"I do not expect it," said the
teacher. "All I wish is that each of you should be faithful in your
efforts to prepare your lessons. I wish you to study from a sense of
duty, and for the sake of your own improvement. You know I do not punish
you for failures. I have no going up or down, no system of marking. Your
only reward, when you have made faithful preparation for a recitation,
is the feeling of satisfaction which you will always experience; and
when you have been negligent, your only punishment is a sort of uneasy
feeling of self-reproach. I do not expect you all to be invariably
prepared with every question of your lessons. Sometimes you will be
unavoidably prevented from studying them, and at other times, when you
have studied them very carefully, you may have forgotten, or you may
fail from some misapprehension of the meaning in some cases. Do not, in
such a case, feel troubled because you may not have appeared as well as
some individual who has not been half as faithful as yourself. If you
have done your duty, that is enough. On the other hand, you ought to
feel no better satisfied with yourselves when your lesson has not been
studied well, because you may have happened to know the parts which came
to you. Have I _done_ well? should always be the question, not, Have I
managed to _appear_ well?
"I will say a word here," continued the teacher, "upon a practice which
I have known to be very common in some schools, and which I have been
sorry to notice occasionally in this.
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