monitor

   A monitor is a student who is appointed to assist a teacher. In former times the monitor was a senior student whose assistance might extend to teaching junior pupils. In junior schools the monitor carries out fairly menial tasks, such as collecting or giving out books, and is rewarded with an enhanced sense of self-importance. ‘Monitors, collect the lesson-books and put them away,’ says a teacher in Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. The same novel has: ‘Monitor of the first class, fetch the globes!’ Etymologically, a monitor is one who admonishes. The term was probably used in a school context because one of the monitor’s early duties was to keep discipline, admonishing other students as necessary. In some British public schools monitors are, or were, known as ‘praeposters’, or ‘prepostors’. School prefects are also monitors, though at a more senior level.