Teachers must develop power of testing. The work of testing has been thus far only superficial.

These are but samples, or, at any rate, brief summaries of the opportunities for practical work which open themselves to the new normal school. Each one of the topics might easily expand into an article. All of the studies indicated and others akin to them are to be simple and concrete. If carried out with great elaboration they would of course require a prohibitive amount of time. They must have enough time to give inspiration for further study and investigation after graduation. Some time might be gained for the purpose if the waste of our present common school curricula,-no inconsiderable item,-were eliminated, so that our normal school studies in special method, etc., might be concentrated on a smaller range of topics to be taught in the schools for which they are preparing. At present these new studies are touched only abstractly and superficially, if at all. They are not really objects of study, for one reason, because practice work is not supplied. A course in practical sociology substituted for some of the outworn features of our present programs in the normal school would smooth the way to many of these perplexing problems which we are now at best touching in a most inconsequential way. When our teachers under training begin to do these things, then only shall we be working at the root of many of our difficulties; for we shall be working at them through education in the school itself. Attack them as we will otherwise, we strike only at the outside. Would anything stimulate a teacher more to perfect himself in matter and methods than this sociological study and work? Could we therefore do anything that would make even our present ideals and aims more effective?

There are various other types of teachers outside the two whose courses we have just followed. Kindergartners, teachers of defectives and backward pupils, technical teachers of various types, call for further differentiation in normal training. It is interesting to note how readily we have accepted the differentiated training school for these classes of teachers, though its scope has been essentially narrow, while we still cling to the notion of a general normal school for rural and city teachers. In all directions we can see the field opening for the new normal school.

Problems in the School Reading of Poetry

P

CHRISTABEL ABBOTT, STATE NORMAL SCHOOL,

GENESEO, NEW York.

•▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪÷OETS have been the people who have preached the dawning of a better day. The aim of poetry is to induce soul states. The reason that this subject is difficult to teach is that it portrays the emotional side of life, and many people shrink from expressing feeling before others. The essential characteristics of poetry are joy, hope, sorrow, faith, beauty, music and inspiration. Unless one becomes highminded and allows feeling to predominate, he cannot enter into the kingdom of poetry. The degree of interpretative genius that a reader possesses depends upon the breadth of his associations and experiences. What background of experience preparation is needed in order to interpret poetry? If we are thinking of the school children of the grades we are aware that the child who comes from the slums brings with him a different background than the child of luxury and refinement. In some poor homes there is so much discontent with the present and worry for the future that it is not a soil in which much poetic thought germinates. There are those who do no thinking beyond what they shall eat, wherewithal they shall be clothed and what pleasures of the cheap show they can find. And so they have no idealized vision. Poetry is essentially feeling. Some dispositions seem to have no feeling in their makeup. A story is told of a chemist who, when he saw the eyes of his beautiful wife filled with tears exclaimed: "Tears! I have decomposed them, they contain a little phosphate of lime, chloride of sodium, and water." Truly he was a man of head rather than heart. In school it is sometimes difficult to get the boys to read poetry expressively. Boys are not less emotional, they are less vocal. Stedman says, "The impersonal element in art may be termed masculine, and there is something feminine in a controlling impulse to lay bare

one's own heart and experience. This is as it should be; certainly a man's attributes are pride and strength-strength to wrestle upon occasion without speech until daybreak." The woman has intuitive sensitiveness, and nervous refinement. The more sensitive the mind, the more delicately the finer thoughts are interpreted. In the preface to "Endymion" we read that, "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man's healthy, but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain." In the full expression of feeling, we must not expect too much of this intermediate age. If the reading of a poem is poor, let us remember that there is a law which says, "Improve the child and you improve the style of his reading." An attempt to express what is not in the pupil or what is beyond his experience or imagination will be an impossibility and no amount of forcing him will bring about good reading. Just as the more one hears good classical music the more he can appreciate it, so in poetry, increase of appetite grows by what it feeds upon. It is according to the law of "use and growth."

Shall we ever complain that the children in our classes are poorly prepared to read poetry when they come to us? If they knew how to read poetry well, they would not be taking it of us. We are to take the child where we find him, in development, whether it be in the germ stage, bud stage, or flower stage, and make him better. We are apt to credit the boy with an overdose of original sin, if he looks out of the window during the lesson and seems inattentive. The child may be doing the greatest amount of thinking and having the greatest development when people think he is the laziest or most indifferent. This was illustrated in an eighth grade class visited recently. The boy in the back seat sat in seeming indifference to the poem the class was reading. He had never seemed interested, had never volunteered to read. But he suddenly raised his hand when the teacher asked for volunteers. The teacher and visitor were surprised to notice that the boy did not have to look at his book but knew the poem by heart. All this time of seeming indifference he had been absorbing it. The wise teacher had not forced him to express himself, but had waited until it had gradually developed. Are we not sometimes

too impatient for results? Our background of experience is so much larger than that of the child. We cannot expect him to grasp as much or as quickly as we do. We are readers of poetry, not different in kind from that of the pupils, but different in degree. Some teachers seem to possess the art of questioning, which to my mind, is the great art in the teaching of poetry reading. The other day an eighth grade was reading, "The Lady of the Lake." One boy let his voice fall at the end of a verse, when the thought should have carried the voice over to the next line to complete it. Not once did the teacher say, "Carry your voice over", or "Do not pause at the end of that line", but she asked him questions that would bring out the thought and finally the boy read it correctly. In the second grade the children were reading about the moth. Evidently they had been well drilled on the words that would be found in the reading. However, one lad stumbled over a certain word. The teacher did not ask, "What is that word?" She directed attention to the thought by asking, "What is it the moth does?" And then the boy told her. A great problem is to get the children to feel. Shall we make the child "put on?" People would think that a florist needed a physician if he were caught painting the geranium leaves in order to have the faded plant look thrifty. We would expect him to dig about the roots. Developing reading power is getting at the root. We must get at the causes of expression. How to get the spirit of the author-that is the problem. We must not be impatient with the child's growth. We must not feel like pulling up the plant to see if the roots are growing. There is a great deal of sprouting and developing of a plant at its root, before there is anything visible above the surface.

How much to tell the pupils is a problem. Do we not frequently tell the pupil how we feel, or how he ought to feel about a poem. Some one has aptly said that, "The teacher can best show his appreciation, as he shows his moral character, indirectly without unwise talking about it. We may too often point out the particular beauties of a poem and so dull the appetite of the child. It gives some pleasure to have a beautiful sunset pointed out to us by some one who has noticed it first, but infinitely more pleasure to see it first for ourselves. Dr. Johnson says, "Think for

thyself, one good thought, but known to be thy own is better than a thousand gleaned from fields by others sown." To do anything worth while we must have a certain amount of freedom. Our problem is to get the child to think. The king, in Hamlet, says, "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

Recently

Some pupils have no conception of what they read. I visited the fifth grade. They were reading poetry. First the teacher drilled thoroughly upon the words that might prove a stumbling block to the thought, asking and explaining their meaning, before she let them look at the poem. Then she gave them time to read the poem through. But that which I was particularly impressed with was this. She asked questions relative to the story and required the children to read the line of poetry which contained the answer to her question. In this way they learned to think in poetic language. Not once did she ask a question that would detract from the thought. Then they read the poem with remarkable interpretation. Their voices became expressive, the tone full of color, and the face animated. Naturally the children made the less emphatic phrases subordinate, and emphasized the most important thought.

Did you ever hear a child read a most sublime thought as if it were a most ordinary, everyday expression? Think of saying, "The silent city steeped and bathed itself in rose tints", in the same tone one would say, "I am going to the grocery to buy a peck of potatoes!" Stedman says, "Even a drop of prosaic feeling is said to precipitate a whole poem." Poetry is never common and unimaginative.

Do you have the problem of the child over-emphasizing meter and rhythm? A writer says, "Poetry is ideal expression through words and words are not poetry unless they reach a stress that is rhythmical. In the whole range of poetry, the deeper the feeling, the more characteristic and decided the rhythm." So we must expect the child to feel the rhythm. I have heard a professor of English in one of our large universities read to his class and ask them to listen just to the beauty of the rhythm, and the music of the words.

In visiting a fifth grade recently I was much interested to hear