Ella, a little schoolgirl of the sixties

by Eva March Tappan

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.”