USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > Weymouth > Town annual report of Weymouth 1878 > Part 6
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DISCIPLINE.
During the year the methods of discipline have waxed much more humane. The number of cases of corporal punishment in the earlier months of the present school year has not reached twenty per cent of the number in the corresponding months of 1877. To the few teach- ers who, for years, have not inflicted physical chastisement, additions have been made from old and new members of the corps. Schools in which fifty whippings a month were less than the usual allowance, and were followed by a rather-to-be-expected neglect of study and abuse of teacher, have been conducted successfully without a blow ; and in other schools, before thrashed into a spirit of insubordination, the rod has been reserved, as it ought to be, if used at all, for the few rare
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extreme cases that seem to pass beyond the power of personal control possessed by the teacher. This whole question of corporal punishment is one of limit of good-nature, skill in knowledge of children and in teaching them, and that indefinable thing which we may call personal power. Every teacher possessing these qualities in the requisite de- gree should certainly be encouraged to use the higher means at her command, and leave the lower to the necessities of those less fortu- nate. It may be desirable to restrict, by regulation, all corporal punishment to blows with a rattan upon the left hand, to be inflicted only after hours and out of the presence of other scholars.
In connection with this topic of discipline inay be mentioned the ill effect of the use of class-rooms, to which assistant teachers take pupils for recitation. Most of these small rooms in our buildings are fortunately not now in use. Where. they are in use, the temptation to sociability proffered by the transfer of the pupils from the separate desks of the main room to the contiguous sittings of the recitation settees adds much to the difficulties of the less-experienced teacher. Super- intendent Harris, in the St. Louis Report of 1873-4, says, " It is taken for granted that the style of building is not the old-fashioned type of a large study-room, presided over by a principal, and with small recitation-rooms opening out from it, in which the assistants hear the classes recite, when sent to them from the large room. This type of schoolhouse, invented for the purposes of the Lancasterian system, has gone out of date."
Equally antiquated, and yet more a hindrance to order, independent work, health, and personal self-respect, are the double desks yet to be found in twenty-three of our forty-five school-rooms. The unneces- sary burden imposed upon a teacher by the retention of these double . desks can hardly be estimated at its full extent by anybody who has not had practical acquaintance with the working of rooms seated thus, and of rooms with single desks. During the year old double, desks have been sawed into single in one of the Central-street rooms ; eco- nomical use has been made of some single desks not in service by placing a few in the Athens Primary room to meet the the demand for new sittings there, and by substituting others for the double desks remaining in the Tremont-street lower room and the Perkins upper room ; and one room in the Mt. Pleasant house has been fitted with the admirable single seats and desks manufactured by the Michigan School Furnishing Company.
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TRAINING.
Trained workers are demanded in all modern fields of labor. Schools preparing for the ministry, law, medicine, science, the mechanic arts, the æsthetic arts, and teaching have their well-recog- nized value. There are doubtless other sources of preparation. Daily contact for years with an Agassiz may make one know what teaching is. Treatises on pedagogics are mines of information. But the train- ing-school gives opportunity to apply principles and methods while learning them.
Experience and study may make amends in time for lack of early training. However obtained, acquaintance with correct principles and good methods of teaching, as well as sound scholarship and natural fitness, are absolutely necessary for real success in school-life to-day. The teacher may be born, and not made ; but she certainly can be made a vast deal better by proper training before she enters the school-room, and her pupils and herself be spared many of the risks of experiment- ing to find but the ways which experience always approves.
The Normal Classes, established, and directed to certain lines of work, in our High Schools ; the training class, which met the superin- tendent once a week during the last three months of last school-year; the various teachers' meetings, and the addresses of leaders in educa- tion given occasionally through the year ; the keen discussions at the May Convention of Teachers at Norwood; and the thoroughly enjoyable and profitable two days' work of the Weymouth Institute, held by the State Board of Education in November, have served to train our teachers, and those wishing to become teachers, to do their work in new and better ways.
These agencies have been supplemented by suggestions made in reports, circulars, and courses of study, and during visits to school- rooms ; and by visits of teachers to schools, in this and other towns, named to them as likely to exhibit, in more or less complete appli- cation, the principles and methods profitable for them to study. Rightly prepared therefor, the intelligent teacher who has gone to a well-conducted school to find out quietly wherein and why its work is done better than hers, has done the very best thing to fit herself to be helped to further advance. Some of our teachers have devoted from five to ten days during the past year and a half to study of their profession by such inspection of schools, and faithfully used all other opportunities of training offered them. The study of manuals of in- struction recommended has also thrown much light upon the problem many teachers have been endeavoring to solve, - how to keep and
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teach school on correct principles and by the methods approved as best in the present advanced manner of common-school education.
Scholarship is another requisite qualification for a teacher in these days. To stimulate teachers to train themselves in this respect for better work at their posts by offering them an occasion on which they could show the results of their study, the superintendent, when an examination for teachers had been suggested from several quarters, to facilitate business by presenting the matter in due form, prepared a plan whereby an examination would be proffered the following April, in common-school studies only, to be supplemented by another in the succeeding November, in two higher branches, either one language and one science, or one language and one branch of mathematics, or one science and one branch of mathematics, - the choice to lie between Latin and French, botany and physics, algebra and geometry. Only two of these studies are required, and neither of the two need be a language ; and this supplementary examination is not to occur until three months and more of the next school year has elapsed. The common-school studies are ten in number: Reading, writing, spelling, drawing, music, language (including grammar), geography, history, physiology, arithmetic. Each one of these has direct applicancy in every grade, as do also botany, zoology, and other sciences, and parts of geometry. A usable knowledge of each study mentioned would make better teachers in every grade. Besides, in the treadmill of the school-room, every teacher will deteriorate who does not strenuously pursue constantly some study outside of the necessities of her regular routine.
These examinations should test not only knowledge of facts, but acquaintance with their best use in the school-room. They should be graded to suit the needs of the several lines of work, and while the examinations for Primary teachers might well be, in some respects, severer than those given to Grammar teachers, they should be of a dif- ferent sort. Each might omit topics that the other included, or pre- sent them in another way and for another purpose.
It may be remarked in this connection, that all through the Northern States outside of New England, and to an increasing extent in our own section, examinations of teachers are held at intervals varying from two to five years ; also that four of our own teachers have gone to Boston and passed examination at the hands of the city Board of Supervisors within the last three years.
The intellectual effort requisite in preparation for such tests is not only commendable, but is absolutely necessary to enable a teacher to improve or even to hold her own in the school-room work.
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COURSES OF STUDY.
The only departures from the courses of study printed in last year's report have been as follows : -
In arithmetic, the work of the Middle Primary grade in developing Number has been limited to twenty as the maximum to be touched in combinations. The limit fifty was set in the county course in com- promise with towns that had attempted much more. It is my own judgment that twenty is the proper limit for the second year, and one hundred for the third year, and in that opinion the superintend- ents in the county coincide. All the principles and operations can be taught within the latter limit, and more easily securely fixed in the pupil's mind with the smaller numbers ; what lies beyond is merely extension of the same. In general, the county course has taken the place of our own incomplete, and, in some respects, faulty course, in the Primary grades.
The superintendents mentioned, the officers of the State Board, and our own head-teachers, substantially agree that instruction in Arith- metic might be confined to the following topics, and our work has been mainly in accordance with this general agreement of opinion : -
TOPICS. 1. Development of Number by objects. 2. Expression of numbers. After three years' study of the relations of numbers, in- cluding decimals in one place and common fractions to tenths, then, 3. Applications of the four fundamental rules to (a) Integral Num- bers, to (b) Fractional Numbers, both Decimal (including Metric sys- tem) and Common, to (c) Mixed Numbers, to (d) Compound Num- bers ; and 4. Applications of Reduction to (a) Fractional Numbers and to (b) Compound Numbers. 5. Analysis of problems. ª 6. Percentage and its applications in (a) Insurance, (b) Commission, (c) Business Discount, and (d) Profit and Loss ; and, with the element of time, in (a) Interest, and (b) Bank Discount. 7. Extraction of the square root. We would omit : 1. Most contractions. 2. Multiplying or di- viding by compound parts. 3. True remainders. 4. Multiples and measures applied to large numbers. 5. Properties of numbers. 6. Much of Reduction. 7. In application of Compound Numbers, all except practical parts of Avoirdupois Weight, Distance, Sur- face, Capacity, Solids, Time, Circular and Angular Measure. 8. Repetends. 9. * Partial Payments, except United States Rule. 10. * True Discount. 11. Annual Interest. 12. * Compound Interest, except to teach to put interest with principal. 13. * Technical Prob- lems, generally. 14. * Parts of Banking, Duties, etc. 15. Pro-
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portions, both Simple and Compound, as a means of solving problems. 16. * Partnership. 17. * Averaging Accounts. 18. * Exchange. 19. Extraction of the cube root. 20. Alligation. 21. Progressions. 22. Duodecimals.
In the ninth year, such topics as are starred in this list of omissions may be taken, if the general principles are mastered. The metric system should be gradually introduced for practical use in all grades.
It will be noticed that the aim has been to throw out topics of a merely theoretical interest, antiquated or curious matter, and work for specialists, in order to secure more time for that which is of practical value to the great majority.
No Primary Arithmetic is needed, unless as a reading book in the third year. Such books as the Franklin Elementary Arithmetic treat suitably all the topics useful to three fourths of our pupils, and could profitably be taken as the basis of work from the fourth through the seventh or even eighth grades.
In geography, the use of a text-book in the Upper Primary grade was abandoned by vote of the committee, and a real knowledge of the elements of geography has been gained by many of the pupils of that grade, in conversation with their teachers about the face of nature as the child sees it. Moulding boards, improvised by some enterprising teachers, have aided in this work, and more seeing and thinking and less mere memorizing of words not alive with ideas has been done in consequence of the change from books to nature, and representations of nature.
The removal of this text-book from this grade was but a first step in a comprehensive plan. The intention was to take the Primary Geography out of the Lower Intermediate also next year, and the year after to begin the use of the new Intermediate Geography in the Middle Intermediate grade, meanwhile educating the teachers, by top- ical outlines and other means, to talk with (not to) their pupils, in a systematic way, of those elements of geography, an acquaintance with which, obtained by objective oral teaching, gives children a lively sense of the world, considered as the abode of man, and is absolutely necessary as a preparation for the study of geography proper. 'Space would thus be provided in the upper five grades for the introduction of other geographical matter as reading, and the teachers of those grades be led to a greater independence of text-books in this department, an emancipation much to be desired in all departments, and most easily begun in this.
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It seemed desirable that pupils upon entrance to the High Schools should at once be introduced to a pleasant and profitable study of modern literature in the English tongue, and that their first science should be botany, a science of observation and classification, whose material for object work is at ready command. Accordingly the for- mer was assigned for the first four, and the latter for the last four months of the first year. Both can be taken up again and carried on more extensively nearer the end of the course.
Physiology was dropped from the High School to the Grammar School course for the benefit of both grades. It is a practical study of the temple of the soul with which we ought to acquaint as many of our children as possible, and not confine its pursuit to the few who enter the High Schools. It has proved an interesting addition to the Grammar School course, being different in matter and manner of treat- ment from most of the studies in those grades.
In the direction of our schools for the past year and a half, the aim has not been to establish an over-ambitious programme, but to insist that the characteristic note of our operations should be elementary school work nicely executed.
Simple, not complex ; essentials, not multiplicity of details ; prin- ciples, not all possible applications ; thoroughness, not exhaustiveness ; no new step until the old can be taken with due facility ; practical work rather than technicalities and theory, - these changes have been rung again and again, until the new simplicity, thoroughness, and practical- ness have begun to uproot the old thickets of detail in which our children, entangled, droned out jargons of words, and struggled to per- form tricks of operation, neither whose purpose nor whose principle was well understood.
HIGH SCHOOLS.
The decision, of the committee to require that the work of each grade in these schools be fairly well done before promotion to the next grade can be granted; or a diploma of graduation be awarded, will continue to exert an increasing influence in elevating the pre- vailing standard of scholarship.
During the year just closed the two schools have been brought into closer agreement in the lines of work pursued and text-books used. English literature and language has been taken up in fresh ways and to great profit. Some sciences, especially geology, by aid of an excellent new text-book, supplemented by use of specimens and by
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outdoor expeditions ; and botany, through abundant and enthusiastic observation of plants and notation of facts and inferences in a classi- fied schedule, have been made to serve more effectively their highest purposes, that of sense-training and cultivation of the powers of infer- ence, classification, and generalization. In mathematics more indepen- dent, original work has been done, and in the languages, the beginning made last year in the exceedingly desirable art of translat- ing at sight has been followed out into a development of considerable power in this direction.
The change whereby the tedium and absenteeism due to Friday's reviews of common-school branches were made a thing of the past, and useful normal reviews, conducted on several days of each week, in certain terms in the second and fourth years of the course, were substituted therefor, is abundantly justifying itself by its results. It will continue to do so, if these normal reviews are never treated as of less consequence than other recitations, or as opportunities of release from severer work, and are carried on, not for that keeping fresh or reviving the memory of old information or that making up for imper- fections in their Grammar-school work which these scholars may well be thrown on their own responsibility to accomplish, but to furnish an opportunity, needed but heretofore unprovided, for training them in approved methods of teaching the common school branches. -
General High-school work is not only upon different material, but conducted in the scientific instead of elementary manner, and naturally removes the pupils from the mental attitude and the methods requisite in the lower grades. To acquaint them, therefore, with the correct principles of Primary instruction, and bring group's of little children to them to interest and instruct, is to do them a real service.
EXAMINATIONS.
The burden of these is felt by everybody who gives or takes them, but they are a necessary element of school-life. Properly introduced and conducted, they encourage thoroughness. The familiar classical utterance, " Reading maketh a full man ; conference, a ready man ; writing, an exact man," has applicancy here. More written work in studies generally recited orally would insure, and has of late insured, greater accuracy in expression, both as to form of words and sentences, and as to representation of ideas. The gain in our schools in this respect is quite noticeable.
To lighten the burden felt, our teachers have been urged to curtail their monthly examinations to one half their former length ; not to feel
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obliged to give ten or any specific number of questions ; to avoid intro- ducing many elements into one problem ; to give not an over-abundance, but plenty of time, especially to the younger children ; in no respect to conduct an examination so as to injure the mental or manual skill of their pupils. It may well be questioned whether the formal examina- tions for report to homes might not; at least in some studies, be less frequent.
In order that examinations may not encourage forgetfulness, and fail to aid in connecting present work with all done before that has natural relations with the present, they should not be confined to work done since the last test.
It should also be impressed upon the pupils that examinations are given that they themselves may find out how well their work has been done, and what they need to look after, quite as much as that the teacher may know this. The teacher has other sources of information, although none quite so safe and trustworthy, on the whole, as the wise and fair written examination, so delusive may be the oral performance of pupils of engaging manners, quick but not accurate perceptions, shallow receptiveness, scanty thought, and brief retentive power.
The establishment of any standard per cent before examinations are put has been avoided. Many considerations render this course reason- able, - physical conditions of pupils and of their surroundings on a given day, unfamiliar modes of presentation, impossibility of esti- mating very closely the degree of divergence from the lines of thought mainly pursued.
It has also been made prominent that examinations testing mainly strength of memory may seem to be harder, and yet result in higher per cents than examinations apparently quite simple, but framed to test power of thought and of fresh application of principles to new con- ditions. A comparison of the examinations for entrance to the High Schools the last two summers will illustrate this principle ; although differences in place, day, time allowed and manner. of conducting the examinations, come in to modify the results in figures.
We can but conclude from observation and experience that we should find our schools rapidly running down should we abandon written examinations, yet that the burden of them may safely be light -. ened.
MUSIC.
Poor music, as a school exercise, is worse than none. What sing- ing there was in our schools last year was nearly all either bad in quality of voice, or false in rhythm, or made from music and words
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unwholesome and of low standard in taste ; and much of it shared all these defects.
The simple and healthful words, the sweet and natural music of our new song-books, and Mr. Mason's own interpretation of these melo- dies, many of which have been dear to German hearts and homes for generations, were a revelation to our children and our teachers. Yet the secrets of the charming rendering which the children gave, under his leadership, were so few and simple, - to sing fast, to sing softly when singing together, to phrase by selecting " loud words " and sub- ordinating all other accent, - that several of our teachers, quickly catching his spirit, have followed his example and suggestions so suc- cessfully that music in their rooms is a very different thing from what it was five months ago ; it is a delight.
We find that at least three fourths of our teachers can learn, under proper leadership, to teach singing well; that by interchange of work those specially qualified can easily give to several rooms the benefit of the best instruction available. On the whole, no movement more sat- isfactory in its results has been made during the year than that which established music in our schools on a right basis. A day or two each week in the year from such an instructor as Mr. Mason, to whose kind- ness we are greatly indebted for the help of this year, is all that is now needed to bring all our music work up to the best standards, - a re- sult all lovers of children will desire.
DRAWING.
While other departments lacked so much of perfection, it was not deemed best to give this one the full share of attention it needs. By placing it. however, where every study worth pursuing must be placed or fall into neglect, among the topics on which examination is ex- pected, a stimulus was imparted not without effect. In some Primary Schools there had been no instruction in drawing, an omission without warrant in reason and sacrificial of one of the best opportunities for training hand and eye from the earliest years. A careful assignment was made last winter of work in drawing suited to the present capa- city of each grade, this school year and next, and the general improve- ment in the quality of the drawing in all grades will make it desirable to advance the assignment for each grade above the Lower Intermedi- ate. one step further in 1880-81, as intended. The definite ac- quaintance which some Primaries have gained with geometric form has proved of value to their work in language and number, both as directly tributary to it and through the development of a quality of sense-perception not to be secured in any other way.
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Our drawing needs to be rendered more æsthetic and more valuable as a means of cultivating accuracy of observation by representation of natural objects. The High Schools and the Upper Grammar grade should be equipped with sets of forms for the pursuit of model and object drawing.
BEGINNINGS.
In closing this report with a statement of the particulars of our ad- vance in the most practical parts of school-work, the aim will be to present, not the least advance made, nor the greatest. It might be justifiable to offer as a sample of what all might accomplish in an added year, the work of those schools most favored by co-operation of parents, and by the promptness of exceptionably good teachers to use every means of training within their reach. What is really presented is a picture of contrasts, average with average, between our aims and results at this time, and those in September, 1877.
The interest of teachers in carrying out our united purpose to do better work in the common essentials has been evidenced by care on their own part as to language, both written and spoken ; by pains taken as to handwriting ; and many other tokens of minute attention by no means unimportant in influence upon their pupils or as indicat- ing devotion to their work. The better results reached in any school of any grade would have been missed had not the desire to master their profession been wakened into new life in the teachers, and been embodied by them in efforts for their own before their pupils' advance- ment. The fountain plays not higher than its source, though ever tending towards its level.
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