The Newtown bee., 1894-05-04
WHAT AND HOW TO TEACH.

WHAT AND HOW TO TEACH.
 The large room in the Newtown Acad- emy never presented a more attractive appearane than it did last Friday after noon, when the last teachers meeting of the school year was held there. The pictures cut from our best magazines and neatly arranged on the wall, to it. lustrate the lessons in history and Eng fish literature, the nucleus of future li- brary, containing, among other books, full set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and all the other furnishings of the room bespoke good work and progressive ideas. Newtown is to be congratulated on the prosperous condition of it's Acad- emy, and the principal P. K. Cliff, de. serves great praise for his painstaking | labor in bringing the school to its pres ent high degree of excellence.
 Prof A. B. Nor i'll, principal of the normal school in New Haven, gave the principal address of the afternoon. It was intensely practical and helpful, Mir | Morrill, being man who believes that everything which is done should have a purpose in view, even talk before | trained teachers.
 In deciding as to what should be | taught in the school-room, MT Morrill, said that he had broken away from all tradition and did not regard greatly what had been taught in the past; his | test rather was how to live in the every day sense of the word, and what would be required of the boys and girls when | they came out into life. As to how to | teach, this test should be applied, seek | Fl H,, 1 the schOol-room, strive that every min ute of the time of every pupil be occu- pied with something that will mean something; that is the way business man is transa cting his business to-day.
 Among the things the child should be prepared to do, as matter of first im- portance he should be taught to read. l When the child has reached school age, he has great wealth of ideas. He must get further ideas from all sources since the beginning of time, and reading gives him an instrument by which he | can get ideas. In New Haven we teach children to read by having them read a great deal in the lower grades. Our reading lesson is one in which the teach CT has the children read as much as they can in 15 minutes; thus great deal of practice is had every day. You cannot tell how children learn words, 1 know of a child found by actual count to have acquaintance with 800 words. Phone | tics is taught at the Normal school, but as separate lesson.
 The child should be taught arithmetic because we are measuring all the time. Food is sold by the quart and pounds. We have to use money and give so much money for so many pounds. We study | arithmetic, therefore, as an instrument. and so we ought to teach those parts of the subject which pupil will use. You do not think in playing on piano, 5,OOC notes sometimes are struck in four min- utes, there is no thinking about it; SC much of arithmetic must be automatic ir it's execution. When we hear and 6 13 must come out as their sum; we must not stop to think about it, it must be an inevitable sequence of the con ditions of the problem. In banks, stores and manufacturing establishments thi; quick, automic use of numbers is needed This is the law; associate ideas come to- gether, the third follows. How shal the children get ideas of number! Ob fleets make vivid, images of number The teacher ought to have a lot of con crete objects for practice; she should realize that the condition of automatic action is repetition and so not waste very much time in having the pupils sing the multiplication table. A part of the teachers profession is to have the child: attention taken up, and with something more than "busy work" 1 have 8 pathetic image now in my mind of a long row of little children in the school where I first taught dangling their feet fol three hours at time with nothing to do
 that was cruelty. l have found that children will as industriously copy that which means something as that which merely amuses
 |. Language is important in teaching. Wt ought to teach children to talk correctly and easily and use sentences that can b' clearly understood. What is the condi tion of putting words one after another i. It is again the law of automatic action The condition of my saying "1sn't right 7 for "Tain't right is not my knowledge of the third person, singular number O
 the verb, but if have practised certail . words in sequence, 1 say "Isn't right.
 At Willimantic we used to try to find tn :, wrong idioms the children used at reces and if they said ssHe hadn't ought" w
 practised them in saying ssHe ought not by arranging 20 sentences on that idiom
 Geography gives mental image Q
 space. How attain that? Just as W
 get image of an orange, we can shut ou
 eyes and revive the image of an orange
 so we can revive an image of Sout 5. America simply because we have pras tised it. A good exercise is to have tn children look at maps. At the Norms school we use geographies mainly fC
 reading books. Profile and relief mar
 are good; dissected map will teac more geography than any text book
 have ever seen.
 T. J. Corbett, principal of the Sand
 Hook public school, gave an interestin r IL I>s-
 chief feature of his plan was the associ
 tion of geography with history. E
 showed how the first discoveries ar
 explorers of this continent, having lit
 knowledge of navigation, followed gel lerally the parallel of latitude of the
 starting point in Europe, and tracin
 this across the ocean would give the lplace of landing here. In teaching u
 wars of the Revolution and Rebellio
 great centers would be chosen aroul
 which to group minor details, as u