"Zenna Henderson - Holding Wonder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Henderson Zenna)

"According to your age, you should be third grade." I traced over his
birthdate. This carbon wasn't the best in the world.

"Yes, and I suppose that counting everything, I'd average out about third
grade, but my reading is poor."

"Why?" Maybe knowing as much as he did about his academic standing, he'd know
the answer to this question.
"I have a block," he said, "I'm afraid-"

"Do you know what your block is?" I pursued, automatically probing for the
point where communication would end.

"I-" his eyes dropped. "I'm not very good in reading," he said. I felt him
folding himself away from me. End of communication.

"Well, here at Rinconcillo, you'll be on a number of levels. We have only one
room and fifteen students, so we all begin our subjects at the level where we
function best-" I looked at him sharply. "And work like mad!"

"Yes, ma'am." We exchanged one understanding glance; then his eyes became
eight-year-old eyes and mine, I knew, teacher eyes. I dismissed him to the
playground and turned to the paper work.

Kroginold, Vincent Lorma, I penciled into my notebook. A lumpy sort of name, I
thought, to match a lumpy sort of student-scholastically speaking.

Let me explain Rinconcillo. Here in the mountainous West, small towns,
exploding into large cities, gulp down all sorts of odd terrain in expanding
their city limits. Here at Winter Wells, city growth has followed the three
intersecting highways for miles out, forming a spidery, six-legged sort of
city. The city limits have followed the growth in swatches about four blocks
wide, which leaves long ridges, and truly ridges-mountainous ones-of non-city
projecting into the city. Consequently, here is Rinconcillo, a one-roomed
school with only 15 students, and only about half a mile from a school system
with eight schools and 4800 students. The only reason this school exists is
the cluster of family units around the MEL (Mathematics Experimental
Laboratory) facilities, and a half dozen fiercely independent ranchers who
stubbornly refuse to be urbanized and cut up into real estate developments or
be city-limited and absorbed into the Winter Wells school system.

As for me-this was my fourth year at Rinconcillo, and I don't know whether
it's being fiercely independent or just stubborn, but I come back each year to
my "little inside corner" tucked quite literally under the curve of a towering
sandstone cliff at the end of a box canyon. The violently pursuing and pursued
traffic, on the two highways sandwiching us, never even suspects we exist.
When I look out into the silence of an early school morning, I still can't
believe that civilization could be anywhere within a hundred miles. Long
shadows under the twisted, ragged oak trees mark the orangy gold of the sand