"Bailey’s Babies"
by
“Miss Bailey,” said Miss Blake, entering Room 18 during the lunch hour of a day in January, shortly after school had recovered from the Christmas holidays, “might I come in for a few moments this afternoon to observe your children? I suppose I shall be having them next term. Too bad you first-grade teachers never know what you are going to get down here! It’s different up town, where the kids nearly all go to kindergarten. Down here they sweep them right in off the street.”
Miss Bailey extended a cordial invitation to her colleague and neighbor to visit Room 18 at any convenient hour. And as she proceeded with her solitary luncheon, she was conscious of a heaviness in the region of her heart not due to indigestion. She had committed the folly of growing fond of that term’s crop of little First Readers. Room 18 without Patrick Brennan, Morris Mowgelewsky, Eva Gonorowsky, and all her other aide-de-camps and monitors would be a desolate place. And Miss Bailey, as she munched a chicken sandwich, objected strongly to Miss Blake’s expressive phrase, “sweep them right in off the street.” Yet it was quite true. The children of whom she was now so fond had been swept in to her in September, and she remembered that a considerable portion of the street would seem to have been swept in with them. They had since learned the art of scraping their small shoes on intervening stairs and through intervening halls, but as recruits they had been all that she dreaded in their successors. Miss Blake would now reap the benefit of this and other improvements, while Miss Bailey devoted her energies to a new invoice of seedlings.
Such, of course, was life. Especially a teacher’s life. But Miss Bailey was new to her trade and had not yet learned the philosophic, impersonal view-point of the gardener. She loved her little plants individually, and she shrank from the idea of pulling them out of their places under the protecting glass of her care, and handing them over to the ministrations of another.
The promise of new seedlings did not comfort her. She felt outraged by it, as a man bereaved of a fox terrier may feel toward the friend to whom a dog is a dog, and who boasts that he knows where he can get another worth two of the dear departed.
In the afternoon Miss Blake appeared, and the unsuspecting First Readers were put through their paces. They sang, they marched, they read, and they wrote. They would have gone gallantly on through all the other subjects in their curriculum if she had found time to stay, but she had left Room 19 in charge of a monitor, and that monitor’s inability to preserve order made itself heard through door and wall, so that presently she declared herself quite satisfied, and retired to her own kingdom. A deadly silence followed upon her arrival there.
“They has awful ‘fraids over her,” Sarah Schodsky remarked. “A girl by her class tells me how she throws rulers once on a boy.”
“I’d have a ‘fraid over her too,” cried Yetta Aaronsohn. “I don’t like I shall have no teachers what is big like that. I have all times ‘fraids over big teachers.”
“You’ve never had one,” laughed Miss Bailey, “so don’t talk nonsense. Big teachers are much nicer than little ones.”
“They ain’t fer me,” Yetta maintained. “I ain’t never had no teacher on’y you, and I don’t needs I shall never have no teacher on’y you.”
From these conversational straws Miss Bailey gathered that it would be unwise to insist too strongly upon the personal element in “developing the promotion thought.” Promotion had formed no part in the experience or the vocabulary of the First Readers Class before Miss Bailey somewhat guilefully introduced it.
The children were delighted. They always loved things vague and looming, and Miss Bailey–animated by duty–spoke so enthusiastically of promotion that they all thrilled to experience it. The phrase, “when I’m ‘moted,” grew very fashionable. No one knew exactly what it meant, but it was something more imminent than the “when I’m big” of the boys, and the “when I git married” of the girls. It was something, too, in which one’s prowess as a reader and writer was to count for righteousness; “For of course,” Miss Bailey explained, “we can’t expect to be promoted if we don’t know how to read: ‘see the leaves fall from the tree.'” (It was easier to read than to do in January on the lower East Side.)