Amanda had no desire to teach far from her home. "I want to see the
whole United States if I live long enough," she declared, "but I want
to travel through the distant parts of it, not settle there to live.
While I have a home I want to stay near it. So I wish I could get a
school in Lancaster County."
Her wish was granted. There was an opening in Crow Hill, in the little
rural school in which she had received the rudiments of her education.
Amanda applied for the position and was elected.
She brought to that little school several innovations. Her love and
knowledge of nature helped her to make the common studies less
monotonous and more interesting. A Saturday afternoon nutting party
with her pupils afforded a more promising subject for Monday's original
composition than the hackneyed suggestions of the grammar book's "Tell
all you know about the cultivation of coffee." Later, snow forts in the
school-yard impressed the children with the story of Ticonderoga more
indelibly than mere reading about it could have done. During her last
year at Normal, Amanda had read about a school where geography was
taught by the construction of miniature islands, capes, straits,
peninsulas, and so forth, in the school-yard. She directed the older
children in the formation of such a landscape picture. When a
blundering boy slipped and with one bare foot demolished at one stroke
the cape, island and bay, there was much merriment and rivalry for the
honor of rebuilding. The children were almost unanimous in their
affection for the new teacher and approval of her methods of teaching.
Most of them ran home with eager tales concerning the wonderful, funny,
"nice" ways Miss Reist had of teaching school.
However, Crow Hill is no Eden. Some of the older boys laughed at the
"silly ideas" of "that Manda Reist" and disliked the way she taught
geography and made the pupils "play in the dirt and build capes and
islands and the whole blamed geography business right in the school-
yard."
It naturally followed that adverse criticism grew and grew, like
Longfellow's pumpkin, and many curious visitors came to Crow Hill
school. The patrons, taxpayers, directors were concerned and considered
it their duty to drop in and observe how things were being run in that
school. They found that the three R's were still taught efficiently,
even if they were taught with the aid of chestnuts, autumn leaves and
flowers; they were glad to discover that an island, though formed in
the school-yard from dirt and water, was still being defined with the
old standard definition, "An island is a body of land entirely
surrounded by water."
If any other school had graduated Amanda, her position might have been
a trifle precarious, but Millersville Normal School was too well known
and universally approved in Lancaster County to admit of any
questionable suggestions about its recent graduate. Most of the people
who came to inspect came without any antagonistic feeling and they left
convinced that, although some of Amanda Reist's ways were a little
different, the scholars seemed to know their lessons and to progress
satisfactorily.