Chapter 17
Amberg, Upper Palatinate
August 1635
The dowager countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach called on Rector Muselius to ask where the students at the normal school would be sent for their student teaching? Only to the towns? If so, she would be happy to welcome them to Sulzbach and Weiden. But why invoke such a limit, when one of the main purposes of the normal school was improving the teaching levels in the village schools? As it happened, Floß was a large village; larger than many towns. The school had nearly a hundred students, close to half of them girls; with the pastor currently tutoring ten or so of the sixty boys in Latin so that they could go on the secondary education. Why not there?
Not to mention that the influence of such progressive students, preferably Lutheran ones, might assist in reducing the level of local hostility toward her newly established Jewish settlements, she said enticingly.
Three wagons pulled up outside the Collegium. The student contingent dispatched from the somewhat haphazard teacher training program that Grantville had been running at the middle school for the past five years had arrived. A mixture of up-timers and down-timers, at various levels of progress through the program, both male and female.
All of the up-timers were girls.
Once they settled in to the dorm, Paolo and Carlo invited them to come see some business machines.
He coaxed Sebastian Kellermeister into meeting them there for introductions that would facilitate his doing a feature article on the up-time students newly arrived at the normal school.
“He offered me an exclusive,” Kellermeister said.
“We call it a scoop.” Dee Hardy giggled.
He started talking about the other reporters. “Then there’s Stentzel Grube at the Current Tidings.”
“Stentzel?” Dee thought she had heard a lot of German names over the last five years, but that one was new to her.
“Stentzel’s from Moravia. That’s a nickname for Stanislas.”
“Oh, okay. We had some Polish families around Grantville. There were a couple of guys named Stanislas. Stan Matowski. Stan Szymanski.” She relaxed into the comfort of something that she could feel that she was at least kind of familiar with, even if it wasn’t exactly the same.
Carlo invited each of the students to try out the machine.
Dee’s turn brought an ouchie. “It’s a lot harder to get a paper cut from down-time rag paper than it was from up-time typing paper or copy paper—even notebook paper. That stuff was sharp.” She sucked her thumb. “But when you do manage to get one of the things, it still hurts as much.”
Sebastian had never seen anything quite as fascinating as the skinny, narrow-shouldered, up-time girl, her dark brown hair falling straight to her shoulders from a center part, her brown eyes big and round, standing next to a duplicating machine and sucking her thumb.
He didn’t even hear Carlo expounding on the theme that paper quality was always a problem, and that in Amberg, since the forced sale of Michael Forster’s paper mill a dozen years earlier it was, he had heard, ongoing, so the city council seriously needed to put someone in charge of inspecting paper quality, as he remembered that a dozen or more so years ago when the regiment in which he Paolo were serving at the time was stationed in the Netherlands…