In my nearly 40 years of working in education - many of them for schools in rural Wyoming and Missouri - I have come to respect the expression, "You can't get there from here." When I asked for help finding my way to some remote community I'd never visited, I often encountered that very phrase, followed by directions that were defined by time rather than distance: "Follow that first road north of town for about an hour - unless it's raining, and then it could be longer. Turn when you see the old cement bridge, and it's another half hour, ­unless the Joneses are ­moving their herd, which cou...