ible for us to have as good an exercise every day?" "Yes
sir," answered several faintly. "Do you think it would be reasonable for
me to expect of every member of the class, that she should always be
able to recite all her lessons, without ever missing a single question?"
"No sir," answered all. "I do not expect it," said the teacher. "All I
wish is, that each of you should be faithful in your efforts to prepare
your lessons. I wish you to study from a sense of duty, and for the sake
of your own improvement. You know I do not punish you for failures. I
have no going up or down, no system of marking. Your only reward when
you have made faithful preparation for a recitation, is the feeling of
satisfaction which you will always experience; and when you have been
negligent, your only punishment is a sort of uneasy feeling of
self-reproach. I do not expect you all to be invariably prepared with
every question of your lessons. Sometimes you will be unavoidably
prevented from studying them, and at other times, when you have studied
them very carefully, you may have forgotten, or you may fail from some
misapprehension of the meaning in some cases. Do not, in such a case,
feel troubled because you may not have appeared as well as some
individual who has not been half as faithful as yourself. If you have
done your duty that is enough. On the other hand, you ought to feel no
better satisfied with yourselves when your lesson has not been studied
well, because you may have happened to know the parts which came to you.
Have I _done_ well should always be the question, not have I managed to
_appear_ well?

"I will say a word here," continued the teacher, "upon a practice, which
I have known to be very common in some schools, and which I have been
sorry to notice occasionally in this. I mean that of prompting, or
helping each other along in some way, at recitations. Now, where a
severe punishment is the consequence of a failure, there might seem to
be some reasonableness in helping your companions out of difficulty,
though even then, such tricks are departures from honorable dealing. But
especially when there is no purpose to be served but that of appearing
to know more than you do, it certainly must be considered a very mean
kind of artifice. I think I have sometimes observed an individual to be
prompted, where evidently the assistance was not desired, and even where
it was not needed. To whisper to an individual the answer to a questio