AMONG THE “WELL-BEHAVED ANGELS”
The class to be promoted met as usual in the Second Room, and with
their books marched into the First Room. Besides the glory of the
promotion, Ella’s dignity had another foundation, namely, that she
was thoroughly up to date in her equipment. Her smoothly sliding
slate pencil that worked like a gold one had not yet been surpassed
by any new invention, but the large slate was quite behind the times.
The proper thing now was to have what was apparently a book about the
size of her arithmetic and grammar, but made up of four small slates,
of real slate, but thin and light, and with slender wooden frames.
The binding of Ella’s was of a bright, cheery shade of blue, and on
the outside was printed in gilt, with a large Spencerian flourish,
“Notes.”
The slate was enough to give elegance to her outfit, but the crowning
touch of distinction was her book-carrier. Bags had long before gone
out of use, if indeed they had ever been in use in that city. The
informal court of school girls had decided some time before this that
a strap buckled around a little pile of books would do very well for
boys, but was not in the best taste for their sisters. Moreover,
the strap jammed the edges of the books, and this was an argument
against it which was not without force at home, for even in families
of little education a schoolbook was an article to be tenderly cared
for.
Books were not provided by the city and showered into the hands
of pupils to be used or abused according to disposition and home
training, or lack of training, and then tossed to the following
class. They were to be bought, sometimes with self-denial on the
part of children or their parents, to be neatly covered with light
brown paper or sometimes with some well-wearing color of calico, and
treated with respect. A new book was an acquisition, an article of
value to have and to hold. Usually the child’s name and the date of
its purchase were written on the flyleaf, often, by special request,
in the handwriting of the teacher. Books were used for a long time.
With all the glory of promotion to the First Room, only two new
books were to be bought. The same geography, grammar, speller, and
arithmetic were to serve for the two years before going to the high
school.
To carry these precious volumes a new article had recently been
invented. The books were laid between two parallel pieces of wood
with a strong cord running through holes at either end and wound up
by a little wheel and ratchet under the handle. The slight snap that
the wheel made in catching was exceedingly agreeable to the ears of
little schoolgirl owners.
These carriers were not yet very common; but Ella had with
considerable foresight and crocheting of mittens prepared for the
future; and now when all the boys and most of the girls marched into
the First Room with jagged armfuls of books and slates, Ella, and two
or three others carried only neatly screwed up carriers carefully
packed with the largest books at the bottom and the smallest at the
top, especially when the smallest was a new notebook slate.
The principal sat on the platform, and as Ella went by, she gave
him a friendly little smile which he found himself returning. The
assistant was assigning seats. These were given out according to the
rank of the pupil for the last quarter. Ella had been Number One,
and so the place of honor, the seat in the farthest corner from the
front, was given to her. Alma sat beside her. Back of her was a wall,
and on her right side was another wall.
Alma was a quiet girl who studied hard, and Ella liked her; but Alma
never whispered, not even if she had plenty of extras to spare,
and, Ella feared, would not even “communicate.” The assistant had
explained what was meant by “communicating.” If you smiled at anyone
or nodded your head, or took up your deskmate’s pencil with a look
that meant, “May I use this?” you were communicating. In short, you
were expected to behave “as if you were entirely alone in the room,”
said the assistant.
Ella had meant to be very, very good in this new room, but
expectations of such preternatural excellence alarmed her. She felt
like a naughty little imp dropped by mistake into a roomful of
particularly well-behaved angels. Just then she looked up and caught
sight of a vacant chair standing near the assistant’s place on the
platform. That was where she had sat to do the examples that had
admitted her to the Second Room. It was five months ago. None of the
First Roomers had paid any attention to her. She was quite beneath
them. And now she herself was a First Roomer. She was no longer a
naughty little imp, she was one of the particularly well-behaved
angels. She was twelve years old, and in two years she would go to
the high school. She sat up very straight and arranged her books in
her half of the desk with much dignity.
Ella had supposed that the lessons would be harder in the First
Room, and she was surprised to find that they were no more difficult
than in the Second Room, though perhaps a little more accuracy was
required—if that was possible.
The spelling lessons were always written. “People rarely spell words
orally,” declared the principal. “Nine tenths of the time they write
them. What is needed is the ability to spell correctly on paper, and
to spell without the slightest hesitation.”
The first step in this undertaking was to cut foolscap paper into
strips between two and three inches wide. This was done by the
principal in primitive fashion, that is, with a jackknife and ruler.
They were sold to the pupils at eight strips for a cent. When
spelling was called, each child wrote her name at the top of a
strip, dipped her pen into the ink, and squared for instant action.
The assistant took her stand beside one of the swiftest writers of
the class and gave out words selected from the lesson of the day,
as rapidly as they could be written. Every word must be correct at
the first writing. In the first place, there was no time to make
any change. In the second place, the attempt was always discovered.
Even a shower of little blots, carefully made to resemble the work
of a spluttering pen, and incidentally to conceal a mistake, availed
nothing. The papers were corrected by the pupils, and never was one
allowed to pass with even an undotted _i_ or an uncrossed _t_.
Straight through the spelling book the children went, reviewing over
and over again what they had learned in the lower rooms, and adding
to their knowledge by “advance lessons.” They learned columns of
words in which _ire_, _yre_, _ier_, _iar_, _igher_, and _uyer_ have
the same sound; others in which _c_, _d_, and _ch_ are silent; they
learned words that hunt in couples, pronounced alike but spelled
differently and ridiculously apart in meaning; and finally they
learned some 1500 of those words of the English language that may be
counted upon almost with certainty to produce a crop of failures.
Fifty words were written each day, and to win the longed for 100
per cent, every one of them must be above suspicion. There were
examinations in spelling of course, and as a kind of supertest, the
class was one day required to write from dictation on the spur of the
moment, the following sentence:
It is an agreeable sight to witness the unparalleled embarrassment
of the harassed peddler, attempting to gauge the symmetry of an
onion which a sibyl had peeled with a poniard, regardless of the
innuendoes of the lilies of carnelian hue.
Pupils who ranked high were given in turn the charge of the report
book. This was an honor, but also a great responsibility. There were
no mistakes in that book, for every figure was watched. “I am keeping
my own report very rigidly myself this term,” wrote Ella, “so as to
see if there is any foul play.”
Keeping the reports was not only a responsible but a complicated
matter. To begin with, there were “whole failures” and “half
failures.” A downright “I don’t know” was a whole failure. A
slightly muddled recitation, not all wrong and not all right, was
a half failure. Then, too, there were extras to be considered and
taken account of. Sometimes these were promised in advance, but
generally they were given unexpectedly for some specially good piece
of work. A particularly good map, an unusually clear recitation of
some difficult point, sometimes won from one to ten extras. On one
never-to-be-forgotten day, when there was a very hard lesson in
grammar, the assistant gave to every one who did not fail ten good
solid extras, thus deeply arousing the regret of those who would
have studied harder if they had guessed what she meant to do.
Grammar was in the hands of the assistant, and it was whispered
among awestruck children that the author of the grammar—author of a
printed book!—had said that he wished he could teach his own book
as well as she. Could there be greater glory? In the lower rooms,
a smaller grammar was used; but on entering the Second Room this
larger textbook came to its own, and was used every day for two years
and a half. It never occurred to any one that the children might
cease to be interested and that it would be better to make a change
every little while. The grammar was there to be learned, and learned
thoroughly.
When they came to the list of prepositions, Ella was appalled. She
had never had the training of the lower grades in learning unrelated
words, and to learn this list of sixty-four was much worse than lists
of productions. She asked the assistant:
“Why do we have to learn that list?”
“So that you will recognize a preposition when you come to it.”
“But I always do.”
“How do you know one?”
“Just the same way I know a kitten. If it behaves like a kitten, it
is a kitten. If it behaves like a preposition, it is a preposition.”
The assistant laughed. “It is true that you always do know a
preposition,” she said thoughtfully. “The others learned that list in
the lower rooms, and without it I am afraid some of them would not
know a preposition from a kitten. We’ll talk this over some day.”
Ella wisely concluded that she need not learn the list, but that
she must not tell any one of her privilege. Her experience at the
seminary as a “faculty child” had taught her never to reveal faculty
secrets, and this one was never told. The assistant did not mention
the matter again, but Ella noticed that one day when the embarrassing
question would naturally have fallen to her, it was given to some one
else.
One evening at the close of the first term in the First Room, Ella
did some counting and measuring of paragraphs. Then she said:
“Mother, we have been over only twenty-two pages this whole term. Of
course there are exercises besides, but what we have really learned,
if it was printed together solidly, would make only seven.”
“I will speak to the assistant if you like,” said the mother, “and
ask her if she can arrange to give you longer lessons.”
“Oh, no,” cried Ella in some alarm. “If the lessons were longer,
there wouldn’t be any time to read and play and crochet and draw and
go to see the other girls and have them come to see me. But I was
just thinking how it would sound if I should get to be a famous woman
some day and any one asked how much grammar I used to do in a term,
and you would have to say, ‘Seven pages.’ Then people would think I
must have been horribly stupid.”
“Don’t worry,” advised the mother with a smile. “Before you are a
famous woman, there will be time enough to go over more pages. Just
learn everything thoroughly. That’s all you have to do now.”
“I do learn everything thoroughly,” declared Ella. “I have to, if I
am going to stay at the head of the class—and I am,” she added with
emphasis. “Anyway, I like grammar. I don’t like learning rules, of
course, and when I give an illustration that is just as good as the
one in the book and a great deal more sensible, I don’t see why it
should be called wrong. I recited, ‘The adverbial element may be an
adverbial clause denoting time.’ The illustration was ‘While I was
musing, the fire burned.’ Now when you’re musing, the fire doesn’t
burn, it goes out, or at any rate it burns low; so I said, ‘While I
was musing, the fire burned low.’ The sentence contained an adverbial
clause, and it was good sense and the way fires behave, and it
sounded better; but it was counted half a failure. I don’t think that
was fair; but I do like parsing and analyzing. It’s real fun to shake
a sentence all to pieces till it has to tell you just what it means
and what it didn’t intend you should ever know. It’s as much fun as
any game. But when an illustration illustrates, it does illustrate.
It’s right, and I don’t see how it could be any more right.”
“Perhaps when you become that famous woman, you can write a grammar
that will keep every little girl at the head of the class and never
allow any one to fail.”
“But I don’t believe I’d care so much about being at the head if
every one else was there. Do you think it’s selfish to want to be at
the head?”
“How should you feel if some other girl was always at the head?
That’s the way to find out,” said the mother.
“I suppose I shouldn’t like it,” Ella replied thoughtfully. “But I
like the principal, and I have reason to think that he likes me, and
he would be disappointed if I failed on purpose and went down. It
would not be right to disappoint him, would it?”
“No,” said the mother, “it would be wrong not to do your best; but
you must try just as hard to be kind to all the boys and girls as you
do to stand at the head.”
“There’s one boy who doesn’t like me,” said Ella meditatively, “and
I never did a thing to him. He told the assistant to-day that I was
drawing a picture. She told me to bring it to the desk. I was trying
to copy the ‘Landing of the Pilgrims’ from our history. She looked at
it, and then she said, ‘Ella has taken great pains with it, and it is
very well done. Learn your lessons as well as she does, and you may
draw, too. And remember that I do not like tale-bearing.’”
“I hope you didn’t smile and look pleased when she said that.”
“No, I didn’t—neither did the boy. I did make up a face, though,” she
added a moment later.
“Why, Ella!”
“Oh, just in my mind, I mean. It didn’t do him any harm, and it made
me feel a whole lot better.”