School Stories - P. G. Wodehouse (best e book reader TXT) 📗
- Author: P. G. Wodehouse
Book online «School Stories - P. G. Wodehouse (best e book reader TXT) 📗». Author P. G. Wodehouse
Another fruitful source of discomfort is provided by the type of master who lectures on a subject for half an hour, and then, with a bland smile, invites, or rather challenges, his form to write a “good, long note” on the quintessence of his discourse. For the inexperienced this is an awful moment. They must write something—but what? For the last half hour they have been trying to impress the master with the fact that they belong to the class of people who can always listen best with their eyes closed. Nor poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world can ever medicine them to that sweet sleep that they have just been enjoying. And now they must write a “good, long note.” It is in such extremities that your veteran shows up well. He does not betray any discomfort. Not he. He rather enjoys the prospect, in fact, of being permitted to place the master’s golden eloquence on paper. So he takes up his pen with alacrity. No need to think what to write. He embarks on an essay concerning the master, showing up all his flaws in a pitiless light, and analysing his thorough worthlessness of character. On so congenial a subject he can, of course, write reams, and as the master seldom, if ever, desires to read the “good, long note,” he acquires a well-earned reputation for attending in school and being able to express himself readily with his pen. Vivat floreatque.
But all these forms of notes are as nothing compared with the notes that youths even in this our boasted land of freedom are forced to take down from dictation. Of the “good, long note” your French scholar might well remark: “C’est terrible,” but justice would compel him to add, as he thought of the dictation note: “mais ce n’est pas le diable.” For these notes from dictation are, especially on a warm day, indubitably le diable.
Such notes are always dictated so rapidly that it is impossible to do anything towards understanding them as you go. You have to write your hardest to keep up. The beauty of this, from one point of view, is that, if you miss a sentence, you have lost the thread of the whole thing, and it is useless to attempt to take it up again at once. The only plan is to wait for some perceptible break in the flow of words, and dash in like lightning. It is much the same sort of thing as boarding a bus when in motion. And so you can take a long rest, provided you are in an obscure part of the room. In passing, I might add that a very pleasing indoor game can be played by asking the master, “what came after so-and-so?” mentioning a point of the oration some half-hour back. This always provides a respite of a few minutes while he is thinking of some bitter repartee worthy of the occasion, and if repeated several times during an afternoon may cause much innocent merriment.
Of course, the real venom that lurks hid within notes from dictation does not appear until the time for examination arrives. Then you find yourself face to face with sixty or seventy closely and badly written pages of a notebook, all of which must be learnt by heart if you would aspire to the dizzy heights of half-marks. It is useless to tell your examiner that you had no chance of getting up the subject. “Why,” he will reply, “I gave you notes on that very thing myself.” “You did, sir,” you say, as you advance stealthily upon him, “but as you dictated those notes at the rate of two hundred words a minute, and as my brain, though large, is not capable of absorbing sixty pages of a notebook in one night, how the suggestively asterisked aposiopesis do you expect me to know them? Ah-h-h!” The last word is a war cry, as you fling yourself bodily on him, and tear him courteously, but firmly,
Comments (0)