[Sidenote: Appeals to Vanity]
Annabel Kingsley was an English teacher in a small, prosperous town. She
was a tiny, sharp-faced girl of about twenty-five, keenly intelligent,
clever and selfseeking. She dressed well; she sought social
opportunities; she made the most of her friends. Before she had been
teaching a month she had won the devoted admiration of all the boys and
most of the girls in her classes and by Thanksgiving the other women
teachers would hardly speak to her, regarding her with that silent scorn
which intelligent women have for their sisters who will not play fair.
The superintendent was divided between amusement and contempt.
Miss Sperry, the mathematics teacher, went to Miss Bulwer, who had had
the Latin and German for years, and had a talk with her. “My boys and
girls come day after day with their algebra only half learned,” she
complained. “They say they don’t have time for it, and they are losing
all their interest, too. But they write great long compositions for Miss
Kingsley that must take hours to do, and now she talks of getting up a
play to be given at Christmas. She seems to have captured them
completely. How does she do it?”
“When you’ve seen as much of teachers as I have you’ll know,” Miss
Bulwer replied, grimly. “I haven’t heard her talk to them, but I can
tell you just how she goes about it. She makes every one of them think
he’s the budding genius of the century. She has Verne Gibbs reading
Ibsen and planning to write a tragedy. I’ll be bound! She has persuaded
Morris Talbot that he can write short stories. Warren Hughes thinks he’s
very remarkable because she told him he could appreciate Francis
Thompson. Maybe he can, but he can also appreciate Cicero when he’s
given half a chance. Every one of those youngsters thinks that at last
he has found a teacher who really sees what is in him, the great promise
to which the rest of us are blind. Then he proceeds to fall in love with
Miss Kingsley to show her that her interest is not lost. She appeals to
the adolescent vanity that they all have so much of, and she’s making
them so insufferably self-conscious and sentimental and onesided that
you and I can’t do anything with them.”
Miss Sperry watched Miss Kingsley. She saw that the boys who could use
their father’s automobiles vied with each other for the honor of taking
her home on Friday nights—she lived in a neighboring town; that they
hung over her desk before and after sessions, engaged in interminable
discussions of the value of poetry or the madness of Hamlet. On her
birthday her desk was banked with roses; Miss Sperry wondered how they
found out when her birthday came. Miss Kingsley’s work went very well,
but she robbed every other teacher of the time and energy that fairly
belonged to the other subjects taught. The result was that the poor work
caused by her selfish policy showed in the classes of other teachers. In
her own there was a constant and lively interest, fanned continuously by
the numberless “conferences” with which she kept her hold on her
students. The school was badly demoralized by Christmas, and yet the
real cause of all the trouble appeared to be the one brilliantly
successful teacher on the force.