Reveries of a Schoolmaster | Page 6

have often
wondered what his comment was. He never told me. There are those
"who, having eyes, see not." There had been thousands of people who
had looked at that epitaph with the printed copy in hand, and yet had
never noticed the discrepancy, and it remained for an American to point
out the mistake. But that is Doctor Mendenhall's way. He is nothing if
not thorough, and that proves his scientific mind.
Well, Brown fell to talking about the Isle of Pines, in the course of our
verbal exchanges, and I drew him out a bit, receiving a liberal
education on the subjects of grapefruit, pineapples, and bananas. From
my school-days I have carried over the notion that the Caribbean Sea is
one of the many geographical myths with which the school-teacher is
wont to intimidate boys who would far rather be scaring rabbits out
from under a brush heap. But here sits a man who has travelled upon
the Caribbean Sea, and therefore there must be such a place. Our
youthful fancies do get severe jolts! From my own experience I infer
that much of our teaching in the schools doesn't take hold, that the boys
and girls tolerate it but do not believe. I cannot recall just when I first
began to believe in Mt. Vesuvius, but I am quite certain that it was not
in my school-days. It may have been in my teaching-days, but I'm not
quite certain. I have often wondered whether we teachers really believe
all we try to teach. I feel a pity for poor Sisyphus, poor fellow, rolling
that stone to the top of the hill, and then having to do the work all over
when the stone rolled to the bottom. But that is not much worse than
trying to teach Caribbean Sea and Mt. Vesuvius, if we can't really
believe in them. But here is Brown, metamorphosed into a psychologist
who begins with the known, yea, delightfully known grapefruit which I
had at breakfast, and takes me on a fascinating excursion till I arrive, by
alluring stages, at the related unknown, the Caribbean Sea. Too bad that
Brown isn't a teacher.
Brown has the gift of holding on to a thing till his craving for
knowledge is satisfied. Somewhere he had come upon some question
touching a campanile or, possibly, the Campanile, as it seemed to him.
Nor would he rest content until I had extracted what the books have to
say on the subject. He had in mind the Campanile at Venice, not

knowing that the one beside the Duomo at Florence is higher than the
one at Venice, and that the Leaning Tower at Pisa is a campanile, or
bell-tower, also. When I told him that one of my friends saw the
Campanile at Venice crumble to a heap of ruins on that Sunday
morning back in 1907, and that another friend had been of the last party
to go to the top of it the evening before, he became quite excited, and
then I knew that I had succeeded in investing the subject with human
interest, and I felt quite the schoolmaster. Nothing of this did I mention
to Brown, for there is no need to exploit the mental machinery if only
you get results.
Many people who travel abroad buy postcards by the score, and seem
to feel that they are the original discoverers of the places which these
cards portray, and yet these very places were the background of much
of their history and geography in the schools. Can it be that their
teachers failed to invest these places with human interest, that they
were but words in a book and not real to them at all? Must I travel all
the way to Yellowstone Park to know a geyser? Alas! in that case,
many of us poor school-teachers must go through life geyserless.
Wondrous tales and oft heard I in my school-days of glacier, iceberg,
canyon, snow-covered mountain, grotto, causeway, and volcano, but
not till I came to Grindelwald did I really know what a glacier is.
There's many a Doubting Thomas in the schools.
CHAPTER IV
PSYCHOLOGICAL
The psychologist is so insistent in proclaiming his doctrine of negative
self-feeling and positive self-feeling that one is impelled to listen out of
curiosity, if nothing else. Then, just as you are beginning to get a little
glimmering as to his meaning, another one begins to assail your ears
with a deal of sesquipedalian English about the emotion of subjection
and the emotion of elation. Just as I began to think I was getting a grip
of the thing a college chap came in and proceeded to enlighten me by
saying that these two emotions may be generated only by personal
relations, and not by relations