Reveries of a Schoolmaster Part 1

Reveries of a Schoolmaster.

by Francis B. Pearson.

CHAPTER I

IN MEDIAS RES

I am rather glad now that I took a little dip (one could scarce call it a baptism) into the Latin, and especially into Horace, for that good soul gave me the expression _in medias res_. That is a forceful expression, right to the heart of things, and applies equally well to the writing of a composition or the eating of a watermelon. Those who have crossed the Channel, from Folkstone to Boulogne, know that the stanch little s.h.i.+p _Invicta_ had scarcely left dock when they were _in medias res_. They were conscious of it, too, if indeed they were conscious of anything not strictly personal to themselves. This expression admits us at once to the light and warmth (if such there be) of the inner temple nor keeps us s.h.i.+vering out in the vestibule.

Writers of biography are wont to keep us waiting too long for happenings that are really worth our while. They tell us that some one was born at such a time, as if that were really important. Why, anybody can be born, but it requires some years to determine whether his being born was a matter of importance either to himself or to others. When I write my biographical sketch of William Shakespeare I shall say that in a certain year he wrote "Hamlet," which fact clearly justified his being born so many years earlier.

The good old lady said of her pastor: "He enters the pulpit, takes his text, and then the dear man just goes everywhere preaching the Gospel." That man had a special apt.i.tude for the _in medias res_ method of procedure. Many children in school who are not versed in Latin would be glad to have their teachers endowed with this apt.i.tude. They are impatient of preliminaries, both in the school and at the dinner-table. And it is pretty difficult to discover just where childhood leaves off in this respect.

So I am grateful to Horace for the expression. Having started right in the midst of things, one can never get off the subject, and that is a great comfort. Sometimes college graduates confess (or perhaps boast) that they have forgotten their Latin. I fear to follow their example lest my neighbor, who often drops in for a friendly chat, might get to wondering whether I have not also forgotten much of the English I am supposed to have acquired in college. He might regard my English as quite as feeble when compared with Shakespeare or Milton as my Latin when compared with Cicero or Virgil. So I take counsel with prudence and keep silent on the subject of Latin.

When I am taking a stroll in the woods, as I delight to do in the autumn-time, laundering my soul with the gorgeous colors, the music of the rustling leaves, the majestic silences, and the sounds that are less and more than sounds, I often wonder, when I take one bypath, what experiences I might have had if I had taken the other.

I'll never know, of course, but I keep on wondering. So it is with this Latin. I wonder how much worse matters could or would have been if I had never studied it at all. As the old man said to the young fellow who consulted him as to getting married: "You'll be sorry if you do, and sorry if you don't." I used to feel a sort of pity for my pupils to think how they would have had no education at all if they had not had me as their teacher; now I am beginning to wonder how much further along they might have been if they had had some other teacher. But probably most of the misfits in life are in the imagination, after all. We all think the huckleberries are more abundant on the other bush.

Hoeing potatoes is a calm, serene, dignified, and philosophical enterprise. But at bottom it is much the same in principle as teaching school. In my potato-patch I am merely trying to create situations that are favorable to growth, and in the school I can do neither more nor better. I cannot cause either boys or potatoes to grow. If I could, I'd certainly have the process patented. I know no more about how potatoes grow than I do about the fourth dimension or the unearned increment. But they grow in spite of my ignorance, and I know that there are certain conditions in which they flourish.

So the best I can do is to make conditions favorable. Nor do I bother about the weeds. I just centre my attention and my hoe upon loosening the soil and let the weeds look out for themselves. Hoeing potatoes is a synthetic process, but cutting weeds is a.n.a.lytic, and synthesis is better, both for potatoes and for boys. In good time, if the boy is kept growing, he will have outgrown his stone-bruises, his chapped hands, his freckles, his warts, and his physical and spiritual awkwardness. The weeds will have disappeared.

The potato-patch is your true pedagogical laboratory and conservatory. If one cannot learn pedagogy there it is no fault of the potato-patch. Horace must have thought of _in medias res_ while hoeing potatoes. There is no other way to do it, and that is bed-rock pedagogy. Just to get right at the work and do it, that's the very thing the teacher is striving toward. Here among my potatoes I am actuated by motives, I invest the subject with human interest, I experience motor activities, I react, I function, and I go so far as to evaluate. Indeed, I run the entire gamut. And then, when I am lying beneath the canopy of the wide-spreading tree, I do a bit of research work in trying to locate the sorest muscle. And, as to efficiency, well, I give myself a high grade in that and shall pa.s.s _c.u.m laude_ it the matter is left to me. If our grading were based upon effort rather than achievement, I could bring my aching back into court, if not my potatoes. But our system of grading in the schools demands potatoes, no matter much how obtained, with scant credit for backaches.

We have farm ballads and farm arithmetics, but as yet no one has written for us a book on farm pedagogy. I'd do it myself but for the feeling that some Strayer, or McMurry, or O'Shea will get right at it as soon as he has come upon this suggestion. That's my one great trouble. The other fellow has the thing done before I can get around to it. I would have written "The Message to Garcia," but Mr. Hubbard antic.i.p.ated me. Then, I was just ready to write a luminous description of Yellowstone Falls when I happened upon the one that DeWitt Talmage wrote, and I could see no reason for writing another.

So it is. I seem always to be just too late. I wish now that I had written "Recessional" before Kipling got to it. No doubt, the same thing will happen with my farm pedagogy. If one could only stake a claim in all this matter of writing as they do in the mining regions, the whole thing would be simplified. I'd stake my claim on farm pedagogy and then go on hoeing my potatoes while thinking out what to say on the subject.

Whoever writes the book will do well to show how catching a boy is a.n.a.logous to catching a colt out in the pasture. Both feats require tact and, at the very least, horse-sense. The other day I wanted to catch my colt and went out to the pasture for that purpose. There is a hill in the pasture, and I went to the top of this and saw the colt at the far side of the pasture in what we call the swale--low, wet ground, where weeds abound. I didn't want to get my shoes soiled, so I stood on the hill and called and called. The colt looked up now and then and then went on with his own affairs. In my chagrin I was just about ready to get angry when it occurred to me that the colt wasn't angry, and that I ought to show as good sense as a mere horse.

That reflection relieved the tension somewhat, and I thought it wise to meditate a bit. Here am I; yonder is the colt. I want him; he doesn't want me. He will not come to me; so I must go to him. Then, what? Oh, yes, native interests--that's it, native interests. I'm much obliged to Professor James for reminding me. Now, just what are the native interests of a colt? Why, oats, of course. So, I must return to the barn and get a pail of oats. An empty pail might do once, but never again. So I must have oats in my pail. Either a colt or a boy becomes shy after he has once been deceived. The boy who fails to get oats in the cla.s.sroom to-day, will shy off from the teacher to-morrow. He will not even accept her statement that there is oats in the pail, for yesterday the pail was empty--nothing but sound.

But even with pail and oats I had to go to the colt, getting my shoes soiled and my clothes torn, but there was no other way. I must begin where the colt (or boy) is, as the book on pedagogy says. I wanted to stay on the hill where everything was agreeable, but that wouldn't get the colt. Now, if Mr. Charles H. Judd cares to elaborate this outline, I urge no objection and shall not claim the protection of copyright. I shall be only too glad to have him make clear to all of us the pedagogical recipe for catching colts and boys.

CHAPTER II

RETROSPECT

Mr. Patrick Henry was probably correct in saying that there is no way of judging the future but by the past, and, to my thinking, he might well have included the present along with the future. Today is better or worse than yesterday or some other day in the past, just as this cherry pie is better or worse than some past cherry pie. But even this pie may seem a bit less glorious than the pies of the past, because of my jaded appet.i.te--a fact that is easily lost sight of.

Folks who extol the glories of the good old times may be forgetting that they are not able to relive the emotions that put the zest into those past events. We used to go to "big meeting" in a two-horse sled, with the wagon-body half filled with hay and heaped high with blankets and robes. The mercury might be low in the tube, but we recked not of that. Our indifference to climatic conditions was not due alone to the wealth of robes and blankets, but the proximity of another member of the human family may have had something to do with it. If we could reconstruct the emotional life of those good old times, the physical conditions would take their rightful place as a background.

If we could only bring back the appet.i.te of former years we might find this pie better than the pies of old. The good brother who seems to think the textbooks of his boyhood days were better than the modern ones forgets that along with the old-time textbooks went skating, rabbit-hunting, s...o...b..lling, coasting, fis.h.i.+ng, sock-up, bull-pen, two-old-cat, townball, and s.h.i.+nny-on-the-ice. He is probably confusing those majors with the text-book minor. His criticism of things and books modern is probably a voicing of his regret that he has lost his zeal for the fun and frolic of youth. If he could but drink a few copious drafts from the Fountain of Youth, the books of the present might not seem so inferior after all. The bread and apple-b.u.t.ter stage of our hero's career may seem to dim the l.u.s.tre of the later porterhouse steak, but with all the glory of the halcyon days of yore it is to be noted that he rides in an automobile and not in an ox-cart, and prefers electricity to the good old oil-lamp.

I concede with enthusiasm the joys of bygone days, and would be glad to repeat those experiences with sundry very specific reservations and exceptions. That thick bread with its generous anointing of apple b.u.t.ter discounted all the nectar and ambrosia of the books and left its marks upon the character as well as the features of the recipient. The mouth waters even now as I recall the bill of fare plus the appet.i.te. But if I were going back to the good old days I'd like to take some of the modern improvements along with me. It thrills me to consider the modern school credits for home work with all the "57 varieties" as an integral feature of the good old days.

Alas, how much we missed by not knowing about all this! What miracles might have been wrought had we and our teachers only known!

Poor, ignorant teachers! Little did they dream that such wondrous things could ever be. Life might have been made a glad, sweet song for us had it been supplied with these modern attachments. I spent many weary hours over partial payments in Ray's Third Part, when I might have been brus.h.i.+ng my teeth or combing my hair instead. Then, instead of threading the mazes of Greene's a.n.a.lysis and parsing "Thanatopsis," I might just as well have been asleep in the haymow, where ventilation was super-abundant. How proudly could I have produced the home certificate as to my haymow experience and received an exhilarating grade in grammar!

Just here I interrupt myself to let the imagination follow me homeward on the days when grades were issued. The triumphal processions of the Romans would have been mild by comparison. The arch look upon my face, the martial mien, and the flas.h.i.+ng eye all betoken the real hero. Then the pride of that home, the sumptuous feast of chicken and angel-food cake, and the parental acclaim--all befitting the stanch upholder of the family honor. Of course, nothing like this ever really happened, which goes to prove that I was born years too early in the world's history. The more I think of this the more acute is my sympathy with Maud Muller. That girl and I could sigh a duet thinking what might have been. Why, I might have had my college degree while still wearing short trousers. I was something of an adept at milking cows and could soon have eliminated the entire algebra by the method of subst.i.tution. Milking the cows was one of my regular tasks, anyhow, and I could thus have combined business with pleasure. And if by riding a horse to water I could have gained immunity from the _Commentaries_ by one Julius Caesar, full l.u.s.tily would I have shouted, _a la_ Richard III: "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

One man advocates the plan of promoting pupils in the schools on the basis of character, and this plan strongly appeals to me as right, plausible, and altogether feasible. Had this been proposed when I was a schoolboy I probably should have made a few conditions, or at least have asked a few questions. I should certainly have wanted to know who was to be the judge in the matter, and what was his definition of character. Much would have depended upon that. If he had decreed that cruelty to animals indicates a lack of character and then proceeded to denominate as cruelty to animals such innocent diversions as shooting woodp.e.c.k.e.rs in a cherry-tree with a Flobert rifle, or smoking chipmunks out from a hollow log, or tying a strip of red flannel to a hen's tail to take her mind off the task of trying to hatch a door-k.n.o.b, or tying a tin can to a dog's tail to encourage him in his laudable enterprise of demonstrating the principle of uniformly accelerated motion--if he had included these and other such like harmless antidotes for ennui in his category, I should certainly have asked to be excused from his character curriculum and should have pursued the even tenor of my ways, splitting kindling, currying the horse, was.h.i.+ng the buggy, carrying water from the pump to the kitchen and saying, "Thank you," to my elders as the more agreeable avenue of promotion.

If we had had character credits in the good old days I might have won distinction in school and been saved much embarra.s.sment in later years. Instead of learning the lat.i.tude and longitude of Madagascar, Chattahoochee, and Kamchatka, I might have received high grades in geography by abstaining from the chewing of gum, by not wearing my hands in my trousers-pockets, by walking instead of ambling or slouching, by wiping the mud from my shoes before entering the house, by a personally conducted tour through the realms of manicuring, and by learning the position and use of the hat-rack. Getting no school credits for such incidental minors in the great scheme of life, I grew careless and indifferent and acquired a reputation that I do not care to dwell upon. If those who had me in charge, or thought they had, had only been wise and given me school credits for all these things, what a model boy I might have been!

Why, I would have swallowed my pride, donned a kitchen ap.r.o.n, and washed the supper dishes, and no normal boy enjoys that ceremony. By making pa.s.ses over the dishes I should have been exorcising the spooks of cube root, and that would have been worth some personal sacrifice. What a boon it would have been for the home folks too!

They could have indulged their penchant for literary exercises, sitting in the parlor making out certificates for me to carry to my teacher next day, and so all the rough places in the home would have been made smooth. But the crowning achievement would have been my graduation from college. I can see the picture. I am husking corn in the lower field. To reach this field one must go the length of the orchard and then walk across the meadow. It is a crisp autumn day, about ten o'clock in the morning, and the sun is s.h.i.+ning. The golden ears are piling up under my magic skill, and there is peace.

As I take down another bundle from the shock I descry what seems to be a sort of procession wending its way through the orchard. Then the rail fence is surmounted, and the procession solemnly moves across the meadow. In time the president and an a.s.sortment of faculty members stand before me, bedight in caps and gowns. I note that their gowns are liberally garnished with Spanish needles and c.o.c.kleburs, and their shoes give evidence of contact with elemental mud. But then and there they confer upon me the degree of bachelor of arts _magna c.u.m laude_. But for this interruption I could have finished husking that row before the dinner-horn blew.

CHAPTER III

BROWN

My neighbor came in again this evening, not for anything in particular, but unconsciously proving that men are gregarious animals. I like this neighbor. His name is Brown. I like the name Brown, too. It is easy to p.r.o.nounce. By a gentle crescendo you go to the summit and then coast to the bottom. The name Brown, when p.r.o.nounced, is a circ.u.mflex accent. Now, if his name had happened to be Moriarity I never could be quite sure when I came to the end in p.r.o.nouncing it. I'm glad his name is not Moriarity--not because it is Irish, for I like the Irish; so does Brown, for he is married to one of them. Any one who has been in Cork and heard the fine old Irishman say in his musical and inimitable voice, "Tis a lovely dye,"

such a one will ever after have a snug place in his affections for the Irish, whether he has kissed the "Blarney stone" or not. If he has heard this same driver of a jaunting-car rhapsodize about "Shandon Bells" and the author, Father Prout, his admiration for things and people Irish will become well-nigh a pa.s.sion. He will not need to add to his mental picture, for the sake of emphasis or color, the cherry-cheeked maids who lead their mites of donkeys along leafy roads, the carts heaped high with cabbages. Even without this addition he will become expansive when he speaks of Ireland and the Irish.

But, as I was saying, Brown came in this evening just to barter small talk, as we often do. Now, in physical build Brown is somewhere between Falstaff and Ca.s.sius, while in mental qualities he is an admixture of Plato, Solomon, and Bill Nye.

When he drops in we do not discuss matters, nor even converse; we talk. Our talk just oozes out and flows whither it wills, or little wisps of talk drift into the silences, and now and then a dash of homely philosophy splashes into the talking. Brown is a real comfort. He is never cryptic, nor enigmatic, at least consciously so, nor does he ever try to be impressive. If he were a teacher he would attract his pupils by his good sense, his sincerity, his simplicity, and his freedom from pose. I cannot think of him as ever becoming teachery, with a high-pitched voice and a hysteric manner.

He has too much poise for that. He would never discuss things with children. He would talk with them. Brown cannot walk on stilts, nor has the air-s.h.i.+p the least fascination for him.

One of my teachers for a time was Doctor T. C. Mendenhall, and he was a great teacher. He could sound the very depths of his subject and simply talk it. He led us to think, and thinking is not a noisy process. Truth to tell, his talks often caused my poor head to ache from overwork. But I have been in cla.s.ses where the oases of thought were far apart and one could doze and dream on the journey from one to the other. Doctor Mendenhall's teaching was all white meat, sweet to the taste, and altogether nouris.h.i.+ng. He is the man who made the first correct copy of Shakespeare's epitaph there in the church at Stratford-on-Avon. I sent a copy of Doctor Mendenhall's version to Mr. Bra.s.singer, the librarian in the Memorial Building, and have often wondered what his comment was. He never told me. There are those "who, having eyes, see not." There had been thousands of people who had looked at that epitaph with the printed copy in hand, and yet had never noticed the discrepancy, and it remained for an American to point out the mistake. But that is Doctor Mendenhall's way. He is nothing if not thorough, and that proves his scientific mind.

Well, Brown fell to talking about the Isle of Pines, in the course of our verbal exchanges, and I drew him out a bit, receiving a liberal education on the subjects of grapefruit, pineapples, and bananas.

From my school-days I have carried over the notion that the Caribbean Sea is one of the many geographical myths with which the school-teacher is wont to intimidate boys who would far rather be scaring rabbits out from under a brush heap. But here sits a man who has travelled upon the Caribbean Sea, and therefore there must be such a place. Our youthful fancies do get severe jolts! From my own experience I infer that much of our teaching in the schools doesn't take hold, that the boys and girls tolerate it but do not believe. I cannot recall just when I first began to believe in Mt. Vesuvius, but I am quite certain that it was not in my school-days. It may have been in my teaching-days, but I'm not quite certain. I have often wondered whether we teachers really believe all we try to teach. I feel a pity for poor Sisyphus, poor fellow, rolling that stone to the top of the hill, and then having to do the work all over when the stone rolled to the bottom. But that is not much worse than trying to teach Caribbean Sea and Mt. Vesuvius, if we can't really believe in them. But here is Brown, metamorphosed into a psychologist who begins with the known, yea, delightfully known grapefruit which I had at breakfast, and takes me on a fascinating excursion till I arrive, by alluring stages, at the related unknown, the Caribbean Sea. Too bad that Brown isn't a teacher.

Brown has the gift of holding on to a thing till his craving for knowledge is satisfied. Somewhere he had come upon some question touching a campanile or, possibly, _the_ Campanile, as it seemed to him. Nor would he rest content until I had extracted what the books have to say on the subject. He had in mind the Campanile at Venice, not knowing that the one beside the Duomo at Florence is higher than the one at Venice, and that the Leaning Tower at Pisa is a campanile, or bell-tower, also. When I told him that one of my friends saw the Campanile at Venice crumble to a heap of ruins on that Sunday morning back in 1907, and that another friend had been of the last party to go to the top of it the evening before, he became quite excited, and then I knew that I had succeeded in investing the subject with human interest, and I felt quite the schoolmaster. Nothing of this did I mention to Brown, for there is no need to exploit the mental machinery if only you get results.

Many people who travel abroad buy postcards by the score, and seem to feel that they are the original discoverers of the places which these cards portray, and yet these very places were the background of much of their history and geography in the schools. Can it be that their teachers failed to invest these places with human interest, that they were but words in a book and not real to them at all? Must I travel all the way to Yellowstone Park to know a geyser? Alas! in that case, many of us poor school-teachers must go through life geyserless. Wondrous tales and oft heard I in my school-days of glacier, iceberg, canyon, snow-covered mountain, grotto, causeway, and volcano, but not till I came to Grindelwald did I really know what a glacier is. There's many a Doubting Thomas in the schools.

CHAPTER IV

PSYCHOLOGICAL

The psychologist is so insistent in proclaiming his doctrine of negative self-feeling and positive self-feeling that one is impelled to listen out of curiosity, if nothing else. Then, just as you are beginning to get a little glimmering as to his meaning, another one begins to a.s.sail your ears with a deal of sesquipedalian English about the emotion of subjection and the emotion of elation. Just as I began to think I was getting a grip of the thing a college chap came in and proceeded to enlighten me by saying that these two emotions may be generated only by personal relations, and not by relations of persons and things. I was thinking of my emotion of subjection in the presence of an original problem in geometry, but this college person tells me that this negative self-feeling, according to psychology, is experienced only in the presence of another person. Well, I have had that experience, too. In fact, my negative self-feeling is of frequent occurrence. Jacob must have had a rather severe attack of the emotion of subjection when he was trying to escape from the wrath of Esau. But, after his experience at Bethel, where he received a blessing and a promise, there was a s.h.i.+fting from the negative self-feeling to the positive--from the emotion of subjection to that of elation.

The stone which Jacob used that night as a pillow, so we are told, is called the Stone of Scone, and is to be seen in the body of the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. The use of that stone as a part of the chair might seem to be a psychological coincidence, unless, indeed, we can conceive that the fabricators of the chair combined a knowledge of psychology and also of the Bible in its construction. It is an interesting conceit, at any rate, that the stone might bring to kings and queens a blessing and a promise, as it had done for Jacob, averting the emotion of subjection and perpetuating the emotion of elation.

Now, there's Hazzard, the big, glorious Hazzard. I met him first on the deck of the S. S. _Campania_, and I gladly agreed to his proposal that we travel together. He is a large man (one need not be more specific) and a veritable steam-engine of activity and energy. It was altogether natural, therefore, that he should a.s.sume the leaders.h.i.+p of our party of two in all matters touching places, modes of travel, hotels, and other details large and small, while I trailed along in his wake. This order continued for some days, and I, of course, experienced all the while the emotion of subjection in some degree. When we came to the Isle of Man we puzzled our heads no little over the curious coat of arms of that quaint little country.

This coat of arms is three human legs, equidistant from one another.

At Peel we made numerous inquiries, and also at Ramsey, but to no avail. In the evening, however, in the hotel at Douglas I saw a picture of this coat of arms, accompanied by the inscription, _Quoc.u.mque jeceris stabit_, and gave some sort of translation of it.

Then and there came my emanc.i.p.ation, for after that I was consulted and deferred to during all the weeks we were together. It is quite improbable that Hazzard himself realized any change in our relations, but unconsciously paid that subtle tribute to my small knowledge of Latin. When we came to Stratford I did not call upon Miss Marie Corelli, for I had heard that she is quite averse to men as a cla.s.s, and I feared I might suffer an emotional collapse. I was so comfortable in my newly acquainted emotion of elation that I decided to run no risks.

When at length I resumed my schoolmastering I determined to give the boys and girls the benefit of my recent discovery. I saw that I must generate in each one, if possible, the emotion of elation, that I must so arrange school situations that mastery would become a habit with them if they were to become "masters in the kingdom of life," as my friend Long says it. I saw at once that the difficulties must be made only high enough to incite them to effort, but not so high as to cause discouragement. I recalled the sentence in Harvey's Grammar: "Milo began to lift the ox when he was a calf." After we had succeeded in locating the antecedent of "he" we learned from this sentence a lesson of value, and I recalled this lesson in my efforts to inculcate progressive mastery in the boys and girls of my school.