olars all around, looking him in the face, all
waiting to be employed. Everything comes upon him at once. He can do
nothing until the day and the hour for opening the school arrives,--then
he has everything to do.

Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the young teacher
should look forward with unusual solicitude to his first day in school;
and he desires, ordinarily, special instructions in respect to this
occasion. Some such special instructions we propose to give in this
chapter. The experienced teacher may think some of them too minute and
trivial. But he must remember that they are intended for the youngest
beginner in the humblest school; and if he recalls to mind his own
feverish solicitude on the morning when he went to take his first
command in the district school, he will pardon the seeming minuteness of
detail.

1. It will be well for the young teacher to take opportunity, between
the time of his engaging his school and that of his commencing it,--to
acquire as much information in respect to it, beforehand, as
possible,--so as to be somewhat acquainted with the scene of his labors
before entering upon it. Ascertain the names and the characters of the
principal families in the district, their ideas and wishes in respect to
the government of the school, the kind of management adopted by one or
two of the last teachers, the difficulties they fell into, the nature of
the complaints made against them, if any, and the families with whom
difficulty has usually arisen. This information must of course be
obtained in private conversation; a good deal of it must be, from its
very nature, highly confidential; but it is very important that the
teacher should be possessed of it. He will necessarily become possessed
of it by degrees, in the course of his administration, when, however, it
may be too late to be of any service to him. But by judicious and proper
efforts to acquire it beforehand, he will enter upon the discharge of
his duties with great advantage. It is like a navigator's becoming
acquainted beforehand with the nature and the dangers of the sea over
which he is about to sail.

Such inquiries as these will, in ordinary cases, bring to the teacher's
knowledge, in most districts in our country, some cases of peculiarly
troublesome scholars, or unreasonable and complaining parents,--and
stories of their unjustifiable conduct on former occasions, will come to
him; exaggerated by the jealousy of riva