“In his talk to the teachers,” said Superintendent Spalding, “he showed a deeper knowledge of the subject than most of the teachers present possessed.”
Those who remember with a shiver of dread the syntax, parsing, sentence diagramming, paragraph dissecting, machine composition construction of the grammar grades, should have stepped with me into the class of an Indianapolis teacher of seventh grade English. The teacher sat in the back of the room. The class bent forward, attentively listening while a roughly clad, uncouth boy, slipshod in attitude, stumbled through the broken periods of his ungrammatical sentences.
“And Esau went out after a venison,” he was saying, “and Jacob’s mother cooked up some goat’s meat till it smelled like a venison. And then Jacob, he took the venison—I mean the goat’s meat to Isaac, and Isaac couldn’t tell it wasn’t Esau because”—so the story continued for two or three minutes. When it was ended, the boy stood looking gloomily at the class.
“Well, class?” queried Miss Howes, “has any one any criticism to make?”
Instantly, three-quarters of the class was on its feet.
“Well, Edward.”
Edward, a manly fellow, spoke quietly to the boy who had told the story.
“Paul, you don’t talk quite loud enough. Then you should raise and lower your voice more.”
Several of the class (having intended to make the same criticism) sat down with Edward. The teacher turned.
“Yes, Mary.”