Few students realize how closely a classroom resembles a commonwealth.
To most of us it seems a place into which we go to have a certain amount
got out of us, or put into us. This conception of the classroom is
unworthy the modern girl who has, otherwise, a fine understanding of the
meaning of team-play, of playing all together for a common end, a game
or a republic united by a tacit compact.
Does the average student feel responsibility for the game of basket-ball
or lawn hockey which she is playing? The first thought of the girl in
answering this is that it was a foolish question even to ask. Of course
she does. But for her classroom? No, that is a different sort of game,
in which the responsibility lies all on the shoulders of the instructor.
It is a one-woman or a one-man game, and very often the students are
but spectators, cheering or indifferent, approving or disapproving. The
pupil does not hold herself accountable for this game; it is the teacher
who makes the class "go," who extracts from each student the information
bottled up in her, together, often, with a good deal of carbon
dioxide,--a process difficult and hard as drawing a swollen cork out of
a soda-water bottle. Finally, with a sort of noble rebound of effort,
the exhausted instructor is to put a vast deal of information back into
the girl before the student claps her book together and rushes pell-mell
to the next classroom, there to be similarly uncorked, if the teacher
has learned the art and her mental muscle is sufficient.
Such a conception of a classroom is not fair-play. The teacher, like the
coxswain of a college crew, may have rowed over the same course and she
may know it well enough to cover it in the dark; she may have won
distinction upon it, may be the fittest person in all the states of the
Union to cover it again, but if she has not a good or a winning crew to
coach, she will never win any race, even the shortest. No instructor has
shoulders equal to such a multiple burden as coaching, steering and
doing all the rowing, too. To play any classroom game in this spirit is
to be dead weight for every one else embarked upon the same adventure.
It is not fair-play.
By such an attitude on the part of merely one student in the class,
every other student associated with her loses, for the girl who will not
lift her own weight the others must carry. If that student were playing
in that spirit on the basket-ball team, do you suppose that the coach,
or the captain, would let her stay on? Not for a moment; off she would
go and very much humiliated, too. If it is a discussion, the touch and
go of the whole recitation will depend upon the presence of the
team-play, or fair-play, spirit in the course. The instructor may do her
best but if there is no play-the-game in that classroom, she might just
as well fold up her tent, like the proverbial Arab, "and silently steal
away." It is not that any recitation need be a brilliant affair--if most
of them depended upon that for existence they would scarcely exist at
all--but there must be an honest, earnest, responsible effort to make
the best of the hour. Good will inevitably come from the clarifying
effort to express thought, and the leading from thought to thought as
the work goes forward.
The basket-ball team cannot win, or even play, unless all the members
are playing together. Each one is needed despite the fact that she may
not be one of the chief or best players. Just so does the class need all
its students. If a girl is only average, it is not fair-play for her to
sit back and do nothing; neither is it fair-play for her to monopolize
the attention if she happens to be more than commonly able. It is not
fair-play to laugh at the girl who is at a disadvantage, or to appear
bored. It is unfair to the individual, to the classroom in general and
to the instructor. The least she can do in this class game is to give
her whole and her courteous attention.
Think of all the practice games in which the average athletic team takes
part. What can be said for the student who comes into the classroom
unprepared to lift her own weight, unprepared to help others? When one
comes to think about it from the fair-play point of view there is
nothing to be said for her. Nor is it fair-play for a girl to allow
herself to get into such a state physically that she is unable to study.
How often and often have fudge-heads--due to an application to too much
sugar and not to books--sitting row after row killed a school or even a
whole college! Before a class tempered by fudge and not by wholesome
outdoor living and conscientious devotion to work, the teacher might
better put away her notes and close her book. Nothing can happen through
or over that barricade of fudge-heads.
And it is not fair-play to cram because of time lost, or for any other
cause. The only end of cramming is that the student soon forgets all
that has been learned. Alone by normal, slow acquisition and all the
associations formed in such learning can information come to us to stay.
It may not be particularly wicked to cram if one has plenty of time to
waste, but it is foolish unless one has.
There is a kind of gossip in which a girl takes part, made up of
snap-shot judgments of the classroom, idle carping about some little
unimportant point, expression of wounded vanity and unfair talk, which
may mean a tremendous loss of prestige for a really admirable course; it
may mean that girls, who would naturally go into it because of their
liking or gift for the work, do not go or go in a critical and
unsympathetic attitude. If there is a complaint to be made about any
course it should be made to the responsible person concerned, and that
is usually the teacher. Anything else is not fair-play. In the
classroom the instructor is the "coach" of the game and she is the
person with whom to talk. It is needless to say that if a girl is
putting nothing into a course she cannot expect to get anything out of
it, or to complain because things do not "go." If she wants them to "go"
why does she not help, and have the profit of taking something away from
the work as interest on her effort? A girl gets dividends only from work
into which she has put some brain-capital.
And the people at home? Is it fair-play to them, when they are making
sacrifices of money or of happiness to keep the daughter at school, for
her not to put good work into her study and play her part faithfully in
the classroom game? So many things have to be taken into consideration
of which we are not likely to think. There is the girl herself, the
other girls with whom she is working, the instructor, the people at
home, the institution that is providing an expensive equipment or plant
through the philanthropic efforts of others or the taxation of the
public. If the girl does not play her part fairly, there is a rather big
reckoning against her, is there not?