OUR SCHOOL OF OBSERVATION.
BY MISS ANNA M. CAHILL, FISK UNIVERSITY.
Sixty bright faces welcomed me as I took my place with other visitors, this afternoon, in the school-room of our practice school. These faces are the property of as many happy children—children with no more weight of years upon them than properly belongs to pupils in a primary school. As I looked down the rows of little seats on this my first visit for the year, I saw at once that many new pupils had taken their places in this company since the first of September, but some of the little folks have grown so familiar that I realize they are soon to “graduate” into the English department of the University. At least half a dozen of those before me are the children of parents, one or both of whom were pupils at Fisk at some time during the first ten years of its work. They come from comfortable and well-regulated homes in the city, as do the majority of those primary pupils.
The special occasion that drew us together to-day was the public exercise of the practice teachers who taught in the school during the fall term. Every member of the senior normal class spends six weeks, at some time during the year, in practice work, under the direction and criticism of the principal of the school. To-day each of the four teachers taught three classes ten minutes apiece, and in the two hours thus occupied, not only the regulation studies, reading and number, were presented, but very interesting lessons were taught in elementary grammar, geography of Tennessee, form, color and physiology. When the bright sunlight gave its aid by flashing through a prism the rainbow colors on the wall, the little people were quick to tell how these colors might be combined and others formed; and when to the physiology class there were shown the heart, lungs and liver of a sheep, they gathered with so much interest around their young teacher that spectators and school were forgotten in their childish eagerness to ask and answer questions.
In one of the motion-songs that varied the exercises of the afternoon, these little people sang of the shoemaker, “All he wants is his elbow room,” and as I came away impressed with a sense of the power developing in that school-room and thought of the future of its pupils, I said gladly to myself, “All they want is their elbow room.”
These public exercises are held semi-annually, in order that all members of the normal class may have opportunity to show the result of their practice work.