The Evolution of "Dodd" / A pedagogical story giving his struggle for the survival of the fittest, tracing his chances, his changes, and how he came out

by William Hawley Smith

The matter had been set up for the year before, but the examiner of teachers had vetoed the plan by refusing a certificate to teach to the young man who talked so much and knew so little. This official had asked the candidate, when he came for examination, to add together 2/3, 3/4, 5/6, and 7/8, whereupon he wrote: "Since you cannot reduce these fractions to a common denominator, I adopt the method of multiplying the numerators together for a new numerator, and the denominators together for a new denominator=210/576! This, reduced to the greatest common divisor, or, add numerators and denominators=17/21!"

Please do not think that I am jesting, for I have copied this quotation verbatim from a set of examination papers that lie before me as I write, papers that were written before the very face and eyes of an examiner in this great State of Illinois, by a bona fide candidate for a certificate, on the 16th day of December, in the year of grace, 1875; the man who wrote them being over thirty years of age and having taught school for more than half a decade! This is a truthful tale, if nothing else.

So Amos did not teach the first year that his friends and relations wanted him to. His friends and relations, however, had their own way about it after all, for they met and resolved that it should be "Amos or nobody," and they got the latter. That is, they asked the examiner to send them a teacher if he would not let them have the one they wanted.

The examiner asked them what they would pay for a good teacher and they replied, "Twenty dollars a month!" The poor man sent them the best he had for that money, but it was of so poor a quality that it could ill stand the strain put upon it by the wrangling and angered patrons of "deestrick four," and it broke down before the school had run a month.

This year they had tried the same thing again, and the examiner, in sheer despair, gave them their way, as perhaps the lesser of two evils.

If any one thinks this an unnatural picture, please address, stamp enclosed, any one of the one hundred and two county superintendents of schools in Illinois, and if you don't get what you want to know, then try Iowa, or Ohio, or Pennsylvania, or even the old Bay State. The quality is largely distributed, and specimens can be picked up in almost any locality where it is made possible by the system that permits such a condition.

This was the teacher to whom "Dodd" came on an October morning, just preceding his ninth birthday. Amos had heard much of Elder Weaver and had boasted not a little of how he would "out argy" him the first "lick" he got at him, and he gazed on these small scions of so notable a stock with a feeling that the contest had already begun. He put the children into their seats somewhat gruffly when they appeared, as if resolved to paralyze his antagonist from the first.

"Dodd" had learned to read by this time, in spite of the hindrance imposed by Miss Stone in the chart class. Indeed, the only redeeming feature in his career as a pupil up to date, was his natural love for reading. The child had a fondness for this art, a genius for it, if you will, which triumphed over all obstacles, and asserted itself in spite of all attempts to cripple it, or to bring it down to the level of his more limited attainments, or to raise these lesser powers to a line with his special gift.

And in this respect, too, "Dodd" was like other children, or other children are like "Dodd." Most of these individualities have special things that they can do ever so much better than they can do some other things. Why not put them at the things that they can do best, and help them on in this direction, instead of striving to press them down from the line of their special genius, and up from the line of their mediocrity, so as to have them on one common level, as some would fain have all the world?

As said, "Dodd" had a special genius for reading. When he began to go to school to Amos this fact appeared at once, and it speedily became a casus belli between the two, for Amos was a blockhead with a reading book, and the boy put him terribly to shame before all the school.