Immigrant children -- Fiction; Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction; Teachers -- Fiction
Abraham Wishnewsky was so ill-advised as to confide the details of this
adventure to a young gentleman who rejoiced in a rabbit face, close-set
lashless eyes, and the name of Isidore Cohen. Isidore was new to Room
18, and new to his place beside the gentle Abraham. Miss Bailey and her
applied ethics were startlingly new to him. And he never reported to
Abraham any effort to experiment in revolutionary doctrines.
Some of the more credulous among the feminine First Readers also weighed
these precepts in the balance and found them wanting.
"You know how Teacher says," Sarah Schodsky remarked to Bertha
Binderwitz, as the two friends, arms intertwined, heads close together,
walked and talked in the yard at the recess hour. "You know how she says
we dasen't never to tell no lies."
Bertha nodded. "That's how she _says_," she agreed.
"Well," resumed Sarah, "you see how Mamie Untermeyer don't comes no more
on the school?"
Bertha had remarked this absence.
"Well, Mamie she lives by her auntie. She is got a awful auntie. Und she
asks her auntie for a penny for buy hokey pokey. Und her auntie makes a
mean laugh und says, 'What you think I am, anyway?' und Mamie, she tells
it right out what she thinks over her auntie, like Teacher says, 'We
shall all times tell what we thinks.' She lays on the bed now mit
bangages on the head. It ain't so awful healthy you shall tell truths
on aunties."
This report also reached the rabbit ears of Isidore Cohen. And again he
wondered that Miss Bailey should waste her time--and his--in folly.
And then he made an amazing discovery. Teacher actually believed what
she taught. She was ready to meet confidence with trust, and to practise
what she preached.
"I never seen nothing like it," he reported to his friend, Hymie
Solomon. "She looks like she knew a awful lot, but she don't know
nothings 'tall."
"What do you suppose is the matter with her?" demanded Hymie. "Miss
Blake, she don't act crazy. She don't give us no talk 'out no sense."
Now Hymie and Isidore were old friends and cronies. In the days before a
Truant Officer and their distracted fathers had consigned them to
school, Hymie and he had trod the ways which might have led them to the
Children's Court and the Reformatory; but the Board of Education chanced
to be the first power that laid hands upon them, and Hymie, who was a
year older than his friend, and who had once undergone some intermittent
education, was put in Miss Blake's class, while Isidore, virgin soil
where prescribed learning was concerned, joined the First Readers. Miss
Bailey's teachings as reported by Isidore formed amazing subjects for
conversation.
"Und she says," he would report, "that nobody dasn't to steal nothings
off of somebody."
"Then how does she think we shall ever get anything?"
"Somebody shall give it to us."
"Who?"
"Teacher ain't said."
"No, I guess she ain't. I'd like to see her gettin' along on just what
was give to her."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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