A Scot in the Sixth Grade

Miss Isobel MacDonald, an energetic Scottish schoolmarm, spent a year in Manhattan teaching English and history at a flossy private grade school for girls. Back in Britain last week, she summed up her experience in a BBC broadcast. Her central theme: it was a "fight to the finish."

The "most painful aspect" of teaching in the U.S., said Teacher MacDonald, is "the fight put up by the children against being educated." She blamed their boisterousness on the American desire to win ("If you make it almost impossible for [the teacher] to teach, you win"), and on "the educational theory, very strong in America, that no child should be thwarted or suppressed in any way." Miss MacDonald, by her own account, believes in "spankable little bottoms." Denied that privilege, she found the "young fiends" of eleven difficult to control.

"Let me tell you what life was like with the sixth grade," Miss MacDonald told her British audience. "They come charging in, all 14 of them, bursting with pep and dog and devil . . . Milly throws on my desk two battered and scrawled anonymous sheets. 'Where's your name, Milly? You should write your name on your [home] work before giving it in.' She borrows a pencil from Alice, her companion in crime. Alice has a clip machine; she clips the pages together ... so that I cannot open them. I get possession of this mangled piece of work, have an argument with Milly about not sitting beside Alice, and we start the lesson . .

"Alice and Milly [then] put miniature sets of false teeth into their mouths and leer at each other; I confiscate the teeth. Then Alice puts a pair of spectacles made of scarlet wire on her impudent nose and grins round ... I send her out . . . The class . . . call: 'Goodbye, Alice -aren't you lucky to leave' this boring lesson!' "

Occasionally, Teacher MacDonald allows, her American sixth-graders were "sensitive and brilliant." Somehow, the troublemakers "picked it all up ... in a way that many of our more studious classes might envy." One day she read them Matthew Arnold's The Forsaken Merman, and "there was dead silence, everyone as deeply attentive as a devout congregation in church." It was one day when victory went to teacher.

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