"They has awful 'fraids over her," Sarah Schodsky remarked. "A girl by her class tells me how she throws rulers once on a boy."
"I'd have a 'fraid over her too," cried Yetta Aaronsohn. "I don't like I shall have no teachers what is big like that. I have all times 'fraids over big teachers."
"You've never had one," laughed Miss Bailey, "so don't talk nonsense. Big teachers are much nicer than little ones."
"They ain't fer me," Yetta maintained. "I ain't never had no teacher on'y you, and I don't needs I shall never have no teacher on'y you."
From these conversational straws Miss Bailey gathered that it would be unwise to insist too strongly upon the personal element in "developing the promotion thought." Promotion had formed no part in the experience or the vocabulary of the First Readers Class before Miss Bailey somewhat guilefully introduced it.
The children were delighted. They always loved things vague and looming, and Miss Bailey--animated by duty--spoke so enthusiastically of promotion that they all thrilled to experience it. The phrase, "when I'm 'moted," grew very fashionable. No one knew exactly what it meant, but it was something more imminent than the "when I'm big" of the boys, and the "when I git married" of the girls. It was something, too, in which one's prowess as a reader and writer was to count for righteousness; "For of course," Miss Bailey explained, "we can't expect to be promoted if we don't know how to read: 'see the leaves fall from the tree.'" (It was easier to read than to do in January on the lower East Side.)
The First Readers were hardly daunted when they learned that a barrier, known as "zamnation," was to be stretched between them and the "'moted" state. "Zamnation," when first Miss Bailey pronounced it, caused something akin to panic in Room 18. It differed in no perceptible degree from a word which they all understood to be _taboo_ ever since Ikey Borrachsohn had addressed it, in the heat of argument, to a classmate. In the lower grades an examination does not greatly differ from an ordinary recitation, and so the First Readers, protected from stage fright by complete ignorance of what they were undergoing, passed the ordeal in triumph, and fell out at the other side victorious almost to a man, and First Readers never more.