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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superseded, in the school-room, the divisions of the clock face.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


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