Pick up the mouse, examine it with interest, and say, “He is a funny little fellow, isn’t he! (Approval.) But he hasn’t very good manners to interrupt us so in school time. Let’s put him up here on the teacher’s desk, where he can learn to be more polite.” (Suggestion—that the act was rude.) “Charles, you may read next. Imogene, see if he reads just right.” (Substitution.) COMMENTS A teacher who is so infantile as to scream at a tiny, frightened mouse, even though it were a live one, should not blame the pupils for indulging in less marked exhibitions of arrest of development. Teachers meet pupils sanely on the play question when they sympathize with their desire to play, but see clearly why and how these impulses must be controlled for the child’s future good. Play is a good servant but a poor master; no human being is more pitiful than the amusement drunkard. Play in its right place is a wonderful renovator of health and spirits; play in the wrong place stunts character and makes for selfishness and littleness. The ideal teacher wants his pupils to play, helps them to realize the great values that lie in play, but shows them clearly that play must be indulged in at right times and places, and rigidly excluded from work hours, except where it can be made to help on the work. In short, he leads his pupils as they grow older to play with reason and to plan play intelligently, rather than blindly to follow impulses. ILLUSTRATION (HIGH SCHOOL) [Sidenote: Play in Study Hour] In a certain large high school the teachers had had much trouble with the students in the assembly room. A spirit of uncontrolled play seemed to take possession of the room a few minutes after the hour had begun. Instead of settling down to work, the boys and girls wrote notes, played little tricks on each other, whispered and made endless meaningless trips to dictionary and bookcase. They seemed to think the hour was given to them for social purposes. Many teachers had failed to remedy this condition, before Miss Stansbury was relieved of two classes that she might take hold of the assembly room. “Do you give me permission to do whatever I think is wise?” she asked the harassed principal. “Go ahead,” said he. So she did. She had been in the room about five minutes, and was busily marking papers, when a hard lemon came rolling up the aisle toward her desk. She went to it, picked it up, and saw that two boys, the only two who could have thrown it up that aisle, were looking at her under lowered lids. Very quietly, so as not to be overheard except by those hard by, she asked who had thrown the lemon, and the doer acknowledged at once—lying was not a fault in this school. “You don’t seem to know what a study period is for. You may take your books and go home, and study your lessons there. I shall call up your mother on the telephone and tell her why you are coming home.”