"I made mention last year about your fine work in basketry, and am glad
to do so again. I like your teacher's idea of utilizing native
material, corn husk, dried grasses and reeds, all from our own Garden
Spot, and a few colored strands of raffia from Madagascar, and forming
them into baskets. This faculty of using apparently useless material
and fashioning from it a useful and beautiful article is one of our
Pennsylvania Dutch heritages and one we should cherish and develop.
"I understand there has been some adverse criticism among a few of the
less liberal patrons of the community in regard to the basket work and
nature study Miss Reist is teaching. Oh, I suppose we must expect that!
Progress is always hampered by sluggish stupidity and contrariness. We
who can see into the future and read the demands of the times must
surely note that the children must be taught more than the knowledge
contained between the covers of our school books. The teacher who can
instil into the hearts of her pupils a feeling of kinship with the wild
creatures of the fields and woods, who can waken in the children an
appreciation of the beauty and symmetry of the flowers, even the weeds,
and at the same time not fail in her duty as a teacher of arithmetic,
history, and so forth, is a real teacher who has the proper conception
of her high calling and is conscientiously striving to carry that
conception into action.
"Directors, let me make this public statement to you, that in Miss
Reist you have a teacher well worthy of your heartiest cooperation. The
danger with us who have been out of school these thirty years or more
is that we expect to see the antiquated methods of our own school days
in operation to-day. We would have the schools stand still while the
whole world moves.
"I feel it is only just to commend a teacher's work when it deserves
commendation, as I consider it my duty to point out the flaws and name
any causes for regret I may discover in her teaching. In this school I
have found one big cause for regret---"
The hard eyes of Mr. Mertzheimer flashed. All through the glowing
praise of the County Superintendent the schemer had sat with head cast
down and face flushed in mortification and anger. Now his head was
erect. Good! That praise was just a bluff! That red-head would get a
good hard knock now! Good enough for her! Now she'd wish she had not
turned down the son of the leading director of Crow Hill school!
Perhaps now she'd be glad to accept the attentions of Lyman. Marriage
would be a welcome solution to her troubles when she lost her position
in the school so near home. The Superintendent was not unmindful of
that "flea in his ear," after all.