“Oh, is the time up?” said Elizabeth Ann. “Why, she does beautifully, I think, for such a little thing.”
“Do you suppose,” said the teacher thoughtfully, just as though Betsy were a grown-up person, “do you suppose she could go into the second reader, with Eliza? There’s no use keeping her in the first if she’s ready to go on.”
Elizabeth Ann’s head whirled with this second light-handed juggling with the sacred distinction between the grades. In the big brick schoolhouse nobody ever went into another grade except at the beginning of a new year, after you’d passed a lot of examinations. She had not known that anybody could do anything else. The idea that everybody took a year to a grade, no matter what! was so fixed in her mind that she felt as though the teacher had said: “How would you like to stop being nine years old and be twelve instead! And don’t you think Molly would better be eight instead of six?”
However, just then her class in arithmetic was called, so that she had no more time to be puzzled. She came forward with Ralph and Ellen again, very low in her mind. She hated arithmetic with all her might, and she really didn’t understand a thing about it! By long experience she had learned to read her teachers’ faces very accurately, and she guessed by their expression whether the answer she gave was the right one. And that was the only way she could tell. You never heard of any other child who did that, did you?
They had mental arithmetic, of course (Elizabeth Ann thought it just her luck!), and of course it was those hateful eights and sevens, and of course right away poor Betsy got the one she hated most, 7 × 8. She never knew that one! She said dispiritedly that it was 54, remembering vaguely that it was somewhere in the fifties. Ralph burst out scornfully, “56!” and the teacher, as if she wanted to take him down for showing off, pounced on him with 9 × 8. He answered, without drawing breath, 72. Elizabeth Ann shuddered at his accuracy. Ellen, too, rose to the occasion when she got 6 × 7, which Elizabeth Ann could sometimes remember and sometimes not. And then, oh horrors! It was her turn again! Her turn had never before come more than twice during a mental arithmetic lesson. She was so startled by the swiftness with which the question went around that she balked on 6 × 6, which she knew perfectly. And before she could recover Ralph had answered and had rattled out a 108 in answer to 9 × 12; and then Ellen slapped down an 84 on top of 7 × 12. Good gracious! Who could have guessed, from the way they read, they could do their tables like this! She herself missed on 7 × 7 and was ready to cry. After this the teacher didn’t call on her at all, but showered questions down on the other two, who sent the answers back with sickening speed.
After the lesson the teacher said, smiling, “Well, Betsy, you were right about your arithmetic. I guess you’d better recite with Eliza for a while. She’s doing second-grade work. I shouldn’t be surprised if, after a good review with her, you’d be able to go on with the third-grade work.”
Elizabeth Ann fell back on the bench with her mouth open. She felt really dizzy. What crazy things the teacher said! She felt as though she was being pulled limb from limb.
“What’s the matter?” asked the teacher, seeing her bewildered face.
“Why—why,” said Elizabeth Ann, “I don’t know what I am at all. If I’m second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading and third-grade spelling, what grade am I?”
The teacher laughed at the turn of her phrase. “you aren’t any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You’re just yourself, aren’t you? What difference does it make what grade you’re in! And what’s the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don’t know your multiplication table?”
“Well, for goodness’ sakes!” ejaculated Elizabeth Ann, feeling very much as though somebody had stood her suddenly on her head.
“Why, what’s the matter?” asked the teacher again.
This time Elizabeth Ann didn’t answer, because she herself didn’t know what the matter was. But I do, and I’ll tell you. The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown-up. Of course, she didn’t really know that till she did come to be grown-up, but she had her first dim notion of it in that moment, and it made her feel the way you do when you’re learning to skate and somebody pulls away the chair you’ve been leaning on and says, “Now, go it alone!”
The teacher waited a minute, and then, when Elizabeth Ann didn’t say anything more, she rang a little bell. “Recess time,” she said, and as the children marched out and began putting on their wraps she followed them into the cloakroom, pulled on a warm, red cap and a red sweater, and ran outdoors herself. “Who’s on my side!” she called, and the children came darting out after her. Elizabeth Ann had dreaded the first
