will still find in it something new and interesting, and every year you will be better able to teach it. New thoughts will often come to you while conducting a classroom exercise, which, noted down before you have time to forget them, and later developed, will help you in presenting the truth to subsequent classes. For more than thirty years Dr. Taylor of Andover taught the same books of the Iliad and of the Æneid to his Senior classes, and he came before his students each year with fresh interest and enthusiasm. He read the new commentaries by English and German scholars on these and similar portions of ancient literature, and carefully prepared each lesson anew before he took it up with his pupils. It is to the teacher who gives but little attention to his subject outside the classroom, that a course becomes irksome when repeated year after year.

But when you repeat a course with succeeding classes, you are not doing over and over the same work. You teach a course solely for the benefit of the students who take it. The course which you teach is the means which you employ to accomplish the end which you have in view. A farmer may use the same machine in his fields for successive years, but his work each year is new. He takes good care of his machine, but his purpose is to get better results from his fields. Your first thought should be not for your subject, but for the young men in your classes. They are the material on which your efforts are to be expended. Your real work, therefore, is always new, because every year a

new class comes under your instruction. The opportunity to study human nature by coming in contact with many different classes, and with youths unlike in character and temperament, is one of the interesting features of a teacher's life. However familiar you may be with your subject, it will be a new subject to each new class. Their eagerness to learn will give you a fresh interest in what you have taught many times before, and the more you know about it, the more you will enjoy teaching it.

It has been thought by some teachers that the calling is under a greater or less social disadvantage; that a teacher is not regarded, even by the parents of his pupils, as on a level in rank with other young men of less ability and attainments who belong to good families, because he supports himself by work, and that in general those who get their living by teaching are not welcomed in good society. I do not think there is ground for this feeling. If this were true of a teacher, it would be equally true of one in any other profession where he had to work for his own support, and a selfrespecting young man would not resent the lack of social recognition under such conditions. To earn one's own living by service of any kind is many times more honorable than to live in idleness and to subsist on the earnings of another. In this country the man who accomplishes something worth while is respected and appreciated by all who are themselves worthy of respect. Among any class of people for whose good opinion we care, a person's social standing depends

chiefly on his personal qualifications as his fund of knowledge, his conversational gifts, his manners — and very little on his occupation, provided the occupation be honorable.

Another objection which has been raised against teaching is that much time is taken up with "drudgery." It will not be denied that a part of the work of many teachers may be rightly so designated. Most instructors have no fondness for making out time tables or schedules of recitations and examinations, or for reading and marking written exercises or examination papers. If a teacher's time is to be mainly occupied by such tasks, the calling would not be inviting to many.

A little experience in making schedules will not be for any one a mere waste of time. You might accept it as a part of your education. After a few trials, you will understand how difficult it is to satisfy every one and will be less ready to criticize the efforts of another when the task no longer falls to you. Much of what is generally considered the real drudgery of the teacher, i. e., the reading of papers, may be avoided by lessening the amount of written exercises and written examinations. It is no doubt for the advantage of teacher and pupils that a certain proportion of the work be written. But in many schools there is too much written work for the efficiency and for the health of the teachers, and I believe there is also too much for the good of the students, who get greater advantage

from personal contact with the teacher in oral recitations. It is but fair to remember, however, that if you expect to succeed in any occupation, you must be ready to give a considerable amount of time to small tasks in themselves uncongenial, and that you will probably find as little “ drudgery" in teaching as in most other

vocations.

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Where boys live in a school building, the supervision of the room for study in the evening, and especially of the dormitory by day and by night, is generally considered a disagreeable task. It does encroach on the time one can take for private study, and if the supervision is not uniform, or if the supervisor is nervous and easily irritated, or if he is wanting in tact, there is danger of unpleasant relations between him and some of those under his charge. But when a teacher and a not too large number of boys live together in the same building, an opportunity is offered for personal influence which must not be undervalued and which some teachers in schools where there are only day pupils have told me they would be glad to have. If one's thoughts are well under control, and if he has a definite plan, it is possible for him to do good work when liable to frequent interruption, and even when living in the midst of restless and impulsive boys. We read that Dr. Arnold sat at his study table, with no attempt at seclusion, with conversation going on in the room, and surrounded by his children or by his pupils; that he was always ready to break off his occupation to re

ceive visitors or to answer questions, and that after an interruption he took up again his writing, as if it had not been broken off.

There are men who ought never to undertake the supervision of a dormitory, but for many teachers some experience of this kind is valuable as a part of their training. A man whose life work is to be the instruction and management of boys, and who hopes to become sometime the headmaster of a school, will get an intimate acquaintance with boy nature, which will fit him to deal more understandingly with all kinds of students, if at the beginning of his career he lives for a period in close daily contact with the young life in a school dormitory.

If you devote your life to teaching, you will no doubt have days of discouragement, when you will feel that your efforts are wasted because you are making so little impression on your pupils, and because there are among them those who are disrespectful and those who show no appreciation of what you are trying to do for them. They will sometimes seem incomprehensibly slow of understanding, and deficient in interest and ambition. You will have to repeat the same thing over and over, and may then find some whose heads it has not begun to penetrate. Your patience will be tried, but you must not lose it. The trouble may lie partly with you, perhaps mainly if you are of an ill temper, and your students may not be as bad and as dull as they sometimes seem to you. Professor Denison Olmsted tells us of an irritable teacher of his acquaintance