CHAPTER IX

TENDENCIES OF NOVICES IN TEACHING

THE writer recently sent letters to one hundred high-school principals and superintendents of schools in the Middle West, asking them to give the results of their experience with new teachers, specifying their strong and their weak points as they had occasion to observe them in the practical work of the school-room. The opinions gained in this way were then compared with reports upon the strong and weak points of one thousand teachers made after careful inspection of class-room work by a special committee of a state university.

The principals and superintendents declared, with scarcely an exception, that the secondary-school Some typical teacher fresh from college commonly defects in falls far short of large success in his teaching teaching, mainly because he has no adequate conception of what a high school ought to accomplish. And when he begins he often lacks genuine sympathy with the kind of work the high school must do. Further, he frequently has but

slight appreciation of what should be the proper relation of his department to other departments in the high school. His ambition usually is to push his subject to the front regardless of its relative importance for secondary-school pupils. Speaking generally, he has given but little serious thought to the question of the values of studies, and consequently he has only a meager notion of how to construct a well-balanced program of studies for the high school. He has been thinking, even up to the moment of beginning his teaching, about mastering his college physics, or Latin, or algebra, and his mind is quite destitute on the subject of the needs as a whole of high-school boys and girls.

Such teachers often strenuously insist upon doing special and technical work before their pupils have

Special and gained a general view of a subject. technical An enthusiast in physics may spend work too early a whole year on such a topic as light; a biologist may decline to teach anything in his department but the frog; a Latinist may endeavor to get the subjunctive mood in all its breadth and depth set right in the minds of the immature classicists under his care. And so it is apt to go through all the studies. The teacher has himself passed beyond the general view of his subject, and he has come to feel the necessity of going deep into

some special problem. He is eager to push toward the frontier, and take a look into the unknown country; and, naturally enough, he feels that what is of chief interest to himself ought to be of chief interest to every one else. Here again it is impressed upon us that most of the tragedies of the class-room arise out of the inability of the teacher to put himself at the point of view of the learner, with the result that the latter may remain quite untouched by his instruction.

Eighty-five of the principals and superintendents consulted mention a third very common defect in "Shooting over the high-school teachers especially; heads" of pupils they lecture to their pupils in a formal way, and consequently "shoot over their heads." And the lecturer is apt to reason that if he is not followed and appreciated the class is at fault, and so he gives his pupils a good "dressing down” frequently. It is his business to expound the truth, and the pupils' business to absorb it. He does all that can be expected of him when he spreads out wisdom before these callow youths.

The reports upon one thousand teachers made by university inspectors point out a half-dozen or more Spiritless teaching and

the causes therefor

common defects, the one mentioned most frequently

being spiritless teaching. The causes for this are

numerous; but dry, text-book work is at the bottom of most of it. One type of teacher insists upon verbatim rendering of a text, which at best is only partially comprehended by the pupil. Out of one thousand teachers, one hundred and thirteen teach in this lifeless way. The pupils see little or no relation between the parts of the subject they are studying; and, worst of all, what they are trying to assimilate has but slight connection with the real situations of daily life. Such teachers, as far as they have any clear end in view in their work, and some of them probably have none at all, are dominated by the aim of formal discipline—to "develop the mental faculties" of their pupils. The way to accomplish this is to require them to learn a text, and give it back verbatim. This sort of work will, moreover, in the opinion of these teachers, develop habits which will be of great importance in after life— habits of attention, perseverance, long-suffering (although the instructor would not call it by this name), and the capacity for doing disagreeable and uninteresting tasks. It will develop contentment with plodding, and docility in the performance of drudgery; and since life is one long struggle in doing things one hates, a pupil had best get used to it while he is in school.

It seems probable that all novices, and par

ticularly those who teach in the high school, would Vital vs. be saved some unhappy hours, and would formal become a more helpful guide to youth, if teaching he could be made to realize that he ought to try to teach his subject so that it will explain in a real and vital way some phase of the pupil's environment, and give him a mastery over it. Elementary teachers have been hearing so much the last decade, or longer, about mere formal teaching, that even a novice in the grades can hardly escape being influenced by the discussion; but this is not quite so true of high-school teachers. A considerable number of the latter fail because they are satisfied with more or less verbal, mechanical, definition teaching. This is why things move so slowly in the classes of some of these novices. Pupils are "eager to get out of the class at the close of the hour"; "they seem bored"; their faces "show lack of intelligence and appreciation"; they seem ready to "cut up pranks at every opportunity"; "they make the teacher's life miserable"; "there is a good deal of nagging going on in these class-rooms much of the time." This style of teacher has a hard time himself, and he makes things hard for his pupils. Most unfortunate of all, he is apt to waste their time, and to develop in them a distaste for everything that has to do with school life.