As I took the third year at Queen 's I can enter the Sophomore year . I 'm tired of teaching in a back country school . Some day I 'm going to write a treatise on ` The Trials of a Country Schoolmarm . ' It will be a harrowing bit of realism . It seems to be the prevailing impression that we live in clover , and have nothing to do but draw our quarter 's salary . My treatise shall tell the truth about us . Why , if a week should pass without some one telling me that I am doing easy work for big pay I would conclude that I might as well order my ascension robe ` immediately and to onct . ' ` Well , you get your money easy , ' some rate-payer will tell me , condescendingly . ` All you have to do is to sit there and hear lessons . ' I used to argue the matter at first , but I 'm wiser now . Facts are stubborn things , but as some one has wisely said , not half so stubborn as fallacies . So I only smile loftily now in eloquent silence . Why , I have nine grades in my school and I have to teach a little of everything , from investigating the interiors of earthworms to the study of the solar system . My youngest pupil is four -- his mother sends him to school to ` get him out of the way ' -- and my oldest twenty -- it ` suddenly struck him ' that it would be easier to go to school and get an education than follow the plough any longer . In the wild effort to cram all sorts of research into six hours a day I do n't wonder if the children feel like the little boy who was taken to see the biograph . ' I have to look for what 's coming next before I know what went last , ' he complained . I feel like that myself . `` And the letters I get , Anne ! Tommy 's mother writes me that Tommy is not coming on in arithmetic as fast as she would like . He is only in simple reduction yet , and Johnny Johnson is in fractions , and Johnny is n't half as smart as her Tommy , and she ca n't understand it .
And Susy 's father wants to know why Susy ca n't write a letter without misspelling half the words , and Dick 's aunt wants me to change his seat , because that bad Brown boy he is sitting with is teaching him XXXXX say naughty words .
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