"But," it is urged, "the children are always interested in such things." Yes, and they would be more interested still if you showed them a monkey or displayed red, green, and blue lights. The law of interest tells us what shall _not_ be placed before the children--"Nothing that is not interesting"--but as a guide to what we _shall_ give them it tells but half the story. The other half is, "_Not everything that is interesting, and not anything just because it is interesting_." Let this caution not be misunderstood. The children must use their eyes. To expect children to follow your stories by ear, and make up their mind-pictures out of whole cloth or from the few objects and pictures that can be shown them, or to remember texts and lesson points out of hand, is to suppose them ready to graduate into the senior department. Let us have more blackboards. An individual board for every pupil, if possible, and the more use--wise use--of blackboards the better. But many "blackboardists" have yet to learn that it is possible to be apt without being alliterative, that one may be extravagant without being effective, sensational without being spiritual. In short, they seem not to understand that common sense applies even to blackboard work. What are the points in good blackboard work? To be quite dogmatic, for the sake of brevity, good blackboard work is: 1. Simple. "Blackboard ingenuities, dissolving from acrostic into enigma, and from enigma into rhyme are not necessary" and they are harmful besides. They distract, distort, make dizzy. The best blackboard work has the fewest lines, the most unity in its variety, the least approach to anything like a maze. 2. Clear. The best blackboard work is that which is easiest to follow, hardest to forget. 3. Varied. Our stock symbols are worked to death. Is it _right_ to use the cross as commonly as you would a letter of the alphabet? Find something new or give the blackboard a vacation. It is not necessary that there be a quarter hour on every day's program for blackboard work. Who has not spent a "bad quarter of an hour" when the "exercise" was perfunctory? 4. Descriptive. All maps and plans, sketches of roads and rooms, of mountains and rivers, are good, because they help us to form for ourselves the picture which we must see in order to grasp the meaning of the story. For example, we may illustrate the Mount of Transfiguration; first with four figures, then six, then four; the winding road to Emmaus, two figures--straight lines, merely--and a little farther on, a third; the upper room, its occupants represented by marks or initial letters. Anything is helpful that gives a notion of position, number, form, contrast, sequence, change. 5. Free, living, personal. The best blackboard work is that which is freest. Children are impressionists. For them the broad side of the crayon is better than the point; two strokes better than twenty.