Four hundred and sixty-five children were irregular in attendance. Since the same child is sometimes below standard in scholarship and irregular in attendance, or in need of advice and information, the groups here mentioned often overlap and the numbers total more than 1,157.
Six hundred and seventy-five needed advice or information. In all of these cases the child needed someone to plead his cause either at home or at school, that he might be the more thoroughly understood and that his special need, whether it be recreational, physical, or vocational, might be satisfied.
The task of the visiting teacher is plain. She must get at the facts. This she does by studying closely the child’s environment, realizing that he is the product of varied associations and influences. There are circles within circles—the home, the school, the immediate neighborhood, and what at times seems almost “beyond his ken,” the great wide world itself. No analysis of the forces that in their play and interplay tend to shape this young life would be complete that did not include the shifting, kaleidoscopic scenes amid which so often his plastic years are spent; nor would the picture be lifelike did it not show upon its face the changes that are wrought through that remoter contact with men and things.
The action followed depends naturally upon what the investigation reveals. Should the home be at fault, then an effort is made to remove the “trouble maker,” and, should this be impossible, then effort is made at least to effect some compromise, the benefit of which the child will reap both in the home and in the school.
Margaret had many times struck a discordant note in the classroom. At home she had always had her own way. Small wonder, then, that she played the prank she did in the assembly. In the midst of the gathering of some five hundred children when the morning exercises were being held, she spoke loud enough to be disturbing, and when reprimanded and told to leave the hall, she walked its full length on her heels, thus creating a greater disturbance and openly defying the principal’s authority. She was sent home and the matter was explained to her parents. The child felt that she had been insulted because ordered from the room, and the mother, unfortunately, took her side. At first she could not be made to see that if her child saw fit to leave the hall as she chose, the other 499 might use their wits to the same end and pandemonium result. Only after repeated interviews with the visiting teacher and after the child had lost fully a month of school did the mother allow her to return.
Sometimes it happens that the child has neither time nor place to study. “The noise, it gets me all mixed up,” is her pathetic comment. The neighborhood is scoured till a quiet room is found, either in a settlement, a sisterhood, or a public library, and then the mother’s co-operation is enlisted and many times secured when she understands that noise, interruptions and general disorder are not conducive to the formation of good habits of study.
Should it happen that the child’s work is seriously impaired because his sleep is interfered with, either because the mother’s work is carried late into the night and goes on in the child’s so-called bedroom, or because he is allowed to partake too freely of tea and coffee, the injurious effects of this way of living are demonstrated and the family is, in the one case, urged to move to better rooms, and in the other, plead with until milk and cocoa are substituted for tea and coffee. If then, the longed-for change sets in, showing itself in the child’s ability to make normal responses at school, word is carried to the home and thereby is strengthened the bond that makes these two centers one in their desire to promote the child’s well being.
But there are times when the cause is not so obvious and does not lend itself so easily to a simple solution. It happens often that what to the school appears a lack of co-operation on the part of the home means only that the parents have tried and failed. Again and again the visiting teacher is besought “Use your influence,” “Come and advise us,” “Robert” or “Alice,” “pays attention to you,”—all of which reduced to its lowest terms means that somewhere there is failure to understand. “It is because we are treated as we are at home that we run the streets,” is the way one girl of fourteen sums up the situation.
On the other hand it may happen that the source of the difficulty is to be found in the school itself, in the conditions that surround the child there, which, in the light of the information gathered in the home, expose to view some serious maladjustment. Perhaps it is a case of simple misunderstanding between teacher and pupil, the former holding the latter to a sort of rule-of-thumb scale of measurement when, mentally and physically, the child is incapable of following. Handicapped by nature, perhaps one of a long line similarly affected, is it to be expected that his reactions will be what in age and grade they should be? For such as he the hope lies in a curriculum so elastic that at some point the spark of interest cannot fail to be struck.
In the class room Lillian, a frail girl of thirteen, had apparently made only the impression of being a slow, sleepy, listless child. The first interviews showed her ill at ease. She studied hard every evening, she insisted; but when she was questioned in the class all the carefully memorized facts flew to the winds, she was so afraid. History was her Waterloo. Try as she would, she could not conquer. The outlook was not promising. The visit to the home revealed that she loved to draw. Tony, the black and white spaniel, and Nellie, his fox-terrier companion, had up to that time been her only models. In her leisure moments she sketched them lying before the kitchen stove, or curled up, asleep, under the table.