lent opportunities for such lessons. If school property is injured either wantonly or accidentally it is evident that the first thing to do is to repair Injury to public property to be made good the damage. The child should be made to see that the taxpayers of the district have supplied the schoolhouse and equipment for the use of the school, but that these things belong to the district. In one rural school a boy was found to have marred a newly decorated wall of the school building. He was sent for a workman to come and repair the wall, and the bill was presented to the boy and paid by him out of his own earnings. The boy learned through this incident a practical lesson in business honesty, which could never have been taught him theoretically. toward vandalism Our people are sadly lacking as a nation in the respect for public property. There are those who will ruthAmerican tendency lessly deface public buildings, parks, or even monuments in order to to obtain a little souvenir to carry away. Others will commit such acts of vandalism wantonly. The most effective cure for these things lies not so much in lectures on morals and ethics, as in inculcating practical lessons in morals and ethics by making them a part of the conduct of the children in the school, the community and the home. The child must learn that the first step in either repentance or reparation is, so far as it is possible, to make good the injury. The question of morality is insistent in every school. The matters which have just been discussed are of such Children's morals nature that they apply more or less to be guarded generally to the entire school. some of the most difficult problems of management grow out of the occasional case of immorality. It is an excep But tional school which does not have some child who uses profane or improper speech, or whose conduct does not in some other way suggest immorality. The pure-minded child should be protected from this moral contagion. One such center of immoral influence in the school, if left unchecked, may spread until the whole school is contaminated. The detection and prevention of such influences is one of the teacher's most difficult tasks. The teacher must not be suspicious and spying in his attitude toward the pupils; but, on the other hand, he must not be blind or deaf to what is going on. He must be thoroughly alert to what is taking place not only in the schoolroom, but also on the playground. He must know the morals of his pupils if he is to protect the innocent and reform the wayward; and this constitutes both an opportunity and an obligation. FOR TEACHERS' DISCUSSION AND STUDY 1. Counting up all the acknowledged failures among teachers you have known, were most of them failures in management? Is it possible that some fail in instruction, but their failure is not so easily discovered? Do some fail in instruction because they first fail in management? 2. Judging from your observation, what are the most troublesome points in the management of a rural school? Can you suggest how such troubles may be avoided? 3. What, in your judgment, is responsible for the attitude of so many pupils who seem to look on the teacher as a natural enemy, and feel it a personal triumph if they succeed in playing some trick or committing a misdemeanor without being discovered? What is the remedy? 4. Do you agree with the position taken on scolding? Does the habit have a tendency to grow on a teacher? What is a good substitute? 5. Do you find it difficult to be uniform from day to day in your requirements and government? Can you relate any inequalities to lowered vitality or impaired health? To bad nerves? 6. Did you ever go to school to a teacher who had fits of temper? If so, did the school look on exhibitions of temper as a weakness and lose respect for the teacher because of them? 7. Do you believe in corporal punishment? If not, what is your substitute? Is sarcasm or ridicule to be preferred to whipping? Should a child usually be punished before the school (effect of making a martyr of him)? Should punishment take place while teacher or pupil is angry? What are your tests of the effectiveness of punishment? 8. Do you know your legal rights as fixed by the laws of your state in governing and punishing a pupil in your school? Some states do not define the teacher's rights in detail, but simply say the teacher stands in loco parentis to the pupil. What powers are thus given? CHAPTER XIII Teaching the high- GOOD TEACHING Important and necessary as good organization and management are in the school, they can never be an end in themselves. Both exist only to provide the conditions under which teaching may go on. Teaching, the actual instruction and guidance of children in their learning and development, is the ultimate purpose for which we erect our schoolhouses, organize our schools and pay our school taxes. And no matter how excellent the building and equipment, how perfect the organization of the school, or how skilful its management, these all fail of their aim if they are not crowned by good teaching. The true teacher will therefore always have before him a triple ideal for his school-careful organization, efficient management, and good teaching; but the greatest of these is teaching. Good teaching requires first of all that the teacher shall meet the children on their own plane, be able to put Meeting the child himself in the child's place and look on his own plane at the problems and difficulties of learning through the eyes and mind of a child. Children do not know how to study, for study is an art and has to be learned the same as any other art. When the children first enter school they are fresh from the work and the play of home life, accustomed to deal with real tasks and concrete objects. We place in their hands books full of symbols of which they know nothing, and dealing with lines of thought unfamiliar to them. We tell them to get their lessons, but they do not know how. And even after they have learned to recognize words and their meanings, the process of gathering and unifying the thought of a printed page is difficult. Those of us who have studied a foreign language have not forgotten how possible it is to know all the separate words of a paragraph or page, and yet find great difficulty in collecting the thought of the whole. How often children say to the teacher, "I don't know how to study this lesson." Or, "I don't understand how Need of teaching how to study to begin on this." Every such confession is in some sense an indictment of of the chief of whose functions is It would do many the teacher, one to show the child how to study. teachers good to try an experiment sometimes given to college classes in psychology. The students are given slips of paper on which is printed an easy story consisting of about two hundred words. Each student is to read this story aloud as fast as he can with good expression. The average time required is about seventyfive seconds. Next, the class is given similar slips with another easy story of the same length. But this second story is printed in reverse order from the bottom of the page upward, and without capitalization or punctuation. The students are to read the story aloud, the same as the first one, as rapidly as possible. The average time required for the second story is nearly five minutes, and the reading sounds for all the world like a First-Reader pupil puzzling out unfamiliar words. We often forget |