Footnote 2: O’Shea, Social Development and Education, p. 422. Houghton, Mifflin. CASE 62 (SIXTH GRADE) [Sidenote: Mimicry of Speech] Miss Burch was from Massachusetts, and had an exquisitely soft voice and unimpeachable pronunciation. She came to Peoria, Illinois, to teach in the public schools, and found these two assets very much in the way. Mabel Gulliver, a little girl whose cleverness was largely the product of much running of streets, turned both to account in a series of imitations that “delighted crowded houses” whenever she chose to hold forth. As she did this frequently, poor Miss Burch soon found herself helpless and ridiculous in her own school-room. “Authah, will you ausk the janitah to give us a little moah heat?” Mabel would flute, with inimitable saccharinity. “And I want you all to cease lawfing at once, foah this is the clauss in correct pronunciation, and if youah to be cleavah like me you’ll learn how to do it properly.” Miss Burch’s manner was the perfection of simplicity, but in Mabel’s imitation it appeared with a simpering ingenuousness both funny and untrue. Miss Burch realized the situation and wept over it. She did not know what to do. Realizing she was the subject of ridicule, she became self-conscious and timid, and her discipline grew worse and worse. CONSTRUCTIVE TREATMENT Things were in this bad shape when Mr. Nearing, the superintendent, came to visit her one day. He was so kind and sympathetic that after school Miss Burch told him the whole story, and asked his advice. “The trouble with you is,” he said, “that your most prominent characteristic is one which lends itself to ridicule here in the Middle West, where we don’t know an Italian “a” from a mud-pie. Now, don’t think of changing your pronunciation; to do so consciously would be to be affected. But make the children forget it in something more exciting. If you’d start a museum for your nature study, or get up a little play for Christmas, and make Mabel its chief factotum, she’d have an outlet for her energies, she would still lead her crowd and have their admiration, and your pronunciation would fade into the background of the Things That Are. It’s all a matter of relative emphasis.” Miss Burch did try this plan. She had her room dramatize and then play The Birds’ Christmas Carol, and in the intense interest of this project the teacher-mocking was forgotten. When Mabel remembered it again, she and Miss Burch were such good friends that it was out of the question. COMMENTS When the imitation takes place in the school-room the matter is much more under the teacher’s control, for there is no end of ways in which the child can be kept too busy to indulge in histrionic performances. But whatever is done, the teacher should not appear to notice that a pupil is disrespectful to her. ILLUSTRATION (SEVENTH GRADE)