USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Ipswich > Town annual report of Ipswich 1925 > Part 7
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in demand and will always command a good salary.
This statement is in keeping with all intelligent economic experience. We rarely get more than we pay for. To employ a poor teacher because you can secure her at a smaller salary, is the very worst kind of educational and economic blundering. It is as wasteful as it is disastrous, and an enlightened selfishness alone should dictate a different policy and procedure. The quality of output should have first and final consideration in the employment of a teacher and in the estimate and measure of her work. The best are always the most economical. This is especially true where the welfare of our youth is concerned; for it is upon them, upon the character and kind of development and training they receive, that our national life, and our civiliza- tion even, in large measure depend.
If frequent overturn among the employees in our industrial establishments is considered a hindrance and a bar to success, and often leading to failure, how much more important is it that we should be able to retain our best teachers for the proper training of our children? We are constantly losing some of them. This, of course, may be expected. We cannot compete with those richer communities nor with those States whose set- tled policy is to secure the best that the market affords regardless of price. But we can and should make our appropriations for salaries large enough to retain a larger proportion of our teach- ing force. In this way alone shall we be able to maintain the standard of our schools and to compete upon fairly equal terms with those communities with larger financial resources at their command.
As these salary increases are contingent upon the measured quantity and quality of the work of the individual teacher, her attitude towards her school, the public, the school authorities, and the degree of co-operation shown towards each of these, there should be little difficulty in making a satisfactory salary
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adjustment, and our appropriations should be sufficient to meet all such cases.
Our funds should be large enough to make a better select- ion of new teachers, also. These should be selected on the basis of character, preparation, experience, and fitness for the work. No consideration should be given to a candidate on ac- count of relationship, religious or political affiliations, popularity or social prestige. She should have an innate, mother love for children, and should believe in her work for the work's sake. This type, to be sure, is not common; but by employing as many as possible of this kind and paying them an adequate salary, you would soon have a corps of teachers of whom any community would be proud, and the mental and moral growth of your children would give infinite satisfaction. A school system cannot be built in a day, nor a corps of high grade teachers col- lected during a summer vacation. The best you can get should be secured, and the best you have should be retained.
Teaching is fast becoming a profession requiring as great an expenditure of time and money in its preparation as that of either the law or medicine. Many of our Commissioners of Ed- ucation and Superintendents of large city school systems receive salaries that compare favorably with those paid to Mayors of cities and Governors of states. This careful preparation is reach- ing down into the ranks of the teachers themselves, and commu- nities should be wise enough to recognize this tendency and to encourage it in every possible way. This will mean better sal- aries and better teachers everywhere.
Reorganization of the Junior High School.
Attention was called in last year's report to the unfavorable teaching conditions existing in this school. They were classified under three general heads, viz: The overcrowded condition of the rooms, the impossibility of a systematic grading according to mental ability, and the impossibility of holding the pupils up to
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their work. Mass teaching may be held responsible for the lar- ger part of these troubles. This may well be termed the factory method.
Educators everywhere are seeking relief from this unscien- tific and wasteful method. Individual differences in mental ability as well as differences in mental alertness are recognized and ad- mitted by all. In fact, they are self-evident. Still, we have felt obliged to adhere, for various reasons, to this method, notwith- standing the fact that we were fully cognizant of its defects, and its terrible burden of failures.
In addition to the physical and financial difficulties to be overcome, there is another of a more technical character, and that is that our Normal Schools have not trained teachers for work with individual pupils. These schools now acknowledge that too much emphasis has been placed upon method, that we have been teaching subjects rather than pupils. What we tried to find is some arrangement of classes wherein no pupil is neg- lected, and still to retain the largest convenient group of uni- form mental ability as a class. Something between the Winnetka system, which is almost wholly individual, and the present class- ification. The Dalton plan may work well with older pupils, but we did not care to try it here.
Here is, briefly, the plan we are trying out. First, all the slower pupils of both the seventh and the eighth grades were placed in the largest room in the building under the charge of Miss Stanley as principal with Miss Hayes acting as her assist- ant. These pupils have no connection with the other classes except in chorus singing, and are thus freed from the lockstep of departmental teaching. The plan is to give to each pupil such individual attention as he needs. The same course of study is used throughout the school, but the assignments to these pupils are shorter, that is, they are limited to the individual capacities of the pupils.
The other classes are arranged on the same basis of mental
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ability and alertness, and classes in two grades sit in the same room and pursue the same subject at one and the same time. To make this a little clearer, suppose we have a room of forty pupils. Twenty of them will be seventh grade and twenty will be eighth grade. Both will be studying the same subject during the period, let us say arithmetic. Another room will have the same arrangement but with another subject, as geography or history. While one class is reciting the other class is preparing the lesson for the next recitation, either in that same room or some other one under a different teacher.
The following advantages for this arrangement may be claimed: First, the time used in passing is reduced just one half. This in itself is an important item, as nearly a period a day was consumed under the old arrangement. Second, the classes are just one half as large and the teacher can give more attention to the individual pupil, both during the recitation period and after school if occasion requires. This she could not do before. Pupils can do more blackboard work and their mistakes are made and corrected directly under the eye of the teacher. Third, the brighter pupils do more work and progress more rapidly. They are no longer held back by the slower ones. Fourth, each pupil may do the grade of work for which he is mentally fitted. If a boy in the seventh grade is capable of doing eighth grade work he may take the work of the higher grade, without confu- sion or conflict with any other of his classes or subjects, as both classes have the same subject at the same time. Fifth, the pupils of each grade learn something from the other by "listening in." We gain information by the ear as well as by the eye. Few of us realize or appreciate how much of our knowledge is gained in this way. The testimony of former pupils is most conclusive on this point. Sixth, the pupil learns how to study. The teach- er may expect and demand of him some preparation in the work of her class. Here he may be trained to meet his obligations fully and promptly --- a training we feel justified in saying that,
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heretofore, has been but poorly done or omitted altogether --- a training that will help the boy to become a more successful man and a better citizen. Homework, too, may be somewhat re- duced. Seventh, the pupil's opportunities for "getting by" are reduced to a minimum. Each teacher has the authority to pro- mote or demote from one grade to another within her own classes. The responsibility can be placed where it belongs, whether it be the teacher's or the pupil's, and such measures, looking toward an improvement in the situation, may be em- ployed to suit specific cases. More time, more authority, more scope for initiative, more opportunity for self-expression is given the teacher, and her work should be correspondingly improved. This gives the maximum of flexibility. The only thing rigid about it is, that the work must be done. Eighth, last but not least, the last fifteen minutes of each day the teacher has her home-room pupils back in her own room. Of all the periods of the day, this is the one period above every other for the teacher to impress her personality upon the children under her charge. It is a time of relaxation, one in which the time is given over to discussion and round-table conferences, when biographies and the best selections of prose and poetry may be studied and freely commented upon by pupils and teacher, with the distinct purpose of having the pupil acquire a taste for what is beautiful and good in literature and in art, and to lay a foundation upon which to build character. It is a time, too, in which the teacher should strive to create a real home atmosphere, whose influence may be felt and lived by the pupil long after he has left school. This is the end and aim of all right training. Said one little girl to her teacher at the close of one of these last period exercises " It makes you feel better when you go home."
The degree in which these aims, as expressed in the fore- going, may be realized, depends upon the attitude of the teacher towards the arrangement, and her whole-hearted co-operation in carrying out its provisions, These arrangements are not fool-
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proof; neither can they withstand the shock of half-hearted or self-seeking participation. There must be thorough preparation and the time allotments for recitations and for study must be rigidly adhered to, else some other teacher will be defrauded of her rightful share of preparation by the incoming class. Each teacher must have a keen moral sense of what is just and right, and give to others in the same measure that she would receive from them. Whenever this spirit is lacking, weakness and fail- ure will develop at that point. But to the teacher of broad vis- ion, of refined and sympathetic insight into the needs of her pupils, there is given the opportunity for some fine constructive work which will reflect credit upon both her pupils and herself. Some further adjustments in the organization of this school are still to be made, after which our Junior High School should, and will, be doing more thorough work than ever before.
For further information concerning the work of the school, you are referred to the report of its principal, Miss Katherine F, Sullivan.
Senior High School.
What is true of our schools taken as a whole, is also true of our two high schools. The Junior High has an enrollment of 234, while the Senior High enrollment of 276 surpasses that of any other year in the whole history of the town.
When the Manning School was opened in 1874, it had a graduating class of five members, among whom was Mr. George W. Tozer, the present clerk of the School Board. This year the class will number about 40, an increase of 700 per cent. It will be seen from these figures alone, that the membership of these two schools is in excess of the whole school population of the town at the time the Manning School was opened. The large percentage of increase of our graduating classes reveals a trend or modern tendency in school populations of which too many of our people are wholly unaware. More and more of our youth
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are attending the higher grades and are remaining in those grades for a longer period of time.
A few figures from the Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Education may be of interest here. The estimated school pop- ulation of the country at large in 1924 was 29,345,911. The total number actually enrolled 24,288,808, of whom 20,898,930 are in the elementary schools and 3,389,878 in secondary or high schools. £ In 1900 the percentage of high school pupils to the whole number attending all schools was 3.3; in 1924 the percentage was 14 .--- an increase of over 300 per cent, and one, when all the facts are considered, that is fully justified.
The high schools the country over are giving a good ac- count of themselves and retaining the confidence of the people. A high school diploma is a necessary credential and passport to a rapidly increasing number of occupations and callings, and the young man or young woman starting out in life without one, is entering the field under a severe handicap. Too many of our pupils in the past have been made to realize the true significance of the "closed door" when it was too late; too many of them have been forced to abandon the hope of engaging in those oc- cupations which otherwise appealed to them. It is on such oc- casions as these, when the young man is brought face to face with these hard, inexorable situations in life, that he does his real thinking. But this is not forethought, and neither wishes nor regrets will avail him anything then.
I have said that the high schools of the country are giving a good account of themselves. And so they are. Prof. Green- ough of Harvard University, in an address before the High School Masters Club, held in Boston a few Saturdays ago, made a statement which should convince the most skeptical or the prejudiced as to the real value of this type of schools to the common people. This is as it should be. The high school is the college of the people; and when they undertake to prepare pu- pils for college they should do so as well or better than
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any competitor in the field, else they lose both caste and con- fidence. Not to be able to prepare for college is a reproach to any high school, and a certain stigma attaches to the graduates of such school when thrown in with those from accredited high schools. I know whereof I speak, for some of our former grad- uates were made to feel the sting of this situation.
But we have emerged from that condition. We are an ac- credited high school, although it took seven long years to be- come such. Today our high school has all the exemptions and privileges of any high school in New England. Our students stand well in the higher institutions to which they have gone, in some cases being the only one in the class to receive an A mark. The school spirit developing here is fine, extremely so. Nothing gives me such real joy as it does to see the old boys come back to the school during their college vacations and ac- knowledge in most manly fashion their indebtedness for what this school has done for them. At last, the wishes of the found- er are being realized, the sowings of years past are coming to fruition. In another connection I shall speak of a few outstand- ing needs of this school; but, for the present, will refer you to the report of its principal, Mr. Ralph C. Whipple, for a more de- tailed account of its work.
The other schools of the town have suffered no change in leadership during the past year. These are the foundation schools of the whole system, and the standards of the higher schools can be maintained only by the quality and character of the work done here. As has already been indicated, they have suffered greatly in their work by reason of the unusual amount of sickness. And while not so much progress has been made, especially in the lower grades, as in other years, a good found- ation has been laid and more rapid progress will be made upon the return of normal conditions.
We were unable to try out the Winnetka System, as we had planned, for the reasons already given; but under more favorable
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conditions it may be well to give the system a fair trail in one of the primary rooms. These grades have lacked sufficient reading material. This we have recently tried to supply, but the want is still felt and further additions to this part of our equipment should be provided as soon as possible. The teachers have been very patient and uncomplaining, but under the present pressing ne- cessity, they should be given some encouragement, if the stand- ards of attainment are to be reached before June.
The penmanship in the grades has improved, and the letters received at the office each month show more care in preparation, a larger content, and better workmanship. I hope the Committee will see a way to renew the practice of giving prizes for this work, as in years past. It was a great stimulus to the whole school membership, and a worth-while practice which I hope may again have a place in our school program.
The Linebrook School.
This is our only rural school. It is nearly five miles from the center of the town, and some of the children live a mile or a mile and a half beyond the school house. To transport these children, especially the smaller ones, such a distance in all sea- sons and in all kinds of weather, is out of the question. It is too much to ask or expect of any parents to consent to having their children separated from them six or seven hours each school day, especially as so many things might befall them during that interval.
More than this there is an economic factor to be taken into the consideration. Not a few of these children belong to fam- ilies where the fathers work for the owners of the surrounding farms. Without school privileges for these children, farm help cannot be secured, and the farmer stands to lose in both land and production values.
So far for the negative side of the proposition. But there is another side which contains many elements of a genuinely pos-
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itive value. There are the school, the church, and the homes of these people --- three of the great outstanding landmarks of our civilization --- and these are all functioning in this little neighbor- hood far more effectively than in any other community in the whole town. The schoolhouse has become a real community center. The people, both old and young, gather here for social and educational purposes, and on most occasions the room is crowded to overflowing. Home talent is utilized to the fullest extent, and an effort is being made to regain something of that prominence in certain special lines which this neighborhood once so rightfully enjoyed. A good start has been made and we have reason to believe that the future is assured. We feel that Linebrook Parish will be a good place in which to live.
During the year electric lights have been installed, thus per- mitting the use of the stereopticon lantern; a new floor has been laid, and the ground in front of the building partially graded. Arrangements with the librarian, Mrs. Baxter, have been made whereby books from the Public Library will be sent to the school once a fortnight. These will be placed in charge of the teacher, who will be responsible for their proper distribution to both the children and to people of the neighborhood. Mag- azines, books and papers will be contributed for a prospective reading table.
A few necessary improvements should be made as soon as the weather permits. The walls and ceiling should be painted and real slate blackboards should take the place of those that have done service for the last fifty years.
By continuing the grading beyond the westerly end of the buil- ding, and painting the outside of the building itself, the appear- ance of the whole plant would be greatly improved.
Too much cannot be said in commendation of Mrs. Jahnke and the work she has done for this school and neighborhood. She has been the one moving, energizing force that made these improvements possible. She has given of her time and strength
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and her devotion to the work of these improvements has been given in unstinted measure. She has secured a response and an appreciation that is as gratifying as it is rare. We trust that the good work begun may continue through the coming years, and that the people of this community may take a just pride in their school and reap the full enjoyment of its opportunities and privileges.
Evening School.
Just where the greatest need exists and should be realized, we get the least encouragement.
The Evening School was opened in October just after a carefully planned drive had been made. The proprietor of the Opera House threw upon the screen, night after night, for a whole week or more, announcements stating when and where this school was to be held. These announcements were in three different languages and must have reached a large number of people. Posters were scattered about the different parts of the town, and the reporter of the Salem News did his part in inform- ing his many readers of the advantages to be derived from at- tendance at this school. More than this, there was a genuine effort of personal soliciting. Promises were given that classes in any subject would be formed provided ten members would register and agree to attend throughout the course. Every pos- sible inducement was given to insure a large membership, but when the time came, fewer than forty presented themselves for registration.
These were divided into three classes, two in Americaniza- tion work and one in Typewriting. A few additions were made to the first two classes, and their members have shown the same earnest effort to master the difficulties of speaking and writing English, as has characterized these people from the very first. They are responsive, eager to learn, and are willing to forego any pleasure or to make any sacrifice in the successful pursuit
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of this knowledge. Some of them are reading quite well, though they knew not a single word of English when they first came to school. Their writing, too, is exceptionally good, in some cases beautiful, and their progress far outstrips that made by some of our day pupils. They are foreigners, men and women together, but they each have a purpose and are striving most commend- ably to reach their goal. Many of them are married; some have children in our public schools. These are making every effort to the end that they may converse with their own children in the language of our schools.
The class in typewriting died a natural death; that is, if the word natural has any relation to that which is usual or customary as determined by observation and experience.
The class started with seventeen members. It was warned that it would be discontinued when the membership fell below ten. I think it took just four evenings --- it may have been five --- to accomplish this remarkable feat in rapid transit. There were a few foreigners in the class, but too few of them to give stability or to make for permanency in the organization, and the class was given up.
It is in this as in many other matters in life, --- much depends upon the choice you make. If our young people place pleasure above the serious preparation for life, then, to that degree are they limiting their possibilities for successful living. Knowledge and skill were never at a larger premium than today, and these come only through persistent effort and struggle. The question is, is it worth while? It's just a matter of choice.
New Phases of the Year's Work.
Education has been defined as a preparation for complete living. One of the objectives, agreed upon by educators gen- erally, is a preparation for one's leisure.
The hours of labor have been shortened considerably. In-
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stead of working ten and twelve hours a day, we work but eight. Fully one-fifth has been lopped off our working time and may be devoted to other uses. What shall we do with it? How shall we use it to our best advantage, to our highest physical, mental and spiritual good? It is a matter of choice largely, and choice is determined by our ideals. To fix our ideals and to help us in making a choice has become the function of the school, and so, by common consent, we have fixed upon music as the one great source of both pleasure and profit. Music, too, is the universal language.
The Music supervisor is already working with the grade children with a scheme of music appreciation. This is accom- plished by means of the victrola and a carefully graded series of records. The children are taught to recognize the various in- struments used in making the record and also to distinguish the different tonal qualities, the phrasing, and the movements to be found in our best musical compositions. The children of Ger- many, of Italy, and of England, are far ahead of us in this matter of music appreciation. Their musical tastes have been devel- oped and cultivated; ours have been neglected. Any effort, then, along this line of music interpretation should be consid- ered as a great boon to the rising generation, for it will add much to the enjoyment of its leisure.
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