620 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



"CONFESSIONS" OF A NORMAL-SCHOOL TEACHER. 



Br MARY HALL LEONAED. 



IN this age of frank subjective expression wlien we are taken 

 into the confidence of so many interesting personalities, when 

 authors write their " reminiscences" or recall their "literary pas- 

 sions," when men of business recount the stej^s by which they 

 climbed the ladder of success, and when even the public-school 

 teachers have found a welcome for their "confessions" in the 

 literary magazines, it seems good to me also, having been a nor- 

 mal- school teacher from the first (that is, having spent most of 

 the years since, a girl in my teens, I graduated at a State normal 

 school, in teaching in similar institutions of different sections of 

 the country), to set forth in order a few of the things that are 

 surely believed by the members of our craft. 



It is currently reported that we normal-school people are not 

 an erudite class ; that there are many things in the philosophies 

 of heaven and earth that are not included in the horizon of 

 our mental vision. Indeed, we have heard this so many times 

 that it begins to seem like a "chestnut" to our indurated ears. 

 Brethren of the college and out of the college, when next you 

 feel moved to characterize our mental status, please tell us some- 

 thing new. 



As to the charge itself we have no desire to enter into contro- 

 versy regarding it. We have a high respect for knowledge, espe- 

 cially of the real kind. We prefer this to the sort possessed by a 

 certain fabled princess of one of Henry James's novels, who had 

 been told all the facts in the universe, but had never in her life 

 perceived anything. For this latter kind of "knowledge" we 

 are not perhaps so greedy as some, while recognizing that " infor- 

 mation " also has its value and uses. 



But we confess, jointly and severally, to a measure of truth in 

 the indictment. There are halls in the temple of knowledge where 

 the feet of some of us have never trod ; there are shrines at which 

 some of us have never worshiped. Friend Critic, forgive us if we 

 sometimes question whether you yourself have tasted of every 

 "apple" that grows upon the tree of knowledge, unless by proxy 

 as it were, after the manner of the fabled princess aforesaid. 



We are inclined to the belief that native ability and persistent 

 effort have more to do with the acquisition of mental power than 

 the question of what seat of learning one studies in. Much that 

 a student thinks he learns while acquiring a so-called " educa- 

 tion" is only "skin-deep," and has little appreciable effect upon 

 the after-efforts of life. But if a mind of good ability has learned 

 how to study, and has a strong desire for improvement and is ex- 



