c. Bring in new points supplementing the text.—While the lesson of the textbook should be followed in the main, and most of the time devoted thereto, yet nearly every lesson gives the wide-awake teacher opportunity to supplement the text with interesting material drawn from other sources. This rightly done lends life and interest to the recitation, broadens the child's knowledge, and increases his respect for the teacher. In this way many lessons in history, geography, literature—in fact, in nearly all the studies,—can have their application shown, and hence be made more real to the pupils.
d. Inspire the pupils to better efforts and higher ideals.—The recitation is the teacher's mental "point of contact" with his pupils. He meets them socially in a friendly way at intermissions and on the playground. His moral character and personality are a model to the children at all times. But it is chiefly in the recitation that the mental stimulus is given. The teacher who is lifeless and uninspiring in the teaching of the recitation cannot but fail to inspire his school to a strong mental growth, whatever else he may accomplish.
Most pupils have powers far in excess of those they are using. They only need to be inspired, to be wakened up mentally by a teacher whose mind is alive and growing. They need to be made hungry for education, and this can be accomplished only by a teacher who is himself full of enthusiasm. Inspiration is caught, not taught.
e. Lead pupils into good habits of study.—It is probably not too much to say that one third or one half of the pupil's time is lost in school because of not knowing how to study. Over and over pupils say to the teacher, "I didn't know how to get this." Many times children labor hard over a lesson without mastering it, simply because they do not know how to pick out and classify its principal points. They work on what is to them a mere jumble, because they lack the power of analysis or have never been taught its use.
Very early in school life the pupil should be taught to look for and make a list of the principal points in the lesson. If the lesson starts with a Roman numeral I, the child should be taught to look for II and III, and to see how they are related to I. An Arabic 1 usually means that 2, and perhaps 3 and 4 are to follow; the letter a at the head of a paragraph should start the pupil to looking for b, c, etc. And if the text does not contain such numbering or lettering, the pupil should be led to search for the main divisions and topics of the lesson for himself.
Of course these principles will not apply to spelling lessons, mere lists of sentences to be analyzed or problems to be solved, but they do apply to almost every other type of lesson. The best time to teach the child to make the kind of analysis suggested is when we are assigning the lesson. We can then go over the text with the class, helping them to select the chief points of the lesson until they themselves have learned this method of study.
5. Drill as an aim in the recitation
There is a great difference between merely knowing a thing and knowing it so well that we can use it easily and with skill. Perhaps all of us know the alphabet backwards; yet if the order of the dictionary were reversed so that it would run from Z to A, we would for a time lack the skill we now have in quickly finding any desired words in the dictionary.
Certain fundamentals in our education need to be so well learned that they are practically automatic, and can hence be skillfully performed without thought or attention. We must know our spelling in this way, so that we do not have to stop and think how to spell each word. In the same manner we must know the mechanics of reading, that is, the recognition and pronunciation of words, the meaning of punctuation marks, etc.; and similarly multiplication and the other fundamental operations in arithmetic. Pupils should come to know these things so well that they are as automatic as speech, or as walking, eating, or any other of the many acts which "do themselves." If this degree of skill is not reached, it means halting and inefficient work in all these lines farther on. Many are the children who are crippled in their work in history, geography, and other studies because they cannot read well enough to understand the text. Many are struggling along in the more advanced parts of the arithmetic, unable to master it because they are deficient in the fundamentals, because they lack skill. And many are wasting time trying to analyze sentences when they cannot recognize the different parts of speech.
Skill is efficiency in doing. It is always a growth, and never comes to us ready-made. To be sure, some pupils can develop skill much faster than others, but the point is, that skill has to be developed. Skill is the result of repetition, or practice, that is, of drill.