The arithmetic was his share of the teaching, and he conducted it by methods that were successful certainly, but never used in any other school in the city. He was quite likely to break into a rather lame explanation of a problem by handing the one who was reciting a foot-rule and saying, “Go and measure those steps across the street and find out how many square feet of boards are in them”; or, “There’s a pile of wood in the next yard. Go and find out how many cords there are.” Once when he thought a class needed waking up, he suddenly asked, “What would happen if an irresistible force should meet an immovable body?” Again he demanded, “Why can’t a man lift himself up by his bootstraps?” Another time he sent a boy for a wooden rolling hoop. When it arrived, he held it firmly to the chalk ledge of the blackboard, and marked one point on the hoop where it touched the ledge and another exactly opposite that one. Then he turned the hoop a little and demanded, “Why does the point at the top move over more distance than the opposite point at the bottom? You can see that the whole hoop is moving, can’t you? Why don’t they keep together?”
There would be reasons why it did and why it didn’t, until when he thought the class were thoroughly waked up, he would turn back to the lesson and go on as if there had been no interruption. He was as fond of cube root as if it had been a pet child of his own, and when Ella’s class came to that corner of the arithmetic, he took it almost as a personal grievance that they complained of the difficulty.
“You try to do it without thinking,” he declared wrathfully. “If you have just three minutes in which to do something new, take two of them to think out what is the best and quickest way to do it. Cube root is the finest thing in the arithmetic. Miss Ella doesn’t groan over it,” he added, “and you ought to be able to do it as well as she.”
“Ella’s done it before,” said a boy. “She did it before she ever came to this school. She said so.”
The principal’s fine little speech was spoiled. Probably he had never come so near being angry with her. When the class was over, he called her to the desk. “Miss Ella—Ella,” he said, “you must always remember that there are some things which it is better not to tell.”
He had quite a liking for making his pupils turn teachers. Sometimes he would say to a boy or girl in the middle of a recitation, “You may take the class now”; and he would sit back restfully in his big chair on the platform with his eyes half closed.
It was an honor to be asked to hear a class, but it was hardly a pleasure, for the gentleman in the chair was not so sleepy as he seemed, and woe to the substitute teacher if he allowed the slightest mistake to pass.
Sometimes when the teacher of a lower room was absent, he would send one of the First Roomers in to take her place.
“Tell them,” he would say, “to multiply 1 by 2; that product by 3; that by 4; and so on until they have multiplied by 26. Then let every one who has it right go home.”
“Will you please give me the right answer?” the young substitute teacher would ask, and he would reply with apparent indifference,