Teaching as a Business; Four Addresses (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901. Excerpt: ... FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES Doing business without advertising, somebody has said, is like winking at a pretty girl in the dark, --you know what you are doing, but nobody else does. Advertising is a systematic means of informing people who want something where they may get it. Before you cook a hare you must catch it. Before you fit teachers to places you must find them. NEED OF ADVERTISING TEACHERS This is not so easy as it looks, for teachers are not well advertised. The clergyman is advertised by his sermons, the physician by his patients, the lawyer by his cases; in each instance the work is to a large extent under the public eye and a matter of public discussion. But the teacher's work is done in the school-room, which few people visit, and few of those who visit know how to judge. The average community is best satisfied with the teacher, as with the stomach, when he does his work without attracting attention. The history of famous teachers illustrates how other teachers might have become famous if they had.been advertised. Cyrus Peirce was principal of the first normal school in the country only because Horace Mann happened to visit his little Cape Cod village; and Nicholas Tillinghast would never have been appointed at Bridgewater had his private school been elsewhere than in Boston. SOME METHODS OF ADVERTISING Teachers occasionally advertise themselves through the newspapers. The Nation now and then contains a description of a young man by himself, with announcement that those who are eager for his services may apply to such-and-such an address. I doubt if anybody ever got a place that way, partly because schools are not in the habit of looking in the advertising columns when they want a teacher, and partly because a teacher cannot in an advertiseme..