Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/303

Rh on the board. Then we constructed a cross in the same way, and copied that.

An unconscious innate feeling impelled the children to find as a general thing a sufficiently accurate correlation of the lines, although they drew the lines badly enough. And I did not consider it necessary to insist on the accuracy of the straight lines in each figure, for I did not wish to torment them unnecessarily, and all I wanted was to have the figure copied. I preferred at first to give the children a comprehension of the relations of the lines according to their size and their direction, rather than to labor over their ability to draw these lines as regularly as possible.

The child will understand the relation between length and shortness of lines, the difference between a right angle and parallels, before he will learn by himself to draw a straight line tolerably well.

Little by little in the succeeding lessons we succeeded in copying the angles of these quadrangular sticks, and then we made the most varied figures with them.

The pupils entirely neglected the thickness of the sticks, the third dimension, and we drew all the time only the front side of the objects set before us.

The difficulty of clearly presenting the position and coördination of figures, owing to our deficiency of materials, compelled me sometimes to draw the figures on the board. I often combined a sketch from nature with a sketch from models, taking any object whatever: if the boys could not copy the given object, I would sketch it myself on the board.

The drawing of figures from the board proceeded as follows:—I drew at first a horizontal or perpendicular line; I divided it by points into a certain number of parts; the pupils copied this line. Then I drew another or several perpendicular or slanting lines to the first, and divided into equal parts. Then we united the points of division of these lines with straight or curved lines, and thus composed a kind of symmetrical figure, which, according as it developed, the boys copied. It seemed to me that this was advantageous, in the first