Salinas Junior College - La Reata Yearbook (Salinas, CA)

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year in school in the eighth. The high school had a three year course, but it included three years of Latin, three of English, three of Mathematics, two of History, and Fourteen Weeks ' Courses in Geology, Astronomy, Chemistry, Philosophy, and Physiology — all required. Here again I did not put in the full time: I regret to say that I did no work at all the first year, which sad fact ought to give me sympathy with idlers — but doesn ' t! However, I made up my lost grades and part of the second year during the summer vacation, took the rest of the second and all the third con- currently, and was graduated with honor at sixteen, having completed the full course in two years with, I venture to say, a far more solid achievement than belongs to the product of the modern high school. At least I could spell, and I loved to read. Indeed long before I went to school, I was an inveterate reader, not always of the best, alas! I remember at the age of seven being an addict of the NEW YORK LEDGER, for which I duly spent seven cents every Wednesday, and I kept the run of its three or four somewhat sensational continued stories. At that time there were no books for children, except Sunday School tales, which had httle appeal. Miss Alcott ' s LITTLE WOMEN was revolutionary, and well do I recall my early possession of that immortal work. As I always had my nose in a book, oblivious of everything about me, this new treasure was bestowed with the proviso that I was to read only twenty-five pages a day. So be it! I read my allotment, and then I read it all over again and again, till my parents, seeing that I was reading not less but more, took oflF the embargo, and I finished the book the next day. After high school I was assistant bookkeeper and secretary for a year and then taught, for the munificent sum of twenty dollars a month, (my male classmates had twenty-five, and the injustice still rankles!) an elementary grade of twenty-four boys and twelve girls, unusually alert and irrepressible, who rejoiced in a well-deserved reputation for disorder and whom I governed by the simple device of giving them work enough to keep them out of mischief and, by seeing that they studied hard and with concentration, was able to promote them all two years ahead, thereby breaking the tradition. What would Modern Pedagogy think of such high-handed disregard of the System! But it worked, and they certainly increased in wisdom and in grace. In 1881 I met A. Bronson Alcott, whose biography, by the way, PEDLAR ' S PROGRESS, by Odell Shepard, was a notable book of this Continued on Dhislon Page Bouk 111