Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/52

48 will conduct classes in the lower grades. The result has been that pupils from the elementary school will next year go on with the regular work of the second-year high-school classes in modern languages, equally well trained with the pupils who began their language work in the high school, and superior to them in their feeling for the language and in their ability to pronounce it accurately.

The adjustment in English was comparatively easy. It was found that here there was considerable unnecessary repetition of material. By eliminating this and securing definite progress at each point in the course it was found possible to promote the eighth grade directly into the second-year work in high-school English. The class thus promoted this year is proving one of the best of our divisions in second-year work.

In mathematics, as I have already indicated, there is likely to be much waste. By eliminating this much may be saved, but the most effective results in mathematics teaching can not be secured without recasting our material for the upper grades of the elementary and the earlier years of the high school. Much material from constructive geometry and the use of the equation in securing the value of the unknown quantity could be introduced into the grades naturally and with advantage to the pupil at the time, which would result in a considerable saving at the point at which formal algebra and geometry are taken up, with tremendous toll of failure, in the high school. In our own high school the material of the first two years has been thoroughly reorganized, interweaving elementary elgebra, plane geometry and some trigonometry, in a way to secure a more unified and sequential development of mathematical knowledge and power without the waste involved in the usual method of breaking this material up into the usual arbitrary divisions. While the introduction into the grades of the geometric and algebraic material referred to above has not been fully secured, we succeeded last year in giving our eighth grade fully one half of the first-year high-school mathematics. This year the eighth grade is taking the entire first-year high-school work in mathematics and in the monthly uniform tests which have been given to all our first-year mathematics classes, have every time stood well above the average of the regular high-school classes.

The elementary school, as already indicated, gives much attention to elementary science. In the high school a course in general science has been organized which is required of first-year pupils. It was found, on investigation, that this first-year science course was uninteresting and of little value to pupils of our own elementary school by reason of its repetitious nature. These pupils are now allowed to omit this course and take either in their first year or later some of the specialized science courses designed to follow the general introductory course.

A similar lack of coordination in manual training, in which our own