The habit of talking aloud is easily cured.
Miss Ellis was called upon to substitute in the place of a teacher who
had been lax in her discipline. The pupils talked aloud almost as freely
as if they had been in their own homes. Miss Ellis knew her position as
substitute would be a hard one, and made up her mind that she would
spend the first day, if necessary, doing nothing but enforcing order.
[Sidenote: Making Up Time]
The first time a child talked out loud without permission, she said,
quietly, “Now, John, you know we can’t get very far with this lesson if
we are to be interrupted. And we don’t want to have to take it over
again tomorrow. Suppose you try to settle the matter yourself, or wait
until after this class to ask me.” And she did not answer John’s
question.
It was only a few minutes until Isabel remarked that she couldn’t see
what was written on the blackboard from where she sat. Miss Ellis told
Isabel that by standing up she could read what was written there very
plainly, and that it was unfair to the rest of the school for her to
take up their time by speaking aloud.
At the third interruption Miss Ellis said, again very quietly, “At this
rate we shall all have to stay after school today to finish our work. I
will not answer any more questions until this class is over. Then I will
give you three minutes to do all the speaking, borrowing, and so forth
that is necessary for the rest of the morning. And any talking aloud
will put us just five minutes behind with our work, so we’ll have to
make up that five minutes after school.”
No one went home that afternoon until an hour and a half after the
regular time for dismissal, but the talking aloud habit was broken, once
and for all, during Miss Ellis’ regime.
One big element in a teacher’s control of a school is a phase of
stick-to-it-iveness, namely, her ability not only to prescribe a given
line of action but to stick to it herself and hold her pupils to it day
after day. Too many teachers are spasmodic in their control. They are
very strict for a few days, then grow negligently lax in their
discipline, only to pull their pupils up to the previous standard again
with a jerk. It is just as easy to form good habits as bad ones, but a
teacher can never hope to train a school in good habits if she punishes
today what she leaves unnoticed tomorrow, as Miss Rand, a seventh grade
teacher, did.