The Recitation

by George Herbert Betts

a. The preparation of the lesson assigned.—The preparation of every lesson assigned should be tested in some definite way. This is of the utmost importance, especially in all elementary grades. We are all so constituted mentally that we have a tendency to grow careless in assigned tasks if their performance is not strictly required of us. No matter how careful may be the assignment of the lesson, and no matter how much the teacher may urge upon the class at the time of the assignment that they prepare the lesson well, the pupils must be held responsible for this preparation day by day, without fail, if we are to insure their mastery of it.

Nor is it enough to inquire, "How many understand this lesson?" or "How many got all the examples?" It is the teacher's business to test thoroughly for himself the pupil's mastery of the lesson or the knowledge or power required for the examples, in some definite and concrete way. It will not suffice to take the pupil's judgment of his own preparation and mastery, for many will allow a hazy or doubtful point to go by unexplained rather than confess before teacher and class their lack of study or inability to grasp the topic. Further, pupils seldom have the standards of mastery which enable them to judge what constitutes an adequate grasp of the subject.

b. The pupil's knowledge and his methods of study.—Entirely aside from the question of the preparation of the lesson assigned, the teacher must constantly test the pupil's knowledge in order that he may know how and what next to teach him; for no maxim of teaching is better established than that we should proceed from the known to the related unknown. And this is only another way of saying that we should build all new knowledge upon the foundation of knowledge already mastered.

To illustrate: Pupils must have a thorough mastery and ready knowledge of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division before we can proceed to teach them measurements or fractions. And without doubt much time is wasted in attempting to teach these subjects without a ready command of the fundamental operations. Further, pupils must know well both common and decimal fractions before they can proceed to percentage. They must know and be able to recognize readily the different "parts of speech" before they can analyze sentences in grammar.

But not less important than what the pupil knows is how he knows the thing; that is, what are his methods of study and learning. The pupil in a history class may be able to recite whole pages of the text almost verbatim, but when questioned as to the meaning of the events and facts show very little knowledge about them. A student confessed to her teacher that she had committed all her geometry lessons to memory instead of reasoning them out. She could in this way satisfy a careless teacher who did not take the trouble to inquire how the pupil had prepared her lessons, but she knew little or no geometry.

The mind has what may be called three different levels. The first is the sensory level, represented by the phrase "in at one ear and out of the other." Every one has experienced reading a page when the mind would wander and only the eyes follow the lines on down to the bottom of the page, nothing remaining as to the meaning of the text. It is easy to glance a lesson over just before reciting, and have it stick in the memory only long enough to serve the purposes of the recitation. Things learned in this way are not permanently serviceable and really constitute no part of an education.

The second level of the mind may be called the memory level. Matter which enters the mind only to this depth may be retained for a considerable time but is little understood and hence of small value. All rules and definitions committed without knowing their meaning or seeing their application, and all lessons learned merely to recite without a reasonable grasp of their meaning, sink only as deep as the memory level.

The third and deepest level is that of the understanding. Matter which permeates down through the sensory and memory levels, getting thoroughly into the understanding level, is not only remembered but is understood and applied, and therefore becomes of real service in our education. Of course it is clear that the ideal in teaching should be to lead our pupils so to learn that most of what enters their memory shall also be mastered by their understanding.

Therefore, in the recitation we should test not alone to see what the pupil knows, but also to see how he knows it; not only to find out whether he can recite, but also what are his methods of learning. We should discover not alone whether the facts learned have entered the memory, but whether they have sunk down into the understanding, so that they can be used in the acquisition of further education.

c. The pupil's points of failure and the cause thereof.—Every teacher has been surprised many times to discover weak places in the pupil's work when everything had seemingly been thoroughly learned. With the best teaching these weak places will occasionally occur. It is not less essential to know these points of failure than to know the foundations of knowledge which the pupil has already mastered. For these weak spots must be remedied as we go along if the later work is to be successful. Very frequently classes are unable to proceed satisfactorily because of lack of thoroughness in the foundation work which precedes. To know where a pupil is failing is the first requisite if we are to help him remedy his weakness.