My own connection with the girls is in the cooking classes, as I have indicated, and in the Parker Model Home and the Practise Cottage. The Parker Model Home is the home of the young women who each year reach the Senior class. Eight large, conveniently arranged rooms are set apart for them, and they are taught things by having to do them. The class, as a whole, is required to do actual work in the line of general housekeeping, cooking and serving food, and laundering.
In order to give practical demonstration in housekeeping and to develop the sense of responsibility in the work, a four-room house has been set aside, in which the Senior girls "keep house." Four girls at a time live in this house and have the entire care of it. They do all the work that pertains to ordinary housekeeping, from the Monday morning's washing to the Saturday's preparation for Sunday. They are also charged with the responsibility of purchasing the food supplies which they consume. Three dollars are allowed as the weekly expenditure for food. In view of the low prices that obtain for provisions here, four girls can live comfortably on this small allowance and have variety and plenty, and at the same time very wholesome food. Thus the lesson of economy is taught in the most effective way. The girls learn to appreciate the purchasing power of money, a kind of training which boarding-students, who have so much done for them, do not get. They acquire the habit of evolving their own plans, of exercising unhampered their own tastes. Regularity, system, exactness, neatness, and the feeling of responsibility, are all developed in this way.
A MODEL DINING-ROOM.
From the department where table-service is taught.
In both the Parker Model Home and the Practise Cottage I have charge, with my assistant, of the oversight of what is done in the direction of providing food, cooking it, serving it, etc.
Twenty-one classes a week are now taught; the preparatory classes one hour per week, and the normal classes two to three hours per week. The girls are required to work in groups, to wear white aprons, caps, and sleeves, and to bring to the classes towels and holders. Each girl brings her own blank books and keeps, through the year, a full report of each lesson given.
Most of the girls who come to us know absolutely nothing of cooking and housekeeping. They are, as a rule, like most beginners, more anxious to make cakes, candies, pies, etc., than to make bread, to care for utensils, and learn the practical things most necessary. Improvement soon follows, however.
We do some outside "extension work," in addition to what has been enumerated: a cooking class in the town of Tuskegee for those unable to attend the school at all, and classes for the children at the Children's House, the model training-school of the institution, where they are given understandable lessons in cooking and housekeeping. A bedroom, a dining-room, a bathroom, and a kitchen are also provided in connection with the Children's House.
I am happy in the thought that I have a part in this fundamental, home-building part of the instruction being given the girls who come from thirty-six States and territories of the Union, and from Cuba and Porto Rico and other foreign countries, to attend this famous school, of which I am myself a graduate.