Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/75

 fulness, his ability to meet a-new situation, to assemble facts in a different way than he had been accustomed to do, and from them to draw new conclusions.

"I never heard of some of the things the teacher asked us today," one of my neighbor boys announced following a final examination. "I'm sure a lot of the answers were not in the book."

It always seems an injustice to a boy to be asked on an examination anything the answer to which can not easily be found by turning to the book. But really the best sort of question to ask is the one that requires the searching of a boy's brain rather than the book before he finds the proper answer. Nobody in real life ever finds a problem presented just as it is in the book, but, if he has learned to analyze and to organize his knowledge, the one in the book helps him to the solution of the one in real life. The lawyer seldom if ever finds the series of circumstances surrounding his first important case like any particular illustration he has studied; the surgeon taking out his first appendix can seldom put his finger on the disturbing organ at the point where the books say it ought to be. It is the thing that isn't in the book that we are always running up against in practical life, and it is a very good experience to get used to in the examinations taken in school.

The greatest howl which is set up by the high school boys I know against examinations is caused by the so-called "catch-questions" which are frequently introduced