CHAPTER II.
GENERAL ARRANGEMENTS.
The distraction and perplexity of the teacher's life are, as was explained in the last chapter, almost proverbial. There are other pressing and exhausting pursuits, which wear away the spirit by the ceaseless care which they impose, or perplex and bewilder the intellect by the multiplicity and intricacy of their details. But the business of teaching, by a pre-eminence not very enviable, stands, almost by common consent, at the head of the catalogue.
I have already alluded to this subject in the preceding chapter; and probably the greater majority of actual teachers will admit the truth of the view there presented. Some will however, doubtless say, that they do not find the business of teaching so perplexing and exhausting an employment. They take things calmly. They do one thing at a time, and that without useless solicitude and anxiety. So that teaching, with them, though it has, indeed, its solicitudes and cares, as every other responsible employment must necessarily have, is, after all, a calm and quiet pursuit, which they follow from month to month, and from year to year, without any extraordinary agitations, or any unusual burdens of anxiety and care.
There are indeed such cases, but they are exceptions; and unquestionably an immense majority, especially of those who are beginners in the work, find it such as I have described. I think it need not be so; or rather, I think the evil may be avoided to a very great degree. In this chapter I shall endeavor to show how order may be produced out of that almost inextricable mass of confusion, into which so many teachers, on commencing their labors, find themselves plunged.
The objects then, to be aimed at in the general arrangements of schools, are two-fold.
1. That the teacher may be left uninterrupted, to attend to one thing at a time.
2. That the individual scholars may have constant employment, and such an amount and such kinds of study, as shall be suited to the circumstances and capacities of each.
I shall examine each in their order.
1. The following are the principal things which, in a vast number of schools, are all the time pressing upon the teacher: or rather, they are the things which must, every where, press upon the teacher, except so far as, by the skill of his arrangements, he contrives to remove them.