The Use of Methods and Devices
- Author:
Carrie A. Ritter,
Syracuse, N. Y.
The special teaching which is being done by the writer aims to discover why children do not get on in school. It endeavors to stimulate them to succeed, and especially to help the defective and deficient.
Often the pupil continues in school but is tutored out of hours to keep him up with his classes. This is frequently done at the recommendation of the teacher, who is not supposed to do tutoring in addition to her regular school work. In such cases the teacher sends a written statement of what the child lacks, what sort of work he is doing in school, and what he is expected to cover in that term’s work. At first she sends a daily statement of lessons but after the first week it usually fails to be sent. It would be difficult to determine whether she loses interest, or thinks the special teacher can run alone on her own responsibility, or whether she considers the teaching amounts to so little it is a waste of her time to send statements. At all events she accepts the word of the special teacher at the end of the term that all the ground has been covered which she designated. and we infer that the pupil showed improvement in his school work. Sometimes the special teacher has the entire training of the child when he is unfit to be with normal children in school. First it is necessary to find out how little or how much the pupil knows and wherein lies the trouble. There are various ways of ascertaining this. When one means is unsuccessful another is tried. Usually the first or second written lesson shows the deficiencies but not always. Some children at the first lesson appear brighter than they really are, for they throw all their energies into making a good impression. Some are not accustomed to doing written work and hesitate over it. Some are nervous or excited in oral work, especially in reciting to a stranger and do even worse than usual. Also sometimes they feel that the report given of them by teacher or parents when they were consigned to the tutor’s care, showed them as hard cases who could not or would not learn. Naturally they are depressed by this feeling. To win the child’s confidence first, then to teach him to have faith in his own ability and to respect himself is the work of the teacher.
After years of experience one naturally looks for physical defects that might cause the trouble when the child does not get on well at school. Often circumstances are found not conducive to study. Children who go auto-riding or upon long pleasure excursions all day Sunday are unfit for work Monday. They are, as they themselves express it, “just dead,” that is they are tired out and the brain is sluggish. Their fatigue affects their memory. They are irritable and easily get into quarrels. They have to drive themselves to work, sometimes even their writing is shaky, like that of an elderly person. Driving oneself or being driven by a teacher is not conducive to good work, and little is accomplished. The child might just as well be sent home to rest or play. John used to come to school on Mondays completely used up. It was discovered finally that his Sunday afternoons were given to long drives in the car, followed by visiting and a heavy dinner. The strain told. Evening performances of all kinds and late hours, especially when the child has taken part in the entertaining, tend to lower the standard of work he can do next day. It may sound severe, but a child ought not to be out in the evening at all during the school week. Of the “movies”?judge for yourself! It is not easy to convince parents that these activities have anything to do with poor lessons. They think the teacher is to blame if the child is not promoted, or the school board that devises too much work for their sensitive darlings. Here is a case in point. Mabel was not a poor student, in fact she could do fair work if she put time enough on it, but her mother had social ambitions. Night after night Mabel had to be driven to some church or social function that she might catch a desirable husband, for Mabel was in the High School. She begged to be allowed to stay at home to study, but pleadings were of no avail, she had to go or there was a scene. The mother called her an ungrateful, selfish child to be unwilling to further these worldly ambitions. Consequently Mabel barely made her grades, and the mother declared favoritism was shown by the teachers, for her daughter was as bright as the honor students. The years have passed? Mabel is unmarried and with no definite profession, but having to earn her bread.
Is there any known method of bringing the child to study profitably? Surely many of them. Of necessity the method varies according to the age, grade, and mental capacity of the child, also according to what is expected of him. If he is to keep up with a class in school, the work must conform somewhat at least with that being taught there. With the defective, many devices are necessary and infinite patience on the part of parents and teachers over slow advances.
This being a specialty in teaching, the great point is to arouse interest by any method or mixture of methods. These are read about in magazines and books, then subjected to experiment. After a time one gets to know what is most likely to succeed but it is always well to watch for new suggestions.
One idea becomes prominent in dealing with those children who have fallen behind a class,?that a lesson given to be clone, must be done. Work carried home to be done, brought incomplete with the smiling statement “I didn’t do it, I didn’t have time” or “I didn’t know how” or “I went over to Jean’s house and we got to playing games so I forgot my lessons” must be done for the next day before anything new is taken up. One educational writer says the trouble is that children do not know how to obey, to do exactly what they are told. Never having to obey at home, they cannot do it at school. Generally speaking there is not very much use in sending work home to be done. It had better be done under the teacher’s eyes, then we can avoid a great deal of waste in time and energy.
Some children will lose their lessons. Bertha is good girl but she loses her papers, she never knows what lessons were assigned. She forgets what was said or loses the pages she had marked. She is not sufficiently interested to remember the connection between tomorrow’s lesson and today’s, so as to be able to find it in the book. She is a trial?all teachers have seen her. She has not yet conquered her proclivity to lose things?her books, her sewing, her purse, her rubbers?she never knows where they are, but she is trying. Her mother has the same failing of losing and letting things go half finished. Can we blame the daughter? Loose papers are fastened to her history by means of patent-fasteners, and unless she loses her history, which is not improbable, they are there. In time we hope to teach her to take care of her possessions.
In sharp contrast is Felicia, a little defective, who puts away all her materials before she goes. If she takes home a book, she remembers to bring it back next day. She never forgets material affairs, only her lessons, for her deficient mind cannot retain them. The task of the special teacher is to teach the child “to get a grasp on his work’’ as one principal expresses it. The teacher who has just graduated, or been at work only a few years, or who never investigates but keeps on doing the same thing year after year, will tell just what to do and how to do it. But where one has been experimenting and testing, say, for twenty years and has run up against all kinds of snags in the way of children and parents, one realises how little is known about the much discussed “child-study” and how much has yet to be learned. Many of the books written upon this inexhaustible subject do not seem to throw much light upon it. “The Backward Child” by Barbara Spofford Morgan gives many excellent devices and tests which, as she says, “do not require elaborate material nor involve unusual methods. They are intended to utilise the things that a child does every day and to make them serve the purpose of builidng up the mental faculties in which he is weak.” She also states that any single kind of training is not a cure-all,?”The individual difficulty is the thing and any device, fantastic or obvious, which tends to remove that difficulty is the only cure worth considering.”
With each individual the method may have to be different. A visitor was present when a deaf mute was brought by her mother to see if she could be taught anything. The visitor heard much of the conversation with the mother. After they had gone, she became insistent to know what we were going to do, how we would begin the lessons. She was told, much to her disgust, we did not know, it would depend entirely on how the thing worked out. With the troubled child the first point is to become acquainted so he will be at his ease with the teacher. The plan of operation works itself out. When one thinks of the multitude of things there are to do to interest a child, it would not seem hard to find something with which to begin. Different things are tried until one fits the case of this particular pupil.
The special teacher has many books on all subjects, primers, readers, histories, arithmetics, English books?language and grammar proper. She has blocks, cards, colored paper, beads, crayons, dominoes, spelling books, sets of letters, toothpicks, pitcures, puzzles, a great variety of things and is getting more all the time. Children like to make something to illustrate their idea?draw pictures or cut paper?to help express their meaning, their words seem to them inadequate. Sometimes these illustrations are grotesque and totally unlike the reality, but they seem to convey an idea in the child’s mind. Sometimes if they portray some object with which the pupil is unfamiliar, the teacher may discover wherein lies the wrong impression given by the description the child has heard. One of the funniest things ever seen was a set of drawings by a class of city children, many of them members of an orphanage family, showing a carrot, tops and tiny roots. Most of them knew a carrot only as seen in the markets, the results were queer yellow and green vegetables.
The child’s sense of proportion is also often sadly at fault. A little pupil was asked how large a playmate was. She said, as large as a paste-board box which had held stockings. One did not need to see the playmate to know this was no comparison. After a little training in relative sizes, she could get it much nearer right. Little children may draw illustrations in their writing lessons, generally balls, and color them to learn the colors. They may be crude but when the child can get one fairly round, she is proud of it. There’s nothing like a child’s imagination to help out reality.
Sometimes when the pupil has had previous instruction it is advisable to take away the book with which he is to a degree familiar, and has studied with only a partial understanding and substitute an unknown book, because he may say when you designate a lesson, “Oh, yes, we had that, I know it” and so fail to study it, though he does not really know it thoroughly. You cannot interest him in it as you can in a new lesson though the new one is the same lesson with a new setting. This is especially true of language work.
Arlene was a pupil during school vacation time. When asked to write a story about a picture or from an outline of a composition, she could not originate anything, but only write what the teacher or her schoolmates had said in class the term before. A book was substituted, which she had never seen. Oral instruction, if things can can be told in a way to hold the child’s attention, is often helpful for new words or names can be explained and illustrations taken from common things he has seen.
No one has ever been able to expalin why children prefer stories about animals, especially those supposed to talk, to tales about real children. With the paper-bound books furnished by many educational publishing houses at five and ten cents each, one may get plenty of supplementary reading of the best quality. Current magazines often have pretty stories, too, and attractive pictures. Do not think because you like a book the child must perforce enjoy it. Tastes differ in persons of a like age and a child’s opinion differs greatly from that of a grown-up, because of development and literary transition. Some stories have never been known to fail to interest. When the reading must be very simple, the children, especially the deficient ones, prefer ” The Three Bears’’ to anything else. They read and reread it, yet they seem to never tire of it. Next perhaps comes the story of the ” Goose that laid the Golden Eggs,” which varies considerably in the telling, and one child adores “Mother Hubbard.”
Charles B. Gilbert says that school readers contain much “silly, idle thoughts,” that do not really train the child mind at all, except in learning the words. One of that variety appeared not long ago, such a jumble of words without any definite story was never met before. One was about a boy who went out and sat “on a wet, mossy rock,” naturally he caught cold. “I think he was a silly boy,” said the little defective pupil, “anybody would know better than that.” Mr. Gilbert continues that there is “an abundance of available material in the natural activities of children and in the delightful field of children’s lore to equip any primer builder. Reading books from highest to lowest, should satisfy the two main desires behind all voluntary reading, getting information and finding enjoyment and inspiration Children should come to look upon a book as a treasure-house to be approached with glad anticipation.” When one compares the old school and reading books of our ancestors with our modern works of art called readers, compares especially the famous New England Primer with its crude illustrations in which you could almost tell a tree from a man, it seems wonderful that any child felt interest enough in reading to persist in it. Yet one can get excellent results from a reader absolutely unillustrated?it is far better than one with pictures that do not tally with the reading matter, for children are quick to detect these incongruities.
Standing before the book-shelves in our public libraries, we see the multitude of books upon child life and training, upon methods, upon every phase of the child problem, realise, too, the vastness of the subject. And yet, it may be questioned whether we are going to make, with all our investigations and our methods and devices in general, better men and women than those who absorbed education in the primitive “little red school-house,” or the log cabin of the decade before. Some one has said,?”Discipline of mind and character is the first object, all else is secondary to character building.” One thing we may strive to do, assisted by the physicians, to deal wisely with the backward, the defective, the wayward; through a knowledge of his physical and mental misfortunes train him as far as possible to cease to be a burden to the community and to find some joy for himself in life.
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