gravel road that blizzards often
render impassable.
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"It was awkward at the beginning," Mrs. Rodgers said, so much so that
when classes began last fall Joe was not sure whether to raise his hand
to ask questions or just speak up. Mrs. Rodgers urged the latter.

"Now it feels pretty good," Joe said. "There's nobody else to bug us."

Cozy Hollow Elementary is unusual but not unique, although nobody seems
to track precisely how many single-student schools there are across the
nation. Wyoming has three, Nebraska six, Montana two. North Dakota has one.

The challenges of educating students in rural states from Maine to
Alaska are enormous. They include attracting young teachers to truly
remote places, supervising their work and finding ways to prepare
students like Joe, raised in isolation, for the bustle of college campuses.

The tiny school at Cozy Hollow, about 100 miles northwest of Cheyenne,
is one way educators teach children who live on far-flung ranches and
Indian reservations. Wyoming, America's least populous state, is
experimenting with other strategies, too. Flush with revenues from rich
coal and gas reserves, the state has spent $24 million to install
instructional video cameras in each of its 76 high schools, Trent
Blankenship, Wyoming's superintendent of public instruction, said in an
interview. The state hopes the cameras can help bring advanced courses
like calculus and astronomy to schools that may have only a few dozen
students, Mr. Blankenship said.

But for all the technological advances, flesh-and-blood elementary
teachers like Mrs. Rodgers, 23, are still a critical link in the
educational chain.

Just out of teachers college, she keeps the school day businesslike when
it begins sharply at 8 a.m., after Joe has fed the horses, walked past
the corral to the school and taken his seat. She marches him through a
traditional schedule of 45-minute periods, with the early morning
devoted to the three R's.

Mrs. Rodgers lives with her husband, a graduate student in astronomy, in
a trailer attached to a second trailer that serves as Joe's classroom,
but this is not home schooling. She is a certified public school
teacher; her annual salary is $25,720. Joe must pass the same
standardized tests that bedevil urban students.

In the Albany County No. 1 School District in southeastern Wyoming, the
job of supervising Mrs. Rodgers's work falls to Charles Cashman,
principal of the 120-student Rock River School, who set out the other
day in his 1998 Chevy Blazer for the 40-mile trip to Cozy Hollow. A few
miles down a two-lane blacktop, he turned east onto a gravel road
leading through sagebrush and grasslands rising toward the Laramie
Mountains.

Test scores show that the individual instruction at tiny rural schools
is extremely effective, Mr. Cashman said, eyeing a herd of Black Angus
as a golden eagle soared overhead.

"But you better hope you get a match between the student, teacher and
family, because if you don't, it can be miserable," he said.

At midjourney, Mr. Cashman used a two-way radio to call ahead,
announcing his visit. "KT216 to the Kennedy ranch, Joyce or Gene, can
you hear me?" he asked.

He could not establish contact, and an hour later he pulled into the
ranch and braked to a stop in front of the school. Inside he found Mrs.
Rodgers and her student seated across from each other, engrossed in a
math lesson. Joe correctly calculated the height of a tree, based on the
length of its shadow.

"Good job, that's awesome," Mrs. Rodgers said. "Now let's go for some
geography."

 Joe read aloud from a textbook about how experts divide the world into
regions, based on political, linguistic and other criteria. He read
fluidly, but stumbled on the word spiritual, pronouncing it "serpital"
until corrected.

There was time for a lesson on genetics and heredity before Mrs. Rodgers
dismissed Joe for lunch. At the ranch house, he sat at a table where his
father, his mother, his uncle, Mr. Cashman and a reporter were passing
around steaming platters of roast beef, baked potatoes and peas.

Talk turned to the early 1900's, when Joe's great-grandfather
homesteaded the ranch, which now sprawls across 50 square miles.
Children from ranches in the area, including Joe's forebears, have been
educated at Cozy Hollow since the school's founding in the early 1930's.
Joe shared a teacher with older brothers and cousins until fall 2002,
when they moved on to regional high schools.

If schools like Cozy Hollow are a rich part of Wyoming history, the
state appears likely to rely on technology in the future to help educate
rural students.

The other day John Tinnin, a math teacher based at the Kaycee High
School in north central Wyoming, was teaching calculus to seven students
there. Also participating -- listening and watching on video monitors and
occasionally asking questions -- were 10 students at three high schools
separated by hundreds of miles of mountain roads.

Mr. Tinnin congratulated Jim Harlan, a Kaycee student, for using an
unorthodox approach to solve a calculus problem involving what are known
as the Fibonacci numbers. A moment later, he urged a student at Lyman
High School, 360 miles to the southwest, to pay attention.

"Jenn, you look bored to death," Mr. Tinnin said, to the chuckles of
students spread across western Wyoming.

Cozy Hollow Elementary has no video hookup, but it is not primitive. A
satellite dish provides a high-speed Internet connection, and after his
return from lunch, Joe took a seat to practice touch-typing on a new
Apple PowerBook.

The school has no science laboratory, however. For a biology exercise
last fall, Joe collected a horse hair and a fleck of manure from the
ranch yard, and Mrs. Rodgers arranged a visit to Rock River so he could
view them under a microscope.

One reason for making the trip, Mrs. Rodgers said, was to give Joe time
with other students.

"So far my best friends are cows," he said, only half joking. On a visit
to Rock River in his sixth-grade year, he said, he met a nice
fifth-grade girl. He looked for her eagerly during his most recent visit
to the school, but she was gone.

"I'm thinking she moved to Laramie," he said. "I was kind of hoping she
wouldn't. I wish I had her phone number."

When the school day ended at 3 p.m., Joe joined the men in the corral,
where they were slaughtering a cow in a freezing wind. He drove a
tractor with a front-end loader across a pasture to deposit the cow's
entrails on a bone pile.

Mrs. Rodgers lingered for a time in her classroom.

"I like the one-on-one thing," she said. "I get to know what Joe finds
hard and what's easy. But being isolated out here is a big wake-up call.
There are no other teachers to talk to."



-- 
I am not who I think I am
I am not who you think I am
I am who I think you think I am

...or some such shite.