Teacher's manual

“ It discusses vital problems in teaching the manual arts and presents the best current thought on the development of manual training and vocational education. To the inexperienced teacher, it is valuable in solving numerous problems, and to the experienced teacher, it is a means of keeping abreast of the times. It is ably edited, attractively printed, and well illustrated with photographs and drawings made especially for its pages. ”

“ When you come to the carrying out of a special scheme of education, such as manual training, you will readily see that its methods necessarily depend very largely upon teacher psychology, and I propose to devote the first part of this paper, which has to do with the methods of manual training, to an examination of the attitude of mind which the teacher of manual training brings to his work. ”

“ Manual training appears in the course of study for the first time. The principle on which it is given is represented in the sentence, "All drawing should be the expression of facts which they have been led by their teacher to observe in solid forms." The observation of Nature, plants, and animals by pupils is closely followed by lessons in manual training; while drawing and oral and written language are used to express the results of observation and manual work. The work of observation begun in the primary schools is continued, under the name of elementary science, in the grammar schools. ”

“ For his reading must lead up to the reading of the pupils; and they ought not to be confronted with the finished product of a culture turned out, all ready-made by the mechanism of the handbook. So that we should now complete our previous statement, and say that the teacher re-creates the book when he revives it in the mind of the one for whom the book was written; when author, teacher, and pupil constitute but one single spirit, whose life animates and inwardly vivifies the manual, which therefore ought not to be called, as it is, a 157 hand-book, but a spiritual guide for the mind. ”

“ The numerous type lessons that are contained in the Manual are intended to suggest principles of method that are to be applied in lessons upon the same and similar topics, but the teacher is cautioned against attempting to imitate these lessons. This error can be avoided by the teacher's careful preparation of the lesson. This preparation should include the careful study of the concrete materials that are to be used. The books, bulletins, etc., that are named in the Manual as references will be found helpful. ”

“ In some cases, it may be helpful for the pupil to read the manual first. Others might do better to begin with the workbook. Still others may need to start at the more abstract level of the text. Which is for which? Who would profit more from prayers alone? Who needs but a smile, being as yet unready for more? No one should attempt to answer these questions alone. Surely no teacher of God has come this far without realizing that. The curriculum is highly individualized, and all aspects are under the Holy Spirit's particular care and guidance. ”

“ Sufficient to say that a manual training teacher to do his best work should be a teacher well trained in methods of teaching and the psychological bases back of them. He should at least understand the art if not the science of good teaching.
Where an instructor is engaged in teaching his entire time it is not just that he should be required to attend to formal disciplining of pupils. In most schools, therefore, an instructor, like the regular grade teacher, conducts his shop as best he knows how. ”

“ Upon the foundations laid by Friedrich Froebel and his students in the kindergarten, we are trying to build up a course in systematic hand-training, through the primary, to intermediate and grammar grades, and thence to manual training in the high schools. What to do and how to do it has now become the practical problem of the day. Everywhere the wide-awake primary teacher is sharing her thought and experience with her co-workers. ”

“ This manual, an outgrowth of the author’s work as supervisor of the training school of the Whitewater (Wis.) normal school, is designed “for the use of students in training, for the use of teachers who are desirous of analyzing the various elements in the teaching process, and for the use of other persons who are interested in the observation of teachers at work.” (Preface) Contents: The nature of the problem; The purpose of observation; The value of observation; The teacher; The pupils; The lesson procedure; The development lesson; The drill lesson; The review lesson ”

“ The manual training school student is an investigator—as much so as a student in chemistry. His mind must always guide his hand, his reasoning opens new fields of thought with every stroke of the chisel. ”

“ In a broad sense, all of the manual and laboratory work in the curriculum is in the nature of manual training, but especial attention is given to the branches mentioned and to weaving and basketry and other work which prepares students for positions as manual training teachers in the public schools. ”

“ These questions are purposely put in an incomplete form so that the instructor must needs formulate them before putting them to the pupil. They are intended, as are any public speaker’s notes, merely to enable him to carry on the discussion or recitation in a systematic and logical manner, missing none of the important facts to be brought out.
The whole time taken in any one lesson for recitation, preparation for demonstration and demonstration should not exceed, ordinarily, twenty-five or thirty minutes.
It is a skilled teacher who can present a lesson to the best advantage. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the hand stands for use, for service, and for unyielding integrity; and it may be confidently asserted on the conviction of observation, experience, and a studious consideration of historic facts, that its drill and discipline as enforced in the world’s workshops, and in the best of existing Manual-training schools, results in a far greater degree of mind development than is produced by any exclusively academic course, and hence that Manual Training is the most important of all methods of education. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The question may be answered in two ways: one is the very cold and matter-of-fact way of telling just what the graduates of a manual-training school are doing at the present moment; the other is the more rosy method of setting forth what we think these same graduates, in view of their education, ought to be doing, and what, when manual training shall have done its perfect work, they undoubtedly will be doing. ”

“ The manual is interesting not merely as giving a general study of the nature of man and the existence of modes of education, but because it includes a list of books recommended for the student, a list which gives an impression of the extent of the education and literature of that date. ”

“ And the student becomes too painfully aware, for his own educational good, of a chasmal separation between his textbook and his collateral reading. The present manual is designed to supply a narrative of such proportions that the need of additional reading will be somewhat lessened, and at the same time it is provided with critical bibliographies and so arranged as to enable the judicious instructor more easily to make substitutions here and there from other works or to pass over this or that section entirely. ”

“ If the assignment has been read and studied carefully by the pupils in preparation for the recitation, the only purpose of having any portion of it read aloud in class must be to give the pupils practice in reading clearly, accurately, and intelligently. To be of value this practice must be systematic and must be regarded as an exercise in expression. Careful preparation by the pupils including practice in reading aloud at home, and helpful criticism by the teacher, are as essential for success in exercises in reading aloud as in other forms of expression. ”

“ The drawing and applying of lessons, the exercise which we are here recommending, has been found a valuable remedy for this defect in ordinary reading. The object of the teacher by its use, is to accomplish in the pupil by reading, what we have shewn Nature so frequently does by observation;—that is, to train the child to apply for his own use, or the use of others, those truths which he acquires from his book, in the same way that he does those which he derives from experience. ”

“ I have purposely left the consideration of the strictly manual training part of the curriculum—that is, the tool work—to the last, and I have done this that I might make it very clear that the humanistic studies, and the mathematics, and the science, and the drawing are quite as essential a part of the school as the tool work ”

“ If a student has had an opportunity to study a subject from either a textbook or a printed copy of the lecture notes, then comments by the teacher explaining some difficult point, or describing some later development, or showing some other application or consequence of the principle, may be both instructive and inspiring; but the main work of teaching engineering subjects should be from carefully prepared textbooks. ”

“ Ordinary textbooks are prepared for students in school and are intended to be supplemented by the personal instruction and guidance of a teacher, standing at the pupil's elbow, or readily approachable. But the reader who wishes to inform himself upon some progressive branch of science after his school days are over needs to have the teacher included in the book itself. ”

“ Characteristics of the Method.—The third, or developing, method of directing the selecting activity of [114] the learner, is so called because in this method the teacher as an instructor aims to keep the child's mind actively engaged throughout each step of the learning process. He sees, in other words, that step by step the pupil brings forward whatever old knowledge is necessary to the problem, and that he relates it in a definite way to this problem. ”

“ Next, it is important to keep the attention fixed on the task: thus only can tenacity of purpose be cultivated. Manual training enables us to keep the attention of the child fixed upon the object of study, because the latter is concrete. ”

“ There is no such thing as a valuable observation and investigation of natural objects without language in which to embody the results at every step." (Geo. P. Brown.) Report on Correlation of Studies by Committee of Fifteen. With annotations by Geo. P. Brown.
[86] "Of course, there is great difference between the disciplinary value of that study in which the pupil solves his own difficulties and that teaching in which the teacher accompanies the pupil, supplying the needed information or suggestion at every step of his progress. ”

“ High standards of work and correct processes should always be set before the pupil, and these are best assured by the teacher becoming thoroughly conversant not only with the general construction of an article to be made, but with the best methods of securing neat and accurate results. Eventually, the pupil’s mental attainments will show in the tangible work of his hands. ”

“ Kindergarten, Nature studies, object lessons, sloyd, and the many occupations included under the name of manual training, all lend a successive and continuous stimulus—the one underlying principle and aim of the schools being to induce observation and comparison as a basis of thinking and doing. ”

“ And I am also convinced that the manual training school boy’s comprehension of some essential branches of knowledge will be as far superior to that of the other boy’s, as the realization of the grandeur and beauty of the Alps to the man who has seen their glories is superior to the conception of him who has merely read of them.... ”

“ The teacher should always have a copy of the Pupil’s Book for Work and Study and do the work in it just as he would like to have the children do it. Of course it should be better done than any child can possibly do it. If the teacher colors the pictures with water colors, uses illuminated initial letters, and writes neatly and plainly, his book will be a great incentive to the children to do the very best possible work themselves. ”

“ The desire of a pupil to do as well as other members of his class, or the desire of a class to equal the record of another class of the same grade, will do much to keep attention fixed on the work. Neither the devices mentioned nor any others will avail unless the teacher is wide-awake and alert herself. ”

“ I have known pupils who would, unless restrained, ask for the repetition of half the words in a spelling lesson. Speak distinctly, and teach pupils to listen attentively. It is the part of the pupil’s duty to listen attentively to every word of the teacher that is addressed to him or his class. Another habit of many teachers is after a question has been properly answered by some pupil, to again state the answer herself. Nothing is more deadening either to the pupil who first gave the answer or to the interest of the class. ”