Fall Festival?

September 20, 1932 - Minnie told us today that she has a little baby brother, born Saturday nite.  We were to have gone over to see it this evening but we were all too tired.  Allan Francis birthday.
September 21, 1932 - Rained this morning.  The Nurnberg's didn't come to school until noon.  This evening all of us except Evie went over to Nurnberg's to see the baby.
September 22, 1932 - This is the first day of the Fall Festival in Norfolk.  Yesterday's program was postponed until tomorrow.  All of Walker's went.  Read this evening.

I do not know what the Fall Festival is or was.

I was thinking of one-room schoolhouses today when I was watching the national news and a story out of California.  They were reporting on a test school (private and wildly expensive) that has a dozen or so students of different ages.  Because it is in testing there are extra behind-the-scene things going on, so some of what they talked about will not always happen.  The main gist of the news piece was that these kids have only two teachers and all ages meet in the same room.  Lessons are tailored to each student.  For the time being, all are watched by technies in another room to gauge how things are going; the school is very high-tech (piloted by big tech firms) and the students's work on their computers is also monitored in real time.  There are no report cards and students can listen to music with headphones while they do their work.

Obviously this is not like the one-room schoolhouses of Grandma's day, but the feeling seemed somewhat the same.  I do not think it would be all bad, at least for students where smaller is better, to go back to mixed-age, high teacher-to-student ratio learning.  The concept of old schoolhouses was brought up during the coverage and the educator interviewed said, in not so many words, that educational methods are fluid and ever-changing and that some so-called progress (bigger classes, less direct teacher interaction) is not always best.

I would likely have to make a dedicated effort to track that particular school to see how things go from here and if the concept takes off, but I was pleased at the effort to make some old things new again.