On Monday, I took advantage of the Historical Society being closed for Columbus Day, to spread out in the reading room and process some nineteenth-century notebooks. Most were from students, but I discovered one that belonged to a teacher.
The book was donated by Mary Hipple Vanderslice, herself a teacher, in 1953. An accompanying letter explains that the notebook contains the tests given to tenth graders by the Montgomery County Superintendent of Schools. The students of each township were tested together at a central site. The notebooks belonged to Rachel A. Yerger of Linfield.
We’ll get to the questions in a minute, but first I wanted to find out more about Rachel A. Yerger. The family file and our good old card catalog turned up nothing, so I tried HSMC’s newest resource – Ancestry. Rachel appeared in the 1900 census, living with her father, sisters, and brother, and working as a teacher at the age of 25.
And here’s arithmetic and history:
So, how did you do?