THE ESSAY
Essays should always be written neatly and legibly. Only a bad essay-writer forgets to apply himself to the clarity of both the thoughts and the letters. You should always think first before you write. To start a sentence with an unfinished thought is sloppiness that can never be forgiven. And yet the slothful schoolboy believes that words will arise from other words. That is nothing but a vain and dangerous idea though. You get tired from walking on a country road much faster if you don’t have a goal in mind. — Periods, commas, and other punctuation are a mistake to neglect, a mistake with a further consequence: untidiness of style. Style is a sense of order. Anyone with an unclear, untidy, unsightly mind will write in a style with those same qualities. From the style, says a proverb old and clichéd but no less true for all that, you can know the man. — When writing an essay, your elbows can’t fly around too wildly back and forth. That annoys the writer next to you, who is no doubt not insensitive to disturbances since he too is a thinker and a writer. Writing is about getting quietly worked up. Anyone who can’t sit still but who always has to act loud and self-important to get his work done will never be able to write anything lively and beautiful. — It’s much prettier, and thus much quicker, and thus much more sensitive and pleasing to write on clean, smooth paper, so always make sure you have good writing paper ready. Why else are there so many stationery stores? Writing something thoughtful is good, but wanting to stuff your work too full of thoughts is something you should avoid. An essay, like any other work for that matter, should be pleasant to read and to use. Too many thoughts and opinions make the simple framework, in other words the form on which every essay must be draped, just collapse. What, then, is an essay? A quarry, a landslide, a raging fire that may be splendid to look at but is also very sad. Someone with no thoughts doesn’t need his nose rubbed in this point, since there is no way he will overload his construction anyway. — Humor can be used in essays, but only as a subtle, delicate adornment. Anyone funny by nature needs to pay especially careful attention. Jokes that sound nice when they come out of your mouth only rarely look as good on paper. In addition, it is unrefined to make use of a gift one is richly endowed with in any but the most selective way. — Crossing out words looks messy. You should try to avoid this habit. I myself often need to remind myself of this. Self, hear and obey! Looking in the notebook of the boy next to you, to steal thoughts or ideas that you can’t think up yourself, is a rotten thing to do. No student should have so little self-respect that he prefers a stupid theft to the noble confession that his knowledge has reached its limits. It’s best not to pester the teacher with questions and sighs. Acting like that is weak and it only shows how embarrassed you are about the knowledge you are supposed to have but don’t. Teachers despise that.
THE CLASSROOM
“The Classroom”
Our classroom is a miniature world. After all, can’t all the feelings and passions in the world be found just as well among thirty people as among thirty thousand? Love and hate, ambition and revenge, nobler and also more primitive conceptions all play an important role with us. We have poverty and richness, knowledge and stupidity, success and failure in all their variations and fine distinctions. You often have the opportunity in the classroom to play the hero, the traitor, the victim, the martyr. If a novelist or poet cast his eye into our social world he would find rich material for exciting works. We are short-tempered and affectionate, hotheaded and docile, obedient and fresh, sarcastic and pious, moved and silly, indifferent and enthusiastic. We have every type of virtue and bad behavior among us, every kind of rascalliness and charm. You have to respect us, whether you want to or not. Often the teacher in fact hates one or another of us in the most violent way. Maybe he shouldn’t do that. We are maybe not worth being taken so seriously. He really does stand a bit too high, too far superior to us. It seems to me at least that it would make more sense for him to mock us than hate us. We have a class clown in our class. He gives us more to laugh at in fifteen minutes than ten other kids in a whole year. He is unbelievably good at making funny faces and has all kinds of expressions at his disposal. His sheep face is for when he’s in real trouble. He puts that one on when he’s getting caned. We all like him, and even the biggest scaredy-cat in our class would never dream of tattling on him to the teacher. On walks and field trips and in games, he’s our god. His pranks are never-ending and make the air shake with our laughter. We are always pushing him into playing naughty tricks, which he does as casually as can be, no matter how bold they may seem to us. Even the teacher can’t help laughing along with us sometimes, probably because he’s touched by so much humor. He is also a handsome, flexible boy, good at gymnastics, smart, but he pays so little attention it’s outrageous. Every day blows rain down upon his back. He will come to a bad end if he’s ever caught playing one of his crazy, reckless tricks. And it has to happen sometime. His parents won’t feel any particularly great sorrow when it does, because they are small-minded people and don’t look after their son much. In a certain sense he is noble. All unthinking, slovenly people are. When they do something bad it is only a game. It’s their passion, and being totally in the grip of a passion is never smart, but it is beautiful. He is like a kind of king among us. We are all happy to follow him, because every one of us secretly feels sorry for how abandoned he is. That is our little world. The teacher is like someone from the bigger outside world. But really he is too small to seem big to us.