From The Watch Tower

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 434, 16 August 1928, Page 7

From The Watch Tower

By “THE LOOK-OUT MAN ” VEST POCKET SNAKE We hear through the columns of an Australian paper that a well-known traveller journeying through Burma discovered a new snake —one which will fit into the vest pocket. The bite of this snake is said to counteract the effects of alcohol, and as a “pick-me-up” it is far superior to a sudden immersion in cold water. It is a black and white snake. There will be general regret that the Government has seen fit to place an embargo on the importation of reptiles into this country. NEW ZEALAND'S LURE The charm of New Zealand’s climate is becoming more widely known. Even members of the Peerage, who have the choice of so many “happy hunting grounds,” are turning their attention this way. So that he can spend a long holiday in this country, the Earl of Orford has handed over his estate to a 15-year-old cousin. The Earl, who first visited the Dominion when he was in the Navy, has been in bad health, and will sail for New Zealand with his Countess in September. THE SHYEST NOVELIST I suppose anyone who ever met Joseph Conrad would say that shyness was the novelist’s main characteristic. His American publisher, Mr. F. N. Doubleday, now tells of his endeavours to force a meeting with Conrad after “Chance” became a success. “I shall never forget the day when he came to lunch with me (says Mr. Doubleday in the “World of Today”), nervous to the last degree and hardly able to talk intelligently at first.” The only lecture he gave in New York nearly killed Conrad, because of this extremity of nervousness. Mr. Doubleday, who had to introduce him, was so affected by the spectacle that he surprised himself and everybody by saying, “This is the first time that Mr. Conrad has ever spoken in public, and please God, if I have anything to do with it, it will be the last.” It was. EDUCATION’S “MISFITS 39 The L.O.M. scarcely thinks that Mr. T. U. Wells could have been in earnest when he told the Education Board that the careers of unsuitable probationary teachers should be stopped as soon as possible. Such vigorous measures would make the muchcriticised teaching profession more unattractive to people of spirit than it already is. However, to get to the main point of the discussion. It seems that the Education Board feels that there are misfits in the teaching profession who are spoiling the education of hundreds of children. What a ghastly confession of administrative impotence. Yet, without striving to be paradoxical, experience has shown in many instances that the “misfit” is often the teacher who does educate the child. After all, education is the drawing out and stimulation of a child’s inherent qualities, and the unorthodox teacher often does the best work. The competent teacher, one who would win the whole-hearted applause of boards and school committees, quite frequently has no recommendation other than an ability to thrash text-book stuff into a child’s bewildered brain.

THE POWER OF THE PRESS Fleet Street is in trouble again. A member of a firm engaged in the making of straw hats has announced that Fleet Street is the principal criminal in the matter of the massacre of what he calls “the Gent’s Boater” —a term which in itself seems sufficient condemnation of the article referred to. It seems that this hat has been “decried and written down” in certain newspapers, and that he has written (apparently in vain) “more than once to the newspapers who are the guilty parties.” One would have liked to have been present at the secret meetings in Fleet Street at which the decline and fall of the “Gent’s Boater” was decreed. One imagines close-lipped men sitting round a table and drafting leading articles headed, “Away with the Gent’s Boater.” One conceives a careful inquisition of the premises in order to make sure that no member of the staff possessed the doomed hat, and the insistence that every such member should sign an undertaking not only never to wear a Gent’s Boater, but never to pass a window In which Gent’s Boaters were displayed without making some public gesture of contempt and derision as should deter the public from purchasing.