[Sidenote: Experiments]
Miss Miller came into a very noisy fifth grade room, where the pupils
were good-natured and docile, but unused to orderly methods and
untrained in self-control. She won their liking at the outset by her
courtesy and her real mastery of her teaching subjects; therefore she
found herself in a good position, after the first fortnight of
establishing her authority, to attack her great problem of reducing the
school-room routine to quietness and economy of nerve-force.
“I want you to help me make an experiment,” she said one day. “Yesterday
was a rainy day, and we had more than the usual amount of noise, I
think. You spent the whole of your twenty minutes in studying your
mental arithmetic, and yet you made eighty-two mistakes out of a total
of one hundred thirty questions; I kept count carefully. That was too
many by far, wasn’t it? I tried to think how we could bring up our bad
record, and I decided that we make too much noise in study hour. So I
thought we would experiment, and see if we can get our arithmetic better
when we are quiet. I’m going to select ten pupils today, and let them go
off by themselves in quiet places to study by themselves. Who wants to
go? And the rest of us here will be as quiet as we can be, and we’ll see
what the effect will be on our lessons.”
The children were eager for the novelty of an “experiment,” and of
course it proved to them, as Miss Miller planned it should, that
quietness brings better lessons and that they are learned in less time.
“I wonder if we can reduce the time spent on our arithmetic lesson to
fifteen minutes, and thus have five minutes more for our music, or for
the story hour?” she said. “Of course, we shall need to have the room
very quiet, to do that. Who can suggest ways in which we can control the
noise during study hours?”
Many suggestions came from the children. “We can remember not to move
our feet around after we have placed them on the floor.” “At home, when
baby is asleep, mother has us walk on tiptoe if we have to cross the
room.” “We can have it quiet if everybody makes up his mind not to
whisper once.” “I keep dropping my pencil on the floor, and I’ve thought
of a way to stop that. I’m going to have a string on it and fasten it to
my buttonhole, and then if it does drop it can’t reach the floor and
make a clatter.”
Miss Miller suggested other ways, and they made a list of them on the
blackboard, so as to keep them all in mind. Under the teacher’s
sympathetic leadership, there ensued a campaign to eliminate noise from
study hours. Without mentioning it, Miss Miller enlarged the scope of
their efforts to include quieter ways of passing materials, walking
about the room, and putting away books. Mutual imitation strengthened
the movement; just as these pupils had before imitated the thoughtless,
careless, noisy way of doing things, now they imitated a thoughtful,
controlled method of accomplishing results. What mischievous noise there
had been disappeared automatically through the force of public opinion;
for when the room as a whole saw the results of a quiet regime, saw that
it brought them more time for the recreational part of the school
program, a prejudice against unnecessary noise developed which rendered
the maker thereof unpopular.