Miss McCord, of the Benton High School, was very unpopular one winter
because she had failed two star basketball performers, and thus kept
them from remaining on the team. These players were in her advanced
algebra class, with about twenty other students, all ardent basketball
enthusiasts. One day she said to Coith Burgess, who was not one of the
players, but who had been especially indignant at her firmness, “I
should like to see you for a moment, Coith, after class.”
[Sidenote: Sacrificing Scholarship]
“Oh, _would_ you?” Coith shaped the words with his mouth, but uttered no
sound, and Miss McCord did not see the disrespectful response. When the
class was dismissed he started to go with the rest. Miss McCord, seeing
him go and thinking he had forgotten her request, said to him, “Don’t
forget, Coith,” and went on with her conversation with another pupil.
When she had finished it, Coith was nowhere in sight. He had gone on to
the assembly room, where he was explaining to all the disaffected his
reasons for not doing as “the old crank” had asked him.
Miss McCord had no mind to pass over the matter lightly. She talked at
once to the principal, and the two arranged a plan of treatment. Nothing
was said to Coith, but he was not asked to recite the next day, nor did
Miss McCord appear to hear him when he volunteered. The next day the
same thing happened; Miss McCord did not seem to hear or see him at all.
That afternoon, Coith met Mr. Stacey, the principal, in the hall. “How’s
this, Burgess?” he inquired, “You’re reported absent two days in
succession in advanced algebra.”
“Absent? Not a bit of it. I’ve been there all right, but Miss McCord
hasn’t asked me to recite. She doesn’t give a fellow a chance.”
“Were you there?... All right.” Mr. Stacey was looking gravely at Coith.
“What reason could Miss McCord have had for not paying any attention to
you?”
Coith began to flush and stammer. Finally, he told the story of his
disobedience, rather sullenly but frankly.
“Why did you do it?”
“I don’t know. Just natural meanness, I guess.”
“I’ll tell you why you did it, Coith. You thought it would make a little
hero of you with all the basketball crowd to be rude and insubordinate
to Miss McCord, just now when they all dislike her, because she had the
courage to stand by her guns in that affair. It was a case of posing,
and the thing has happened to you that does happen sometimes to the
poseur—she took you at your word. If you chose to put an end to your
relations as teacher and student, she agreed to accept the situation. As
I see it, you are out of the class and your own fault it is, too.”
Of course in the end Coith came back into the class, after making all
due apologies. He had learned the lesson of coöperation; he had learned,
too, to subject his love of approbation to a standard of fairness and
reciprocity.
The instinct for self-gratification often takes the form of a
pathological fondness for prominence and the approval of others. In
Coith’s case his sense of fairness, courtesy, and submission to rightful
authority had all become subordinate to promptings of his vanity and
resentment. The course of Mr. Stacey and Miss McCord restored in him the
proper sense of the relative importance of the admiration of his fellows
and a sound working relation with his teacher.