Miss Cornelius was not an intentionally negligent teacher. She simply
had not learned to keep on searching for the cause of trouble until the
real cause was found. Miss Jackson, referred to below, took a more
thorough method of testing out her difficulty.
[Sidenote: Sick Child Cannot Study]
Miss Jackson taught second grade, and took great delight in making her
school work as attractive as possible to the children. They rewarded
her, for the most part with unlimited devotion, but in spite of her best
effort she had never been able to awaken the interest of one of her
pupils, a beautiful, winsome child of nine years—a year older than most
of the children in the class. Jeanette was not obstinate. She tried to
get her lessons, but she never had them. She held her book patiently
before her eyes day after day, and, after long perusal of her lesson,
invariably answered, when the recitation period came, “I don’t know,
Miss Jackson.”
One day, when Miss Jackson’s patience was about exhausted, she sat down
by Jeanette’s side, determined to find out if her failure was due to
“just laziness.”
“Jeanette, tell me why you did not have your lesson today?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. I studied.”
“Are the lessons too hard? You understand them when I explain them, do
you not?” As Miss Jackson said this she reached out her hand hoping to
increase the confidence between herself and Jeanette, and clasped it
over hers. As she did so she noticed how hot was the little hand that
lay in her own. Surprised, she looked at Jeanette’s face. It was
beautifully flushed, though ordinarily rather pale, and the eyes were
bright but a little unnatural. “Never mind, dear!” said Miss Jackson,
without waiting for Jeanette to answer, “I know you try. I see you try
every day. Some day you are going to understand it all. That is enough
for today. I want you to have a nice play now. Would you like this
orange?”
Miss Jackson went home very much dissatisfied, and hardly able to wait
for the following day to come when she would see Jeanette again. Miss
Jackson had taken a course of lectures in nursing one year when she had
been ill herself and was not yet strong enough to teach, but she thought
the lectures on nursing would be a help sometime in taking care both of
herself and her pupils. The little hot hand of Jeanette had brought all
those hospital lectures vividly to mind again.
Next morning she slipped her clinical thermometer into her hand bag, and
before school opened she called Jeanette and said:
“Was the orange good? Let’s play this morning that Miss Jackson is the
doctor and is going to take Jeanette’s temperature. Open your mouth,
dear.”
It was as Miss Jackson suspected. The thermometer read 101.2 degrees.
Miss Jackson immediately phoned a request for the visiting nurse to
call. The nurse looked even more grave over Jeanette’s case than Miss
Jackson did, when she said,
“I’m afraid, Miss Jackson, that it’s a case of incipient tuberculosis.
We must notify the parents at once.”
The result of the interview was that Jeanette was taken out of school
and put under the doctor’s care. Later when much better she was
transferred to the open air school and today she thanks Miss Jackson for
being a comparatively strong girl, fully up to grade and no longer
struggling with lessons which could not be learned. Miss Jackson had
gone to the bottom of Jeanette’s laziness.