The Way It Spozed to Be by James Herndon

Author:James Herndon [Herndon, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Hell, I thought; it didn't seem very important to me all of a sudden, and I went over and grabbed a stack of seventh-grade spellers from the shelf and passed them out. Everyone was delirious. The holidays were only a couple of weeks off, and I told them it was a Christmas present.

It was true the second- and third-grade spellers were of no use to them. What they needed was official spellers with seven big dots on them, to carry outside on the school grounds and home with them to prove they were too in seventh grade. I gave out a bunch of homework in spelling and ordered everyone to take the spellers home that very night to do the homework in; everyone carried those spellers home and back again every day from then on, until they were lost or swiped. I was, if not a real teacher like Mrs. A, at least a good guy again, and that was something. We were back to normal, ready to go.

(23) Mrs. A's Advice

In my free period that first day back I conferred with Mrs. A, who was sticking around to let me know what she'd been doing. She was an extremely attractive woman, perhaps thirty, well-dressed, light-colored, her hair nicely waved and under control; everything else was pretty well under control too, as I discovered. She told me, although not in so many words, that my classes had been a mess when she took over, that she considered them well on their way to straightening up after a month with her and that it was now up to me to keep them that way. She got this across to me very nicely in the kind but firm manner some people have with training animals.

She advised me to figure out a regular and consistent plan of work, or simply to accept the one she had devised, and see to it that the students did this, or if not that they at least did nothing else during the period. I should grade all papers immediately and hand them back so that students who did the work could see their rewards promptly.

It was important, she said, to get them into the proper mood for schoolwork as soon as they entered the room. In particular, avoid beginning the period by talking to them, explaining, or lecturing, which they would not listen to and which only encouraged them to start talking themselves. She believed that I talked to the class too much anyway—there was no point in their expressing opinions about things they knew nothing about. Let them learn something first, she said, and then they might have something to say.

The best method for getting them in order was to have a paragraph written out on the board when they entered, and get them in the habit of copying this paragraph in their notebooks immediately they sat down, giving a time limit for its completion, erasing the paragraph when the time was up, and grading the notebooks frequently.

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