If possible, the experiments should be done by the pupils individually
or in couples, in a school laboratory. Where this cannot be done,
almost all the experiments can be demonstrated from the teacher's desk
if electricity, water, and gas are to be had. Alcohol lamps can be
substituted for gas, but they are less satisfactory.
It is a good plan to have pupils report additional exemplifications
of each principle from their home or play life, and in a quick oral
review to let the rest of the class name the principles back of each
example.
This course is so arranged that it can be used according to the
regular class system of instruction, or according to the individual
system where each child does his own work at his natural rate of
progress. The children can carry on the work with almost no assistance
from the teacher, if provision is made for their doing the experiments
themselves and for their writing the answers to the inference
exercises. When the individual system is used, the children may write
the inference exercises, or they may use them as a basis for study
and recite only a few to the teacher by way of test. In the elementary
department of the San Francisco State Normal School, where the
individual system is used, the latter method is in operation. The
teacher has a card for each pupil, each card containing a mimeographed
list of the principles, with a blank after each. Whenever a pupil
correctly explains an example, a figure 1 is placed in the blank
following that principle; when he misapplies a principle, or fails to
apply it, an _x_ is placed after it. When there are four successive
1's after any principle, the teacher no longer includes that principle
in testing that child. In this way the number of inference exercises
on which she hears any one individual recite is greatly reduced.
This plan would probably have to be altered in order to adapt it to
particular conditions.
The Socratic method can be employed to great advantage in handling
difficult inferences. The children discuss in class the principle
under which an inference comes, and the teacher guides the discussion,
when necessary, by skillfully placed questions designed to bring the
essential problems into relief.[1]
[Footnote 1: At the California State Normal School in San Francisco,
this course in general science is usually preceded by one in
"introductory science."]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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