Classroom

“ This problem of accommodating twenty-four boys will have to be met, and may as well be planned for just so long as school directors insist upon crowding fifty pupils in the regular classroom when the teacher ought to have but thirty-five or forty to do her best work. ”

“ Some men are primarily teachers—are in their element in the classroom engaged with the problems of the student but only indifferently successful in the laboratory, while others, at home in the laboratory, are somewhat out of place and ill-at-ease in the classroom. ”

“ The school life is a unit, into which each department fits and in which it works. The spelling lesson is covered in the classroom and set in type in the print shop. The grammar lesson consists in revising compositions with regulation proofreaders’ corrections. The art department designs clothes which are made in the sewing classes. The drawing room furnishes plans for the wood and iron work and designs for basketry and pottery. In the English classes, the problems of caning and weaving are written and discussed. The mathematical problems are problems of the school. ”

“ They may move about, talk to each other, place their tables and chairs where they please, and, what is of more significance, each pupil may choose what work he will do, and may work at one thing as long or as short a time as he wishes. She says, “A room in which all the children move about usefully, intelligently, and voluntarily, without committing any rough or rude act, would seem to me a classroom very well disciplined indeed.” ”

“ The only effective form of classroom management is that which anticipates the act and develops a social atmosphere in which condemnation or approbation is naturally and spontaneously contributed by the whole group. ”

“ It's who the person is standing up in front of that classroom each and every day instructing our children that improves their test scores, that improves their reading and math and enables them to achieve the educational level that they have to, to compete and be successful in our society. ”

“ It is the classroom that is the training field of character and good citizenship—of [Pg 254] true manhood and womanhood. Yet many would wholly exclude and banish its most important and essential feature! ”

“ And because the most important factor in a child’s success is the person standing at the front of the classroom, we will better prepare teachers, support teachers, and encourage teachers to stay in the field. ”

“ The teachers in the school make use of any illustrations from the practical life about them that fit in well with the work the grade is doing. Thus the third grade set up a parcel post system in their classroom, basing all their English and arithmetic work on it for some time, and80 learning to use a map and scales and weights as well. ”

“ Now seeing this difference, how much education is there in school or college? In the classrooms there is none. All that is given in classes is instruction, which may be useful or detrimental inasmuch as it helps personality or not. ”

“ In most classrooms in elementary and in high schools, and even in colleges, boys and girls are seated in rows, the one back of the other, with little or no opportunity for communication or coöperation. ”

“ But I would mingle education with their joy and with their pleasures—health and lessons with their play—and affection and forgiveness in their little bands. Thus their joys or their pleasures, their play and their companions, become their teachers. By an infant school I would not mean a room where a hundred children may be crowded together in an unhealthy atmosphere. The situation and comforts of the school are almost as important as the nature of the instruction, or the character and disposition of the teacher. ”

“ The lessons which involve the mastery of the symbols used in reading, writing, and number, or the drill and practice [62] necessary to attain skill in music or drawing or writing, have no self-evident goal for the child. So many lines, so many letters, so many problems, he attempts, because the teacher says so, and in his new universe the teacher is supreme. At home he has always chosen more or less; so, too, in the kindergarten his interest and choice determined the story or the game or the topic of conversation. ”

“ Convert the statements about doing school duties in good fashion into a form of coöperation between pupils and teacher. Drop out the first personal pronoun and put the entire school behind the plans for a clean schoolroom floor, about home study and all the other hundred things that need to be done.
Taking up the matter of the disposal of wraps:
“All we want is to make ourselves as little trouble as possible. Do you all understand? We are all going to hang our wraps up in the cloak-room as we march into this room instead of coming in just before the bell rings to form line. ”

“ We are apt to look at the school from an individualistic standpoint, as something between teacher and pupil, or between teacher and parent. That which interests us most is naturally the progress made by the individual child of our acquaintance, his normal physical development, his advance in ability to read, write, and figure, his growth in the knowledge of geography and history, improvement in manners, habits of promptness, order, and industry—it is from such standards as these that we judge the work of the school. ”

“ Special attention is being directed to the subject of child language, and pupils and old students are supplied with small indexed books for records in this particular department. Further opportunities for daily observation and experiment in certain lines of child-study and in teaching are offered in a newly organized children’s class or kindergarten. ”

“ In our Training College, the students are not taught how to stimulate attention, how to keep order, how to give marks, how to punish or even how to reward, how to manage a large class or a small school with children in different classes. All these things come by nature in a school where the teachers know something of the capacities and requirements of children. To hear children of the slums ‘telling’ King Lear or Woodstock, by the hour if you will let them, or describing with minutest details Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb or Botticelli’s Spring, is a surprise, a revelation. ”

“ Exercise 114.—As a class exercise, try writing on some one subject and comparing the results. See who has been able to produce the clearest impression and why his description is successful. The subjects should be only those of which the whole class has an equal knowledge, e.g. description of some public person who has addressed the school; of the walk to school on a snowy, rainy, or hot day, of the playground at recess time, of the aspect of the halls directly after school is dismissed, of the schoolroom, of any incident which all the pupils saw, a fire in the neighborhood, etc. ”

“ Proper seating and grouping pupils, the calling of classes, the distribution of wraps, the collection of papers, the passing of classes, the dismission of school at recess and at night, the answering of questions, the passing of pupils from the room or across the floor—all these do much to make or mar the school.—A well-arranged program that indicates not only the time and order of the recitation but of the study period as well will help. Teachers make woeful failures often from no other cause but that they fail to plan carefully in advance just what to do, how to do it and when to do it. ”

“ Every child on attaining the age of six must now attend a Common Elementary School, where during a four years' course instruction is given in morals, reading, writing, arithmetic, the rudiments of technical work, gymnastics, and poetry. ”

“ But it is obvious that in the usual schoolroom no such differentiation of appeal is possible; and the only really useful practical lesson that emerges from this analytic psychology in the conduct of large schools is the lesson already reached in a purely empirical way, that the teacher ought always to impress the class through as many sensible channels as he can. Talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and make them write and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your diagrams colored differently in their different parts, etc. ”

“ The object of the division into classes is instruction. Whenever it is desirable that several individuals should pursue a particular study, a list of their names is made out, a book selected, a time for recitation assigned, a teacher appointed, and the exercises begin. In this way a large number of classes have been formed, and the wishes of parents or the opinion of the Principal, and in many cases that of the pupil, determines how many and what shall be assigned to each individual. ”

“ Methods and materials must be used which are in themselves vital enough to represent to the child the whole of this compact nature which constitutes his world. The child and the curriculum are two operative forces, both of them developing and reacting on each other. In visiting schools the things that are interesting and helpful to the average school teacher are the methods, and the curriculum, the way the pupils spend their time; that is, the way the adjustment between the child and his environment is brought about. ”

“ When pupil-teachers have made such observations several times, with several teachers, and in several 106 subjects, the broader investigation may be made as to the organization of one of the model rooms, its daily programme of recitations and of study, the methods of discipline, the relations between pupils and teacher, the “school spirit,” the school movements, and class progress. ”

“ Teaching (class and individual) .Beginning in the kindergarten, modelling should continue without a break through the ordinary term of school life. In the elementary stage class teaching is of the greatest value, but no such class should contain more than eighteen pupils. The advanced stage will require most individual teaching. ”

“ It is maintained by some, that all the Normal School work is professional, in that throughout the curriculum the aim is to present the subject matter of instruction in the way that the teacher should present it to his or her class of children, and so to make the lessons model lessons. ”

“ There are, of course, certain usages peculiar to a school-room which would not be considered in order elsewhere, because unnecessary; but, generally speaking, good manners in a school-room and in a parlor are the same.
3. Pupils should be kind and thoughtful in assisting teachers whenever it is possible, by handing anything needed, or by waiting upon them in any way. Boys, especially, should be quick to offer help in erasing blackboards, in lifting heavy articles, or in picking up anything accidentally dropped. ”

“ Fifty-six teachers should teach the history, geography, arithmetic, language, and reading, and manage the auditorium. Two teachers should have charge of the music, four of the play and physical training, one of the library, two of the drawing, two of the science laboratories, and nine of the manual training, domestic science and art, and the shopwork. ”

“ When a pupil enters a room to teach one of these assigned lessons, he is to bring with him only his crayon and pointer, and is expected to assume entire charge of the class, maintaining order, hearing the pupils recite, correcting their mistakes, illustrating the subject, if necessary, by diagrams or experiments, giving supplementary information drawn from other sources than the text-book, and acting in all respects as if he were the regular teacher. ”

“ Each pupil is standing opposite a black-board, with his eyes turned to the teacher; questions and answers are written by the instructor, and then copied by the pupils. In this room are assembled classes, each under the charge of a separate teacher, studying geography, grammar, history; and in one room is a small class just beginning to read. The chirography of some of the pupils is really beautiful; and we leave the room feeling that though God has deprived them of two senses, yet, in his loving kindness, he has bestowed upon them unusual capacities in the others. ”

“ THE TRANSITION AND THE JUNIOR SCHOOL PROGRAMME Even after the Nursery School period much of the curriculum and subject matter is in the hands of the children themselves, though the relative proportions will vary according to the children's experiences. It is pretty evident to the honest-minded teacher that the subjects are, in school terms, nature work and elementary science, mathematics, constructive and expressive work, literature, music, language, physical exercise and religion. ”

“ A boy in a telegraph or a lawyer's office has a better opportunity to reach influence than a boy in a workshop. The scholastic requirement for such advancement as these vocations contemplate, is provided for in the established school program of the lower grades. A certain display of a few historical and literary facts beside a facility in reading, writing, and arithmetic are the qualifications which average parents believe are the necessary ones for their children's advancement. ”

“ In some cases a different course is wise undoubtedly,—as, for example, where a teacher is commencing a private school, on a previously well-digested plan of his own,—or where one who has had experience, and has confidence in his power to bring his new pupils promptly and at once into the system of classification and instruction which he prefers. ”

“ The entire elementary school could be [Pg 192] a general, free, spontaneous, amateur pre-vocational school, where in direct contact with machines and industrial processes as well as books, with gardens and gymnasiums as well as laboratories and kitchens, with tools and print and pottery shops and drawing and music studios, children might have their imaginations stirred, try out their busy hands on things, and gradually sift out of the variety the interests that they can lay hold on with some promise of creative use. ”