OCR Text |
Show Troubles of the Teacher. Another thing about teacher that is very exhaustive to a woman is Jhe maintenance of discipline. We like to look upon children as the incarnation of innocence and purity. It is right that we should do so. But every once in a while something happens in, school to show the teacher that the acquired and inherited ' seeds of vice and crime received from the past generation exist in the germ in this one. The terrible, but inevitable, conclusion confronts the teacher that in spite of her work the criminals of a few years hence are now in our schools. Petty and hidden though most of the faults of school children seem, yet here they are perplexing, districting and disheartening to the teacher. ' The punishment and correction of moral faults are even more wearing on the teacher than the maintenance of a high spirit of interest all day. Everybody Every-body knows the heartache that comes from' disappointment in finding that some friend is not the fine charactetr he has been Judged to be. Few things are harder than the task of endeavoring endeavor-ing to set aright such a friend. A teacher, especially a woman, takes her class into her heart; each child is a friend; the whole group seems like one family. But there are from thirty, to seventy in it, and among them some who go contraiwise. One disloyal child will wear the nerves of a sympathetic" teacher to shreds. Forty boys sometimes get the devil into each one of them at once. He can't be driven out in these theoretical days by muscle, hence the drain on the teacher's nerves. A father who has only one young rascal at home to drive him to distraction,, can save some idea why good health and iron nerves are a requisite re-quisite for a woman teacher of boys' classes numbering over forty. Good temper is a prime requisite for a woman teacher. It ia her preservation. preserva-tion. The women who take work too seriously, break down first. Irish girls as teachers of boys' classes are unsurpassed. unsur-passed. If it hadn't been for the proverbial pro-verbial lightness of heart of the Irish race, It must have been crushed long since by its own heavy history. These merry young women, in spite of the excessive formalism and system that has encrusted American school management, man-agement, are able to keep the bright side of teaching turned upward. Quick to resent any mean advantage taken of them by a class or a pupil, they will launch an outburst of 'sarcasm, invective invec-tive and correction, ; that, coming from a teacher of another race, would alienate alien-ate the children from her for a long time. But in a few minutes you will hear the whole company, teacher and children, laughing together. I recall hearing through an open transom one day such a tongue lashing given by an Irish teacher that it seemed to me it would drive the big boys to open rebellion. After the storm : was over, some half an hour late, I looked timidly in, and what do you think I saw? The teacher seatedon a high bench with the whole class beside be-side her and around her, looking at the pictures in a huge folio "Picturesque Ireland." "You caught it pretty heavy up in your room thig morning, didn't you?" I said to one of the boys in the hall. "No more than we deserved," he an swered. Another school scene made a deep impression on me. It was a day of the first snowfall; one of those soft, pack-able pack-able snowsMhat is the delight of the small boy and the horror of the schoolmaster school-master and the neighbors. There was a great shouting in the street, and into the office came a big. puffing officer leading a small boy that had dented the official helmet and the official dignity dig-nity with a winter missile aimed not wisely but too well. "Officer" was angry an-gry through and through, and insisted either that I should send for the parent right away or he would haul the youngster to the station house. Someone Some-one told Miss O , an Irish girl, that one of her flock was held by the enemy. In she came, with flashing eyes. "What are you doing with my boy?" she cried. "Give him to me." Then we had a pretty tableau. My lady with one arm aboui the sobbing youngster's neck, pointfhg her other hand defiantly defiant-ly at the law! "I know you, Flanna-gan Flanna-gan you bring this n yourself; you never were a child. You jumped from your high chair to long trousers. You strut around the port so that everybody every-body itches to throw something at you. Now you get out here and don't you dare to touch a boy of mine again." Then he laughed and she laughed, and we all laughed, and that's the kind of Irish spirit that keeps a school alive. That's what I understand by a good temper; plenty of warmth to keep the blood from freezing and plenty of humor hu-mor to cool it with. Principal McAn-drew McAn-drew of New York, in Primary Teacher. |