Piney Grove Elementary Students and Superintendent Hop in a Model T and Motor to 1925

Don Martin and Natalie Strange with Piney Grove Elementary Students

When Superintendent Don Martin dropped by Piney Grove Elementary School this morning to read the first chapter of The Secret School to the students gathered in the gym, he made a point to stop along the way and talk about any words he thought some students might not know.

He made stops at such words as “privies,” “miserly” and “humiliated.”

“If you are humiliated, how do you feel?” he asked the students.

“Embarrassed,” suggested one student.

“Embarrassed, exactly,” he said and returned to the novel by Avi. Set in rural Colorado in 1925, it tells the story of a 14-year-old girl named Ida Bidson who secretly keeps a school going after the head of the school board decides to shut down the one-room schoolhouse when the teacher has to leave before the end of the school year.

Afterward, students said they appreciated Dr. Martin making sure that they understood all the words.

“I think he was good at explaining the words we didn’t know,” said Jacqueline Inscho, a fourth-grader.

“It was good,” said fellow fourth-grader, Tyler Williams.

Natalie Strange, the media coordinator at Piney Grove, was dressed for the day as a teacher might have dressed in 1925. She invited Dr. Martin to read the first chapter as a way to kick off a reading project for third-, fourth- and fifth-graders. In the coming days, they will all be reading The Secret School.

“I really want to start,” said Jacqueline.



Joe Huygens with his 1917 Model T

 The chapter that Dr. Martin read opens with Ida, who is in the eighth-grade, and her younger brother, Felix, driving a Model T to the one-room school house. Ida has sit on her knees to get high enough to see out of the car, which means that Felix has to crouch in the floorboard and operate the pedals. So he can’t see where they are going.

The students had no trouble visualizing that Model T. Strange invited Joe Huygens, a member of the Old Salem Chapter of the Antique Automobile Club of America and of the Tarheels Model T Club, to visit the school on Monday with his 1917 Model T. So they had just spent time with a real Model T.

Before he began reading the chapter, Dr. Martin talked to the students about how much he enjoys reading. “I read every night before I go to bed,” he said.

They were suitably impressed when he told them he was more than 900 pages into his current book. (Winter of the World by Ken Follett, he said when asked later.) “All the people in the book are my friends now,” he said. “I’m going to miss them.”