Frost chose the other path

by David Safier

A NY Times blog post says that Robert Frost taught an 8th grade class in a Massachusetts Grammar School in 1893.

His qualifications? Well, at 17 years of age, having recently dropped out of Dartmouth College before he finished his first semester, he didn't have many. But that was typical of the time. Your only qualification to teach school was an education slightly better than your students. Some teachers, often girls as young as 16, began teaching in the one room school house they just graduated from.

Speaking of famous and reluctant schoolteachers, there was one Walt Whitman. He wrote this in a letter to a friend:

"O, damnation, damnation! thy other name is school-teaching and thy residence Woodbury."

Whiman taught 4 years, starting when he was 17. Apparently, he was kindly and creative in the classroom. Melville, Emerson and Thoreau put in time teaching as well.

Years ago I created a website, School Tales in 19th Century Literature, with a number of contemporary stories revealing what went on in 19th century classrooms. Whitman's contribution is a short, grizzly story, A Death in the School-Room (A Fact). You'll find schoolroom excerpts from Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer" as well as work by Charles Dickens, Stephen Crane, Washington Irving, W.E.B. Du Bois and others less famous.

Don't let the "19th Century" part scare you away. All the pieces I selected are eminently readable and often very enjoyable, if you like that kind of thing.