A Girl\'s Student Days and After
J >> Jeannette Marks >> A Girl\'s Student Days and AfterA Girl's Student Days and After
By
JEANNETTE MARKS, M. A.
(_Wellesley_)
_With an Introduction by_
_MARY EMMA WOOLLEY, LL. D._
_President of Mt. Holyoke College_
_New York Chicago Toronto_
_Fleming H. Revell Company_
_London and Edinburgh_
Copyright, 1911, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 125 North Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
_Inscribed
to
MARY EMMA WOOLLEY, LL. D._
_Introduction_
The school and college girl is an important factor in our life to-day.
Around her revolve all manner of educational schemes, to her are open
all kinds of educational opportunities. There was never an age in which
so much thought was expended upon her, or so much interest felt in her
development.
There are many articles written and many speeches delivered on the
responsibility of parents and teachers--it may not be amiss occasionally
to turn the shield and show that some of the responsibility rests upon
the girl herself. After all, she is the determining factor, for
buildings and equipment, courses and teachers accomplish little without
her cooeperation.
It is difficult for the "new girl," whether in school or college, to
realize the extent to which the success of her school life depends upon
herself. In a new environment, surrounded by what seem to her
"multitudes" of new faces, obliged to meet larger demands under strange
and untried conditions, she is quite likely to go to the other extreme
and exaggerate her own insignificance. Sometimes she is fortunate enough
to have an older sister or friend to help her steer her bark through
these untried waters, but generally she must find her own bearings.
To such a girl, the wise hints in the chapters which follow this
introduction are invaluable, giving an insight into the meaning of
fair-play in the classroom as well as on the athletic field; the
relation between physical well-being and academic success; the
difference between the social life that is _re_-creative and that which
is "_nerves_-creative"; the significance of loyalty to the school and to
the home; the way in which school days determine to a large degree the
days that come after. These, and many other suggestions, wise and
forceful, I commend not only to the new girl, but also to the "old
girl" who would make her school and college days count for more both
while they last and as preparation for the work that is to follow.
MARY E. WOOLLEY.
_Mt. Holyoke College_,
_South Hadley, Massachusetts._
_CONTENTS_
A WORD TO THE WISE 13
I. THE IDEAL FRESHMAN 17
II. THE GIRL AND THE SCHOOL 25
III. FRIENDSHIPS 33
IV. THE STUDENT'S ROOM 41
V. THE TOOLS OF STUDY AND THEIR USE 54
VI. THE JOY OF WORK 61
VII. FAIR-PLAY 70
VIII. THE RIGHT SORT OF LEISURE 78
IX. THE OUTDOOR RUNWAY 88
X. A GIRL'S SUMMER 99
XI. FROM THE SCHOOL TO THE GIRL 107
XII. THE WORK TO BE 115
_A Word to the Wise_
We train for basket-ball, golf, tennis or for whatever sport we have the
most liking. Is there any reason why we should not use the same
intelligence in the approach to our general school life? Is there any
reason why we should make an obstacle race, however good and amusing
exercise that may be, out of _all_ our school life? We don't expect to
win a game with a sprained wrist or ankle, and there really is no reason
why we should plan to sprain the back of school or college life by
avoidable mistakes.
The writer believes in the girl who has the capacity for making
mistakes,--that headlong, energetic spirit which blunders all too
easily. But the writer knows how much those mistakes hurt and how much
energy might be saved for a life that, with just a pinch less of
blunder, might be none the less savoury. School and college are no place
for vocal soloists, and after some of us have sung so sweetly and so
long at home, with every one saying, "Just hear Mary sing, isn't it
wonderful!" it is rather trying, you know, to go to a place where vocal
solos are not popular. And we wish some one--at least I did--had told us
all about this fact as well as other facts of school life. Anyway it
should be a comfort to have a book lying on the table in our school or
college room, or at home, which will tell us why Mary, after having been
a famous soloist at home made a failure or a great success in chorus
work at school. Such a book is something like having a loaded gun in
readiness for the robber. We may never use the shotgun or the book but
they are there, with the reassuring sense of shot in the locker.
It is something, is it not, to have a little book which will tell you
how to get into school and how to get out (for at times there seem to be
difficulties in both these directions)--in short, to tell you something
of many things: your first year at school or college, your part in the
school life, the friendships you will make, your study and how to work
in it, the pleasure and right kind of spirit involved in work, the quiet
times, as well as the jolly times, out-of-doors, your summers and how to
spend them, what the school has tried to do for you; and, as you go out
into the world, some of the aspects, whether you are to be wife,
secretary or teacher, of the work which you will do. Of one thing you
may be certain; that behind every sentence of this little book is
experience, that here are only those opinions of which experience has
made a good, wholesome zwieback.
I wish to take this opportunity to thank my friend, Mrs. Belle Kellogg
Towne, editor of _The Girls' Companion_ and _Young People's Weekly_,
Chicago, for her cooeperation in allowing me to use half the material in
this little book; also Dr. C. R. Blackall, of Philadelphia.
_Camp Runway._ J. M.
I
THE IDEAL FRESHMAN
Freshman year, the beginning year, the year of new experiences, new
delights, new work, new friends, new surroundings; the year that may
mean much to a girl, that may answer some of the questions that have
lain long in heart and mind, that will surely reveal her more clearly to
herself, that may make her understand others better and help her to
guess something of the riddle of the years to come!
What has the student done to get ready for this year? If she were going
camping she would know that certain things were necessary to make the
expedition a success. With what excitement and pleasure, what thoughts
of jolly camp-fires, deep, sweet-smelling forests, and long days afoot,
she would prepare everything. She would not let any one else do this for
her, for that would mean losing too much of the fun. But the _freshman
year_, what about the thinking and planning for that, also an expedition
into a new world, and a veritable adventure of a vast deal more
importance than a few days or weeks of camping? Would she enter forests
upon whose trees the camp-fires throw many shadows, follow the stream
that cleaves its way through the woods, go along the runway of deer or
caribou or moose, with a mind to all intents and purposes a blank? No,
her mind would be vivid with thoughts and interests.
With the same keen attention should she enter the new year at school or
college, and as she passes through it, thinking about all that comes to
her, she will find it growing less and less difficult and more and more
friendly. She will consider what the freshman year is to be like, think
of what sorts of girls she is to meet and make friends with, what the
work will be, what she may expect in good times from this new adventure,
and, thoughtful about it all, make the minimum of mistakes and get the
maximum of benefit.
Here come some of the girls who are entering school and college with
her--bright-haired, dark-haired, rosy or pale, tall and thin, fat and
short, clever and average, desirable and undesirable,--in fact, all
sorts and conditions of girls. Who is to be the leader of them all? She
is the _ideal freshman_, a nice, well-set-up girl who does not think too
much of herself, who is not self-conscious, and who does not forget for
what she is sent to school. Despite the temptations of school life she
uses her days wisely and well. She does not isolate herself, for she
sees the plan and value of the recreative side of school-days. She is
already laying the foundations for a successful, useful, normal
existence, establishing confidence at the outset and not handicapping
herself through her whole course by making people lose their faith in
her. Our _ideal freshman_ may be the girl who is to do distinguished
work; she may be the student who does her best; and because it is her
best, the work, though not brilliant, is distinguished by virtue of her
effort. She may be the girl who is to make a happy home life through her
poise and earnestness and common sense. Whoever she is, in any event in
learning to do her best she is winning nine-tenths of the battle of a
successful career. It is she, attractive, able, earnest, with the
"fair-play" or team-play spirit in all she does, true to herself and to
others, whom every school wants, whose unconscious influence is so great
in building up the morale of any school. Mark this girl and follow her,
for she is worthy of your hero worship.
This is the girl who goes into school in much the same spirit that she
would enter upon a larger life. She is not a prig and she is not a dig,
but she knows there are responsibilities to be met and she meets them.
She expects to have to think about the new conditions in which she finds
herself and to adjust herself to them, and she does it. She knows the
meaning of the team-play spirit and she takes her place quietly on the
team, one among many, and both works and plays with respect for the
rights and positions of others. It is in the temper of the words
sometimes stamped upon the coins of our country--_E Pluribus Unum_--that
she makes a success of her school life. She knows that not only is our
country bigger than any one of its states, but also that every school is
bigger than any one of its members whether teacher or student. In a
small family at home conditions have been more or less made for her,
just as they are for other girls. Yet she knows that the school life is
complicated and complex, and it is impossible for her to feel neglected
where a more self-centred or spoiled girl fails to see that in this new
life she is called upon to play a minor part but nevertheless a part
upon which the school must rely for its _esprit de corps_. She goes with
ease from the somewhat unmethodical life of the home to the highly
organized routine of the school because she understands the meaning of
the word "team-play." She has the cooeperative spirit.
Yet there are other girls, too, in this school which the freshman is
entering. There is the student who errs on the side of leading too
workaday a life, and in so doing has lost something of the buoyancy and
breadth and "snap" which would make her associations and her work
fresher and more vigorous. "The Grind," she has been called, and if she
recognize herself in this sketch, let her take care to reach out for a
bigger and fuller life than she is leading. And there is, too, the
selfish student whose "class-spirit" is self-spirit; and the girl who is
not selfish but who uses herself up in too many interests, dramatic,
athletic, society, philanthropic and in a dozen others. She is probably
over-conscientious, a good girl in every way, but in doing too much she
loses sight of the real aim of her school life. To these must be added
another student,--the freshman who skims the surface, and is, when she
gets out, where she was when she entered--no, not quite so far along,
for she has slipped back. She is selfish, relying upon the patience and
burden-bearing capacity of her father and mother, as well as the school.
No doubt every girl would meet her obligations squarely if she realized
what was the underlying significance of the freshman year; the school
life would surely be approached with a conscientious purpose. What a
girl gets in school will much depend upon what she has to give. No girl
is there simply to have a good time or merely to learn things out of
books. Nor is she there to fill in the interim between childhood and
young womanhood, when one will go into society, another marry, and a
third take up some wage-earning career. No, she is there to carry life
forward in the deepest, truest sense; and the longer she can have to get
an education and to make the best of the opportunities of school and
college life, the richer and fuller her after-years will be. Both middle
life and old age will be deeper and stronger. Let us think about these
girls, let us think about what it means to be a freshman, and so lessen
our difficulties and increase our pleasures; let us have a big
conception,--a large ideal always at heart--of what the _first year_
should be, and beginning well we shall be the more likely to end well.
II
THE GIRL AND THE SCHOOL
Inside school or college the girl is in several ways responsible for the
atmosphere. Merely in her conversation she can be of service or
dis-service. It may be simply a good joke which she is telling, but if
the joke misrepresents the school she will, perhaps, do lasting harm. If
she is hypercritical--and there is nothing so contagious as
criticism--she influences people in the direction of her thought; she
sets a current of criticism in motion. A student frequently gives vent
to an opinion that is only half-baked--it is well, by the way, to make
zwieback of all our opinions before we pass them around as edible--about
courses and instructors. She does not realize that some opinions to be
worth anything must be the result of a long process of baking, that a
nibble from the corner of a four months' or nine months' course will
not, however understandingly it may be Fletcherized, tell you whether
the course is going to be fruit cake, meringue or common soda crackers.
She may think that she herself is so unimportant that what she says
can't matter, or she may not mean what she says and be merely letting
off steam. Nevertheless her influence is exerted. Some one showed an old
lady, who had never been known to say anything in the least critical of
any human being, the picture of a very fat man prominent in public life.
She looked at it a moment, and then said sweetly: "My, isn't he plump!"
If only there were more old and young ladies like that dear soul!
There is another kind of conversation which may not be ill-natured and
yet does harm. Idle gossiping, talking about things that are not worth
while or speculating about affairs which are not our business and of
which we know little or nothing. Akin to this is fashionably slangy
conversation concerning the latest thing in books, magazine articles,
trivial plays. For even the "tone" of school or college conversation a
student is responsible. She can make her school seem cheap or
cultivated. The remarks which visitors overhear as they go from room to
room or from building to building are likely to indicate the "tone" of
an institution. A catalogue may say all it pleases about a school but in
the end the school is judged by the women it educates and sends out,
even as a tree is known by its fruit. Cultivated, strong women are worth
more in advertisement than all the printed material in the world,
however laudatory.
When a girl has received everything her Alma Mater has to give, she has
no right to be untrue to its fundamental aims and ideals, or to
misrepresent it in any way, either by what she says or by her own
behaviour. Every student in a large institution is in a sense a
pensioner. No student can pay for what is given to her. Is it not a poor
return for her to be reflecting dishonour rather than honour upon her
school?
There is a certain social selfishness in the way some students take
their opportunities for granted without realizing that there are
thousands and hundreds of thousands of girls who would give all that
they possess for a tithe of such riches. Also, because of the sacrifice
which is being made for them at home girls are selfish in taking their
school or college life carelessly. The school has to bear much of the
responsibility for the individual failure. But of this the student who
is failing rarely thinks. Parents hold an institution to blame if it
does not do for their child what they expect it to do, when it may be
the girl who is at fault.
In the use she makes of her portion of inheritance, in the gift the
school bestows on the student, there is a large social question
involved. The school gives her of its wealth, the result of the
accumulation of years and of the civic or philanthropic spirit of many
men and women. This, if the girl's sense of responsibility is what it
should be, she feels bound to increase and hand on. It is the old
_noblesse oblige_ under new conditions of privilege.
While she is still in school the girl discharges part of this obligation
by realizing what is best for her school as an institution. A college or
a big school is no place for vocal soloists. Its life is the life of an
orchestra, of many instruments playing together. The student's sense of
responsibility is shown by her attitude towards the corporate government
and administration of the school. Instead of regarding the laws of her
school as natural enemies, chafing against them, making fun of them or
evading them if possible, she has a duty in fulfilling them. The
consciousness of this responsibility is the very heart and soul of the
student self-government movement, for it recognizes not only the
obligation placed upon its members by an institution, but also the wide
influence one girl may have on others. Student government knows that
upper class girls can determine the spirit of the under classes. Even
looking at the matter from the lightest point of view, respectful and
law-abiding ways are always well-bred ways.
When a student becomes an alumna she can discharge a large part of her
great responsibility by realizing that it is not any longer so much a
question of what her school can give her as of what she can give to her
school. One thing she can always give it--that is, kindly judgment. And
she can acknowledge that her ideas of what her Alma Mater is after her
own school-days may not be correct. The school, sad to say, is sometimes
placed in the position of the kindly old farmer who, hearing others call
a certain man a liar, said: "Waal now, I wouldn't say he wuz a _liar_.
That's a bit harsh. I'd say he handled the truth mighty careless-like."
Schools find that some of their alumnae handle the truth mighty
careless-like.
While she is still a student a girl's service to her school lies largely
in her daily work, the mental muscle she puts into all that she does in
the classroom and studies out of it. If because of her and a multiple of
many girls like her, the college does not possess that _sine qua non_ of
all the higher mental life, an intellectual atmosphere, it is the
student's and her multiple's fault. "You may lead a horse to water but
you cannot make it drink," may be an old adage, but it would be hard to
improve upon it. You may set before students a veritable Thanksgiving
feast of things intellectual, but if they have no eagerness, no appetite
for them, the feast remains untouched. Energy and hunger of the mind,
not the anxious hosts, will in the end decide whether that feast is or
is not to be eaten.
The school considers not only scholarship but also the sum of all that
it is, its culture, its attainment, its moral force, as these elements
are expressed in its living members, its students and its teachers--in
short, its idealism. Idealism is having one's life governed by ideals,
and an ideal is a perfect conception of that which is good, beautiful
and true. If the girl's life is not governed by ideals, how, then, can
the school hope to have its idealism live or grow? Frequently students
think of the ideals of college or school as of something outside
themselves, more or less intangible, with which they may or may not be
concerned. Students cannot do their institution a greater injury than by
harbouring such a thought, for if their sense of responsibility will
only make the idea of the school personal, then indeed will the school
be like that house upon which the rains descended and the winds blew but
it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock.
III
FRIENDSHIPS
Homesickness and friendships, how much and how vivid a part they play in
the first year, or years, of school life! An old coloured physician was
asked about a certain patient who was very ill. "I'll tell you de truf,"
was the reply. "Widout any perception, Phoebe Pamela may die and she may
get well; dere's considerable danger bofe ways." I will tell you one
truth about the first year of school life: friends there will surely be,
and homesickness there is likely to be,--there is "considerable danger
both ways."
Even if a girl has never been away from home before, it is possible that
she will not suffer from homesickness. It is probable, however, that the
new surroundings in which the girl finds herself, and the separation
from those who are the centre of her personal life, will bring on an
attack of this most painful malady. It takes time to fit comfortably
into the new surroundings, and meanwhile everything is strange.
Homesickness is not to be laughed at, but it must be less deadly, less
fatal than some people think it, or there would not be so many
recoveries. Girls often weep when they enter school, and then after the
long dreary years are really over, lived through, and the poor forlorn
freshman is metamorphosed into the senior, they weep again. Is it not
strange that these seniors who wept on entering school should weep also
when leaving it? It looks in the end as if Phoebe Pamela were sure to
get well. Yet the effort to get well requires a fine effort at
self-control,--an effort every girl is the better for making, although
it may take everything plucky in a girl to "back up" her intention to
remain in school. The earlier the student considers this question of
homesickness the better. Let her face its possibilities before she goes
away from home, and make up her mind, if she is attacked, resolutely to
overcome it. If it comes, let her never give up the struggle, for, by
giving in, she will only lose ground in every way, morally, socially,
intellectually. By her cowardice she will part with what she can never
recover later.
Many temptations follow in the wake of homesickness, and the most
serious of all is to make friends too rapidly. It may be laid down as a
rule that a friendship formed on this stop-gap principle, and too
rapidly, is not likely to endure. Such a friendship is not a sane or a
wise relation, for friendship is like scholarship: if it is worth
anything at all it comes slowly. Impulsive, quickly forced friendships
are not wise investments; the very fact that they come so quickly
implies an unbalanced state of idealizing, or lack of self-control. This
does not mean that one is not to form pleasant acquaintances from the
very beginning of the school life. Acquaintanceship always holds
something in reserve and is the safest prelude to a deeper and more
vital friendship.
There is no denying that there is great temptation to violent
admirations and attractions in school. In the first place, in school or
college the girl is brought into contact with a large circle of people
who are immensely interesting to her. The whole atmosphere is full of
novelty, of the unusual. Some of the students and teachers whom she
meets for the first time represent a broader experience, it may be, than
her own home life has given her. They are often new types and new types
are always interesting.
I shall say nothing of the idealism of friendship--it plays its part in
other books. It would seem sometimes as if almost too much emphasis had
been placed upon the making of friendships in school,--friendship which
is, after all, but a by-product, the most valuable it is true,
nevertheless a by-product of the life. Wholly practical are the tests of
friendship which I shall give. In the first place a friend is too
absorbing who takes all of one's interest to the exclusion of
everything else: there should be interest in other people, other
activities as well as in one's work. Such a friendship can only make a
girl forget for what she has come to school. The new relation which
disposes one to look with less respect and affection upon one's own
people and home--and they, be it remembered, have stood the most
valuable test of all, the test of time--cannot be a good influence. It
may be said in general that an association which is developing the less
fine traits in one's character, giving emphasis to the less worthy
sides, should be relinquished immediately, even at the cost of much
heartache. The heartache will be only temporary; the bad influence might
become permanent. On the other hand, since friendship is giving as well
as taking, one does well to consider the fact that if one's own part in
it does not tell for good, there is just as much reason for stopping the
friendship where it is. Some of these associations--and this is a hard
saying, I know--which seem everything at the time are nothing, as the
years will prove. A girl idealizes, and idealizes those who are not
worthy. Inevitably the day comes when she laughs at herself,--if she
does not do worse and pity herself for having been such a goose.