Civics and HealthAllen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Science
Civics and Health
Allen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Hygiene; Public health
These tests probably exclude few applicants who should be admitted.
Experience proves that they include many who, for their own sake and
for children's sake, should be rejected. The moral character, physical
fitness, quality of voice, personal bearing, self-command, executive
ability, capacity for supervision, are qualities that are modified by
conditions. The voice that is satisfactory in conference with an
examiner may be strident and irritating when the teacher is impatient
or is trying to overcome street noises. On parade applicants are
equally cleanly; this cannot be said of teachers in the service, coming
from different home environments. Self-command is much easier in one
school than in another. Physical fitness in a girl of twenty may,
during one short year of teaching, give way to physical unfitness.
Therefore the need for _periodic tests_ by principal, superintendent,
and school board, _to determine the continuing fitness_ of a teacher to
do the special task assigned to her, based upon physical evidence of
her own vitality and of her favorable influence upon her pupils' health
and enjoyment of school life. Shattered nerves due to overwork may
explain a teacher's shouting: "You are a dirty boy. Your mother is a
dirty woman and keeps a dirty store where no decent people will go to
buy." A physical examination of that unfortunate teacher would probably
show that she ought to be on leave of absence, rather than, by her
overwork and loss of control, to cause the boys of her class to feel
what one of them expressed: "Grandmother, if she spoke so of my mother
I would strike her."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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