When at length I resumed my schoolmastering I determined to give the boys and girls the benefit of my recent discovery.  I saw that I must generate in each one, if possible, the emotion of elation, that I must so arrange school situations that mastery would become a habit with them if they were to become “masters in the kingdom of life,” as my friend Long says it.  I saw at once that the difficulties must be made only high enough to incite them to effort, but not so high as to cause discouragement.  I recalled the sentence in Harvey’s Grammar:  “Milo began to lift the ox when he was a calf.”  After we had succeeded in locating the antecedent of “he” we learned from this sentence a lesson of value, and I recalled this lesson in my efforts to inculcate progressive mastery in the boys and girls of my school.  I sometimes deferred a difficult problem for a few days till they had lifted the growing calf a few more times, and then returned to it.  Some one says that everything is infinitely high that we can’t see over, so I was careful to arrange the barriers just a bit lower than the eye-line of my pupils, and then raise them a trifle on each succeeding day.  In this way I strove to generate the positive self-feeling so that there should be no depression and no white flag.  And that surely was worth a trip to the Isle of Man, even if one failed to see one of their tailless cats.

I had occasion or, rather, I took occasion at one time to punish a boy with a fair degree of severity (may the Lord forgive me), and now.  I know that in so doing I was guilty of a grave error.  What I interpreted as misconduct was but a straining at his leash in an effort to extricate himself from the incubus of the negative self-feeling.  He was, and probably is, a dull fellow and realized that he could not cope with the other boys in the school studies, and so was but trying to win some notice in other fields of activity.  To him notoriety was preferable to obscurity.  If I had only been wise I would have turned his inclination to good account and might have helped him to self-mastery, if not to the mastery of algebra.  He yearned for the emotion of elation, and I was trying to perpetuate his emotion of subjection.  If Methuselah had been a schoolmaster he might have attained proficiency by the time he reached the age of nine hundred and sixty-eight years if he had been a close observer, a close student of methods, and had been willing and able to profit by his own mistakes.

Friend Virgil says something like this:  “They can because they think they can,” and I heartily concur.  Some one tells us that Kent in “King Lear” got his name from the Anglo-Saxon word can and he was aptly named, in view of Virgil’s statement.  But can I cause my boys and girls to think they can?  Why, most assuredly, if I am any sort of teacher.  Otherwise I ought to be dealing with inanimate things and leave the school work to those who can.  I certainly can help