Leo Tolstoy Archive
Written: 1862
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
The two smaller classes are put by themselves in one room; the older scholars are in another. When the teacher goes to the first class, all gather around him at the blackboard, or on the benches, or they climb on the table, or sit down around him or one of those that are reading.
If it happen to be for writing, they take more comfortable positions, but they keep getting up, so as to look at each other's copy-books and show their own to the teacher. It is calculated that the time till dinner will be occupied by four lessons; but often only three or two are introduced, and sometimes the roster is entirely changed. If the teacher begins with arithmetic, he may go over to geometry; or if he begins with sacred history, he may end with grammar.
Sometimes the teacher and the pupils get carried away, and instead of one hour the class lasts three hours. There have been cases where the pupils themselves cried, "More! more!" and they exclaim against those things which bore them: "That is stupid! Go to the little ones,"they cry contemptuously.
In the class for religious instruction, which is the only one that is held with any approach to regularity, because the teacher lives two versts away, and comes only twice a week, and in the drawing class, all the pupils are gathered together. Before these classes begin, liveliness, racket, and external disorder are the rule of the day; one drags benches from one room into the other, another scuffles, another goes home to the mansion
after bread, another heats that bread in the oven, another borrows something, another goes through gymnastic exercises; but just the same as in the tumult of the morning, it is far more easy to bring order out of chaos by leaving them to their natural impulses than by setting them down by main force.
In the present spirit of the school, to restrain them physically is impossible. The louder the teacher shouts,
this has been tried, the louder shout the scholars; his voice only excites them. If you succeed in calming them, or start them in another direction, this sea of youths will begin to rage less and less violently, then come to rest. But for the most part, it is not necessary to say anything.
The class in design, which is the most popular with all the school, takes place at noon, after lunch; and when they have been sitting three hours, and here again it is necessary to lug benches and tables from one room into another, and the racket is terrible! But still, as soon as the teacher is ready, the scholars are ready also, and any one who delays the beginning of the class is disciplined by the scholars themselves.