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An Amish elelementary school on a gravel township road outside
Mount Hope, Ohio, seems like an odd place to look for innovative ideas
for the Hudson schools. This school is right out of "Little House on the
Prairie" -- wood building, two outhouses, two buggies with horses tied
to a hitching post, boys playing baseball, girls jumping rope, two
teachers wearing white bonnets and dresses looking like they were made
from sheets. My grandmother in 1903 at age 15 taught in a similar
school. She qualified by taking the eighth grade twice, but actually had
eight years of experience since at the time, second-graders taught
first-graders, and third-graders taught second-graders, and so on and so
forth.

This school is ideal for evaluating the contribution of a large
amount of physical exercise and highly repetitive role learning to
student achievement. Without electricity and motor vehicles, work on an
Amish farm is done by children, adults and animal power. The physical
work provides children with a large amount of exercise. Amish teachers
know from experience of training farm animals that very repetitive
practice is a powerful teaching tool which they then employ in teaching
children.

Scientifically speaking, a large amount of physical and repetitive
mental exercise is known to map neurological patterns into the brain
which speed up mental processing and increase student ability. A
critical evaluation of the effectiveness of these techniques in this
Amish school might lead to a consideration of how they could be utilized
in the Hudson schools.

Next time you hear about the latest and greatest innovative
developments in education, you might ask if they have been tested on a
horse.

Cecil Wristen, Hudson