I saw at once that the difficulties must be
made only high enough to incite them to effort, but not so high as to
cause discouragement. I recalled the sentence in Harvey's Grammar:
"Milo began to lift the ox when he was a calf." After we had
succeeded in locating the antecedent of "he" we learned from this
sentence a lesson of value, and I recalled this lesson in my efforts
to inculcate progressive mastery in the boys and girls of my school.
I sometimes deferred a difficult problem for a few days till they had
lifted the growing calf a few more times, and then returned to it.
Some one says that everything is infinitely high that we can't see
over, so I was careful to arrange the barriers just a bit lower than
the eye-line of my pupils, and then raise them a trifle on each
succeeding day. In this way I strove to generate the positive
self-feeling so that there should be no depression and no white flag.
And that surely was worth a trip to the Isle of Man, even if one
failed to see one of their tailless cats.
I had occasion or, rather, I took occasion at one time to punish a
boy with a fair degree of severity (may the Lord forgive me), and
now.
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