THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL
I suppose every reader will say that genius consists very largely in
seeing Opportunity in the set of circumstances or thoughts or impressions
that constitute Opportunity, and making the best of them.
Jim Irwin would have said so, anyhow. He was full of his Emerson's
_Representative Men_, and his Carlyle's _French Revolution_, and the other
old-fashioned, excellent good literature which did not cost over
twenty-five cents a volume; and he had pored long and with many thrills
over the pages of Matthews' _Getting on in the World_--which is the best
book of purely conventional helpfulness in the language. And his view of
efficiency was that it is the capacity to see opportunity where others
overlook it, and make the most of it.
All through his life he had had his own plans for becoming great. He was
to be a general, hurling back the foes of his country; he was to be the
nation's master in literature; a successful drawing on his slate had
filled him with ambition, confidently entertained, of becoming a
Rubens--and the story of Benjamin West in his school reader fanned this
spark to a flame; science, too, had at times been his chosen field; and
when he had built a mousetrap which actually caught mice, he saw himself a
millionaire inventor. As for being president, that was a commonplace in
his dreams. And all the time, he was barefooted, ill-clad and dreamed his
dreams to the accompaniment of the growl of the plow cutting the roots
under the brown furrow-slice, or the wooshing of the milk in the pail. At
twenty-eight, he considered these dreams over.
As for this new employment, he saw no great opportunity in it. Of any
spark of genius he was to show in it, of anything he was to suffer in it,
of those pains and penalties wherewith the world pays its geniuses, Jim
Irwin anticipated nothing. He went into the small, mean, ill-paid task as
a part of the day's work, with no knowledge of the stirring of the nation
for a different sort of rural school, and no suspicion that there lay in
it any highway to success in life. He was not a college man or even a
high-school man. All his other dreams had found rude awakening in the fact
that he had not been able to secure the schooling which geniuses need in
these days. He was unfitted for the work geniuses do. All he was to be was
a rural teacher, accidentally elected by a stupid school board, and with a
hard tussle before him to stay on the job for the term of his contract. He
could have accepted positions quite as good years ago, save for the fact
that they would have taken him away from his mother, their cheap little
home, their garden and their fowls. He rather wondered why he had allowed
Jennie's sneer to sting him into the course of action which put him in
this new relation to his neighbors.
But, true to his belief in honest thorough work, like a general preparing
for battle, he examined his field of operations. His manner of doing this
seemed to prove to Colonel Woodruff, who watched it with keen interest as
something new in the world, that Jim Irwin was possibly a Brown Mouse. But
the colonel knew only a part of Jim's performances. He saw Jim clothed in
slickers, walking through rainstorms to the houses in the Woodruff
District, as greedy for every moment of rain as a haymaker for shine; and
he knew that Jim made a great many evening calls.
But he did not know that Jim was making what our sociologists call a
survey. For that matter, neither did Jim; for books on sociology cost more
than twenty-five cents a volume, and Jim had never seen one. However, it
was a survey. To be sure, he had long known everybody in the district,
save the Simmses--and he was now a friend of all that exotic race; but
there is knowing and knowing. He now had note-books full of facts about
people and their farms. He knew how many acres each family possessed, and
what sort of farming each husband was doing--live stock, grain or mixed.
He knew about the mortgages, and the debts. He knew whether the family
atmosphere was happy and contented, or the reverse. He knew which boys and
girls were wayward and insubordinate. He made a record of the advancement
in their studies of all the children, and what they liked to read. He knew
their favorite amusements. He talked with their mothers and sisters--not
about the school, to any extent, but on the weather, the horses, the
automobiles, the silo-filling machinery and the profits of farming.
I suppose that no person who has undertaken the management of the young
people of any school in all the history of education, ever did so much
work of this sort before his school opened. Really, though Jennie Woodruff
did not see how such doings related to school work, Jim Irwin's school was
running full blast in the homes of the district and the minds of many
pupils, weeks and weeks before that day when he called them to order on
the Monday specified in his contract as the first day of school.
Con Bonner, who came to see the opening, voiced the sentiments of the
older people when he condemned the school as disorderly. To be sure, there
were more pupils enrolled than had ever entered on a first day in the
whole history of the school, and it was hard to accommodate them all. But
the director's criticism was leveled against the free-and-easy air of the
children. Most of them had brought seed corn and a good-sized corn show
was on view. There was much argument as to the merits of the various
entries. Instead of a language lesson from the text-book, Jim had given
them an exercise based on an examination of the ears of corn.
The number exercises of the little chaps had been worked out with ears and
kernels of corn. One class in arithmetic calculated the percentage of
inferior kernels at tip and butt to the full-sized grains in the middle of
the ear.
All the time, Jim Irwin, awkward and uncouth, clad in his none-too-good
Sunday suit and trying to hide behind his Lincolnian smile the fact that
he was pretty badly frightened and much embarrassed, passed among them,
getting them enrolled, setting them to work, wasting much time and
laboring like a heavy-laden barge in a seaway.
"That feller'll never do," said Bonner to Bronson next day. "Looks like a
tramp in the schoolroom."
"Wearin' his best, I guess," said Bronson.
"Half the kids call him 'Jim,'" said Bonner.
"That's all right with me," replied Bronson.
"The room was as noisy as a caucus," was Bonner's next indictment, "and
the flure was all over corn like a hog-pin."
"Oh! I don't suppose he can get away with it," assented Bronson
disgustedly, "but that boy of mine is as tickled as a colt with the whole
thing. Says he's goin' reg'lar this winter."
"That's because Jim don't keep no order," said Bonner. "He lets Newt do as
he dam pleases."
"First time he's ever pleased to do anything but deviltry," protested
Bronson. "Oh, I suppose Jim'll fall down, and we'll have to fire him--but
I wish we could git a _good_ teacher that would git hold of Newt the way
he seems to!"