If planning and scheming are confined within these limits, and conducted on these principles, the teacher will save all the agitating perplexity and care which will otherwise be his continual portion.  He can go forward peaceably and quietly, and while his own success is greatly increased, he may be of essential service to the cause in which he is engaged, by making known his various experiments and plans to others.  For this purpose, it seems to me highly desirable that every teacher should KEEP A JOURNAL of all his plans.  In these should be carefully entered all his experiments; the new methods he adopts; the course he takes in regard to difficulties which may arise, and any interesting incidents which may occur which it would be useful for him to refer to at some future time.  These, or the most interesting of them, should be made known to other teachers.  This may be done in several ways: 

(1.) By publishing them in periodicals devoted to education.  Such contributions, furnished by judicious men, would be among the most valuable articles in such a work.  They would be far more valuable than any general speculations, however well conceived or expressed.

(2.) In newspapers intended for general circulation.  There are very few editors whose papers circulate in families who would not gladly receive articles of this kind to fill a teacher’s department in their columns.  If properly written, they would be read with interest and profit by multitudes of parents, and would throw much light on family government and instruction.

(3.) By reading them in teachers’ meetings.  If half a dozen teachers who are associated in the same vicinity would meet once a fortnight, simply to hear each other’s journals, they would be amply repaid for their time and labor.  Teachers’ meetings will be interesting and useful, when those who come forward in them will give up the prevailing practice of delivering orations, and come down at once to the scenes and to the business of the school-room.

There is one topic connected with the subject of this chapter which deserves a few paragraphs.  I refer to the rights of the committee, or the trustees, or patrons in the control of the school.  The right to such control, when claimed at all, is usually claimed in reference to the teacher’s new plans, which renders it proper to allude to the subject here; and it ought not to be omitted, for a great many cases occur in which teachers have difficulties with the trustees or committee of their school.  Sometimes these difficulties result at last in an open rupture; at other times in only a slight and temporary misunderstanding, arising from what the teacher calls an unwise and unwarrantable interference on the part of the committee or the trustees in the arrangements of the school.  Difficulties of some sort very often arise.  In fact, a right understanding of this subject is, in most cases, absolutely essential to the harmony and co-operation of the teacher and the representatives of his patrons.