This paper focuses on the analysis of certain didactic resources that proliferated on the fringes of schooling during the second half of the nineteenth century in Mexico. The first of these is a method that, according to its author, made it possible to teach a pupil how to read in only six lessons, dated 1830; the second is a writing method from 1870, which according to the author would enable a teacher to teach large groups, and any person to learn alone; the third, from 1880, consists of a "machine" for teaching in schools that made it possible to practise reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar and other subjects through direct experience. Each method offers the opportunity of exploring various conceptions about teaching. The first concerns the basics of teaching. The second deals with conceptions of memorising, and the third illustrates conceptions based on experience and intuition as points of departure for learning. The didactic devices selected are objects specific to teaching, inspired by the principles of the nascent nineteenth-century project of schooling, that set in motion routines linked to the learning of the basic skills of writing, reading and general knowledge, and were produced by teachers whose inspiration was cultivated by their own experience. Yet they are far from forming part of the set of objects used in schooling: slates, pencils, blackboards, exercise books, posters, cupboards, etc.; rather they make up a less common set of ephemeral and fragmentary objects, minor or secondary objects in the landscape of the classroom; in some cases they even constitute waste products of formal schooling that, despite their marginal status - or perhaps because of it - offer us a window onto the intricate relationships and porous frontiers between the school and other social spaces. The author is particularly interested in the processes of re-signification and hybridisation between erudite knowledges (the pedagogical knowledge of the time) and "popular knowledges." (Contains 42 footnotes and 5 figures.)