We are told that only 5 per cent of the people who enter the mercantile business succeed at it. What is the matter? Is it the fault of the goods they are selling? Is it the fault of the men they buy from? Or is it the inability to cope with something for which the merchant is not adapted? Just so with the teacher. He must be not only well prepared for the work, but he must be adapted to it.

These two characteristics are not enough to insure him not to fail. He must possess a personality that will attract students to his classes and will hold them there, and will cause those students to study, and to study to a definite purpose, and to have a desire to do something. The teacher's personality must be tempered with an ambition to go higher up, and to be master of a situation. In one sense it must be of the Napoleonic typeto conquer all fear, all fallacies, to reach the topmost pinnacle of success in his chosen line of work. In another meaning his ambition must be of the type of Abraham Lincoln, an ambition to be of use to humanity in general and to his community in particular, an ambition to serve to a fixed purpose, to assist in the upbuilding of his own immediate neighborhood.

Not only must the teacher be ambitious, he must be patient. He must possess the patience of Job, that he can forbear the many weaknesses' of his pupils, or the complaints of his patrons without any outward sign of smarting, or resentful revenge, or intemperate tact in dealing with them.

He must also have perseverance. He must be as persevering as Cyrus W. Field. When his students seem to be failing he must rally his strength and resources and keep his students in the right path. Because a boy or girl may be slow in grasping a subject is no cause to become impatient with them; forbearance is a virtue to be cultivated, and it is one of the guides to success in directing students on the road to a better life, a nobler citizenship, and the final accomplishment of the happiness that all are striving to attain.

Sympathy is the next requisite to success in teaching boys and girls. The teacher must show his students that he is human; that he has an interest in their well-being; in their progress; in their success in all undertakings of a high and noble desire. He must prove his sympathy by his acts. He must have that sympathy that will be inspiring to his students, and will cause them to put forth all their ability to master whatever may be set before them to do. Whatever may be the students' troubles are his troubles, and whatever may be their joys are his joys.

The teacher that is not enthusiastic about his work will never succeed. How can he arouse interest in a subject if he is not interested in it himself? How can he expect a student to do something that he would not do himself? There never was any great and lasting success that was not accomplished on a wave of enthusiasm.

Having briefly outlined the requisite qualifications of the teacher, I will next turn to the other force, the student.

As stated already, many students on entering high school for the first time are led into taking up subjects which they are by nature unfitted to pursue. They are influenced in doing so by outsiders, or by those with whom they associate. And after they have studied these subjects for a little while, they are disappointed, and want to drop out of the class. And again, many students take up the commercial studies because they think they afford an easy avenue for credits for graduation from the high school. Many students work under an erroneous idea that it is time they are to pass, instead of the complete mastery of the subject they are studying. I find that many students who have been in high school for two or three years are still laboring under the impression that all they have to do is to put in so many periods each week in the particular subject for a term, and then they will be entitled to so many credits toward graduation. The average high-school pupil seems to think of but two things, viz., time and credit toward graduation. Now whose fault is this? Are the students to blame? I think not. They have not been instructed differently, and the custom has grown up, and is still growing; each class coming into the high school inherits this same impression, and it continues to grow from year to year. What the teachers should do, is to begin right now, and instill into the students a desire to be something, to prepare for a definite career, and cleanse their minds of that false idea that time and credits are the ultimate goals to be reached in their high-school life.

The environment of the student determines to a great extent his progress in school. The student may have inherited a lazy and indifferent disposition, and by his associates cultivated this to such an extent that all of the ambition, patience, perseverance, sympathy, and enthusiasm of the best teacher in the country would be a failure with such students. The student may be of a temperament that requires tact and skillful effort in directing into right channels, in which case the teacher must ever be alert to his duty to guide the student properly along lines of least resistance, and in highways of most usefulness.

A student may be ambitious and have tendencies that hinder his progress under the most skillful guidance of his teacher. These must be overcome, and the avenues of success pointed out to the boy or the girl, that they may keep in view one object and only one, viz., the complete mastery of the subjects they are studying, to the end that they will be tools in the students' hands for wielding power and conquering difficulties in the battles for existence.

The teacher who possesses a thoro training for his chosen line of work, and is adapted for it, and has a personality that will grasp his students and hold them, and has the relative amount of ambition, patience, perseverence, sympathy, and enthusiasm, and uses his best efforts in his work. will not be responsible for failures of the students in the classroom. In proportion as he falls short of this will his responsibility be.

(II) C. A. BERNHARD, COMMERCIAL DEPARTMENT, UKIAH HIGH SCHOOL, UKIAH, CAL.

After reading the subject assigned I cannot see that it calls for a brief either for or against my fellow-teachers. Rather it should, be a discussion of responsibility: For what are we responsible and for what not? For instance, the opportunity is here to give ourselves a most excellent "roast" for all our classroom failures. On the other hand, the opportunity is equally good to blame the other fellow.

There are some things for which we teachers are largely responsible. For the first one we will mark preparation.

Do we prepare as we should? I think not. Why? Well, there are a number of reasons. One is the unstability of the occupation-or profession, as many of us like to call it; occupation is the better word. Unstable you say. You point me to the great army of teachers here and remind me that there is none other like it and point to the fact that for a hundred years we have been rolling down the corridors of time, making history as we go and making ourselves one of the strongest factors in the development of this great nation. Unstable! And I answer, "Of course we are."

Did I hear some Missourian over there say "Show me"? Well, here you are. It is indeed a great army of teachers we have in the United States, but it is about as changing as the sands of the sea. Look at the great majority of women it contains. Now why does any woman teach school? That question we dare not answer, but I am going to lay you down this proposition as bearing on the subject. If the right man should come along in each case and ask the right question, backed up by the right amount of security, nearly every lady teacher would answer in the affirmative and enter upon her real "profession"-that of home-builder. As it is, a large percentage of our lady teachers will have married before we meet again.

And how about the men? I have never known a man who honestly and truly started out to be a school teacher for life. For a hundred years we have been making it a stepping-stone for law, medicine, politics, or business. The young man "graduates" and must have some quick money. He knows he can get a certificate, and a school job will support him and give him some spare time until he can find something better. Some of us soon fall into the salary rut, others teach on because they are unfitted for anything else, and while they hate the work they cannot give up one hundred dollars per month for the uncertainty of business. Pretty soon they are too old and too proud to begin business at the beginning and unfit to begin anywhere else. They are chained to the teacher's desk. The chains gall them and they chafe and fret, yet they cannot We see them, down to old age, unsatisfied and half-failures. Not long ago a school superintendent complained to me that all his

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first-class lady teachers get married as soon as they really learn to do good work. I said "How about the men?" "Oh, they are promoted to principalships." "Then what?" And after a moment's thought he replied, "Well, I see what you mean. All our best men soon go into something else. We seem to be doomed as superintendents to carry on our work with young stock, unbroken, mixed in with the old, discouraged half-failures, and sometimes the friction is terrific, consuming nearly as much energy as goes into the real work."

Because of this unstability we do not take the trouble to prepare as we should. In fact it is not even a question of preparedness. It is a question of getting a certificate and a school. With the great majority the preparation ceases as soon as they can secure a certificate.

With law it is not thus. A lawyer begins to practice and keeps right on studying as long as he practices. He must-or be crowded out by his more progressive fellows. In medicine and in business a man's success depends upon the degree of his preparedness. In teaching his success depends upon his certificate and how politic he is. His preparation has ceased and his surplus energies are directed toward a future occupation or profession.

Of course temperament and good-nature are important factors for success. These two terms may be condensed into that one word "tact.” If a teacher has tact he can surmount great difficulties with ease.

I maintain that the teacher who has a certificate and is endowed with a reasonable amount of tact can go right on indefinitely without any further preparation. This is not true in the outside business and professional world. There men must make good. The teacher's product is not judged until long after. In the business world our work is judged every day.

Now I am supposed to be discussing our responsibility for classroom failures. It may look as tho I am a long way off the track, but really I think not. If we were properly prepared for our work and used the best effort we knew, we would have no responsibility for the failures. I maintain that we are not properly prepared and that there does rest upon us a heavy responsibility.

We commercial teachers are preparing men and women for earning a livelihood in the great commercial world. We have in our classes the future great accountants, general managers of vast corporations, expert reporters-both court and verbatim. We are supposed to be teaching these things to them. Dare I ask you, Have you ever done the thing you are trying to teach these boys and girls to do? Could you expert the books of your home county? Could you formulate and install an up-todate set of books for a department store such as is found in our cities of five thousand to ten thousand population? Do you understand department accounting? Could you show your class just how cost accounting

is conducted in an ordinary manufacturing plant? Can you readily draw up in correct form all the legal documents discussed in your commerciallaw class? You are better than the average if you can. Or can you go into the courtroom and properly report the next murder trial in your home county? Suppose one of the great city papers had said to you, "We will give you one hundred dollars if you will send us in a complete transcript of everything said and done at this meeting today"; could you get that one hundred dollars? If we can all answer these queries and some more of the same nature in the affirmative, I will take back my statement about unpreparedness.

The plain fact is that many of us are trying to teach boys and girls to do something that we cannot ourselves do. In our bookkeeping classes we use about twice as much time as we should on the work we accomplish. We have some textbooks with high-sounding titles and we teach these thru, and call the product "bookkeepers." In shorthand we have a great variety of systems and we teach the book thru, doing about so much scolding about poor lessons, but when the end of the term comes, certain ones are passed on and called stenographers. Are they?

I give it to you as the opinion of one, that no person can properly teach a thing he cannot himself do. I once knew a great piano teacher who had but one arm. He had, however, learned to play the piano before he lost his arm. It takes more than ability to write to make a reporter. Before a teacher is qualified to teach shorthand to a pupil for any purpose he should be a master of the science-a real reporter. Before a teacher is qualified to teach bookkeeping he should be a tried and proven bookkeeper, for by that means only will he know how it is done in the rush and hurry of the business world. Commercial law should be taught by a good lawyer.

We teachers are not responsible for this state of the profession. It is the result of our form of civilization. We are, however, responsible to our pupils for undertaking to teach what we cannot properly teach. We are also responsible if we allow this condition to remain.

I believe that we get in this world about what we pay for. The communities in which we live have set their price for teaching. They have then proceeded to certify teachers. If the examinations are too rigid those of proper training will not apply because the business world offers more money for their services. The examinations have year by year been set low enough to get teachers enough to go around. When teachers get plenty the examinations are made more difficult. When teachers are scarce they are made easier, and you know that is the fact.

The price should be set for this work just a little higher than the business world can afford to pay. The very cream of men and women in this land should be in our schoolrooms. There is a great moral question involved. We are dealing with the lives of men and women of the future.