We used to have "General Exercises" on Friday afternoon. The most
exciting feature of this weekly frivolity consisted of a free-for-all
exercise in mental arithmetic. Mr. Hinman gave out lists of numbers,
beginning with easy ones and speaking slowly; each succeeding list he
dictated more rapidly and with ever-increasing complications of
addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, until at last he was
giving them out faster than he could talk. One by one the pupils dropped
out of the race with despairing faces, but always at the closing
peremptory:
"Answer?"
At least a dozen hands shot into the air and as many voices shouted the
correct result. We didn't have many books, and the curriculum of an
Illinois school in those days was not academic; but two things the
children could do, they could spell as well as the dictionary and they
could handle figures. Some of the fellows fairly wallowed in them. I
didn't. I simply drowned in the shallowest pond of numbers that ever
spread itself on the page. As even unto this day I do the same.
Well, one year the Teacher introduced an innovation; "compositions" by
the girls and "speakin' pieces" by the boys.
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