I controlled my true feelings sufficiently to ask her what effect an epidemic of Gwendolin's little characteristics would have upon my class. I urged her imagination to picture fifty children late every morning because their fifty fathers always missed the first act of a play, and fifty voices always raised in howls because fifty mothers wept upon one hundred poached eggs on toast.
"Oh, but dear me," purred Mrs. Marks, as she heaved herself to the perpendicular, shedding Gwendolin, a pocket-book, a handkerchief, and a fan--"oh, but dear me, my sweet Gwendolin is such an exceptional child."
There is another class of parent from whom teachers suffer much. It generally has but one child, and that child is generally a pitiful, conscientious, earnest little creature in sombre hair ribbons and "Comfort" shoes. Very frequently this parent has been, in some prehistoric age, a teacher of mathematics in a high-school. Now, a spiritualistic seance at which Messrs. Froebel, Pestalozzi, Herbart, Locke, and Spencer should appear and explain their theories of education, and at which Professor James should come from Harvard to preside, while Professor John Dewey looked in to make a few remarks, would never persuade that parent that her child's progress was not to be gauged by an ability to spell obsolete words, and to worry her way through complicated problems in long division.
"Why, she's been to school every day for seven months; rain, nor snow, nor sleet has daunted her. She has an umbrella, a mackintosh, and a pair of rubbers. And yet with all these aids to education she cannot spell 'parallel.'" If you are rash you will inform her that the rubbers, the mackintosh, and the umbrella may travel to school for yet another seven months, and the child may still remain unable to spell "parallel." If you are patient and "so disposed," you would deliver a little lecture on the new methods of teaching reading, in which first a whole sentence is used as a unit; later a phrase; later still a word; and last of all a letter; but do not hope for a favorable reception of this theory. The ex-teacher of high-school mathematics, who, in her own far-distant youth, excelled at spelling-bees, could name the capital of every State in the Union and every country in the world; who could recite the names and dates of the Presidents, "The Village Blacksmith," "The Old Oaken Bucket," "The Psalm of Life," and the Declaration of Independence, is not prepared to accept a method of teaching based upon the interests and the reason of the child, and never upon its mechanical memory. "Things," she will tell you, "are changed since my day," and she allows you very thoroughly to understand that they are changed most mournfully for the worse.