was different with other lines, as in the one, “And the stars heard, and the sea." When asked why the poet did not say, "And the stars and the sea heard," the boy at once saw that it would not sound right. "It would not be poetry to speak in that way." This impressed him with the poetical order in which the simple thought conveyed could be best expressed. Then when he came to recite the line he experienced little difficulty. He had the content, and he also had gained the idea of the poetical form of expression.

Proceeding in this way with the remaining stanzas, the boy got a preliminary acquaintance with each one in a few minutes. Then going back and reciting two or three stanzas as a unit, because they described a situation which could be apprehended as a whole, he could in this way bind them to one another in memory. The thread which held them together in his thought was the progression of events which they narrated, and which was perfectly natural and orderly, such as he is familiar with in his daily experience. Once this matter of progression of ideas is appreciated, the remaining task of getting the details of expression is comparatively easy; but without this thread of connection being grasped, it becomes a process of remembering by main force. The only way this latter sort of memorizing can be accomplished is by establishing a purely automatic

series, in which there is no bond of natural connection, except that any given word may release the word which has followed it through a large number of repetitions.

There is so much that children should become possessed of in the schools to-day that every effort ought to be made to eliminate waste in memory work. It will not take long to impress upon children in the fourth grade that when they are memorizing a poem they must first get the situation described in each stanza, so that they can begin at the beginning and tell the story, running through the stanzas to the end. Next they must see how the poet expresses each thought developed, and thus they can fix the poet's form of expression. A method like this will not only conserve energy and time, but it will also give pupils an appreciation of the content and poetical mode of expression of the poems which they are memorizing.

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
technical
work too early

gained a general view of a subject. An enthusiast in physics may spend 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 3) 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 common defects, the one mentioned most frequently A

the causes therefor

being spiritless teaching. The causes for this are