Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/243

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the first and second classes the choice of compositions is granted the scholars. The favorite subject for these boys are the Old Testament stories, which they will write two months after they have been related by the teacher.

The first class not long ago began to write on New Testament history, but this was not nearly so successful as the Old; they even made more mistakes in spelling in it. They did not understand it so well. In the first class we tried compositions written on given themes. The early themes, which, by the most natural process, first came into our heads, were descriptions of simple objects, such as corn, a cottage, a tree, etc.; but to our extreme amazement their labors on these subjects almost brought the tears into the pupils' eyes, and in spite of the help of the teacher, who divided the description of corn into the description of its growth, or of its manufacture, or about its use, they strenuously refused to write on themes of such a nature; and if they wrote, they made incomprehensible and most ridiculous mistakes in spelling, in language, and in ideas.

We tried the experiment of giving up compositions on such subjects, and all were as delighted as if we had bestowed a gift on them. Compositions on so-called simple subjects, so much affected in schools, such as a pig, a kettle, a table, seemed immeasurably more difficult than the writing of whole stories based on their own experiences.

One and the same mistake is always repeated as in all other matters of instruction—the simplest and most common seems to the teacher to be easiest, while to the pupil only the complicated and vivid seems easy.

All the text-books of natural sciences begin with general principles, text-books of language with definitions, history with divisions into periods, even geometry with