Max Steele

 Do you think that a teacher should treat students like adults or like children ?  How important is it to have good manners and social poise?  What can teachers do to increase or decrease a student’s sense of pride?  What do you consider to be the really important things a person needs to learn in school ?  What are some ways in which little things tell you a lot about people---such as their manners, how they enter a room, or the way they say their names?  Why do people sometimes become shy when they say their names?

 The writer attended the kindergarten of Miss Effie Barr in No Southern lady of Miss Effie's generation worked. From 1910 to 1940 she supplemented her income by teaching 11 children at the rate of two dollars a week. She taught them: to drink coffee, sweep, dust, garden, wash windows, behave as ladies & gentlemen, & read. It was said by the public school teachers that the children she had taught to read had grown up reading everything they could find. She made it clear that parents did not need to know what their children did while under her instruction. Her cat was old & liked to fight. When it came home torn & bleeding, the children helped her chloroform it. She dismissed them early, saying, "Tell your parents the only thing Miss Effie had to teach you today was how to kill a cat."