Gary Schoening: Transcript

One-Room Schoolhouse Lore, Mineola
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My name is Gary Schoening, and I was born and raised in a farmhouse two and a half miles south of Mineola, Iowa, which is a small unincorporated village in Mills County.

I am currently a school teacher, work for the Alegent—Glenwood School District. I teach at the Alegent Health Pmic unit, which is a dual purpose facility, psychiatric and drug/alcohol treatment program for teenagers, teaching kids from as low as seventh grade and up to the twelfth grade in all of their core courses. The kids come from all over the State, and my major job is to see to it that after their 90-day stay with us, they are not behind in their school work.

We, of course, went to a country school back at that time, since I was born in ‘42. Country schools existed in Mills County until ‘62, so my first nine years of education, counting kindergarten—I wasn’t held back a year—the first nine years of education, kindergarten through 8th grade, was in a one-room country schoolhouse called Sand Hollow.

And it was a half mile from our farm. And so every day we’d walk to school, if we couldn’t con somebody out of a ride. Everybody talks about walking to their country school, but there are days when we got rides, too. Walked usually with the neighbor kids. There would be neighbor kids that had to walk further than I did, but we’d usually wait, and we’d walk together. Had good times—part of all we’re going to celebrate when we have the rural school reunion.

You’re talking to the kid that graduated the top of his class—also the middle, also the bottom. I was the only kid in my class. But starting out in the very beginning, your first graders you listened to the second graders’ lessons; you listened to the third graders’ lessons. When the fourth and the fifth graders are doing long division on the board, and you’re a first grader, you look in amazement as they’re doing it. But by the time you get up there, you already know how to do it.

The seventh and eighth graders end up helping the fifth, sixth and fourth graders. The teacher can’t do it all. So if a fourth grader was having a problem, quite often—and that was quite an honor to be chosen the helper. That meant the teacher had enough faith in you to help somebody else in the math, or to help somebody else in their studies.

If you went back through and checked things in a lot of your communities, you will find that the country school kids—when they finally went to high school at whatever larger town that they went to—got along and graduated right up there with the rest of the city kids. So I don’t feel we were hurt. Possibly in science, possibly in art and music we were at a little disadvantage in the country schools, depending upon your teacher.

When I left teaching the first time—I taught juniors—I was invited back up to their graduation a year after I had left. And by that time I had raised some hogs and shipped them off to market. Even though a pickup load of hogs that brought in somewhere between a thousand and eleven hundred dollars a pickup load was pretty rewarding, more rewarding than what the teaching was paying, to watch those kids walk down that aisle and say just maybe, just maybe you taught one of them one thing that will do them some good the rest of their life, was more satisfying than kicking this hog in the butt, trying to get it up the chute.

And I don’t know. It was just a little more satisfaction to me.