The Rev. Calbraith Bourn Perry, a Northerner, was an Episcopal clergyman who ministered at Mount Calvary Church in Baltimore. He wrote Twelve years among the colored people. A record of the work of Mount Calvary chapel of S. Mary the Virgin, Baltimore, It has many interesting, painful, and edifying incidents, and also one or two amusing ones.
Anyone who has taught in middle school will appreciate this anecdote about the wiggliness of boys (of any race) who are not destined for intellectual labor:
We trust one honest fellow will pardon our using him as an example. He has since turned out a good, steady, upright workman. His schoolmates — after the manner of boys— nick-named him the “India-rubber boy.” There seemed to be no bones or fixed joints in his body. When G. was asked a question he would begin to wriggle. First he would shuffle his feet, then his ankles would begin to twist, then his legs to writhe, finally when arms, legs and whole body were going through painful contortions and gyrations, out would pop the answer from his mouth with a sort of explosive force of desperation as if from an air-gun. But the answer thus painfully worked out was not always satisfactory. For G. had a way of mastering one long word, the first that struck his fancy, early in the day. This was made to do service in answering all subsequent questions of a puzzling character. On one occasion, when he had just finished his geography recitation, he was called in the history class to give the name of one of the Presidents of the United States. He began to writhe with unwonted energy, at last, after seeming to wriggle up from his feet the whole length of his body, out popped the unexpected answer, “Archipelago, sir.”
One of our children was extraordinarily wiggle. As one home-schooling mother wrote:
I have a house full of wiggly kids. I could spend most of my day banging my head against the table and wishing I had a child who would just sit down and do their school work, but instead I have worked hard to harness with wiggles.
We had him jump up and down the stairs as he did his math problems.
Another mother:
My boys are, well, all boy in the sense that they are always moving-fidgeting-fiddling around kinds of kids. They can’t be still, they always have something to say (and more often than not, it is off topic) and they seem to be in a constant state of movement.
And another:
I’ve got a Wiggler! Some days he wiggles more than others. Can any learning get done when the wiggling is out of control?
This also reminds me of the story of the old woman who told her pastor that she “found great support in that comfortable word Mesopotamia.”
The eternal class struggle:jocks vs nerds!