Give this student relatively difficult and complex tasks. There is no
way to hinder his exuberant self-discharges except by measures which
embarrass and baffle him. We can not "lead him into all truth"; we
have to drive him back from all error. The lessons of psychology are
to the effect that the normal way to teach caution and deliberation is
the way of failure, repulse, and unfortunate, even painful,
consequences. Personal appeals to him do little good, since it is a
part of his complaint that he is too ready to hear all appeals; and
also, since he is not aware of his own lack nor able to carry what he
hears into effect. So keep him in company of scholars a little more
advanced than he is. Keep him out of the concert recitations, where
his tendency to haste would work both personal and social harm.
Refrain from giving him assistance in his tasks until he has learned
from them something of the real lesson of discouragement, and then
help him only by degrees, and by showing him one step at a time, with
constant renewals of his own efforts. Shield him with the greatest
pains from distractions of all kinds, for even the things and events
about him may carry his attention off at the most critical moments.
Give him usually the secondary parts in the games of the school,
except when real planning, complex execution, and more or less
generalship are required; then give him the leading parts: they
exercise his activities in new ways not covered by habit, and if he do
not rise to their complexity, then the other party to the sport will,
and his haste will have its own punishment, and so be a lesson to him.
Besides these general checks and regulations, there remains the very
important question as to what studies are most available for this type
of mind. I have intimated already the general answer that ought to be
given to this question. The aim of the studies of the motor student
should be discipline in the direction of correct generalization, and,
as helpful to this, discipline in careful observation of concrete
facts. On the other hand, the studies which involve principles simply
of a descriptive kind should have little place in his daily study.
They call out largely the more mechanical operations of memory, and
their command can be secured for the most part by mere repetition of
details all similar in character and of equal value. The measure of
the utility to him of the different studies of the schoolroom is found
in the relative demand they make upon him to modify his hasty personal
reactions, to suspend his thoughtless rush to general results, and
back of it all, to hold the attention long enough upon the facts as
they arise to get some sense of the logical relationships which bind
them together. Studies which do not afford any logical relationships,
and which tend, on the contrary, to foster the habit of learning by
repetition, only tend to fix the student in the quality of attention
which I have called "fluidity."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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