Bringing Children up to Grade
- Author:
Carrie A. Ritter,
Syracuse, N. Y. Why must we endeavor to bring children up to grade in school work? Why have they fallen below? Why, since few children are doing all they might, must it be necessary for any to have extra tutoring? Or, if not up to grade, why should they not be left to repeat the grade until such time as they are capable of doing advanced work? Partly must we endeavor to give them the desired requirements to please ambitious parents, who wish to see their offspring advance as swiftly up the educational ladder as do the neighbors’ children. The main point is to arouse interest, for it is much easier to maintain it than to gain it. Once let the child get in a way of studying and a satisfaction in results of work accomplished will spring up, then half the battle is won.
Teachers tell us that for many a child there is a decided turning point in his educational life, a time when he comes to realize why he goes to school. From that time on there is less difficulty. To carry him safely past this point and send him forward, rather than let him drop out of school is one great reason for trying to bring him to grade, lest he become discouraged by repeated failures. Give a child a purpose that he may enter upon some chosen work, and he will study. A boy must know mathematics that he may study engineering, a girl must have a certain training before she can study nursing.
It seems to me that lack of attention and desire to study, playing and whispering in study hours, wasting time by inattention and watching some other pupil at work or at some mischievous prank, absence from school often with parents’ sanction, rather than want of ability, cause a child to fall behind in school. There are, of course, many exceptions to this, children who are “slow” for various reasons, particularly from physical defects. The slow pupil cannot quickly grasp the teacher’s meaning in her explanations to the class. While he is puzzling it out, she has gone on to something else with the quicker ones. Much is lost to the slower, and naturally his interest lags since the connection of ideas is gone. Have you not felt a similar lack when attempting to listen to a sermon or lecture of which you could not get the whole? Presently you gave up trying to hear and went to thinking of something else.
Often the children who fail are from families where the elders read almost nothing and the youngsters themselves rarely touch even a newspaper or magazine, so they lack general information. We know a young contractor and his wife who read little beyond the daily paper or a fashion-magazine?and not always those. They seem to know nothing of the pleasure aside from the information to be obtained even from fiction. “No, we have no time to read,” the wife says.
Once we fell to describing to them a story which dealt with certain phases of life in the Ozarks. They listened very attentively, finally the man said, “Why, I didn’t know you could learn about places from stories. I believe I would like that kind.” They are an industrious couple, who admire knowledge in others but they simply do not know where or how to get it for themselves. This is not due to lack of time, as they thought, for they have spent more time in telling what they had to do than in doing it. We know two boys past sixteen years of age who have not completed the elementary subjects, spelling, history and grammar being those in which they fail repeatedly. The mother of one told us her son never read anything. When we mentioned a question in the state examination in which he had failed, “State who each of five of the following is: William Jennings Bryan, Colonel Goethals, Elihu Root, George Dewey, Robert E. Peary, Charles S. Whitman, Thomas A. Edison,” she said, “He would not even know who Bryan is, for he does not read such things.”
A mother may do much to help her child along in school, yet the principal of one school tells us that when the child must be brought up to grade he refuses to accept the mother as instructor, though she may be capable, because she so rarely fulfills her promise to attend to the lessons. He prefers a professional tutor who can give all her attention to the work.
Even if the mother intends conscientiously to hear lessons, the only possible way is to have a specific time for them with which nothing must interfere. Many things happen in a house to break in upon home lessons,?visitors, social and business engagements, household demands, “so we’ll put off your lesson today, Robert, and surely do a double amount tomorrow.” When tomorrow with its new demands comes, again the lessons are slighted. Often it is only one subject in which the child fails. Dr Naomi Norsworthy after experiments with school children says, “It seems probable that certain functions which are of importance in schoolwork, such as quickness in arithmetic, accuracy in spelling, attention to forms, are highly specialized and not secondary results of some general function. That just as there is no such thing as a general memory so there is no such thing as general quickness or accuracy or observation. * * * Accuracy in spelling is independent of accuracy in multiplication and quickness in arithmetic is not found with quickness in marking misspelled words.”
This is rather a broad statement which will bear investigation since we are inclined to expect a child accurate in one subject to be accurate in others. Yet this would carry out the accepted idea that a pupil who excels in mathematics is not good at foreign languages. From experience we know this is not always true, but often when there is a decided preference for one the other is poor. One writer states as her belief that children do not work well at school because they have never been taught to work at home, that the child who from babyhood has had some definite chores to do daily will concentrate his attention in school. She adds, “Deplorable as are the evils of child labor, they are not as farreaching and destructive as the evils of child idleness.” There are certainly extremes in this matter, and it would be interesting to follow out a few examples to see what the best and poorest pupils did out of school hours.
Very few children over-study, though we have known a few, a very few, who were intent upon study, to the sacrifice of health, because they set themselves high standards of work.
More often children who claim to study a large number of hours out of school hours are not studying, they are sitting with a book or paper before them, merely looking at it or idly drawing lines, not even pictures on the paper or margins of the book. Mabel, who had to be tutored to keep her up with her grade and her parents’ ambitions, took much credit to herself because she spent two hours daily on home work. Her paper bore crude figures, she never was known to complete any lesson assigned, either long or short, showing that the two hours were wasted. She could have finished the work in half an hour.
An excellent story is told by a teacher of how a class of boys were told they might go home a half hour early if their work was completed. They accomplished it easily, and the next day a similar amount was given with permission to go even earlier if the work was well done. They did it in even less time and the time was shortened each day until they accomplished in a morning what had formerly taken all day. We tried this out with a boy we were bringing up to grade and found he could do in twenty minutes what had taken one hour if he did not want to be dismissed quickly to go to a ball game. It was well done, too, neatly and accurately, if written. Supervised lessons are what the backward child needs, to be taught how to study, how to concentrate. “Unfortunately many have not learned the greatest and most important lesson of all? to do exactly what he is told to do.”
In some schools far too much work is supposed to be prepared at home, where it is not prepared, for the average house is not a good place in which to study. There is too much going on. The child is allowed to cease his preparation on the slightest pretext. We see very small children carrying home many books, we wonder if it is not wiser to have them do that work under the teacher’s eye. W. C. Bagley in “The Educative Process” states that “the mind is constantly open to distractions?it always tends to follow the line of least effort.” We all know how that is from personal experience, we know how our own attention can be diverted from our work and we have seen our pupils’ attention drawn away by a dog coming into the room or some person stopping at the door. Immediately the child is alert to investigate this new matter. Mr. Bagley adds that a slight distraction may be essential to the best work, but the power to go on working among distracting influences comes only after long training. “The capacity for work is the capacity for sustained effort. It means concentration, organization and permanency of purpose.” These we find lacking in the child who is not up to grade, and these are the things we must strive to inculcate, for they are of more real value in after life than lessons from textbooks. He speaks also of the tendency to revert to type which is latent in all of us, a return to ancestral conditions?”It finds expression in love for change, the desire?sometimes overwhelming?to do ‘something else.’ ” To overcome this we must develop the “willpower,” and “self-control.” “While the desire to do ‘something else’ is always latent the desire to do nothing at all is perhaps more frequently in evidence,” but “always to obey the dictates of interest would mean the instant arrest of all progress.” Doris, a backward maiden of thirteen who needed much tutoring, said one day, “We wanted to go down to the auditorium and play a game, but Miss Sharp wouldn’t let us.” This is the attitude of many a child towards lessons, to get through them somehow, then play, or even play first. The desire and thought are on the side of the game.
Yet Mr. Bagley says, “It is safe to say that the point will never be reached when pain and drudgery can be entirely eliminated from the educative process.” And should it be, since in after life we all have many disagreeable duties, which cannot be eliminated from our daily lives?
We have heard it said that the valedictorian of a class rarely makes a success in life. This may be true of those who simply memorize what is given, but it is not true of the boy or girl who bears highest honor because he or she has dug it out. The real worker or thinker is not going to fail by and by out in the world; he has learned to work. Carrying off high honors does not always mean that the bearer is especially brilliant, or that knowledge was easily attained. The child may have had to struggle for what he obtained. We are inclined to expect more of those with a high record. There was the boy with a high record in one high school class who runs a small coal-yard. Now, it is no disgrace to sell coal?we all need it?but some might sneer at that occupation for an honor student, as being not just what one would expect of him. There is more real satisfaction to the teacher in bringing up to the standard a slow child who is trying to learn, than in dealing with those who think themselves “smart.” The results may not appear great, but the final victory is a delight to parents, teacher and child, for the critical point being passed the child may keep in the upward path doing credit to his teacher.
A child loves novelty. The lessons that stand out most distinctly in my own mind after many years are the first I ever had in physiology, upon the bones, taught in a primary grade by means of a little poem. Then, too, there is a memory of the first drawing lesson in a real drawing book, a slate having been used previously. And that recalls the outside of that book and reminds us that teachers never know just how children are receiving the information given them; that is one reason they fail, because they do not comprehend. This drawing book had “Boston, L. Prang,” printed at the bottom. Now, of course, that is plain to a grown-up, but I read it as one name, thinking the man’s name was Boston L. Prang. It was years before experience in punctuating was great enough for me to realize the mistake. To this day when I see the name of Prang it recalls Boston L. This is not unlike the story of a boy who learned the definition of the equator, then described it as a “menagerie-lion running around the middle of the world.” Set the average child to reading a page of history or geography aloud and see how he jumbles and miscalls words, then wonder if he fails, never having caught the real idea.
There is much criticism of the examination method. It is going out of our lower schools, but is it out of our colleges? It is a fact that while promotion upon daily lessons is our ideal, there are children who shine in written tests who make a wretched job of a class recitation. Some are “scared stiff” when asked to recite, diffidence and shyness are often mistaken for sullenness and stupidity and poor preparation. Of course, ease in public recitation is a habit, but it is one which some never acquire, and a teacher who does not understand character will frighten away what little the child knows. Given a sheet of paper and a pencil they can express themselves. Yet on the other hand there are children frightened by the very mention of an examination who cannot do as well as they do at recitation. The 75 per cent method properly conducted does away with much nervous strain for a majority of the school. Yet if we must have tests every few days we might just as well call them examinations. One of our schools promotes on the monthly work and the teachers’ judgment; no examinations at the end of the term. But they have “tests” in every subject during the last week. Where’s the difference?
Here is someone’s opinion,?”The virtue of the examination lies in its power to force strenuous mental effort to the task of organizing a large body of facts and principles into coherent system. * * * They should be large and comprehensive, so formulated that they will bring out and exercise not the memory for details but the capacity to grasp large masses of knowledge and weld the separate facts and principles into systematic unities.” We cannot yet quite do as Gene Stratton Porter suggests in “Laddie,” but we might make school work more attractive so we would need to bring fewer children up to grade. “Schoolhouses were made wrong. If they must be, they should be built in a woods pasture beside a stream, where you could wade, swim and be corns fortable in summer, and slide and skate in winter. The windowshould be cut to the floor and stand wide open, so the birds and butterflies could pass through. You ought to learn your geography by climbing a hill, walking through a valley, wading creeks, making islands in them, and promontories, capes and peninsulas along the bank. You should do your arithmetic sitting under trees adding hickory nuts, subtracting walnuts, multiplying butternuts and dividing hazelnuts. You could use apples for fractions and tin cups for liquid measure. You could spell everything in sight and this would teach you the words that are really used in the world.” Wouldn’t that be delightful, children and teachers?
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