The children did exactly as they pleased, sat where they
liked, ran about from place to place, and answered questions not
one by one, but all together, interrupting one another, and
helping one another to recall what they had read. If one left
out a bit, up jumped another and then another, and the story or
sum was reconstructed by the united efforts of the whole class.

What pleased my father most about his pupils was the
picturesqueness and originality of their language. He never
wanted a literal repetition of bookish expressions, and
particularly encouraged every one to speak "out of his own head."
I remember how once he stopped a boy who was running into the
next room.

"Where are YOU off to?" he asked.

"To uncle, to bite off a piece of chalk." [2]

[2] The instinct for lime, necessary to feed their bones,
drives Russian children to nibble pieces of chalk or the
whitewash off the wall. In this case the boy was running to one
of the grown-ups in the house, and whom he called uncle, as
Russian children call everybody uncle or aunt, to get a piece of
the chalk that he had for writing on the blackboard.
us," he said to some one when the boy was gone. Which of us
would have expressed himself like that? You see, he did not say
to "get" or to "break off," but to "bite off," which was right,
because they did literally "bite" off the chalk from the lump
with their teeth, and not break it off.