Obrázky stránek
PDF
ePub

was I in six hours a day to teach eight fundamental branches of learning to fiftyseven pupils, and do it according to every one's individual bent?" I had discovered that I must have twenty-seven recitations. every day. And with a class of fifteen in the fourth reader and fifteen minutes for recitation, how was I to teach Tommy to follow his historical bent in reading, lead Jimmy to love Robert Louis Stevenson, and cultivate Mary in literature, and give Bob the desired start in political research? In my dumb, puzzled groping at that time I could see no way of doing anything to that class but teach it the fourth reader.

A country school? To be sure; but isn't two thirds of the public school system in the country? Maybe there are fewer pupils in some rural schools; and yet in the next school that I taught I had ninetyseven, with thirty in the primer class, and a class of algebra and physiology after school hours. And I may add right here, that in all my subsequent teaching I found in varying degree the same difficulties, the same problems, as in this first school.

I made more discoveries the next day and the next. Before the week was out I had it borne in on me that to watch fifty-seven restless, nondescript descendants of Adam and Eve, Judas Iscariot, Lucretia Borgia, and a few other worthy unworthies, and at the same time assign and hear twenty-seven recitations every six hours, was a pretty big job. There was only one thing to be done; nail my flag to the masthead of McGuffey's reader and Ray's arithmetic, and go in soul and body to fight human nature and the demons of ignorance. I knew that unless I taught them to read, the door would be shut on most of them. In a few years - three or five nearly all of them would be out of school; and unless they had learned to follow the printed page and get its meaning, the agricultural paper, the mechanics' journal, the newspaper, the religious journal, the magazine, would fail to carry their helpful message to them; and their mental development would be arrested at the very beginning. I had to teach them how to write, and, of course, I had to teach arithmetic. If I didn't "learn 'em to do their sums" thoroughly I would be

everlastingly and eternally damned in the Bean Ridge district - and all adjacent territory.

I was glad when Friday and four o'clock came. Even now I never hear a clock strike four that I do not unconsciously lean back and say "Thank the Lord," and Friday late in the afternoon will be my favorite day as long as I live. The school had been curious and quiet Monday; not so curious nor quiet Tuesday; restless Thursday; and by Friday the noise had grown to resemble the flight of locusts. When the bell rang Friday at afternoon recess, Slimmy came in several minutes late; and, glancing out of the window, I saw Chuck throwing up a ball to get one more whack at it with his bat. The B geography class was reciting when he sauntered in and dropped with an audible thump into his seat. When I looked around I caught a very distinct wink at Slimmy. I did not say anything. I would wait until Monday and think it over.

As I returned to my boarding place that afternoon I felt more than a faint subconscious flutter of uneasiness. I had been very kind, very reasonable, and gentle with the pupils. Yet there had been too much noise the last two days. I must do something about it; and you are always uncomfortable when you have to do something about it.

My days were passed in aggravated anxiety and my nights in feverish dread. I would dodge a member of the school board as though he had the bubonic plague. I expected every Friday to get a request to resign.

At length I rose up and determined to take radical steps. I promulgated a rule: "There shall be no whispering." Not a word. The slightest breath that shaped itself into an audible request for a "pencil" should be punished rigorously. That would make it easy. Nobody could accuse me of partiality. Everybody who whispered would be kept in at recess.

This was the middle of October. During all my worries and anxieties there had been a few consolations—at least two. Luke, the thin-faced, underfed, shabby boy in the back seat in the aisle row, ate up his studies like a locust on a green limb. I

And Eudora vigilance to She learned

never saw such a fierce passion for knowledge. He heeded everything I said with worshipful attention, and attacked every lesson as though it were a personal enemy of mine to be demolished. watched with ever constant meet my expectations of her. quite as readily as Luke, but hers was a sort of joyous effort; she revelled in her studies; and was happiest when some task led her imagination far afield. She had never offended in the slightest; never by word or act, not even by accident, had she disturbed the faintest ripple of order.

I had promulgated the no-whispering order on a Monday morning. Everything had been quiet. I started to let the school out for the morning recess. I had not seen nor heard a whisper. Arthur Bottler's hand flew up; Arthur Bottler's meddlesome voice piped out:

"Eudora whispered!"

Eudora turned very pale, her eyes went down to her desk, and then sought mine in a sort of scared appeal.

"Did you?" I asked.

"Yes I asked Mary for her arithmetic." Mary was her seatmate.

"Then I guess you will have to stay in." A deep flush of shame and mortification spread over her sensitive face; her lips trembled - Eudora, who had never been punished in school, was the first victim of my new iron-clad rule, while all the rest, guying, laughing, boisterous ones, passed out whooping and yelling.

Eudora's head slowly sank upon the desk before her; and her shoulders rose and fell in a slow sob. She had tried so hard to be perfect; she had wanted to do exactly right with me; just as I had hoped to be perfect before the district - and we had both failed.

Wrath smoldered in me all the rest of the day; the raw sort of wrath that comes when you feel yourself one third in the wrong and two thirds the victim of circumstances. I surely kept a vigilant eye, for by the evening's recess I had garnered eighteen whispers in a little note book, and read the names and ordered them to remain in.

Things drifted after that. There were periods of calm; and again tempestuous

.

times when things approached the riot stage. I invented a number of original forms of moral suasion.

One by one I had forsaken the tenets of my teachers' psychology until all were abandoned but one I clung to that. Never inflict corporal punishment. The teacher who can not govern without the rod should resign. That was deeply ground into me. I did not want to resign, and so I invented other punishments instead of the rod.

My first big contact with parenthood occurred the week before Thanksgiving. I had vowed that no matter what happened I would not use physical violence. But I think the school knew me better than I knew myself, or things would have been worse than they were. Slimmy and Chuck and several others had been baiting me, slowly, cautiously, but constantly encroaching a little here and there. Slimmy took the lead, for he was the largest much larger and older than I.

The boys had been slow about coming in when the bell rang. They tarried a little longer each time.

One day Slimmy stayed out ten minutes. At the evening recess, I remarked: "Slimmy may remain in to make up for the time he lost at noon."

Slimmy gave Chuck a wink, and deliberately got up and went out. several violet rays before my eyes, but held in. When I dismissed at four, I stationed myself at the door, and asked Slimmy to keep his seat.

Slimmy kept it. "Now," I said, dropping psychological formulas, "you will apologize in the morning for your disobedience do it before the whole school, or you will take your books and go home and not come back."

Slimmy took his books. But early next morning his father came back.

He began to talk like a man who is looking for trouble and does not want any excuse for not having it. He laid the law down flat that his boy was coming back to school and was not going to apologize. The other boys had stayed out late at recess and never been kept in; and his boy was just as good as any of them and I couldn't run any "Sandy" over him.

I tried to explain, and at the same time make it clear that Slimmy was not coming back. The interview began to take a rather serious turn. I am glad that I never found out what the result would have been if Melvin Robins, the president of the board, had not arrived just then. Robins had heard from his children about the "Slimmy" affair, had guessed there would be trouble, and had ridden over. He jumped off his horse and began to talk; the gist of it was that Slimmy would do exactly what the teacher said, or stay out. And moreover Slimmy's father would stay off the school premises. Slimmy's father left, and Slimmy spent the rest of the winter hunting rabbits and telling the boys what he was going to do to me.

Expelling Slimmy checked the stream of disorder a little but did not stop it. Trouble accumulated at compound interest. I was working feverishly trying to help the school, trying until my eyes ached to get the classes ahead, and encourage the backward ones. Yet every day things happened that sent me home in a torment of failure.

I worried over all these things, individuually and collectively. Each offered a problem for settlement, each added to the miserable uncertain feeling that something had to be done about it and that it was not nearly all right with the world. But the worst of it was my ideals had toppled, and the vision was gone.

The unruly spirit had been gaining a little all the time. Chuck, who knew and cared less about books than a rat does about roses, had given me constant trouble. Outwardly conforming to my directions, his impudence and sullenness in the school room, his bullying on the playground, gave me constant trouble. Since Slimmy was expelled, he was the leader. Though there were older boys, he was chunky, very muscular, and weighed a hundred and thirty pounds.

Friday all day I felt a vague uneasiness. I had seen looks between Chuck and some of the other big boys that I did not like. After the evening recess, when I rang the bell, the girls and some small boys came trooping in. The big boys, fifteen

of them, did not come. I waited five, ten minutes. Then they came straggling in from the woods. Some of them looked sheepish, some looked as though they were not well pleased with themselves. But Chuck puffed and slammed the books about his desk in a self-gratified way. did not say anything but looked them over carefully to see that they were all in. They were all there but Luke, my prize scholar.

I called the first class and, while it was at the board, sauntered back to Jim Coggins's desk.

"Jim," I said in an undertone, "where is Luke Elton?"

Jim squirmed a little uneasily in his seat "I dunno went home I reckon." "Why?" The question went quick and straight.

"Oh, I dunno-I think he said he wasn't feeling very well."

I was distinctly uneasy. I skipped the next three recitations and dismissed at three o'clock. I would interview the boys about being late, Monday morning.

I closed the school house hastily and started off down the ridge road toward Elton's. The farther I went the more uneasy I became, and the faster I walked. I had not gone a mile when I saw Luke ahead of me. He was walking very slowly. I ran forward.

His lip was cut and blood was over his face and clothes; his face was bruised and already his eyes were swollen shut, and there was an ugly mark on his neck at the base of the skull. I took him to the creek and washed his face and then took him home.

I went for a doctor, who said on examination that the boy's weakened system and nervousness were likely to make his hurts serious.

As I went home I turned to the right and stopped at Coggins's. Jim was out in the field shucking corn from the shock. I headed straight toward him and Jim saw something in the way I came that made his feet restless to run.

"Jim," I was in easy reach before 1 spoke, "what happened to Luke Elton?" Jim made just one halting evasion and then he told it eagerly.

Oh, it was a horrid story. It made my blood boil as it would yours, and I'll save you the boiling by not telling it.

"I didn't have nothing to do with it," whimpered Jim, "none of us did but Chuck."

"No," I said, "you great, cowardly brute, you infamous gang of brutes! -you stood by and saw him do that."

Sunday evening I went out into the thicket, and selected ten young hickory sprouts of last year's growth, nearly an inch in diameter at the big end, four feet long, smooth and straight.

Then I went to bed and slept better than I had in months.

I was at the school house early next morning, and smuggled the gads in without any of the pupils seeing. I hid them on the floor behind my desk.

When school was called there was a slight sense of uneasiness, but Chuck was in his seat, impudent and self-assured as ever. I saw him wink at several of the boys. Without any preliminaries I said: "Chuck, come up here."

I

Chuck did not budge. Instead, I saw him bracing his feet under the desk. waited about ten seconds and then went after him.

When I had landed him on the platform by my desk, I laid him face downward and took off his coat. He was thoroughly scared by that time. This was a new sort of moral suasion.

"Stand up!" I ordered. He stood. I brought out that bundle of hickory gads, and two of them were shredded like hemp strings when I was done.

"Now," I said, when I had deposited the limp and lacerated, moaning, whimpering young brute in his seat, "Tom Murphy, I want you next."

[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

But they didn't come. And the order that I had in that school the rest of the week scared me. It was so still that sometimes I listened to my watch tick to see if I was not deaf.

There was trouble and annoyance at Bean Ridge during the rest of school; but my order was good. I had quite as plentiful complaints of too much strictness as I had had the other way. But I fought it through.

Lots of times I examined myself and felt what a fearful failure I had been. I could scarcely see a thing of importance that I had accomplished. And yet I discovered, afterward, that I had taught a great many things that I had not tried to teach. I found that a teacher teaches most unconsciously; that he is more valuable, or invaluable, than any of his teachings. I discovered that what was in me of ambition, of high ideals, of standards of conduct, somehow impressed itself on the school. I found that my ambition got into the brains of many of the pupils; and of that school, primitive and tempestuous as it was, seven at least are now holding positions of high honor and trust; five are happy in useful professional work — and many others are doing good honest living. After all, it is the teacher who is the doorand through his spirit the pupils are to walk to higher fields of hope and endeavor.

I still felt at the close of school that I was an utter failure, that my hopes were blasted, the vision gone. I would never get another school. I had not had one compliment, not one word of encouragement nothing but complaint during the whole six months.

But when the school was dismissed, Melvin Robins to my surprise came up and shook hands with me.

"You ain't done near as bad as some beginners," he said, encouragingly.

THE PROGRESS OF SIMPLER MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT

HE simplification of municipal government that began twelve years ago with the "Galveston plan" and the “Des Moines plan” of government by commission has found hearty acceptance among the smaller cities of the United States. Two hundred and fifty such cities are now managing their affairs under the commission form of government. Larger communities are adopting the plan as its success is repeatedly demonstrated. Jersey City, with a population of 267,779, accepted the new system at the municipal election last April, and is now one of the largest municipalities under commission government.

A still newer type of management, that is perhaps especially adapted to the needs of smaller communities, is beginning to be copied. This is the "city manager plan," which was first successfully operated in Staunton, Va., beginning five years ago. This experiment was described in the WORLD'S WORK for December, 1911. Probably the ideal man for city manager is a practical engineer, for the problems of municipal efficiency are largely engineering and business problems. The success of the plan in Staunton is credited principally to the selection of an engineer for the task, and most of the cities that have elected to try the method have also chosen an engineer for the job.

Thus, when Hancock, Mich., a year ago, accepted the city manager plan, the mayor chose Mr. William W. Stockly to carry out its purposes. The following account of his administration is condensed from a letter from a correspondent in Michigan:

Mr. William W. Stockly is a shrewd Yankee of mature years and experience; a civil engineer who has run railroads through the rockiest portions of the upper peninsula of Michigan, and a man whose knowledge of municipal engineering, gleaned from many years' service, is more extensive than that of

[blocks in formation]

Mr. Stockly's first act — or, more properly, his first attempt to act was to enforce the collection of water rentals, which had fallen several thousand dollars in arrears. He saw no reason why patrons of the public should not pay their bills as promptly and as willingly as patrons of private corporations. With a monkey-wrench as his emblem of authority, shutting off the water from the premises of he set out, after due notice, upon his task of those who had refused to pay up. Certain influential men objected, and they began immediately a series of bitter attacks upon the city manager that are still continued. Mr. Stockly went his way, however, performing to the very best of his ability the duties which had been entrusted to him. He established a systematic collection of garbage which had never before been known in Hancock. Theretofore garbage had been permitted to accumulate during the fall and winter, to be hauled away when it got too noisome in the spring. If people wanted to be clean and to avoid breeding germs upon their premises, they were compelled to engage a dray at exorbitant cost to remove their garbage. A contract for the collection of garbage was let to the owner of a number of teams; every resident was compelled to provide a suitable utensil for the storage of the garbage, and Hancock saved in doctors' bills last summer many times the cost of the innovation.

Mr. Stockly placed the ban on surface closets; insisted that foreign residents refrain from making cattlepens and pigsties of their basements; rooted insanitary bakeries out of basements; compelled citizens to make use of the sewers in preference to open ditches; saw that the streets were swept and sprinkled, and that the germ-laden dust should have as little opportunity as possible to circulate.

In the spring, when the winter's mass of snow and ice departed, leaving its usual deposit of filth, he had men out with hose and scrub

brushes, scouring the pavements. The alleys

« PředchozíPokračovat »