Irish Girls as Teachers

New Zealand Tablet, 30 November 1911, Page 2439

Irish Girls as Teachers

Mr. William Me Andrew, principal of the Washington Irving High School, New Aork City, in an article on ‘ How to Choose Public School Teachers,’ in a recent issue of World's Work, says, in part: ‘ If you seek a female teacher, you should choose an Irish girl. This kind stands the strain best. If it had not been for the light-heartedness of the Irish race, its own heavy history would have killed it. These merry young women, in spite of the excessive formalism and system that have encrusted American education, are the best able to keep the bright side of schooling turned upward. An Irish teacher won’t be imposed upon. Forty boys sometimes get the devil into each one of them, all at once. The rules nowadays prevent you from driving him out by muscle. The Irish girl laughs at him. If anybody takes a mean advantage of her, she can launch an outburst of sarcasm, invective, and correction in perfect tasteand in a few moments you will hear the whole company, teacher and children, laughing together. Your typical New England woman, with her ingrowing conscience, would be resentful all the rest of the day. The Irish teacher counts more on affection than on system. That’s what makes her children learn faster, for teaching originated in a mother’s love for children. The instinctive, primordial, atavistic love essence in teaching seems to beat scientific pedagogy every time. If a lad likes his teacher he’ll like whatever she proposesgeography or penmanship. Example of Irish affection; One day I heard a great noise in the street. It was a day of the first snowfall —one of those soft, packable snows, such as just naturally forms itself into balls. A big, puffing policeman dragged into the school office a boy who had dented the officer’s helmet and dignity. The preserver of the peace demanded that I send for the lad’s parents or the youngster would be haled to the station-house. Some one told the Duffy girl (of the 6-B) that one of her flock was held up by the enemy. In she came with flashing eyes. ‘ “ What are you doing with my boy?" she demanded. “ Give,him to me!" Then we had a pretty tableau: my lady with one arm around a sobbing youngster’s neck and the other hand extended defiantly at the tyranny of the law. ‘“I know you, Flanagan! You strut about the post like a walking target. Everybody itches to heave something at you. Now you get out of here, and don’t you dare to touch a boy of mine again ‘ Then he laughed and she laughed—and that’s the kind of Irish spirit that keeps the systematic educators from killing the schools entirely. A teacher needs plenty of warmth to keep the blood from freezing and plenty of humor to cool it with.’ b