Bridgewater State University - Alpha Yearbook (Bridgewater, MA)

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l93l NORMAL GFFERING A NEVV TEACHER'S EXPERIENCE I kept him after school. He was only a little boy, and as the minutes of the afternoon ticked off in steady pro- cession, the feeling in his heart turned to childish hate. The shouts of his friends reached him from the street, and added to the misery of which I was the cause. He had to do ten examples in arithmetic before he could leave the confining schoolrooml The hard, don't- care attitude which he had so manfully maintained throughout his ordeal, suddenly gave way to childish sobs. The tears ran down his face and made big spreading spots on the arithmetic paper over which he struggled. Sobbingly, he declared that he could stay no longer, but I, hardening my heart against his pleadings, simply stated: You are to do ten examples correctly before you leave this room, tonight. After much mingling of tears and long division, the paper was completed, and he, still crying, left the room one hour after his schoolmates had been dismissed. Without one look in my direction, he stamped down the stairs, pulling his cap down over his eyes, as he went. The more I thought about the incident, the worse I felt, for viewed from the child's eyes, the punishment rnust have seemed severe. I, who so wanted to be liked, feared that the punishment which I had meted out had incurred the boy's lasting dislike. I made foolish resolutions that I would never keep a pupil after school again unless it was necessary and the only alternative. The next morning, still feeling badly about it, for I did so like Alec, I went to school. With the ringing of the first bell, I was interrupted by a childish voice bidding me Good morning. Turning, I beheld Alec standing beside my desk, and in his outstretched grimy hand, he held a bunch of flowers. At the same time, he said: May I stay after school and clean the boards for you tonight, Miss Eddy? Such is the forgiving nature of a child. CLAIRE F. EDDY B3 ON VVRITING A NOVEL VVe had reached the mature age of eight when the overwhelming urge to write a book Cat that time the word novel was not in our vocabularyb first took possession of us. Such minor difficulties as deciding whether or not twenty hundred thousand dollars was too im- probable an amount for a thirteen year old hero to inherit and whether or not it would be possible to go to Europe in a sailboat bothered us somewhat, but on the whole the master- piece progressed smoothly and with speed. We have always remembered with resentment and just indignation the remark of our brother Cat that time aged fourteenj who said, when the finished work was read to the family, that it was surprisingly like the book Campfire Girls in the VVoods , which he had presented to us that Christmas. To be sure, we had never been a Campfire Girl and had therefore been forced to draw upon the Christmas book for material and local color, perhaps, but anybody should have been able to see the obvious, and, we might say, the startling points of difference between the two.. And now, nearly thirteen years later, we have again felt the overmastering passion. Difhculties are no longer minor ones, nor are they few. Most important among them looms the practical impossibility of convincing our family and friends fsuch of them as have been I 144

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- i I PROSE 4 PROSE . I I 44 ON THIS ROCK Many people cannot see Plymouth for Plymouth Rock. From their schooldays they have read about that wonderful stone, the landing place of America , and make it the goal of their New England tour. It is the crown jewel in the historical crown of glory that over- hangs Massachusetts. Their fertile imaginations fashion a stone of imposing dimensions, for there was nothing in the history text picture to guide them in computing its size. Their conception of a glorified Rock of Gibraltar is fostered by the sight of the imposing canopy that shelters it. They step out of their car, walk across Water Street, step inside the canopy, and wait for a chance to look at Plymouth Rock. At last it comes, and they look down inside the railing to where, six feet below, rests a piece of stone that, as some W'este1'ner described it, His no bigger than some of the boulders out on my ranch at home! Perhaps it is because we Americans are impressed by big things, towering skyscrapers, magnificent theaters, imposing cathedrals, and universities that extend over acres and acres of land, that this scrap of New England granite leaves us with a feeling of absolute indiffer- ence. At this point is where most tourists make their mistake. Disappointed in the Mecca of their tour, they allow this disappointment to carry over and mar the pleasure of seeing other historic points of interest. According to Plymoutheans, Plymouth Rock is one of the least of these. VVhy shouldn't it be? There is no life in a bit of granite that served as a stepping-stone. There is life and ro- mance and love and strength in a house that has sheltered Pilgrims from storm and attack. There is power and vitality in the musket that Myles Standish grasped in his hand, in the metal hat and breast plate that protected him from possible Indian assault. There is tragedy in the hull of a ship that was wrecked and lay buried in the sand for years on Cape Cod. There is sadness in those arrow heads polished smooth by hours of patient labor, in the belts of Wampum once valuable enough to ransom a chief,-relics of an almost vanished race. There is majesty and glory in a monument erected to the ideals of that Pilgrim band, as it overlooks the land they worked so hard to make into a home, and looks toward their old home in England over the sea they fought so hard to conquer. There is peace and quiet and rest in the garden dedicated to the Pilgrim mothers, rest for their spirits after years of patient, uncomplaining toil. That is why Plymoutheans cherish objects such as these,-because they have served, have been of actual practical use, and have had more than an incidental, inanimate con- nection with those first hardy pioneers. BEATRICE HUNT 143 e

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'-' bribed or by other means inveigled into reading the Fifteen chapters we have completedl that the novel in not an autobiography or, possibly, a confession. True, we have been a waitress, but that does not mean, because the plot of our novel is based upon a college-girl waitress falling in love with a cook, that we have ever been in love with a cook. Most un- kind of all are the lifted eye-brows we observe when our reader arrives at the love scenes. How little faith they have in the power of a keen imagination! It is necessary, too, in order to avoid being considered insufferably conceited about our own skill, to assure everyone that we are writing the novel just for the fun of it and that it is not, of course, intended for print. That is, we must be outwardly modest. Inwardly we must feel utter satisfaction with our own cleverness and talent, for when we compared our amateur attempts with 'fThe Qld Wives' Tale or The White Swan , we would otherwise be in grave danger of being consumed with a sense of our own inferiority. Beside all these discouraging elements there are the technical obstacles to be met, and these are no longer few. So there you have us- -the novelist in our bed of roses. In reality, as innocent and sim- ple as a country school girl, in our friends' eyes a gay old rake with a wild and shady past. In the eyes of the world as unassuming an individual as Uriah Heep, in our own heart sub- limely self-confident. VVe struggle on the one hand with the people who read our story, and on the other with those who are acting in it. Take back your envy-you who do not write! MARX? G. CHILDS OUR PLACE IN SPACE Space is measured by the distance light travels in one year. The orbit of the Earth about its sun is only one ten-thousandth of a light year or 600,000,000 miles. The Earth is about 91,500,000 miles distant from the sun in the north latitude winter and 94,500,000 miles distant in the summer. Therefore the diameter of the orbit is about one-thirty-two- thousandth of a light year. To gain a better conception of the Earth's position in the solar system, imagine a circular field and two and a half miles in diameter, place a library globe two feet in diameter in the very centerg eighty-two feet away put a mustard seed. The globe will represent the sun and the mustard seed Mercury. At a distance of 142 feet place a pea, and another at 215 feet. These will represent Venus and the Earth, both as to size and distance. A rather large pinhead at a distance of 327 feet will speak for Mars, and a fair sized tangerine a quarter of a mile distant will stand for jupiter. A small lemon 2f5 of a mile away will play the roll of Saturn, a large cherry 3X4 of a mile distant will answer for Uranus, and a fair sized plum at the very edge of the field will be Neptune. A new planet, approximately 3,768,000,000 miles from the sun, was discovered March 13, 1930 by Prof. Lowell and later named Pluto. This is the most important discovery in the twentieth century and has added 950,600,000 miles to the radius of the solar system. Nearly as important are the explorations of the Milky Way system or galaxy. This galaxy is composed of millions and billions of suns similar to our own sun. These fiery bodies assume a mass which is somewhat similar to a pair of saucers the edges of whose concave sides are joined. Gur own solar system is located slightly to one side of the center 145 .