"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

through twelve.
It looked like a lot of work for seventy-five dollars pet month. I would teach from
nine till four, an hour off for lunch, with the day divided into thirty-four segments. It was
mostly recitation and memorization. My lesson plan was a three-inch stack of paper in a
worn leather portfolio, and I would start work in six weeks.
I'd thought about getting a temporary job before school started, but it was obvious
I wouldn't have time. I had a basket full of books as well as the portfolio, and a keen
sense of all I'd forgotten in the fifteen years since I'd left college. The prospect of
declining Latin verbs again filled me with dread, and since childhood I had never been
good with history, the memorization of names and dates. I had luck with the Latin, which
was being taught by a specialist, but not with history, which of course was heavily
weighted toward the history of Kansas and the West.
Without my asking, Daniel volunteered to go out and find a job till school started,
which filled me with pride. He knocked on doors for a day, and got a job at a newspaper,
the Globe Live Stock Journal, cleaning up and sorting type for a dollar a day.
I opened a bank account with the wedding-ring and necklace money, and stored
the seventy-three golden eagles in a safe-deposit box, putting them out of my mind. I
wanted to hold on to the hard money for insurance. That turned out to be a wise
precaution.
During those frantic six weeks we didn't meet many people. The two other
lodgers at Mrs. Clifton's were stiff gentlemen who spoke in monosyllables at breakfast
and supper, I think embarrassed by the presence of a woman and child. One worked at
William's Variety Story (and he was quite friendly when we showed up as customers);
the other was a law clerk.
I did befriend Waylon Marcel I, the Methodist minister. I joined the choir and
promised to help with Sunday school after regular school settled down. The other choir
members were cordial but distant. After a few rehearsals I recognized the plain fact that it
was a class and regional conflict; I was an Eastern upper-class woman, and to some of
them I might as well have come from China. They did warm up after a few months.
Waylon Marcell would change my life. His church was doing informal missionary
work (what we now might call "outreach")
with a band of Arapaho families camped outside of town, and he wondered
whether I, as an "educated woman," might get through to the women better than he. They
just stared at him and made no comment, unlike the men, who enjoyed argument.
I had no luck at the time. But in the winter, huddled around the smoky fire in a
tipi on Sunday afternoons, they would ask and answer questions. It would be good
training for my future.
The months and years pass.

Teachers today would have a low opinion of the way we taught in the 1890s, but it served
the students' needs. I delivered facts to them, and enforced memorization by repetition,
and then tested their memories. Authorities nowadays would feel I was stifling their
creativity, but in fact we hardly had time to cover the basics.
Many, perhaps most, of the children in Dodge lived on farms, and they had jobs
to do in season, which of course could not be put off. I was to find out that attendance
was pretty good in the winter, subject to storms, but during planting and harvest I would
be lucky to have three-quarters attending at any given day. Not the same three-quarters,
either; families were large in those days, and the children would trade off. You had to
have sympathy for them, but it didn't make teaching easy. I was in charge of seventy-two
students, and keeping track of who had missed which lesson was quite a bookkeeping