several groups in a class makes the work very exhausting.  The more successful the teacher, that is to say, the more truly she draws out the individual powers of each child, the harder does her work become, for she tends more and more to have a class of children working at varying stages.  In the mentally defective schools it is not possible to reach the work of the higher standards, so that there is not the same difficulty, but there is the even greater one of dealing with different standards of defect, instead of different standards of attainment.

Another difficulty encountered in the physically defective schools is the interrupted school-life.  Children will frequently drop out for three months, six months, or a year at a time in order to have some operation performed in hospital, or to go to a convalescent home, or because of an attack of illness.  Both branches of the special schools are faced with the peculiar difficulty of the “spoilt” child—­the lame girl who, by reason of her helplessness, has been indulged and waited on by the healthy members of her family; the ill-balanced boy whose brain-storms have been so disturbing that any opposition to his will has been shirked.  It must not be thought that these children are in the majority at special schools, but they do form a certain proportion of the children there; they give much trouble, and they call for a great deal of tact and patience.  Patience is so continually needed in special-school work that women who are not particularly patient would find themselves definitely unfit for it.  Indeed, although patience and the hopeful spirit do not figure on the list of qualifications demanded of candidates, they might well head it, for most certainly an irritable or despondent woman could not find any work for which she was more unsuited, or in which she was more likely to be miserable and unsuccessful.

A further difficulty of the special-school teacher lies in the “all-round” demands made on her.  The children she must teach, are defective in mind or body, or both.  Some will respond to one subject, some to another; some will make poor progress with headwork, but will do excellent handwork.  The teacher must be able to help each child along its own path, and must be familiar with the various forms of simple handwork as well as with the more usual school subjects.  Basket-weaving, clay-modelling, raffia-work, fretwork, bent-ironwork, strip-woodwork, rug-making, painting, and brush-work, as well as different forms of needlework and embroidery, are all branches of handwork helpful in different degrees to these children.  The importance of handwork to them is felt so keenly, that the special-schools time-tables usually show a morning devoted to headwork followed by an afternoon occupied by handwork.