Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements
History
Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements
Tuskegee Institute
If a girl be one of the forty-five waitresses on the eighty-nine tables
of the dining-room, she eats her breakfast as the other students march
out, then finishes her room-duties and is ready for work at ten minutes
of seven wherever she happens to be assigned. If she is a dishwasher,
she does that work, waits for inspection of the table that she has set,
finishes her room-duty, and is admitted into her work division at half
past seven.
Gardening and greenhouse work are becoming so attractive through the
Nature-Study classes of the Academic Department that there are constant
applications for transfers from the sewing divisions to this outside
work. Equipped in an overall gingham apron and sunbonnet of the same
material, the girl begins her duties, and no prouder girl can be found
than she who takes her first basket of early spring vegetables to the
Teachers' Home.
If the day is to be spent with the whole agricultural force of girls
picking strawberries for the tables of the Boarding Department and the
local market, the stage takes the group out to the patch two miles back
on the farm--and that is happiness unalloyed for the schoolgirl. When
she correlates her outing with her school work on the day following,
there is seen nature at first-hand in the class-room.
If other classmates have been working in the Plain-Sewing Division
turning out cotton underwear and plain articles of clothing to supply
the demand of the Salesroom of the institution, the lesson in English
has a natural, practical bearing, arising from the fact that one hour
has been spent with the theory class of the workroom studying the warp
and woof of the materials used, perhaps the sixth or seventh lesson in a
series on cotton, introduced to the class first in its native heath.
Correlation comes in wherever it may, and the association of ideas
obtained in class-room and workroom is closely joined.
The large class of the Dressmaking Division, spending the day from seven
until half past five making the blue uniform dresses, filling orders for
tailor-made dresses in silk and cloth, measuring, drafting, cutting, and
fitting, has many a representative in the schoolroom the succeeding day;
and still more is the lesson varied by the practical illustrations in
Mathematics or the recital of the experiences of the day in the English
classes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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