Peterborough, New Hampshire, District No 8. Winter Term. Teacher, Miss Ida M Metcalf: This teacher came from Massachusetts well recommended, and really endeavoured to do her work well and faithfully, but some disturbing elements in the school and out of it, prevented as great success as could have been desired. The school closed without an examination on account of a severe snow storm that rendered the roads impassable.

The semi-annual examination of the Framingham Normal School, at the close of the winter term, took place last week. This school [was] established in 1812 ... During the last term it has had 127 pupils, divided as follows: first advanced class 5; second advanced class 7; senior class 15; second class 24; third class 24; fourth class 52. It is at present under the management of Miss Ellen Hyde, who has conducted it as acting principal since the departure of Miss Johnson to take charge of Bradford Academy. The usual examinations took place in the morning, which reflected great credit upon teachers and pupils. In the afternoon essays were read by the graduating class. ... The following young ladies graduated ... Ida M Metcalf, Newton.

Early in the Spring term, Miss Ida M Metcalf resigned her position as Principal of the Saxonville Grammar School ...

The Bryn Mawr School [opened] in 1885 in order to provide girls and young women with the same educational benefits that boys enjoyed. The curriculum was daring and liberal for its time, including both modern and classical languages, English, history, mathematics, the latest scientific theories, and a focus on physical education - all of which stretched the limits of imagination and acceptance.

Professor Oliver was born in Salem, Massachusetts, of Quaker parentage, in 1829. He was the poet of the class of 1849 at Harvard, and the favourite pupil of Professor Benjamin Peirce, who always declared that "Jimmy Oliver was the best mathematician who had ever come under his notice." As a teacher, Professor Oliver was thorough, painstaking, considerate, and, above all, inspiring by his wealth of suggestiveness and depth of intellectual insight. His methods in the classroom were very informal, and he seldom lost an opportunity of making a good joke, even when the joke was on himself. As he was happiest when the textbook could be laid aside and he could follow his own bent, it is possible that he did not always attain the best results with a miscellaneous class of undergraduates; but with an "audience fit though few," he was wont to open up new vistas, sometimes forgetting the lapse of time in his enthusiasm. His publications are not numerous, for the drudgery of working up an article for permanent form was peculiarly irksome to him, especially after the freshness of discovery had passed away; and, during his best years, he had small leisure for writing, as he had then comparatively few assistants, and his recitation hours sometimes amounted to more than twenty in the week. His high original power was of the kind that shows itself not so much in published writings as in familiar classroom talks, and in the inspiration which they impart to others; and it is thus he would wish his name to live. As regards the silent influence of his life, there must be many hundreds of students and others who still derive inspiration from the memory of his high standards, and the rare beauty of his life and character with its unusual freedom from self-consciousness.

... to Miss Ida M Metcalf, who spent half a year in giving form to the text and preparing the questions and exercises.

Newton Lower Falls. Study by the Sea. Tutoring during July and August at a beautiful, restful, and inexpensive place on the coast of Maine. Address Ida M Metcalf, Ph.D., Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts"

Ida M Metcalf M.S. Ph.D. 1275 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn. Tutor in Elementary and Advanced Mathematics.

The explicit statements in this essay are based on personal experience in high-school teaching in a great city with a very large foreign population, and on the testimony of others engaged in the same work.

A slight infusion of the Stoic philosophy would greatly ennoble the views of life held by our school children. Tell them plainly that hard tasks simply call for more earnest endeavour; that they are at liberty to dislike certain work as heartily as they please, but that to offer this dislike as an excuse for leaving their work undone is to play a part unworthy of men and women. Even young children are capable of the conception of duty as a powerful dynamic force. If upon pupils of higher school age this conception has not dawned, they are in danger of developing into incompetent whiners at life's tasks, cowards under life's hardships, pitiable egotists, intellectual and moral invertebrates.

Every high-school pupil, and every parent of such a child in New York State, knows the Regents' tests as a name of weighty import; but for the benefit of other readers, let it be explained that these are the uniform examinations given by the Department of Education of the Empire State. It goes without saying that among the three hundred thousand or so papers sent to Albany after the June examinations there are many answers not only somewhat startling, but also provocative of a smile from even the most ardent devotees of exact knowledge. The following article contains a few gems extracted from this mine of wisdom and folly, of fact and fiction, often oddly combined.

... the degree of confusion, misconception, and inarticulateness that may, and often does, exist in the minds of some of our young people.

... the real mission of the schools, the development of intellect and character, is not only shirked, but belittled.

... though she had three college degrees, had taught public and private school most of her life and had been statistician in the department of finance over two years ...

To teachers and philanthropic workers: Free home and liberal education will be given little girl 8 or 9 years old with capacity to become a woman of high type if given opportunities for development, but now lacking such opportunities.

Kalab, Theresa, author and illustrator juvenile books; b. Hodelein, Austria; adopted by Dr Ida M Metcalf at age of 8; student Columbia University and Grand Central School of Art and Art League. Has done commercial illustration, largely fashion sketches for newspapers. ...

At the first meeting, held on February 26, Mr Robert B McIntyre was chosen as chairman and Miss Ida M Metcalf, a statistician in the Department of Finance, was appointed as secretary to the Commission.

William T Sedgwick [head of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of biology and public health] insisted that women's reproductive physiology precluded their participating in the wider civilisation; that civilised advancement rested on the widest possible exaggeration of sexual differences; that woman belonged only in the home. At the same time, however, Sedgwick's premises about masculinity were disturbingly like Gilman's [Charlotte Perkins Gilman, novelist]. Both agreed masculinity was composed of desire, egotism, and combat. Yet Gilman assumed men would be ashamed of that fact, while Sedgwick clearly relished modern man's kinship to the primal rapist. "There is a lot of the primitive in all of us, both men and women," he insisted; women enjoyed "being mastered," and men enjoyed "mastering" them.

Sedgwick's opinions touched off an extensive reaction in the United States, .... The New York Times praised Sedgwick for openly saying "things which have not been said before so plainly." Feminists were less complimentary. lda M Metcalf wrote a letter to the editor asking whether, in the combative "charming ... future civilisation [that Sedgwick envisioned] all men unable to hold their own against a prize-fighter will be forcibly subdued and held in subjection?" This was a low blow. In 1914, when Metcalf wrote, the most famous American prize-fighter was the exiled but still undefeated Jack Johnson, and white men remained uncomfortably aware that prize-fighting was an unstable way to assert white male dominance.

Prof Sedgwick told us complacently ... that if women persist in claiming the same rights as other citizens, men will exert their superior muscular force and reduce them to literal slavery. ... Are we to understand that all the men unable to hold their own against a prize-fighter will be forcibly subdued and held in subjugation if they ask for fair play and venture upon economic competition with their stronger fellow beings? Apparently the dictum of science, as expressed by this prophet, is that we are evolving backward toward the ancestor we share with the gorilla.

On October 11, 1922, Metcalf expressed her views on "discrimination in business circles against women of middle age, a condition the existence of which is readily admitted by employers." She wrote, "The thinking women of today of any age are asking for our sex not privilege but 'a fair field and no favour,' and intelligent employers, if they would bring their business acumen and judgment to bear upon the matter, would ... seek the most competent and conscientious worker quite irrespective of such incidental qualities as age, sex, complexion, political affiliation or religious creed.

That the Board of Estimate and Apportionment ... does retire from city-service said Ida M Metcalf to take effect January 1, 1922, and hereby awards to her an annual retirement allowance of seven hundred and fifty-one dollars and fifty-five cents, being in part a pension of seven hundred twenty-three dollars and fifty-five cents, based on her years of service and her average annual earnable compensation during her last ten years of city-service.