MY CALIFORNIA SCHOOL.
I was not confident of my ability to teach even a “common school” when
the situation was offered me in a little Tuolumne County mining camp. I
said so to my old friend, Pete H., who had secured me the position.
“Well,” said he, after a reflective pause, “do you retain a clear
recollection of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet? For if you do,
you are equal to any educational demand this camp will make on you.”
It was a reckless “camp.” No phase of life was viewed or treated
seriously. They did walk their horses to the grave slowly at a funeral,
but how they did race back!
It was legally necessary, however, that I should be examined as to my
ability by the school trustees. These were Dr. D., Bill K., a
saloon-keeper, and Tom J., a miner. I met them in the Justice’s office.
The doctor was an important appearing man, rotund, pompous,
well-dressed, and spectacled. He glared at me with an expression betwixt
sadness and severity. I saw he was to be the chief inquisitor. I
expected from him a searching examination, and trembled. It was years
since I had seen a school-book. I knew that in geography I was rusty and
in mathematics musty.
Before the doctor lay one thin book. It turned out to be a spelling
book. The doctor opened it, glared on me leisurely, and finally said:
“Spell cat.” I did so. “Spell hat.” I spelled. “Rat,” said the doctor,
with a look of explosive fierceness and in a tone an octave higher. I
spelled, and then remarked: “But, doctor, you surely must know that I
can spell words of one syllable?” “I don’t,” he shouted, and propounded
“mat” for me to spell, with an increase of energy in his voice, and so
went on until I had so spelled long enough to amuse him and the other
two trustee triflers. Then he shut the book, saying: “Young man, you’ll
do for our camp. I wouldn’t teach that school for $5,000 a year; and
there are two boys you’ll have for scholars that I advise you to kill,
if possible, the first week. Let’s all go over and take a drink.”
My school house was the church, built and paid for partly by the
gamblers and partly by the good people of Jimtown “for the use of all
sects” on Sundays, and for educational purposes on week days.
I was shut up in that little church six hours a day with sixty children
and youths, ranging from four to eighteen years of age. In summer it was
a fiercely hot little church. The mercury was always near 90 by noon,
and sometimes over 100, and you could at times hear the shingles split
and crack on the roof of the cathedral. A few years of interior
California summers’ suns will turn unpainted boards and shingles almost
as black as charcoal.
The majority of my pupils’ parents being from New England and North
America, they brought and carried into effect all their North American
ideas of education. The California summer heat is, I think, unfit for
educational purposes. It is too hot to herd sixty restless children
together six hours a day. They proved this in several cases. Some fell
sick suddenly. Some fainted. But this made no difference. The school
went on in all its misery. I sent a fainting child home one day, and the
father returned with it an hour afterward. He was fierce, and said he
wanted his child kept in school when he sent it to school.
This was in California’s early days. My scholars were the children of
the Argonauts, and in some cases had come out with them. There was then
no regular system of text-books. Publishers had not commenced making
fortunes by getting out a new school-book system every three years.
My scholars came, bringing a great variety of school-books. They brought
“Pike’s Arithmetic,” which had come over the plains, and “Smith’s
Geography,” which had sailed around Cape Horn. Seldom were two alike.
But the greatest variety lay in grammars. There was a regular museum of
English grammars, whose authors fought each other with different rules
and called the various parts of speech by different names. I accounted
for the great variety of grammars on the supposition that it is or was
the ambition of a large proportion of schoolmasters to write a work on
grammar before they died and say: “I have left another grammar to bless
and confuse posterity.”
Besides bringing grammars, most of the boys brought dogs. Dogs of many
breeds and sizes hovered around the school-house. They wanted frequently
to come in, and did often come in, to sneak under the seats and lay
themselves at their masters’ feet. I had frequently to kick or order
them out, and I noticed that whenever a dog was chased out he would
take the longest road to get out and under as many seats as possible,
in order to receive as many kicks as possible from the youthful owners
of the other dogs.
I could not so organize a battalion of ten different grammars as to act
in concert on my grammar class of twenty pupils. So I put them all on
the retired list and tried to teach this so-called “science” orally. I
chalked the rules on the blackboard, as well as the names of the
different parts of speech. I made my scholars commit these to memory,
standing, although I will not argue that memory takes any stronger grip
on a thing while the pupil stands. At last I taught a few with good
memories to “parse.” I worked hard with that grammar class, and was very
proud of their proficiency until I found that after months of this
drilling they neither spoke nor wrote any better English than before.
However, I lost nothing by this experience, for it helped me to the
conviction I have held to ever since, that the entire grammar system and
method does very little to make one habitually use correct language, and
that a taste for reading and constant association with correct
English-speaking people does a great deal. As for spending time in
“parsing,” I think it would be better to use that force in learning the
boy to shoe horses and the girl to make bread, or let the girl shoe the
horses if she wants to and the boy make the bread.
The labor of teaching the alphabet to ten infants, calling them up once
an hour “to say their letters,” is, in my estimation, greater than that
of swinging a pick in the surface gold “diggings.” I have tried both,
and infinitely prefer the pick. It is not so much work when you are
employed with them as when you are occupied with the other pupils. Then
these poor little alphabetical cherubs can do nothing but squirm on
their low benches, catch flies, pinch each other, make and project
spit-balls and hold up their hands for another drink of water. I could
not let them out of doors to play in the sand, where they should have
been, because the North American parent would have considered himself as
defrauded of a part of his infant’s schooling were they not imprisoned
the whole six hours.
Neither can you set a child to studying A or M or any other letter.
There is not an idea in A or B. During the two years of my
administration I wrought with one child who never could get successfully
beyond F. Her parents questioned my ability as a teacher. Some days she
would repeat the whole alphabet correctly. I would go home with a load
off my mind. The next day her mind would relapse into an alphabetical
blank after F. She grew to be an eyesore to me. The sight of her at last
made me sick.
I held public examinations every six months, and was careful to do all
the examining myself. An interloper among the audience I invited did me
great damage on one of these memorized performances by asking a simple
arithmetical question of the show-off geographical boy. The urchin was
brilliant in dealing with boundary lines, capes, and islands, but his
head was one that mathematics could not readily be injected into. On the
other hand, my specimen grammarian was as likely to describe an island
as a body of land surrounded--by land as by water. I had no heart to
find fault with this poor barefooted urchin who, when in class, was
always trying to stand on one leg like a crane, and sending his right
big toe on exploring scratching expeditions up his left trouser. He had
been born and brought up in an inland country, where no body of water
was to be seen save an occasional fleeting mud puddle; and what earthly
conception could he form of the ocean and its islands?
But the parents who attended these exhibitions of stuffed memories were
struck at the proficiency of the progeny, and retired with the
impression that their children knew a great deal because they had
parroted off so much that was all Greek to them; and after I had been in
this occupation a year I would sit in my empty theological school-house
when they had gone and try and convict myself as a profound humbug, and
one, too, compelled, in order to get a living, to encourage and foster a
system which had so much humbug in it.
The California schools were not then “graded.” They were conducted on
the “go-as-you-please” plan, sometimes going as the teachers pleased,
sometimes as the parents pleased, sometimes as the pupils pleased. The
parents of the youthful brains I was trying to develop into future
statesmen and presidents wanted me to teach many things. One father
wished his son taught Latin. It is bringing extremes pretty near each
other to teach Latin and A B C’s. But I “taught” the young man Latin as
I was “taught” many things at school. I started him committing to memory
the Latin declensions and conjugations, and then heard him “say his
lesson.” If he got anything out of it I didn’t know what it was, except
tough work. He never reached any translations of the classics, for
several reasons.
Another father was annoyed because I exercised his son mathematically in
what, in those days, were called “vulgar fractions.” “I don’t want,”
said he, “my son to have anything to do with fractions, anyway. They’re
no use in bizness. Ennything over half a cent we call a cent on the
books, and ennything under it we don’t call nothin’. But I want Thomas
to be well grounded in ‘tare and tret.’”
So I grounded Thomas in ‘tare and tret.’ He grew up, took to evil ways,
and was hung by a vigilance committee somewhere in Southern California.
A boy who stammered very badly was sent me. I was expected to cure him.
Five or six of my pupils were Mexicans, and spoke very little English.
One of my hardest trials was a great stout boy, so full of vitality that
he could not remain quiet at his desk. I could not blame him. He had
force enough inside of him to run a steam engine. It would have vent in
some direction. But it would not expend itself in “learning lessons.” He
would work his books into a mass of dog’s ears. His writing book was
ever in mourning with ink stains. His face was generally inky. His
inkstand was generally upset. He would hold a pen as he would a
pitchfork. He seemed also to give out his vitality when he came to
school and infect all the others with it. He was not a regular scholar.
He was sent only when it was an “off day” on his father’s “ranch.” In
the scholastic sense he learned nothing.
But that boy at the age of fifteen would drive his father’s two-horse
wagon, loaded with fruit and vegetables, 150 miles from California to
Nevada over the rough mountain roads of the Sierras, sell the produce
to the silver miners of Aurora and adjacent camps, and return safely
home. He was obliged in places to camp out at night, cook for himself,
look out for his stock, repair harness or wagon and keep an eye out for
skulking Indians, who, if not “hostile,” were not saints. When it came
to using the hand and the head together he had in him “go,” “gumption”
and executive ability, and none of my “teaching” put it where it was in
him, either. He may have grown up “unpolished,” but he is one of the
kind who are at this moment hiring polished and scholarly men to do work
for them on very small wages.
I do not despise “polish” and “culture” but is there not an education
now necessary which shall give the child some clearer idea of the manner
in which it must cope with the world in a few years? The land to-day is
full of “culture” at ten dollars a week. Culture gives polish to the
blade. But it is not the process which makes the hard, well-tempered
steel.
The “smartest” boy in my school gave me even more trouble than the son
of the rancher. He could commit to memory as much in ten minutes as the
others could in an hour, and the balance of the time he was working off
the Satanism with which he was filled. His memory was an omnivorous maw.
It would take in anything and everything with the smallest amount of
application. It would have required two-thirds of my time to feed this
voracious and mischievous little monster with books for his memory to
devour.
But he was not the boy to drive a team through a wild country and
dispose of the load in Nevada, though he could on such a trip have
committed to memory several hundred words per day on any subject,
whether he understood it or not.
My young lady pupils also gave me a great deal of trouble. They were
very independent, and for this reason: Girls, even of fifteen, were very
scarce then in the mines. So were women of any marriageable age. There
were ten men to one woman. The result was that anything humanly feminine
was very valuable, much sought after and made much of by men of all
ages. My girls of fifteen, as to life and association, were grown-up
women. Young miners and middle-aged, semi-baldheaded miners, who did not
realize how many of their years had slipped away since they came out
from the “States,” took these girls to balls and whirled them by night
over the dusty roads of Tuolumne County in dusty buggies.
It was difficult for one lone man, and he only a schoolmaster, to
enforce discipline with these prematurely matured children, who had an
average of two chances a month to marry, and who felt like any other
woman their power and influence with the other sex. Half of them did
have a prospective husband in some brawny pick-slinger, who never went
abroad without a battery of portable small artillery slung at his waist,
and who was half-jealous, half-envious of the schoolmaster for what he
considered the privilege of being in the same room with his future wife
six hours a day.
One needs to live in a country where there is a dearth of women to
realize these situations. When my school was dismissed at four o’clock
<small>P.M.</small>, all the unemployed chivalry of “Jimtown” massed on the street
corner at the Bella Union saloon to see this coveted bevy of California
rosebuds pass on their way home. The Bella Union, by the way, was only
a few yards from the church. Extremes got very close together in these
mining camps. But the frequenters of the Bella Union, who gambled all
night on the arid green baize of the monte table, had more than half
paid for that church, and, I infer, wanted it in sight so that no other
persuasion should run off with it. I was glad when these girls got
married and entered another school of life, where I knew within a year’s
time they were likely to have a master.
I was once “barred out” at the close of a summer term. This was a
fashion imported from the extreme southwestern part of what some call
“Our Beloved Union.” Returning from dinner I found the doors and windows
of the university closed against me. I parleyed at one of the windows a
few feet from the ground. I was met by a delegation of the two biggest
boys. They informed me I could get in by coming out with a disbursement
of $2.50, to treat the school to nuts, candies, and cakes. I did not
accede, smashed the window and went in. Most of the undergraduates went
suddenly out. I clinched with the biggest boy. The other, like a coward,
ran away. The two together could easily have mastered me. Order was
restored. The mutiny did not hang well together. It was not a good
“combine.” The Northern-bred scholars did not quite understand this
move, and did not really enter heartily into it. Their backing had been
forced by the two big boys, and therefore had not good stuff in it.
The big boy had a cut face. So had I. His still bigger brother met me a
few days after and wanted to pick a quarrel with me about the affair. A
quarrel with his class always lay within easy approach of knife or
pistol. Besides, I was a Yankee. He was a Texan. And this was in 1862,
when the two sections in California were neighbors, but not very warm
friends, and about equal in numbers.
I was discreet with this gentleman, if not valorous, and think under the
same circumstances now I should take the same course. I do not believe
in taking great risks with a ruffian because he abuses you.
My successor, poor fellow, did not get off as easily as I did. He
corrected the son of another gentleman from the South. The gentleman
called at the school-house the next day, asked him to the door and
cracked his skull with the butt of his revolver. The risks then of
imparting knowledge to the young were great. School teaching now in the
mines is, I imagine, a tame affair compared with that past, so full of
golden dreams and leaden realities.
If I could have taken that portion of my scholars who were beyond the A,
B, C business to a shady grove of live oaks near by and talked to them
for an hour or two a day, devoting each day to some special subject, at
the same time encouraging questions from them, I believe I could have
woke up more that was sleeping in their minds in a week than I did in a
month by the cut-and-dried system I was obliged to follow. I would have
taken them out of sight of the school-house, the desks and all thereunto
appertaining, which to most children suggests a species of imprisonment.
I think that amount of time and effort is enough in one day for both
teacher and pupil. It would not be trifling work if one’s heart was in
it, short as the time employed may seem, because a teacher must teach
himself to teach. Knowing a thing is not always being able to make it
plain to others. The gifted dunderhead who tried to teach me to play
whist commenced by saying: “Now that’s a heart, and hearts is trumps,
you know,” and went on with the game, deeming he had made things clear
enough for anybody.
Would not one topic to talk about be enough for one day? Take the motive
power of steam the first day, the cause of rain the second, the flight
of birds and their structure for flying the third, the making of soil
and its removal from mountain to plain the fourth, a talk on coal or
some other kind of mining the fifth, and so on. Would not subjects
continually suggest themselves to the interested teacher? And if you do
get one idea or suggestion per day in the scholar’s mind, is not that a
good day’s work? How many of us wise, grown-up people can retire at
night saying, “I have learned a new thing to-day?”
But I am theorizing. I have placed myself in the ranks of those
disagreeable, meddlesome people who are never satisfied with present
methods. So I will say that I do not imagine that my suggestions will
revolutionize our educational system, based rather heavily on the idea
that youth is the time, and the only time, to learn everything, and also
to learn a great many things at a time. In after years, when we settle
down to our work, we try, as a rule, to learn but one thing at a time.
How would a man stagger along if it was required of him five days out of
seven to learn a bit of painting, then of horseshoeing, then of
printing, and top off with a slice of elocution? It seems to me like an
overcrowding of the upper intellectual story.