Chapter 12 : The Evening Session

In the evening we have singing, graded reading, dialogues, physical experiments, and the writing of compositions. The most popular of these subjects are reading and the experiments.

During the reading the older ones collect in a star around the great center-table, with their heads together, their legs at every angle; one reads, and the others all repeat what has been read. The younger ones have a book for each two; and, if they understand it, they read it just as we grown people do; holding the book to the light, and supporting themselves on their elbows so as to make it easier, and evidently they take great comfort in it. Some try to enjoy two comforts at once, and stand by the heated stove warming themselves and reading at the same time.

Not all the scholars are allowed to see the experiments in physics, only the oldest and best scholars, selected from the second class. This class, by the character which it has acquired among us, is in a disposition well suited for the evening, is very fanciful, and perfectly keyed up to the mood induced by the reading of tales.

Here all that has been said is transformed into reality; everything is personified for them: the juniper pith-balls, repelled by the sealing-wax, the varying magnetic needle, the iron filings which run about on a sheet of paper under which a magnet is moved, all these things are to them alive. Even the most intellectual of the lads who understand the meaning of these phenomena are fascinated, and begin to exclaim at the needle, or the pith-ball, or the filings:

"Just look! where is it going? Hold on! ukh! go ahead!" and the like.

Generally the classes are over by eight or nine o'clock, though often the carpenter's bench will detain some of the older boys a little longer, and the whole crowd, with a shout, rush together out-of-doors, and then divide into groups, crying to each other as their paths diverge toward different parts of the village. Sometimes they arrange to slide on big sleds, from the very door down into the valley where the village lies; they fasten up the thills, have some one in the middle to steer, and then, raising a snowy dust, they disappear from sight with a rush, leaving here and there black specks on the road where children have tumbled off.

Outside the institution, in spite of all its freedom in the open air, new relations are formed between the teachers and pupils, there is greater freedom, greater simplicity, and greater confidence the very relations which present themselves to us as the ideal of what a school should strive to be!