It was in the spring of 1880 that I graduated. I still carried the same baggage with which I had entered—a little heavier to be sure, a little better packed, a little better adapted to the “Purpose.” The only difference which threatened disturbance was that I had added an item which I had refused to bring with me in 1876. Then I was not willing to believe I would ever marry—now I thought possibly some day I might; but the item was not heavy, not heavy enough at least to prevent my rejoicing over the fact that I was graduating with a job. I had signed a contract with an institution of which I had never heard until the negotiations leading to it opened. After frequent communications with the faculty a representative of the Poland Union Seminary of Poland, Ohio, with some misgivings had employed me to serve as its Preceptress—$500 a year “and board yourself.” I was jubilant. It meant economic independence—the first plank in my platform. I would use my leisure to work with the microscope; I would save my money; I would one day go abroad and study with some great biologist. I would never abandon my search for the beginning of life, the point where I expected to find God.
It was then with entire confidence in the future that I started out in August of 1880 for the town of Poland on the Western Reserve of Ohio, to begin what women were then talking of in more or less awed tones as a Career.
4 A START AND A RETREAT
If I had been going on my honeymoon I should scarcely have been more expectant or more curious than I was in August of 1880 when I left home to take my first position: “Preceptress of Poland Union Seminary, Poland, Mahoning County, Ohio—$500.00 a year and board yourself”! Poland was not a long journey from my home—four or five hours.
I found the village delightful. It had the air of having been long in existence, as it had. Here there was no noise of railroads, no sign of the coal and steel and iron industries which encircled it but had never passed its boundaries. Here all people seemed to me to live tranquilly in roomy houses with pleasant yards or on near-by farms where there were fine horses and fat blooded sheep, and where planting and harvesting went ahead year in and year out in orderly fashion.
The chief and only industry of Poland was its seminary, now about thirty years old. It was a community enterprise started in 1848 by Mr. B. F. Lee, the financial agent who had hired me. Everybody in the village had subscribed to its endowment, practically every church had at one time or another been its patron. The long depression of the seventies had crippled its finances sadly; but times were better now, and the well-to-do Presbytery of Mahoning County had agreed to take it under its care. But I was soon to learn that Poland Union Seminary in spite of the patronage of the Presbytery lived on a narrow and worn shoestring. Moreover, I at once divined, kind as were those who were responsible for my being there, that I had been injected into a situation of which Mr. Lee had given me no hint strong enough to penetrate my inexperience. It was serious enough, as on the very day the school bell first rang for me the villagers began to let me know. Men and women would stop me on the street to say:
“So it’s you that’s taking Miss Blakeley’s place. You have no idea how badly we feel about her resigning. I went to school to her, my father and mother went to school to her. I had hoped all my children would go to her. She was a wonderful teacher, a beautiful character. You look pretty young; you haven’t had much experience, have you?”
I was not long in learning that the devotion of the community to Miss Blakeley was deserved. The village was right in honoring her, in mourning her. It no doubt felt a certain satisfaction in letting me know at the start it in no way regarded me as an adequate substitute. Its insistence was such that, before the end of my first fortnight, I was ready to resign.
My morale would hardly have been so quickly shaken if I had not at once discovered to my consternation that there was an important part of my duties which was in danger of proving too much for me. The worst of it was that it concerned the largest block of pupils in an institution where every pupil counted, where Mr. Lee regarded it as of vital importance that every pupil be given what he wanted. Here he advertised you could prepare for college, here you could have special advanced work in anything you wanted. And Mr. Lee was right if the seminary was to live as a cog in the country’s educational wheel.
Somebody ought to write, perhaps somebody has written of the passing of this once valuable institution. It came before the college and the high school and for a time did the work of both; but when the high school began to prepare students for the college and the colleges added preparatory departments and at the same time offered special courses the seminary slowly realized that it must either go out of business or combine with one or another of its healthy growing rivals.
In a few places, as in Poland Village, the seminary was hanging on tenaciously, trying to demonstrate that it was still a better man than these new undertakings, these high schools, these colleges with their preparatory schools.
The faculty which was to make the demonstration at Poland was made up of three persons: in order of rank, the President, the Preceptress, her assistant. The acting President insisted on all the perquisites of his title. His chief duty he regarded as conducting the chapel with more or less grandiloquent remarks. When my assistant and I complained of too much work he would scowl and say that his executive duties made it impossible for him to take on more classes. The result was that I started out with two classes in each of four languages—Greek, Latin, French, and German, as well as classes in geology, botany, geometry, trigonometry. In addition there was my threatened Waterloo, the two largest classes in the school: one in what was called “verb grammar,” the other, “percentage arithmetic”—so named from the points in the textbooks where the term’s work began. From time immemorial these two classes had been conducted in the interests of the district schoolteachers of the territory. It was the custom for these teachers to spend one term a year in the seminary, where, regardless of the number of years they had been teaching, the number of times they had treated themselves to a period of study, they always (so I was told) insisted on their verb grammar and their percentage arithmetic. It was like a ritual. As they were the numerical backbone of the institution, there was nothing so important in the judgment of management as their satisfaction.
It was a killing schedule for one person, but I was so eager, so ridiculously willing, so excited, and also so fresh from college that I did not know it. Indeed, as I look back on it I think I did fairly well, all things considered. I should have had no great alarm about my success if it had not been for the grammar and the arithmetic. From the first day I realized I was on ground there which, once familiar, was now almost unintelligible. I could and did teach my geometry and “trig” with relish; I could and did pilot fairly advanced classes in four languages so that the pupils at least never discovered that in one of them I was far beyond my depth, and that in all of them I at times knew myself to be skating on thin ice; but these district schoolteachers, several of them older than I, were not to be deceived or bluffed. They had had experience—I had not; and like the villagers of Poland they proposed to make me realize that no college diploma could make up for inexperience. Experience in “percentage arithmetic” and “verb grammar” came from doing the same examples and diagraming and parsing the same sentences year after year and going back to teach them in their communities. Many of these examples were tricky. Many of the sentences were ambiguous. They had learned solutions for both, solutions which had the backing of tradition. I was soon terrified lest I be trapped, so scared I would wake up in the night in cold sweats. This was my state of mind when one day the most important man in the Village, Robert Walker, the local banker, stopped me on the street.
“Sis,” he said—he was to always call me Sis—“Sis, you are following a fine teacher.” I could have wept—the same old story. “But don’t worry, what you must do is keep a stiff upper lip.”
“Oh, thank you, sir,” I said as I hurried on lest I cry in the street.
But that “keep a stiff upper lip,” coming from the man it did, restored me; and I resolved, cost what it would, to find a way to master my district schoolteachers. True, it took me two months to discover the weak place in their armor. Finally I learned they were solving problems and parsing sentences not according to principles but according to answers they had learned. The reason they insisted on going over them year after year at the seminary was to keep the solutions in their memory. I had no skill in solving puzzles, but I did know something about the principles and determined to try them on problems and sentences that were not in their books or any books to which they had access.