5. Reading
The selection of suitable masterpieces for reading and study in the first year must be made with particular care, since the pupils’ attitude toward the reading and study of literature is often influenced for some time by their first impressions. As the purpose of the reading is not only to have the pupils understand what they read by teaching them to read carefully and accurately, but also to interest them in reading good literature, it is desirable to begin on material that does not present too many difficulties. The length of the selection is also an important element. The piece of literature must not be so long that interest in it flags or that the pupil can not grasp it in its entirety and study it as a unit. Short stories, tales, and narrative and descriptive sketches combine more of the desired elements than other forms of literature. Prose narratives of this type also make possible the close and effective correlation of the reading and composition, the importance of which has already been emphasized. Among the short stories and sketches that have been used successfully in the first year and that may be taken as typical are Hawthorne’s “Twice Told Tales”, Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, Holmes’ “My Hunt After the Captain”, Warner’s “A-Hunting of the Deer”, Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”. Mythology and folk tales have also been tried with considerable success in the first semester of the first year; the available selections include Hawthorne’s “Wonder Book”, Church’s “The Story of the Iliad” and “The Story of the Odyssey”, Peabody’s “Old Greek Folk Stories”, Bryant’s translations of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” and Palmer’s translation of the “Odyssey”.
The advantages of using prose for reading and study in the first year in preference to poetry or the poetical drama, are important ones. In the first place since it is desirable to teach pupils to get the whole thought contained in what they read, it is undoubtedly best to begin with those forms in which ideas are expressed in the usual order, which, of course, is that of prose rather than that of poetry or the poetical drama. The training in following and grasping in their entirety the expressed thoughts of others as they appear in the simplest logical order of prose should be one of the first aims of the first year reading. In the second place poetic inversions and figurative expressions increase so greatly the pupils’ difficulties in understanding what they read, that at the beginning of the course it makes too great a task of that which should be a source of interest and pleasure. To pass over these difficulties and emphasize simply the story or description in the study of poetry is to encourage the bad habit of careless, inaccurate reading. If the pupil is taught to understand fully the prose that he reads in the first year, his progress in reading poetry in the following years will be much more rapid. These advantages together with close correlation possible between the study of prose and the theory and practice of composition should determine the choice of reading for the first year.
What has already been said in regard to the reading in general (p. [23]) applies particularly to the first year work.