The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 1, July 1897 - April, 1898 Page: 295
334 p. : ill., ports., maps ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Recollections of Early Schools.
and attention given at Wells' school. As a teacher, he had one
fault, a very common one then, as now-he did not always begin
at the beginning, and knowing the subject so well himself, he
could not well discover what the difficulties were which often puz-
zled primary students. If once he knew what the difficulty was,
no man that ever I knew could more easily and quickly lead the
pupil out of it, but he was slow in discovering rudimentary difficul-
ties. I remember puzzling over an arithmetical problem for sev-
eral days; a time which seemed to me months long. The teacher
could not, or at least did not, understand my difficulty, which
was so simple that a very stupid fellow in the neighborhood easily
explained it to me in a few moments; perhaps because he knew how
to reach the comprehension of his kind, in which our excellent
teacher was at fault--over-shooting as it were. But the more ad-
vanced a student became, the more easily and thoroughly did Mr.
Wells carry him forward. I remember his lamenting that there
was no copy of Euclid to be found in the neighborhood, and when
I searched my father's library and found a copy which had been
through the wars and moves, and was torn and deficient of some of
the first books, he hailed it as a treasure, nor was he in the least put
out that the remnant began at the 47th proposition, either because
he remembered all that went before or because he did not con-
sider the mere beginning particularly important. And here I di-
gress to move the Text-book Board to re-elect old Euclid for an-
other term of two thousand years, for in all that time no other
text-book has appeared that will at all compare with his.
Mr. Wells did not confine his exertions for our advancement to
his little school nor to his Gospel ministry, but he also started an
emulation among the young men to read well in the works of the
great writers of our tongue. My brother read the English transla-
tion of Plutarch's Lives and Shakespeare's nlays, in the latter of
which his taste chose King Henry V., which he almost memorized.
A companion of his was the best reader of the English language,
except one, that ever I have heard. During that summer I read
Scott's Life of Napoleon and attacked Blair's rhetoric, though
with problematical success. One of the boys who was not at all
literary in his taste, yet mastered the Life of Putnam, and when
we found a den of wolves, proposed to emulate his hero by crawl-
ing in after them, but we dissuaded him and found a better plan by295
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Texas State Historical Association. The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 1, July 1897 - April, 1898, periodical, 1897/1898; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101009/m1/321/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.