SCHOOLMARM

"What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches."
-Karl Menninger

Courtesy Country Extra magazine, there is this list of schoolteacher rules from a letter writer. They come from a set of rules for Casey County, Kentucky in 1872:

• Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys
• Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day's session
• Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nips to the individual taste of the pupils
• Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly
• After 10 hours in school, the teachers may send the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books
• Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed
• Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of his earning for the benefit during his declining years so that he will not be a burden on society
• Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity, and honesty.
• The teacher who performs his labor faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of 25 cents per week in pay, providing the board of education approves.

The bit about the barber shop confuses me (girlie magazines? In 1872? Maybe it was just an unsavory place of gossip). Yet it is clear where the image of the prim and frosty old maid schoolmarm came from given these rules: fired if you get married? As the letter writer suggested, my how things have changed.