Any teacher who frankly asks himself, "How much of what. I teach will remain with my boys and girls ten years after they have left school?" will have uncomfortable thoughts as well as comforting ones. He will be unable to find excuse or reward for a great deal of the work done by himself and his pupils. Surely every true teacher wishes to build into the lives of his pupils something that will stay there, and it is worth while considering just what will stay there. The real teacher will also not be satisfied to merely hope that his work will endure; common sense and open-mindedness require that some actual evidence be discovered. Only an examination of the boy ten years after will give a true judgment upon the teacher's endeavors, and whatever the judgment may be, it is our duty, to ourselves and to the boy alike, to make such an examination. I Know the Essence of Eternal Youth I know the essence of eternal youth, ; I live and find that life is worth the cost That struggle onward to a love-set goal. Upheld in this-that God Himself still strives. -Jeannette M. Collins. Revitalizing the Rural School Curriculum LAWRENCE A. AVERILL, PH. D., STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, T HE writer has recently collected several illuminating experiences which illustrate graphically how weak and abortive are the attempts of the country school to provide boys and girls with an adequate training to meet the problems of their life. He gives them for what they are worth. A boy of 15, educated in the rural school and at the time a sophomore in the local high school, secured a position in the general store for the country holidays. One of the duties expected of him was to weigh out and sell halfbushels, bushels, pecks and half-pecks of corn, meal, cracked corn, oats, wheat, etc., etc., to the customers. What was the consternation of the employer, however, to overhear his young assistant in the early days of his clerkship, quietly asking the several customers how many pounds of corn made a peck, how many pounds of oats to the bushel, how many pounds of meal in a half-bushel, etc. Upon investigation the proprietor discovered that, although the young man could tell him the number of grains in a pennyweight, or the number of scruples in a dram, or the number of fluid drachms in a fluid ounce, or yet the number of pence in a shilling, decimes in a franc, pfennigs in a mark, etc., etc., he had not the remotest information as to the number of pounds of the various grains, vegetables, etc., in a bushel. The failure of the rural school to fit this boy for the country may be an interesting commentary on the fact that the young clerk soon afterward left the country for good to seek his fortunes in the city. While visiting a rural school class in reading recently, the writer took opportunity to look over rather critically the text which the class was using. Here are some of the titles included within the two covers of this collection of myth, romance, history, adventure and classic legend: The Battle of Bannockburn, The Shipwreck, How they Besieged the Town, Elizabeth and Walter Raleigh, The Boyhood of Gavin Dishart, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Gray Champion, Samuel Johnson, The Red Knight and the Saracen, Selected from Scott's Tales of a Grandfather. Cloister and the Hearth. Westward Ho. Kenilworth. The Little Minister. The Spy. Goldsmith. Twice Told Tales. The Talisman. The criticism obviously here was not to be made of the subject matter as such, but of the method of getting the subject matter before the pupils. An important end in the pedagogy of reading ought to be to get the child interested in the best of the literature suited to his age. It is very open to question, however, whether a child, reading isolated selections at wholesale, however classic they may be, will ever develop any great love for the eminent authors in English and American literature. We shall have more to say of this under the section devoted to Reading. A few months ago I chanced upon a class in advanced arithmetic in a tiny agricultural community in one of our New England states. The class was struggling with some very difficult and, to them, perfectly meaningless and insignificant problems. Here are six of them: (1) A hollow sphere whose diameter is 6 inches, weighs / as much as a solid sphere of the same material and diameter. How thick is the shell? (2) How much alloy must be mixed with 2 lb., 2 oz., 15 dwt., 19 gr. of pure gold to make gold 18 carats fine? (3) Three men bought a grindstone 20 inches in diameter. How much of the diameter may each grind off so as to share the stone equally, making no allowance for the eye? (4) If 300 cats can kill 300 rats in 300 minutes, how many cats can kill 100 rats in 100 minutes? (!) (5) There is a circular park 250 rods in diameter, and within it is a circular lake 125 rods in circumference. What is the area of the park exclusive of the lake? (6) I can offer 6% stock at 84, and 5% stock at 72. Which investment is preferable, and how much? Through the open window of the school house I could see a progressive farmer drilling an artesian well above his home, and faintly I could hear the chug-chug-chug of the gasoline engine as it drove the drill. What wonder that one of the older boys in the class, after grappling hopelessly with problem No. 3 for a few minutes, should whisper to his mate, "Who cares about the old grindstone, anyway?" and turn therewith to watch the flying wheels of the industrious little engine! That boy could not have given expression to the author's own state of mind more perfectly. Such mathematical absurdities as confronted these poor, mindstarving boys and girls bore no relationship whatever to the world which was theirs, and which ought always to be theirs. Dr. Fletcher B. Dressler, in his monumental "Rural Schoolhouses and Grounds," gives us the right viewpoint from which to adapt mathematical problems to the rural environment thus: "It would be poor policy for a joiner to instruct his apprentice simply in the manipulation of saw, chisel, or square, rather than to teach him the use of these tools through the cutting, shaping and fitting of timbers designed to serve a real purpose in life. Every country schoolhouse should have a workshop where boys and girls can put to test their arithmetic and reading and drawing, and all the other educational tools which they are supposed to learn to use. "Here is a problem that will teach more real arithmetic, or at least make the subject more actual and interesting, than all the puzzles found in the regulation text books: "What will it cost to build in this community the sort of a barn needed on a good farm of 100 acres, with 75 acres under cultivation ?' "This is a practical problem for a country boy. Before answering it he will have to make drawings and plans for the barn. These drawings and plans will represent, if he goes at the problem intelligently, all his knowledge and ideas of that part of farm life which must center in or about a barn. He will have to determine how many horses it would be best to keep, and how they should be housed. He will need to consider the number of cattle such a farm will need, and how best to care for them. Problems will arise in connection with the amount of storage space needed for hay and grain, and with the proper location of rooms. He will need to figure on shed room for wagons and farm tools of all sorts, and to consider how these can be cared for with the least trouble and the greatest economy. He will be forced to give thought to the building location, to the water supply, to the care of the comfort and all the included hygienic relations of the home. All this will require calculation of the most painstaking But he has not yet begun to build. When his plans are matured he will need to figure out the amount of material needed and the cost in the local market for this material. Here questions of local economics will come into prominence. The price of labor, skilled and unskilled, the expense of hauling—all of these will enter into the calculations. He will find before he has finished that he has in these and in a score of other ways been brought face to face with the whole problem of the farm and home life that centers about the barn. The arithmetic and sort. other subjects involved in the solution of this problem might be extended to the planning and construction of a house. Here the girls will be more interested. The planning of a convenient, beautiful and sanitary home is about the last thing thought of in our rural school curriculum. In all confidence in the decision, I leave it to the good sense of the reader to declare which is the more profitable type of problem for the rural school arithmetic, the one just given or the six taken from a text book in use in scores of rural schools in New England? Here is a class in physiology; they are four sun-tanned boys |