Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/602

584 exercise of ingenuity in detecting allusions to what they arc studying, in remarks carelessly made by the instructor, to find out what his pet ideas and theories are. And where is the instructor who is not pleased to find his own favorite opinions ardently, and, as it seems, independently indorsed even by a student?

Another difficulty is the almost universal habit which students have of using technical or semi-technical terms which, in reality, convey to them no idea whatever. They think they have comprehended the thing when they christen it with a high-sounding name, and they do not stop to ask themselves whether they understand what the name means. The student who called a hole in a cell-wall a bioplast was quite pleased with his achievement until he was asked what a bioplast was. The suggestion that a hole might, without any great violence to the English language, be called a hole, was timely if not pleasing. Evidently, for an educated man, the art of calling a spade a spade is difficult to acquire. Day after day, one is obliged to ask students to translate their lingo—I don't know what else to call it—into English. Frequently they can not. At length they begin to see that they are only deceiving themselves by using words which they do not comprehend to describe structures which they do not understand. It frequently happens that, after a student has described an object under the microscope in what he considers fine scientific language, he admits that he does not understand the structure of the object at all, but, on making him start over again, and describe it in plain English, he finds that it all comes out clearly enough. It is evident, for instance, that, so long as a student thinks he must call all round bodies in cells nuclei, he will soon have such a stock of nuclei on hand that he will be hopelessly confused, and the matter is not much improved if, as a last resort, he indiscriminately calls some of his superfluous nuclei vacuoles and others bioplasts. The tendency to use meaningless words is not, by any means, confined to biological students, but, in a laboratory where one is examining something definite, the evil should certainly be checked by frequent demands for English translations of verbose rubbish.

In giving you a somewhat detailed account of my own experience, gentlemen, I am probably saying nothing new to you. It is an old story, and perhaps a monotonous one. If I have spent considerable time in stating the difficulties in the way of college instruction, it is because I see that we must first have a clear conception of what the difficulties are before we can make any real progress. The most serious obstacle, it seems to me, is not so much that boys are not taught biology at school, as that they are not taught to observe, but are, on the other hard, taught to memorize text-books, and to regard education as the acquiring of facts in the most rapid and easiest way. It is a mistake to suppose that he is the best teacher who gives the most information in the shortest time with the smallest expenditure