Education: Schoolmarms’ Gazette

No modern text has so exclusive a claim to the title of Teachers’ Friend as had the famed McGuffey Readers. But some 400,000 schoolmarms (two-thirds of all U.S. public grade school teachers) draw regular inspiration from a modern counterpart of McGuffey whose lessons are said to reach 14,000,000 pupils: a magazine called The Instructor. Last week the 50-year-old Instructor got a new boss: Miss Helen Mildred Owen, daughter of the magazine’s founder. Energetic, fortyish, long the magazine’s managing editor, she took over last week as president of the firm, F. A. Owen Publishing Co.

The Instructor is a bright, slick monthly in the Saturday Evening Post format. Its circulation is 133,000, but three teachers (average) use each copy. Aimed at country and small-town teachers, who use more individual ingenuity in their teaching than those in big cities where curriculums are fixed, the Instructor each month brings them a famous painting in color, lessons for “seatwork,” songs, plays, drawings, tests, suggestions for trips, lessons in manners (see cut). Its avowed object is to make teaching fun.

Regular departments include a “Teachers’ Help-One-Another Club” (contributors get $1 apiece for fresh teaching ideas), a lonely hearts column in which teachers and pupils advertise their yen to correspond with classes elsewhere. Eight experts (in arithmetic, reading, etc.) answer teachers’ questions. One of the most popular departments (called The You You Can Be) advises teachers about grooming and behavior. Sample tips:

> Don’t wring your hands. > Don’t put pencils in your hair. > Don’t wear clanking bracelets. > Don’t talk baby talk. > Don’t wear long fingernails. But tint your nails (to avoid being different) unless the superintendent or community objects.

To keep ahead of her only serious rival, The Grade Teacher (circ. 120,000), Editor Owen constantly trots around to schools, conferences, teachers’ conventions. At the National Education Association convention in Boston last month, Miss Owen armed herself with a cake knife and a huge cake celebrating the Instructor’s soth birthday, passed out slices to one & all.