Читать книгу How to Study and Teaching How to Study онлайн | страница 29

Do children need the help of specific aims?

The first question to consider is, Do children seriously need the help of such aims? They certainly do in one respect, for they resemble their elders in being afflicted with inattention and unwillingness to exert themselves in study. These are the offenses for which they are most often scolded at school, and these are their chief faults when they attempt to study alone. There is no doubt also but that the main reason why children improve very little in oral reading during the last three years in the elementary school is their lack of incentive to improve. They feel no great need of enunciating distinctly and of reading with pleasant tones loud enough to be heard by all, when all present have the same text before them. Why should they?

Good aims make children alert, just as they do older persons. I remember hearing a New York teacher in a private school say to her thirteen-year-old children in composition, one spring day: "I expect to spend my vacation at some summer resort; but I have not yet decided what one it shall be. If you have a good place in mind, I should be glad to have you tell me why you like it. It may influence my choice." She was a very popular teacher, and each pupil longed to have her for a companion during the summer. I never saw a class undertake a composition with more eagerness. In a certain fifth-year class in geography a contest between the boys and girls for the best collection of articles manufactured out of flax resulted in the greatest enthusiasm. The reading or committing to memory of stories with the object of dramatizing them—such as The Children's Hour, in the second or third grade—seldom fails to arouse lively interest.

For several years the members of the highest two classes in a certain school have collected many of the best cartoons and witticisms. They have also been in the habit of reading the magazines with the object of selecting such articles as might be of special interest to their own families at home, or to other classes in the school, or to their classmates, often defending their selections before the class. Their most valuable articles have been classified and catalogued for use in the school; and their joke-books, formed out of humorous collections, have circulated through the school. The effect of the plan in interesting pupils in current literature has been excellent.