Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/256

242 If you leave a class in a district institute or a German school where everything is quiet, and if you tell them to keep on with their studies, and if at the end of half an hour you come and listen at the door, you will find the class lively enough; but the purpose of the animation is very different: it is now sheer mischief.

We have often made this experiment in our classes. Leaving in the middle of the recitation, when there is already a good deal of shouting; you come back to the door and you will hear the children continuing to recite, correcting and verifying one another, and often, instead of their playing tricks in your absence, they will become entirely quiet without you.

As in the system of having the pupils sit on benches and of individual questioning, so also in this system there are ways easy enough indeed, but requiring knowledge, so that if you don't practise them your first experiment may fail. You have to be on your guard lest there be noisy fellows who repeat the last words said merely for the sake of disorder. You have to be careful lest this fascination of noise become their chief object and care. You must test some and find out if they can recite the whole lesson by themselves, and if they have got the sense of it. If the pupils are too numerous, then they must be divided into several sections, and these sections must be set to reciting to one another. There is no reason for apprehension even if some newly entered pupil does not open his mouth for a month. All you need to do is to watch if he is interested in some story or in anything. Generally the newly entered pupil at first grasps only the material side of the affair, and is wholly absorbed in observing how the others are sitting and lying, and how the teacher moves his lips, and how all suddenly begin to shout at the top of their voices; and if he be a quiet child, then he will sit just exactly as the rest do; but if he be a bold child, then he will begin to shout as the others do, not understanding anything, and only repeating what the one next him says. The teacher and his comrades hush him, and he perceives that something else is