Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/249

Rh he sets one of the better scholars to telling it over again for the benefit of those who don't understand.

This was not a preconceived plan, but came about of itself, and, whether the pupils are five or thirty in number, is repeated, always with the same success, if the teacher watches them all, if he does not allow them to shout, repeating words which have already been said, and if he does not permit the shouting to degenerate into frenzy but regulates this torrent of joyous animation and rivalry as much as he needs.

In summer, when we had frequent visitors and changes in the instructors, this order of exercises was modified, and the teaching of history was far less satisfactory. The universal shouting was incomprehensible to the new instructor; it seemed to him that those that were reciting at the top of their voices were not merely reciting; it seemed to him that they were shouting for the sake of shouting, and especially that it was hot and stifling in that pack of pupils, crawling up on his back, and thrusting themselves into his very face.

For if children want to understand well, they must infallibly get very close to the person who speaks, must watch every change in the expression of his face and every gesture he makes. I have more than once thought that they understand best of all those passages where the narrator happened to make a genuine gesture or a genuine intonation.

A new teacher made the pupils sit on benches and take turns in answering. The one called on would keep silent and was tortured with confusion, and the teacher, looking away from him, with a gracious expression of submission to his fate, or a sweet smile, would say:—

"Well …. and then? Good …. very good,"—all in the pedagogical way only too well known to all of us.

Moreover, I have become convinced by experience that there is nothing more pernicious for the development of a child than this kind of single questioning which springs from the teacher's relation of superiority to the pupil; and for me there is nothing more disturbing than such a spectacle. A grown man tortures a