Anne Begins Teaching in Avonlea

Anne Shirley’s first day as a teacher at Avonlea school tests the distance between her ideals and the unsettled reality of the classroom. She arrives trembling, loses the speech prepared to welcome her pupils, and spends the day managing lessons and mischief almost mechanically. Yet the day also brings an immediate connection with Paul Irving and ends with Anne renewing her determination to reach Anthony Pye: teaching begins not as a triumph, but as a difficult practice of attention, patience, and hope.

Preparation and the schoolroom

That morning, Anne walked along the Birch Path deaf and blind to its usual beauties, so absorbed was she in the prospect of meeting her pupils. The schoolroom itself was quiet and orderly. The previous teacher had trained the children to be in their places before the teacher arrived, and Anne entered to find rows of bright, inquisitive faces waiting for her. She hung up her hat and faced them, trying to conceal how frightened she felt and how badly she was trembling.

The night before, she had stayed up until nearly midnight composing an opening speech. She revised it painstakingly, improved it, and committed it to memory. The speech had seemed good to her, full of ideas about mutual help and earnest efforts to gain knowledge. But at the moment when she needed it, she could not remember a word. The carefully prepared welcome therefore gave way to a practical first instruction: she asked the pupils to take out their Testaments, then sat down under cover of the noise as they opened their desks. While they read, she tried to collect her shaken thoughts and look over the children before her.

First impressions and an unexpected affinity

Most of the pupils were familiar to Anne. Her own classmates had left school the previous year, but she knew many of the children who remained; the primer class and ten newcomers to Avonlea were exceptions. The newcomers especially interested her. She could not yet know what their capacities might be, and the possibility that one might prove a genius gave her an eager sense of discovery amid the nervous work of taking charge.

At the front desk, Paul Irving met her gaze. Anne felt that she had found the exceptional pupil she had imagined among the newcomers, and she recognized in his dark blue eyes a soul akin to her own. Though he was ten, he looked younger, with delicate features, chestnut curls, and a grave, meditative expression. When Anne smiled at him, his face answered with a sudden smile that seemed to reveal a warm, unforced inner nature. Before either had said a word, they had become fast friends.

Lessons, mischief, and a first conflict

The school day passed in a blur. Anne later remembered it only imperfectly, as though someone else had been teaching. She heard classes, supervised sums, and set copy-writing exercises mechanically. The children behaved fairly well, and only two incidents required discipline, but each showed a different demand of the work: classroom order depended both on dealing with pranks and on deciding how to respond to a pupil who resisted correction.

Morley Andrews was caught driving a pair of trained crickets down the aisle. Anne made him stand on the platform for an hour and confiscated the insects. On her way home, she released them in Violet Vale. Morley, however, believed for the rest of his life that she had taken them home to keep for her own amusement. The incident ended with the crickets free, but not with Morley knowing what had happened to them.

The second case involved Anthony Pye, the hostile boy Anne had noticed at the beginning of the day. He poured the last drops of water from his slate bottle down the back of Aurelia Clay’s neck. Anne kept him in at recess and spoke kindly to him about what was expected of gentlemen, explaining that boys should not pour water down ladies’ necks and that she wanted hers to behave as gentlemen. Her appeal did not move him. He listened in silence, kept his sullen expression, and whistled scornfully as he left. Anne had hoped to win his affection, but this first effort yielded no sign that he had been reached.

An exhausted day ends in renewed purpose

After the children had gone, Anne sank wearily into her chair. Her head ached, and she felt discouraged despite the absence of any truly disastrous event. Tiredness made the prospect of teaching every day for decades seem frightening, and she could not decide whether to cry then or wait until she was home. The opening day had shown how far her hopes of meaningful teaching stood from the simple fatigue of doing the work.

On her way home, Paul was waiting by the Birch Path with wild orchids, called rice lilies by the Avonlea children. He had found them in Fred Wright’s field and brought them back because he thought Anne would like them and because he liked her. His gesture changed the emotional balance of the day. Anne’s weariness and discouragement lifted, and she continued along the path carrying the flowers with renewed hope.

When Marilla Cuthbert asked how the day had gone, Anne could not yet judge it clearly. Her thoughts felt too stirred up for a settled account; the one achievement she could name with confidence was teaching Cliffie Wright that A is A, a beginning that might lead far beyond the first letter. Later, Rachel Lynde reported that the children had said they liked their new teacher, with Anthony the exception. Anne answered that she would not be discouraged and would make him like her through patience and kindness. The day thus closes not with proof that her method has succeeded, but with its governing commitment: she intends to persist, even when a pupil’s first response is scorn.