We saw the sun rise at midsummer, we shall see it rise at Christmas
or some other fine winter's day; for you know we are no lie-a-beds
and we enjoy the cold. I take care to make this second observation
in the same place as the first, and if skilfully lead up to, one
or other will certainly exclaim, "What a funny thing! The sun is
not rising in the same place; here are our landmarks, but it is
rising over there. So there is the summer east and the winter east,
etc." Young teacher, you are on the right track. These examples
should show you how to teach the sphere without any difficulty,
taking the earth for the earth and the sun for the sun.
As a general rule--never substitute the symbol for the thing
signified, unless it is impossible to show the thing itself; for
the child's attention is so taken up with the symbol that he will
forget what it signifies.
I consider the armillary sphere a clumsy disproportioned bit of
apparatus. The confused circles and the strange figures described
on it suggest witchcraft and frighten the child. The earth is too
small, the circles too large and too numerous, some of them, the
colures, for instance, are quite useless, and the thickness of the
pasteboard gives them an appearance of solidity so that they are
taken for circular masses having a real existence, and when you
tell the child that these are imaginary circles, he does not know
what he is looking at and is none the wiser.
We are unable to put ourselves in the child's place, we fail to enter
into his thoughts, we invest him with our own ideas, and while we
are following our own chain of reasoning, we merely fill his head
with errors and absurdities.
Should the method of studying science be analytic or synthetic?
People dispute over this question, but it is not always necessary
to choose between them. Sometimes the same experiments allow one
to use both analysis and synthesis, and thus to guide the child
by the method of instruction when he fancies he is only analysing.
Then, by using both at once, each method confirms the results of the
other. Starting from opposite ends, without thinking of following
the same road, he will unexpectedly reach their meeting place and
this will be a delightful surprise. For example, I would begin
geography at both ends and add to the study of the earth's revolution
the measurement of its divisions, beginning at home. While the
child is studying the sphere and is thus transported to the heavens,
bring him back to the divisions of the globe and show him his own
home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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