The Little Schoolhouse by the River

A Young Teacher's Odyssey

This is the true story as told by the author of one memorable year teaching elementary school.
In the late summer of 1981, freshly minted with a college degree Marvin headed to Western Colorado. He had been hired to be the only teacher in a multigrade one-room church school. The board had estimated he would have four to six grades and probably ten, maybe twelve students. But he had been hearing rumors, more students were coming. And by September he had twenty-one students in all eight grades. The education supervisor from over the mountains had never seen one teacher have such a load. Never. Not in his thirty plus years.
But it was also a year where Marvin discovered his love for the river and the mountains. It was a year marked by weekly winter P.E. ski trips to Sunlight Moutain. It was a year marked by a pet deer in the classroom. (No, this is not Disney.) It was a year marked by arriving early in the morning during the winter to shovel coal in the furnace. And yes, there were times when he was lonely, being single and all. And then there was the spark of a romance. But mostly it was a year in which he was constantly dumbfounded by how much he loved his students and how much they loved him. Finally, it was the year when he had to examine himself seriously and make a decision on who he would be.