Reading
The teacher’s preparation is not complete without the reading of good books. Every true teacher is a student, and to make it possible to remain a student he can not neglect reading good books. Reading the best books in every field of the teacher’s work, and even in many other fields for the purpose of gaining new knowledge is a requirement of the teacher that should not be overlooked. In reading for pleasure and recreation, care must be exercised in choosing reading material. Only the best should be selected by the teacher and that which will give the most aid to his work.
The teacher must be a careful reader; he should not hasten through a book, just to be reading. Important passages should be marked. Whatever is of use to the teacher should be correlated to his work to add more to the subject taught. The author in all his reading, even in fiction, has made use of this method—marking all important passages and quotations as he read; then, in the back of the book, he constructed a list of pages where each passage or quotation was to be found. Following the number of the page in his index, he put a brief note, or sometimes only a word to explain the nature of the passage. To illustrate: quotations or passages of general interest were marked (general); a passage bearing upon history, marked (history), etc. When he sought some thought or passage upon a certain subject, it was easy to look to the “homemade” index of the books read and hastily locate such information.