Myra Kelly, 1904
This story, from Myra Kelly's collection of short fiction, Little Citizens, depicts life in an urban school from the point of view of a young, well-intended teacher. Constance Bailey's "first-reader" classroom is composed mainly of Jewish immigrant children, whose knowledge of the English language is quite limited. Kelly's depiction of their stuggles and successes, and of their exaggerated vernacular tend toward stereotype, but the work vividly illustrates, nonetheless, many of the difficulties of teaching in turn-of-the-century urban America.
Not only does Constance Bailey contend with a large class of diverse children, all limited in their skills, she is also the victim of a supervisory system that scares and intimidates new and experienced teachers alike. Mr. Timothy O'Shea is an example of the "new manager," the product of Progressive theories on school organization that sought to quantify teaching methodologies into a series of rigid formulas. Supervisors were trained to stalk classrooms, searching for breaches in teaching form and technique. Obviously, this new kind of supervision often degenerated into tyranny. One contemporary account described the Progressive supervisor as a "malignant sphinx," marking down the teacher's every move in his "doomsday book" ( Gilbert, 1906, p. 85). Timothy O'Shea is clearly a manager of this same ilk.
Myra Kelly ( 1875-1910) wrote from firsthand experience. Born into a middle-class family in Dublin, Kelly moved with her parents to New York's Lower East Side, the area of New York in which many of her immigrant subjects lived. After attending Horace Mann High School and Teachers College, Columbia University, Kelly began teaching at P. S. 147. Her years in this school provided material for most of her popular stories about schooling.