I had nearly as hard a time with algebra as with arithmetic, and often became rebellious. Feeling that I could not go through the struggles and humiliations that I had with arithmetic, I tried repeatedly to get out of going to the class. I simply could not comprehend the study, and was always behind the others. Girls that were as stupid as stupid could be about tasks that were play to me would do things on the blackboard as impossible for me as the labours of Hercules. How glibly they explained what they had done! How painfully I toiled to perform the simplest tasks! Oh, those miserable days! Professor Durland tried all kinds of methods with me; he sometimes lost patience and would make cutting remarks, not, however, without having first tried to persuade me to work harder. I would not study if I could possibly help it, vainly hoping he would overlook me in class or give me something easy (which he often did), that my stupidity would not be so patent. One day when sent to the blackboard, knowing that the task was beyond me, I refused to try. He insisted, saying he would help me. I hung back. That angered him. “You can go up to the blackboard, can’t you?” he tauntingly asked. I walked up to the board boiling with rage. He stood near giving me points and explanations which, had I not been so incensed and obstinate, would have enabled me to do the work. But I was angry to my fingertips. I fumbled with the crayon and it broke. I was powerless to do a thing but stand there and sulk. The tasks of the other students nearing completion, one by one they took their seats; one by one rose to explain their work; and still I stood, alone now, before the long blackboard, my work untouched, my eyes blinded with angry tears, my listless hand holding that useless piece of crayon, and those meaningless symbols staring me in the face. What an awareness I had of my figure as I stood there, my back to the school! I could see just how the back of my drooping head looked, my long braids hanging below my waist. It was such an uncomfortable awareness of my disgraced self that I had as I stood there. The class-work ended, there was an ominous pause, I still standing helpless and hopeless. Then the storm fell. Before the whole school he launched forth a reprimand, every word of which cut me cruelly, the burden of it being that I was not so stupid as obstinate (I think he said “mulish”); that I thought I knew better than any one else what I ought to study; but that I would soon find that I was tremendously mistaken; that a “bird that can sing, and won’t sing, must be made to sing”; that algebra has its uses as well as rhetoric and physiology (oh, what scorn as he said these words--my pet studies!) and that hereafter I was to get my algebra lessons before being allowed to recite in anything else.