“I want you to help me make an experiment,” she said one day. “Yesterday was a rainy day, and we had more than the usual amount of noise, I think. You spent the whole of your twenty minutes in studying your mental arithmetic, and yet you made eighty-two mistakes out of a total of one hundred thirty questions; I kept count carefully. That was too many by far, wasn’t it? I tried to think how we could bring up our bad record, and I decided that we make too much noise in study hour. So I thought we would experiment, and see if we can get our arithmetic better when we are quiet. I’m going to select ten pupils today, and let them go off by themselves in quiet places to study by themselves. Who wants to go? And the rest of us here will be as quiet as we can be, and we’ll see what the effect will be on our lessons.” The children were eager for the novelty of an “experiment,” and of course it proved to them, as Miss Miller planned it should, that quietness brings better lessons and that they are learned in less time. “I wonder if we can reduce the time spent on our arithmetic lesson to fifteen minutes, and thus have five minutes more for our music, or for the story hour?” she said. “Of course, we shall need to have the room very quiet, to do that. Who can suggest ways in which we can control the noise during study hours?” Many suggestions came from the children. “We can remember not to move our feet around after we have placed them on the floor.” “At home, when baby is asleep, mother has us walk on tiptoe if we have to cross the room.” “We can have it quiet if everybody makes up his mind not to whisper once.” “I keep dropping my pencil on the floor, and I’ve thought of a way to stop that. I’m going to have a string on it and fasten it to my buttonhole, and then if it does drop it can’t reach the floor and make a clatter.” Miss Miller suggested other ways, and they made a list of them on the blackboard, so as to keep them all in mind. Under the teacher’s sympathetic leadership, there ensued a campaign to eliminate noise from study hours. Without mentioning it, Miss Miller enlarged the scope of their efforts to include quieter ways of passing materials, walking about the room, and putting away books. Mutual imitation strengthened the movement; just as these pupils had before imitated the thoughtless, careless, noisy way of doing things, now they imitated a thoughtful, controlled method of accomplishing results. What mischievous noise there had been disappeared automatically through the force of public opinion; for when the room as a whole saw the results of a quiet regime, saw that it brought them more time for the recreational part of the school program, a prejudice against unnecessary noise developed which rendered the maker thereof unpopular. CONSTRUCTIVE TREATMENT Do not treat noise as a crime. Consider it a disease, or rather a lack of development, a failure to acquire a desirable skill. Follow this plan: