ill find that his time must be his
own, and his attention uninterrupted while he is presiding at a class.
All the other exercises and arrangements of the school are, in fact,
preparatory and subsidiary to this. Here, that is, in the classes, the
real business of teaching is to be done. Here the teacher comes in
contact with his scholars mind with mind, and here, consequently, he
must be uninterrupted and undisturbed. I shall speak more particularly
on this subject hereafter under the head of instruction; all I wish to
secure in this place is that the teacher should make such arrangements
that he can devote his exclusive attention to his classes while he is
actually engaged with them.

Each recitation, too, should have its specified time, which should be
adhered to with rigid accuracy. If any thing like the plan I have
suggested for allowing rests of a minute or two every half hour should
be adopted, it will mark off the forenoon into parts which ought to be
precisely and carefully observed. I was formerly accustomed to think
that I could not limit the time for my recitations without great
inconvenience, and occasionally allowed one exercise to encroach upon
the succeeding, and this upon the next, and thus sometimes the last was
excluded altogether. But such a lax and irregular method of procedure is
ruinous to the discipline of a school. On perceiving it at last, I put
the bell into the hands of a pupil, commissioning her to ring regularly,
having myself fixed the times, saying that I would show my pupils that I
could be confined myself to system as well as they. At first I
experienced a little inconvenience; but this soon disappeared, and at
last the hours and half hours of our artificial division entirely
superseded, in the school-room, the divisions of the clock face. I
found, too, that it exerted an extremely favorable influence upon the
scholars in respect to their willingness to submit readily to the
necessary restrictions imposed upon them in school, to show them that
the teacher was subject to law as well as they.

But, in order that I may be specific and definite, I will draw up a plan
for the regular division of time, for a common school, not to be
_adopted_, but to be _imitated_; that is, I do not recommend exactly
this plan, but that some plan, precise and specific, should be
determined upon, and exhibited to the school by a diagram like the
following:

FORENOON.
IX. X. XI. XII