Homework

“ The questions at the bottom of each page, and at the end of each exercise, will give an increased value to the work, and will be found convenient to the teacher, and useful for the pupil. By their arrangement, and that of the exercises, much of that dryness which scholars usually experience, while committing to memory the rules and notes of grammar, will be removed; the study will become pleasing and interesting. ”

“ History, geography, natural science lessons and drawing have been added to the old reading, writing, arithmetic, and grammar. There may appear to be more variety, but less strength. When in addition to this greater variety of studies, enthusiastic teachers desire to increase the quantity of knowledge in each branch and to present as many interesting facts as possible, at every point, we have the over-loading of the school course. This effect will be noticed in a later chapter in its bearing upon concentration. Children have too much to learn. ”

“ The subjects to be introduced in logical sequence and to be taught in accordance with the development of the pupil and to consist [Pg 44] of reading, language work, writing, arithmetic, elements of applied geometry, singing, drawing, moral instruction, elements of anatomy, physiology, hygiene, civic instruction, geography, and history (national and universal) ; talks and lessons on objects of daily life, manual arts, domestic economy, and household arts; elements of political economy, sociology, psychology, duties of parents, accounting, and industrial training. ”

“ The following plans of study for the English texts commonly used in secondary schools are presented in the hope that they may be suggestive to teachers of English who are struggling with the various problems which confront them. Each teacher, of course, must work out his own plan in accordance with the needs of his pupils and the conditions under which he works; but, as it is helpful to observe the class-room work of other teachers, so it may be helpful to see a fellow teacher's plans of work. ”

“ In older classes, the questions may be set before the class a week later, and may introduce the next lesson, by way of review.
Home-Made Question-Books.—To induce your scholars to study at home, provide for each of them two little blank-books. Write a question in one, and request the return of the book next Sunday with the answer written out. Exchange it for the second book, and so alternate. Wise teachers will slip into such books many a personal word of praise or exhortation. ”

“ She takes the reader into the school-room and its different classes, day after day, and exhibits, in her printed account, a transcript, exact as it may be, of what occurred there—illustrating how the teacher started, now this subject, now that, and patiently, and with tact, drew out whatever suggested itself to each of the pupils upon it. As the lessons are advanced, they shape themselves into a kind of system, the operation of which is to awaken the minds of the pupils to self-action and independent thinking. ”

“ In the narrower sense, education may be confined to instruction, the imparting of definite information on various subjects, because such information, in and for itself, is useful in daily life. Elementary education—reading, writing, and arithmetic—is almost wholly of this kind. But instruction, necessary as it is, does not per se constitute education in the sense in which I wish to consider it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A lesson requiring work on the part of the pupil. Telling a Junior class primary stories will deplete it in numbers and weaken it in strength. Assigned work to be prepared at home, questions, note-books, map-making, anything to stimulate and utilize the activity of mind and body through interest, not compulsion, is the great necessity of the lesson hour. ”

“ The important thing is that you set yourself and your class a certain task—I do not mean to imply that it is an unpleasant task—for each month, each week and each day of the week. This lesson plan made at times of leisure or when the mind is free to consider the work as a unit will be a criterion for judging your own progress with the class and will be a valuable guide in planning how best to present the subjects to the class. It will save you much time and energy and worry at the recitation periods when everything must be centered on the work before you. ”

“ For these teachers there is little need for preparation. The course of study and the textbooks have solved the problems of teaching. Let us inquire just what the curriculum of our schools stands for before attempting to decide just what relation the teacher bears to it.
A course of study is not so much knowledge to be poured in. Rather it represents possible experiences for which children may have need, experiences which will aid them in the solution of their problems and make possible for them the realization of their purposes. ”

“ The student will have little or no difficulty in following the narrative of these pages, and with the aid of [Pg 100] topics can be held strictly to account for the mastery of essential details. A good way, at first, is to assign, with the chapter for home reading, a list of topics to be studied, and later to require the pupils themselves to make out similar lists. The analysis of chapters is in itself valuable exercise and the use of topics for oral quiz and discussion is probably the best way for the daily study of such work. ”

“ This assumption leads to the necessity of asking a kind of question which did not confront the teacher in the one-room school. The kind of question which comes up in the graded school can be illustrated as follows: When a pupil is old enough and intellectually mature enough to study the products and industries of North America in his geography, what phase of arithmetic will be appropriate to hold his attention and stimulate his thinking? When a pupil is old enough to read the history of his own city, what other reading material will insure real effort on his part? ”

“ From whatever point of view we approach the problem of teaching our subjects, the answer is the same: meet present situations, solve present real, vital problems, make subject matter meet the needs of the children you are teaching. This analysis of the curriculum makes apparent the important part to be played by the teacher in making available the experiences which the school subjects are organized to present. ”

“ When pupils are old enough, if not provided with a text-book on manners, it is well for them to make a note of the directions given.
4. The time given to this subject must be regulated by the other work in the school. A few minutes daily will amount to a great deal in the course of years.
5. A plan that has been successfully pursued is to allow ten minutes for the opening exercises of school, and to make a brief lesson in manners a part of these exercises. It is not the aim of the author that the illustrative lessons shall be arbitrarily followed. ”

“ There should be in every preparatory school a regular exercise in the use of the dictionary, and in it all students should be required to join. The teacher should read an extract or a sentence, or should give out words to the class, and have the meanings and derivations actually looked up at the moment. ”

“ Grammar, literature, arithmetic, geography, and history are the five branches upon which the disciplinary work of the elementary school is concentrated. Inasmuch as reading is the first of the scholastic arts, it is interesting to note that the whole elementary course may be described as an extension of the process of learning the 36 art of reading. First comes the mastering of the colloquial vocabulary in printed and script forms. ”

“ Much attention was given to training children in good personal habits, cleanliness, tidiness, punctuality, etc., and to moral training. Great stress was laid on information.... The curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry, lessons on common objects, geography, singing and religion, and an effort was made to make the work interesting and 'concrete.' To this end much importance was attached to object-lessons, to the use of illustrations, to questioning and exposition, while the memory was aided by means of didactic verse.... ”

“ The programme of the term’s work for each child is given, as well as the examination questions the children have answered. It will be seen that the plan of their studies is very much the same as would be adopted in the case of advanced students, that is to say, the children read during the term an appointed number of pages or chapters in a considerable number of books written with intelligence. I think that the style of the children’s answers justifies this method of teaching; they speak out of a full and satisfying knowledge of their subjects. ”

“ The school and the home.—Arithmetic, language, history, and geography touch life at a thousand 256points, and we have but to select the points of contact with the life of each pupil to render any or all of these a vital part of the day’s work and the day’s life. ”

“ The pressing problem of the time in methods of practical education is to devise suitable manual exercises for the school period embraced in the interim between the end of the kindergarten series of lessons and the beginning of the series of laboratory exercises described in this work—the grammar-school period—for children of both sexes from six to fourteen years of age. ”

“ Your results in teaching will be infinitely better, the work will be less taxing to you, you and the pupils will get more out of life at the time and more out of life in the future if all are happy in the school-room. To the practiced eye five minutes will tell whether the work is a work of pleasure to teacher and pupils or whether it is a task to both. ”

“ The amount and character of analysis in each assignment of reading should be carefully determined by the teacher as he prepares his work for each day, and he must beware of having the reading lesson become merely a formal analysis of sentence and paragraph structure, for nothing more effectively kills the pupil’s interest in reading than too much of this formal analytical drill on detail. ”

“ Wherever examinations are introduced—and by examinations I understand any demand for answers to questions—there appears only a new and useless object, demanding special labor, special qualities, and this object is called preparation for examinations or lessons. The pupil in the gymnasium learns history or mathematics, and in addition something important—the art of answering examination questions. ”

“ But at school, which now may seem to be called almost in mockery σχολή, or leisure, the true method is, after all, that patronized by the great educators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Boys at school must turn their mind into a row of pigeon-holes, filling as many as they can with useful notes, and never forgetting how many are empty. There is an immense amount of positive knowledge to be acquired between the ages of ten and eighteen—rules of grammar, strings of vocables, dates, names of towns, rivers, and mountains, mathematical formulas, etc. ”

“ The purpose of these outlines is to train pupils to work independently and to study with definite aim. For the teacher they furnish a text for the introduction to the study of the different periods and for the student they furnish a frame-work upon which to build his study. ”

“ This may be accomplished if the teacher in planning her year’s work, sees a close relation between the science, literature, and number work, so that the same words are always recurring, and the interest in each line of work is constant and ever increasing. ”

“ Having taught the pupil to respect a “working line,” which experience shows takes the greater part of the seventh year, it will be time to begin to encourage original thinking on the part of the pupil. ”

“ One of the teachers will probably attend to the rudiments of education, though we prefer to have scholars tolerably well advanced in arithmetic, writing, reading, and grammar. Still it may be requisite at the start to admit some in the elementary branches. ”

“ Once a child has learned basic reading, writing, and elementary mathematics, these traits, skills, and attitudes admittedly fall within the category of those best learned through example and "doing" rather than in a classroom. ”

“ A good course of study will save the teacher much time and energy by the organization of material which it presents. In many of our larger cities a volume of from fifty to two hundred pages has been prepared for each subject. These manuals suggest the order in which it has been found by experience that the topics can best be presented. In many cases a helpful analysis of each large topic from the point of view of presenting it to children is included. ”

“ Skill, originality, and teaching art are much needed in the assignment. It is not how much the teacher says, but the suggestiveness of it, the problems raised, the questions whose answers lie in the examination of the lesson. The reference to previous readings which bear resemblance to this selection; the inquiry into children's experiences, sets them to thinking. ”