It was Friday afternoon and both teacher and pupils were weary of the school-room and of work; all were a little cross and nervous, and impatient for the dismissal bell to ring. “Make John quit tying my hair-ribbon to the inkwell,” spoke up a girl from the back of the room. Before John’s case was quite settled, “May I erase the boards after school?” “Does our geography lesson begin on page 268 or 267?” “Do we have to write our compositions in ink?” and so forth—an endless string of useless questions, confusing to those who were trying to study and nerve-racking to the teacher. And besides the talking aloud there was a constant and needless passing to and fro. “Now see here, children, this has got to stop. Monday morning we’re going to turn over a new leaf and put a stop to this talking aloud. Remember that! The first one who talks or leaves his seat without permission will be punished.” Monday morning, true to her word, Miss Rand punished every child who talked aloud without permission. Tuesday and Wednesday the school was a model of quiet and order. But Thursday Miss Rand had a headache and did not feel quite equal to having it out with Theodore when he asked, without permission, “Is this the 22nd of the month?” for it was a perfectly legitimate inquiry, inspired by the exercise in letter-writing which was his language lesson. A half hour later Margaret called Miss Rand’s attention to the fact that the clock had stopped, then looked scared as she realized she had broken the rule. Miss Rand argued to herself that the child meant well, so she let the talking aloud pass uncommented upon. And so it went, the children falling rapidly back into their old habit of talking whenever they pleased. By the middle of the next week pandemonium was again the order of the day and Miss Rand again “cleaned house,” saying, “Tomorrow morning I’m going to begin making everyone of you who talks aloud stay in at recess. There is no reason why you can’t do your work quietly, and tend to your business without asking so many questions,” and for a few days she was most energetic in enforcing quiet and order. But in two weeks the school-room was again a place of noisy confusion. And so it went. CONSTRUCTIVE TREATMENT Instead of announcing, each time, that there would be a change in her way of running the school, Miss Rand should have said, “Don’t talk aloud without permission, Theodore,” the first time and then, without saying any more about it, she should have quietly signified by a gesture or a look that speaking aloud was forbidden, refusing to answer queries put in this fashion. If she had done this _every_ time a pupil spoke aloud and had never let a single opportunity to correct this bad habit go by, the school would always have run as smoothly and as well as it did for the few days after one of her periodic upheavals of enforcing order.