She was radiantly happy when the reports were given out, for hers read, “Scholarship, 91%, Rank in class, 3. Deportment, Excellent.” Below this, in the space for remarks, the teacher had written, “Ella is studious and well behaved.” This pleased Ella very much.
“You see,” she said to her mother, “she had to write percentage and rank, but she did not have to say anything in the ‘Remarks,’ so she must have done that because she really wanted to.” And she read the line over and over.
Ella’s likes and dislikes were very strong. When she “left out what form and voice the verb ‘forbid’ was,” and so lost her place at the head, she wrote that she “didn’t like grammar at all.” In the middle of the term, when things were a little dull and monotonous, she wrote forlornly:
“Nothing in particular happened to-day, as indeed nothing happens any day but to get up, dress, and start for school; then I study hard all day long and come home at night, go to studying again, and so on, the same old routine over and over again, till I am sure that I am thoroughly sick of it all.”
The trouble was that the lessons had become so much easier that they no longer kept her fully occupied, and she had time to find fault.
However, if Ella did find life monotonous, her teacher did not. The first teacher was ill and out of school, and a much younger one had taken her place.
This new teacher was rather too generous with “extras,” and her pupils soon found out that if they behaved well four days in the week, they could pile up extras enough to make up for all the misdeeds that they could commit on the fifth.
They were very systematic, these naughty children. Four days they behaved like little saints, studying quietly and never whispering; but when the fifth day had come, they wrote notes to one another, they whispered, they made paper dolls, they wriggled and they twisted. They manufactured excuses for walking about the room. How every child could need to go to the dictionary and the waste-basket at least once in five minutes was a mystery to the young teacher. She began to have a nervous dread of Fridays, for fear visitors might come and would report that her classes knew absolutely nothing and behaved exactly as they ought not; for many of her mischievous pupils carried their game so far as to do little studying for Fridays.
Ella would never agree to this. Play and failures in class were two different things. It was fun to play, but it was a disgrace to fail. Besides, Friday’s lesson was always Monday’s review lesson, and, as she very sensibly reasoned, it was better to learn it and have it done with than to spoil Saturday by having to learn a double lesson for Monday.
