TEACHER: "What does B.C. stand for?"
SCHOLAR: "Before Christ!"
TEACHER: "Good! Now what does B.A. stand for?"
SCHOLAR: "Before Adam!"
It is not to be denied that the life of the schoolmaster is always exacting, usually tedious, and occasionally irritating. It is not to be denied that long-enduring patience, untiring perseverance, and philosophical resignation are only the first three of the many qualities essential to success. But still the drudgery of teaching has its compensations. And they are the more acceptable because of their rare charm. There, in the schoolmaster's keeping, is the youthful mind. What may he not do with it? What forgetfulness of the dreary round of toil the very contemplation of the situation compels! And when his task is achieved, and the finished product of his labour has passed out into the world, with what quiet and ineffable satisfaction the schoolmaster reflects upon the part he played in the making of men. In the days of my schoolmastering I fell into this mood always—gently carried thence by some beneficent ministering angel—when wearied and worried at the close of the long day's toil; and in that mood was more balm than in many sedatives and more sereneness than in much repose. This is the schoolmaster's first great compensation.
But there is that other. There is the agreeable amazement that the working of the fresh child-mind is always provoking. And in this the schoolmaster is regularly furnished with food for pleasant reflection and for engaging conjecture day by day throughout the whole of his pedagogic career. "Child-study" and "Psychology" have in recent times taken severely scientific shape, and have fallen under the ægis of Government Departments and into Government Syllabuses. Good! But the least observant and the least interested of all the schoolmasters of the land, long before the Board of Education ever added "Child-study" to its quaint if not exactly terrifying terminology, have never failed to arrive empirically at certain broad conclusions with regard to the child-mind which have been reached by practical and altogether delightful daily experiences. Heaven forbid that I should unduly weary the reader with disquisitions on these conclusions. But, at any rate, I may acceptably rehearse some of the experiences.
Now I admit at once that very many of the artlessly amusing things which are alleged to have been uttered by that prime unconscious humorist, the schoolboy, are quite apocryphal. They have been ingeniously excogitated by their unabashed and artful elders for the purpose of creating a laugh. They used to say that quill pens survived in the office of the Board of Education in order that the Inspectors and other officials, in the operation of persistently trimming them, might never be without something to do. That is absurd. There is always the profitable preoccupation of manufacturing funny puerile answers to inspectorial hypothetical questions. Why not? The proceeding is innocent enough. But it does tend to make one incredulous. For example, I was once told that a London Board School child defined "a lie" as "an abomination in the sight of the Lord, but a very present help in time of trouble." It is possible, remotely possible. But it is extremely unlikely. Then when I am told that a youngster described "the liver" as "an infernal organ," I see visions of a not fully-occupied civil servant suffering acutely from an attack of chronic indigestion which has put him badly off his drive. So, too, when I am told that a Bristol youngster once wrote, "The bowels are five in number, namely a, e, i, o and u," like the Scotsman, "I hae ma doots!" Then there is the classic answer to the question: "What proof have we from the Bible that it is not lawful to have more than one wife"—"Because it says no man can serve two masters!" No child ever said that. And belonging to the same category is the following. The teacher asked: "If one man walking at the rate of three miles an hour gets half an hour's start of another man walking at the rate of four miles an hour, when will the second man overtake the first?" The allegation is that the small boy replied: "Please, sir, at the first public-house!" But I know that small boy. He is a wag, it is true; but he doesn't wear knickerbockers.
So far as possible, therefore, I will endeavour to reject the apocryphal in favour of the authentic, giving the former the benefit of the doubt, of course, if on its merits the humour of the anecdote seems to condone the illegitimacy of its origin.
"A focus is a thing that looks like a mushroom, but if you eat it you will feel different to a mushroom."—SMALL GIRL.
Of course children's witticisms are always unconscious. They have taken the idiomatic quite literally: not quite caught our meaning; missed the right word in favour of another that is curiously like it in sound.
Reasonably enough the idiom is extremely troublesome to the child-mind. "The doctor says my mother has one foot in the grave," wrote a little girl the other day in a Composition Exercise. "That is not true. She has both feet in bed!" Again, if people will talk about "going it bald-headed," or about being "stony-hearted" or "iron-fisted" or "brazen-faced," and so on, they must naturally expect young children to accept the phraseology in its literal sense. Hence amusing misconceptions.
Again, as I say, it is often a question of not having quite got the right word. Having mumbled The Lord's Prayer every day for a year or so, we ultimately get the young Cockney who is found to be rendering "Lead us not into temptation" as "Lead us not into Thames Station"—a London police court shunned of all good costers and others. So too, taught that the Epiphany is a Manifestation, we condone readily the mistake of the little girl who, to her teacher's complete and abiding mystification, insisted that the Epiphany was "the-man-at-the-station!"
Owing its origin to the same sort of misconception is the genuinely funny answer of the boy who wrote, "The marriage customs of the ancient Greeks were that a man had only one wife, and this was called Monotony!"
Then, again, the child-mind is absolutely fresh and alert. It is to the adult mind as is the plastic clay to the baked brick. It is not already overlaid with impressions; it is not restricted in its elasticity by the petrifying effects of already-received preconceptions; it is refreshingly new and instantly impressionable. It is because of this that a youngster wrote: "A vacuum is nothing shut up in a box." It is because of this, too, that the little girl said: "The zebra is like a horse, only striped and used to illustrate the letter Z." Owing its origin to the same freshness of view, we get the following: Two children being awakened one morning and being told that they had a new little brother, were keen, as children are, to know whence and how he had come. "It must have been the milkman," said the girl. "Why the milkman?" asked her little brother. "Because it says on his cart, 'Families supplied,'" replied the sister. Not less quaintly ingenuous and fresh is the reply of a little chap in a Nature-study lesson. "Think," said the teacher, "of a little creature that wriggles about in the earth and sometimes comes to the top through a tiny hole." A small boy in a pinafore put up his hand joyously. "Well?" queried the teacher. "A worm," said the small boy. "Yes," said the teacher, "now think of another little creature that wriggles about in the earth and comes to the top through a small hole." Up went the joyous hand again. "Well?" asked the teacher. "Another worm!" shouted Tommy in triumph.
The workings of the child-mind, the quaint, homely wisdom and shrewdness that it not infrequently displays, and the pathos that—so far as the working-class children are concerned—it so often discovers, are engrossingly interesting. Take the case of the reply to the Inspector who, putting a "Mental Arithmetic" question, asked: "If I had three glasses of beer on this table and your father came in and drank one, how many would be left?" "None, sir," at once replied a very small urchin. "But you don't understand my question," retorted the inspector, proceeding to repeat it. This he did several times, always receiving the same unwavering assurance, "None, sir!" At last he said: "Ah, my boy, it is clear you don't know mental arithmetic." "But I know my father," answered the boy.
Again, there is the instance of the little chap driven into desperation and escaping by a wild stretch of the imagination. "Who made the world?" snapped out a rather testy inspector years ago to a class of very small boys. No answer. Several times he repeated the question, getting louder and more angry each time. At last a poor little fellow, kneading his eyes vigorously with his knuckles, blubbered out: "Please, sir, it was me. But I won't do it any more!" Which recalls to me the old Scotch chestnut: "Why did the priest and the Levite pass by on the other side, child?" "Because the puir man had been robbed already!" was the reply.
Much of the school-room humour purveyed for the delectation of us elders by the unconscious wits of the schoolroom is provoked by quaint pieces of "Composition." Of these I give later a number. One of the most amusing is that by a young lady in the Sixth Standard, who very frankly and faithfully expresses her views on "Schoolmasters." She writes so candidly, that I produce her essay here as a wholesome corrective to professional vanity and as an acute witness to the necessity to "see ourselves as others see us":—
"Schoolmasters are a class of people who have a tendency to a bad temper, and who are generally armed with a cane. We have a very good sample at our school, for we have a schoolmaster who is, as a rule, 'better in health than temper,' especially when we have Geography. To hear most schoolmasters talk you would think that they never did wrong in their lives; and, of course, they will tell you that when they went to school they never used to talk, and they never got the stick; but whether they used to talk in school or not I do not know. All I can say is, that they can talk like magpies when they are outside. Well, I suppose we must have schoolmasters, or we should all be very ignorant indeed——."
Much fun is got out of the weird and fearfully contrived "Notes" which teachers receive from the poorer working-class parents. I have not dwelt much on these, as I never see one of these "Notes" without feeling more inclined to cry than to laugh. If the State had known and had done its duty earlier there would be less melancholy fun in these self-same parental "Notes." I will only dare to reproduce two here:—
"Pleas Sur, Jonnie was kep home to day. I have had twins. It shant ocur again. Yours truely Mrs. Smith."
The other is given in the stories which follow; but it is worth repeating:—
"Plese excuse mary being late as she as been out on a herring!"
It is the fact, and it is not altogether to be wondered at, that the Scripture lesson is a prime source of juvenile undoing. The proper names used are so hard and unfamiliar, and the scope of the subject is so often so far beyond the children's capacity, that the wonder is that the misconceptions and errors are so few. Then, again, the children mostly learn their Scripture texts and so on viva voce from the teacher. Many repetitions cause them to distort the words; and then when they come to write them down the result is, not to put too fine a point upon it, as Mr. Snagsby would say, startling. The classical instance is that given in the report of the "Newcastle" Commission on the Condition of Elementary Education in 1855. The questions were: "What is thy duty towards God?" and "What is thy duty towards thy neighbour?" Here are the two answers given by the Commissioners:—