The violence and disorder of inner-city public schools is a cause for lament. But anyone who has read of the rural schools in nineteenth-century America would not be surprised . Teachers had low status, and boarded around with farm families. The older boys disrupted the one -room schoolhouses. In the Little House books, Laura Ingalls Wilder recounted how one teacher had to take a whip to the insolent boys to establish his authority. The students did not show sufficient deference to teachers, nor did the populace value their attempts to educate them, as Mr. Evans found out in Newberry.
A man by the name of Evans once taught at Coates’ Meeting House for a short time, and I have the impression that he was a most excellent teacher. I think he was an entire stranger in the country. He was quite a large man and rode a very small pony.
He seemed to be a monomaniac on the subject of grammar. He boarded around among the scholars and made it a point opt deliver a lecture on grammar every night, and in this way got the nick-name of Big Syntax, and his pony that of Little Syntax.
He was, moreover, a great lady’s man and attempted to court every women with whom he came in contact.
On the 14th of February, however, he received a valentine which broke up the school. Valentines in those days were not, as now, neatly printed and perfumed, and a person wishing to send one had to make and write it. The verse contained in the one that he received were as follows:
“You hog, you dog, you dirty swine!
I drew you for my valentine;
I drew you from amongst a dozen,
Because I thought you was the old sow’s cousin.”
That straw broke the camel’s back. The school was given up and I never heard of Mr. Evans afterwards.