teachers' meetings. Simply teaching a class of children does not bring the practice teacher into broad enough active contact with school conditions, and plan-writing, as it is found in many places, is an abomination. And, whether they are wise or not, practice teachers often fail to grow enthusiastic over teachers' meetings. As far as teaching is concerned, the practice teacher should be required to teach different classes in different subjects, and this should be supplemented by requiring her to do any other things which naturally enter to fill up a school day. If it were possible, she should be required to take charge of a room of children for a whole day during a part of her time in the department. Some such arrangement as this would greatly broaden the view of school life and duties, which every graduate should take away from a normal school. It would remove the chance of a practice teacher's cultivating the wrong notion that she should make herself proficient in only certain grades and subjects, and in nothing else than mere teaching.

Plan-writing ought to be greatly simplified in many schools. Teaching plans as they are often required to be written from day to day are so elaborate, require so much effort, and so much morbid pedagogical significance is attached to them, that they sap up uselessly the time and vitality of the practice teachers and blind them to their chief duty, the effective teaching and control of children. Of course teaching plans should be written, and the system of writing them, when wise, should be rigidly adhered to. But to be wise the system must be a simple, helpful means, and not a complex, injurious end. Whatever the details of a wise system may be, the central ideal of it should be that in her daily teaching the practice teacher should be trained, not to a vague and verbose idea of almost anything to be done, but to a clear and pointedly stated idea of something definite; and, also, that in her method she should be trained, not to picture in advance a recitation in a multitude of details, most of which never take real form, but to deciding beforehand upon only the general conduct of a recitation, leaving wide scope for the exercise of that freedom which in the actual recitation she must have to meet the spontaneity of her pupils.

Where teachers' meetings are not as stimulating and interesting as they ought to be, there are nearly always two ways of accounting for it. One reason is that the meetings are held late in the afternoon, after the regular school day, when both practice teachers and supervisors have done enough for the day, need rest, and feel extra duties to be more or less of a burden. The other reason is that the work done at teachers' meetings, regardless of the time of day when they may be held, is too often mere repetition, humdrum and monotonous, too deficient in system and freshness. There must, of course, be some opportunity to discuss with practice teachers in a body the details of their present and future work. The best opportunity would be provided by putting the practice teachers within the training department for one of their regular daily periods in addition to, and during the time of, their teaching. This daily period should be given to the details of practical pedagogy and school management, and the work should be done by the different members of the training department faculty.

THE CHILDREN AND THE MODEL SCHOOL

No normal school completely deserves the name until it includes a school of children, and until its children are made its kings and queens, the controlling center about which everything and everybody else revolve. When a law is passed establishing a normal school, the ultimate purpose is to train teachers for the public schools. But when the school is established it is found that teachers can best be prepared for their work by educating children in their presence. When the children are once brought under the roof of the normal school they, and not the prospective teachers, should be the immediate center of interest; not only because their sacred life is committed to the care of the school, but because the best care that can be given them is at the same time the most valuable means of securing what the school is ultimately established for,-the preparation of teachers. Its children and their education, before prospective teachers, should lend to any normal school far the greater part of whatever true dignity and worth it may have.

The complaint of many parents that their children are not

properly cared for by a normal school, though often unjust, is not always without foundation. The constant disturbance of the model school program to meet normal department requirements, and the lowering of the standard of teaching by putting too much of it into the hands of practice teachers, are the chief things that operate against the best care of the children, although it is nearly always only the latter which is in the minds of complaining parents. Where the objection to practice teaching is found it tends toward two results: first, the disappearance of the model school by parents taking their children out; and second, relieving the practice teachers of their teaching and putting it into the more competent hands of members of the faculty. The latter result is much the more fortunate for the normal school, not simply because it quiets rumors of bad work, but because it preserves the model school, and in raising the general excellence of its work makes that school more illustrative of what a school should be. In another place, practice teaching is held up as an important requirement to be made of a normal school student, but such teaching ought not to be permitted to that amount which materially lowers the standard of model school work. If either of the two courses had to be taken, there should be no question as to which is the better in the training of a teacher; for her simply to observe and discuss under supervision a truly model school, or for her to teach even with as capable guidance in a third or fourth rate school. Other things aside, a normal school graduate will go to her work in the public schools better equipped when she has thoroughly high ideals obtained from the observation of an excellent school, though she may have no practice teaching, than when, after much practice teaching in a low rate school, she is necessarily without such ideals, although she may have acquired some command over commonplace school practices.

The model school is the element within a normal school which should be maintained at the highest possible standard. That standard demands that the model school shall not only fairly represent public school conditions, but that it shall also represent much that is in advance of the best public schools. The model school should be a constant source of information and in

spiration to visiting superintendents, principals, teachers and boards of education. It should not merely suggest to them by way of contrast, but actually exhibit things which are better than what they are accustomed to, and which they should desire to attain in their own schools. Moreover, it should be such that teachers trained in contact with it might enter upon their public school work not merely with a speculative ideal of a school in the far distant future and impossible of realization, but with what is much more stimulating,-the practical ideal of the best school which can be, because it is, produced. Whether this is the right notion or not of what a model school should be, one thing is certain, that it cannot be that in many places until the normal schools, of which it is a part, make radical changes in their organization and administration.

With a Copy of Shakspere's Sonnets

ELMER JAMES BAILEY

I cannot write with Shakspere's brain,
But I can love with Shakspere's heart;
And so I trust, not all in vain

I send to you the Master's art.

Deceived, the worst of grief he knew;
Beloved, he felt himself a god.
The deeps he reached I cannot view,

But I shall tread the heights he trod.

RICHARD T. WYCKE, PRESIDENT NATIONAL STORY TELLERS' LEAGUE,

NEW YORK, N. Y.

NCE upon a time the writer undertook to teach a little school in a far-off seacoast town. The little village was on a sandy bluff overlooking the sound and the sea. Cut off from the main land by an impossible swamp in the rear, yet shut out from the great Atlantic by an ever-shifting sandbar that lay for leagues along the seacoast, it gave the little town an ideal harbor of shallow water, the home of fishermen and oystermen, whose cottages were scattered for two miles along the seacoast. Being isolated they were compelled to rely upon themselves, and in doing this had developed a solidarity of community life, and a manhood and womanhood of purity and simplicity that was as refreshing as the breezes that ever swept their shores.

Amid such surroundings I had my first experience as a teacher. Not having libraries or lectures to help me, I too must depend upon self.

I had never studied pedagogy and knew nothing of teaching, except that which I had seen in the university lecture rooms. The teacher who preceded me "heard " lessons and the children "said" lessons. That seemed an easy proposition, for the questions were in the book and the children could memorize and say the answers.

But I soon discovered that the children found no interest in the fact that one word was a verb and another a noun. They memorized the rules and repeated the lessons, but they were not at all interested in the subject. They were bored by this mechanical process, and so was the teacher. Something must be done. One day I told the class the story of "Hiawatha's Fishing." Every child listened with rapt attention. I had found something that they were interested in. I requested the children to write the story out for their lessons the next day. The majority of them did so, and read the story as they had understood and written it down. One little fellow said, "I ain't got no pencil," which meant that he didn't write it.

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