Just as soon as the hen lacked something to aim at, she could not get over the wire barrier, and she taught me the importance of giving my pupils something to aim at.  I like my boys and girls, and believe they are just as smart as any hen that ever was, and that, if I’ll only supply things for them to aim at, they will go high and far.  Every time I see that hen I am the subject of diverse emotions.  I feel half angry at myself for being so dull that a mere hen can teach me, and then I feel glad that she taught me such a useful lesson.  Before learning this lesson I seemed to expect my pupils to take all their school work on faith, to do it because I told them it would be good for them.  But I now see there is a better way.  In my boyhood days we always went to the county fair, and that was one of the real events of the year.  On the morning of that day there was no occasion for any one to call me a second time.  I was out of bed in a trice, at the first call, and soon had my chores done ready for the start.  I had money in my pocket, too, for visions of pink lemonade, peanuts, ice-cream, candy, and colored balloons had lured me on from achievement to achievement through the preceding weeks, and thrift had claimed me for its own.  So I had money because, all the while, I had been aiming at the county fair.

We used to lay out corn ground with a single-shovel plough, and took great pride in marking out a straight furrow across the field.  There was one man in the neighborhood who was the champion in this art, and I wondered how he could do it.  So I set about watching him to try to learn his art.  At either end of the field he had a stake several feet high, bedecked at the top with a white rag.  This he planted at the proper distance from the preceding furrow and, in going across the field, kept his gaze fixed upon the white rag that topped the stake.  With a firm grip upon the plough, and his eyes riveted upon the white signal, he moved across the field in a perfectly straight line.  I had thought it the right way to keep my eyes fixed upon the plough until his practice showed me that I had pursued the wrong course.  My furrows were crooked and zigzag, while his were straight.  I now see that his skill came from his having something to aim at.

I am trying to profit by the example of that farmer in my teaching.  I’m all the while in quest of stakes and white rags to place at the other side of the field to direct the progress of the lads and lasses in a straight course, and raise their eyes away from the plough that they happen to be using.  I want to keep them thinking of things that are bigger and further along than grades.  The grades will come as a matter of course, if they can keep their eyes on the object across the field.  I want them to be too big to work for mere grades.  We never give prizes in our school, especially money prizes.  It would seem rather a cheap enterprise to my fine boys and girls to get a piece of money for committing to memory the “Gettysburg Speech.”  We respect ourselves and Lincoln too much for that.  It would grieve me to know that one of my girls could be hired to read a book for an hour in the evening to a sick neighbor.  I want her to have her pay in a better and more enduring medium than that.  I’d hope she would aim at something higher than that.