Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
Fifty years ago it was the fashion at Harvard, as well as at other colleges, for professors to cultivate an austere dignity of manner for the purpose of preserving order and decorum in the recitation-room; but this frequently resulted in having the opposite effect and served as a temptation to the students to play practical jokes on their instructors.
A, entrance for the boys, through the entry below. C, entrance for the girls. G H, desk and seat: aisles from two to three feet wide. D D, doors. W W, windows. S S, stoves. c v, chimney and ventilator. T, teacher's platform. R, recitation-room. I I, recitation seats in principal room.
At the time we occupied the place there were standing upon it a cabin, formerly used as a dining room, an old kitchen, a stable, and an old hen-house. Within a few weeks we had all of these structures in use. The stable was repaired and used as a recitation-room, and very presently the hen-house was utilized for the same purpose.
"Sufficient for the recitation-room is the evil thereof. But I have spoken long enough. There are times when silence is golden, and one of those times is at hand. Brethren, the feast awaits you! Pitch in!" The speaker took his seat, and then there was a noise of clinking glasses, and knives and forks came to the front. The banquet had begun.
The greedy lungs of fifty hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from the air he breathes in his recitation-room. In short, he undergoes a process of gentle and gradual starvation. The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the old story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus.
In the meantime I saw her admitting other students, and that added greatly to my discomfort, for I felt, deep down in my heart, that I could do as well as they, if I could only get a chance to show her what was in me. After some hours had passed, the head teacher said to me, "The adjoining recitation-room needs sweeping. Take the broom and sweep it."
Never did I receive an order with more delight. I knew that I could sweep, for Mrs. Ruffner had thoroughly taught me how to do that when I lived with her. I swept the recitation-room three times. Then I got a dusting-cloth and I dusted it four times. All the woodwork around the walls, every bench, table, and desk, I went over four times with my dusting-cloth.
No one seems to know much about him; and indeed he has shunned all intimacies and devotes himself wholly to his books. The recitation-room is the one place where he appears well for there he speaks out, as if forgetting himself, or rather, losing himself in some truth under contemplation.
So of personal instruction, such as we give and others give in the interval of lectures, much of it at the bedside, some of it in the laboratory, some in the microscope-room, some in the recitation-room, I think it has many advantages of its own over the winter course, and I do not wish to see it shortened for the sake of prolonging what seems to me long enough already.
When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome. Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good. Who are the scholars who get 'rattled' in the recitation-room?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking