Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/745

Rh than to the high school. You do not wish to have your students tell you from memory the characters of the Sauropsida as distinguished from the Ichthyopsida. What you want is the answer to their own questionings of the frog and the turtle.

I was lately present at a high-school examination in zoölogy. The teacher gave a number of the stock questions, such as "Describe the Gasteropoda." "What are the chief differences between the domestic turkey and the turkey of Honduras?" "How do Asiatic and African elephants differ?" "On which foot of the ornithorhynchus does the webbing extend past the toes?" and so on. At last he said: "I will now give you a practical question: A few days ago we had a frog in the class, and all of you saw it; now write out all the characteristics of the sub-kingdom, class, and order to which the frog belongs."

This is all useless. The definitions of these classes and orders do not concern the child. To the working naturalist these names are as essential as the names of the stations on the road to a railway engineer. They belong to his business, but the names and distances of railway stations do not form part of any good work in primary geography. You do not need to teach your students that vertebrates are divided into mammals, birds, reptiles, batrachians, and fishes. It is not true in the first place, and, if it were, it is not relevant to them. Stick to your frog, if you are studying frogs, and he will teach you more of the science of animals than can be learned from all the memorized classifications that you can bracket out on a hundred rods of blackboard!

The prime defect in our schools is not, after all, that the teachers do not know the subjects they teach, but that they do not know nor care for the purpose of their teaching. In other words, they do not know how to teach. The book is placed in their hands by the school board, and they teach by the book. If the book comes to them wrong-side up, their teaching is forever inverted. That this is true, the statistics gathered last year from the high schools of Indiana, by Prof. Evermann, very clearly show. It is no wonder that a superintendent is needed for every dozen teachers. A good teacher should know the end for which he works, and then he can adapt his means to fit this end.

I once visited a large high school, one of the best in the country, with a science teacher whose studies have won him the respect of his fellow-workers. But for some reason, on that day at least, he failed to bring his own knowledge into the class-room. I heard him quizzing a class of boys and girls on animals—not on the animals of the woods and fields, not on the animals before them, for there were none, but on the edentates of South America. An especial point was to find out whether it is the nine-banded armadillo (novemcinctus) or the three-banded armadillo