IV
LESSONS—COMMANDS
The first lessons in grammar which I gave to children go back fully sixteen years. I first attempted the education of defectives in the "Scuola Magistrale Ortofrenica" in Rome in the year 1899 following a course of lectures I had given to teachers in the normal school of our capital. In this experiment I went far enough with primary work to prepare some of the defective children for successful examinations in the public schools. A very brief and incomplete summary of my pedagogical studies delivered in the teacher's courses is given in the appendix to this volume.
The teaching of grammar was not at that time so complete as it has since been made in my work with normal children; even so it was a marked success. Grammar was actually lived by the children, who became deeply interested in it. Even those wretched children who came, like rubbish thrown out of the public schools, directly off the street or from the insane asylums, passed delightful half hours of joyous laughter over their exercises in grammar. Here are some excerpts from the old pamphlet of 1900 giving an idea of the didactic material which was then used and some notion of a lesson on nouns. "As each word is read or written for every object-lesson, for every action, printed cards are being assembled which will later be used to make clauses and sentences with words that may be moved about just as the individual letters were moved about in making the words themselves. The simple clauses or sentences should refer to actions performed by the children. The first step should be to bring two or more words together: e.g., red-wool, sweet-candy, four-footed dog, etc. Then we may go on to the sentence itself: The wool is red; the soup is hot; the dog has four feet; Mary eats the candy, etc. The children first compose the sentences with their cards; then they copy them in their writing books. To facilitate the choice of the cards, they may be arranged in special boxes: for instance, one box may be labeled noun; or the boxes may be distinguished thus: food, clothing, animals, people, etc. There should be a box for adjectives with compartments for colors, shapes, qualities, etc. There should be another for particles, with compartments for articles, conjunctions, prepositions, etc. A box should be reserved for actions, with the label verbs above it, containing compartments for the infinitive, present, past and future. The children gradually learn by practise to take their cards from the boxes and put them back in their proper places. They soon learn to know their "word boxes" and they readily find the cards they want among the colors, shapes, qualities, etc., or among animals, foods, etc. Ultimately the teacher will find occasion to explain the meaning of the big words written at the top of the drawers, noun, adjective, verb, etc., and this will be the first step into the subject of grammar.
NOUNS
We may call persons and objects by their name, their noun. People answer if we call them, so do animals. Inanimate objects, however, never answer, because they cannot; but if they could they would. For example, if I say Mary, Mary answers; if I say peas, the peas do not answer, because they cannot. You children do understand when I call an object and you bring it to me. I say, for example, book, beans, peas. If I don't tell you the name of the object, you don't understand what I am talking about; because every object has a different name. This name is the word that stands for the object. This name is a noun.
Whenever I mention a noun to you, you understand immediately the object which the noun represents: tree, chair, pen, book, lamb, etc. If I do not give this noun, you don't know what I am talking about; for, if I say simply bring me ... at once, I want it, you do not know what I want, unless I tell you the name of the object. Unless I give you the noun, you do not understand. Thus every object is represented by a word which is its name; and this name is a noun. To understand whether a word is a noun or not, you simply ask: Is it a thing? Would it answer if I spoke to it? or Could I carry it to the teacher? For instance, bread: yes, bread is an object; table: yes, it is an object; conductor: yes, the conductor would answer, if I were to speak to him.
Let us look through our cards now. I take several cards from different boxes and shuffle them. Here is the word sweet. Bring me sweet! Is there anything to answer when I call sweet? But you are bringing me a piece of candy! I didn't say candy: I said sweet. And now you have given me sugar! I said sweet! Sweet, you see, is not an object You cannot guess what I have in mind when I say sweet. If I say candy, sugar, then you understand what I want, what object I am thinking about, because the words candy, sugar, stand for objects. Those words are nouns."[2]
This summary, however, fails to give a real idea of the success of these lessons. When I said with a tone of decision, as if I could not think of the necessary word, "Bring me—bring me—bring me—," the children would gather round me, looking fixedly at my lips, like so many little dogs, waiting for me to throw something for them to fetch. They were in fact ready to run and get what I wanted. But the word refused to come. "Bring me—, bring me—." Finally in great impatience I cried, "But bring it to me quick—I want it." Then their faces lit up and they would laughingly cry, "But bring you what? What is it you want? What shall we bring you?"
This was the real lesson on the noun, and when, after great difficulty, the word "sweet" came out, the children would run and bring me every possible object that was sweet. I would refuse each one in turn. "No, I didn't ask for candy! No, I didn't ask for sugar!" The children would look at the object they had in their hands, half laughing, half puzzled and beginning to realize that sweet was not a name, that it was not a noun. These first lessons, which seemed something like commands that needed the help of the children to express themselves, brought the children to understand some part of speech, while evoking, at the same time, vivid and interesting scenes. They furnished the original impulse to the development we have reached to-day in our lessons on grammar. For such lessons we have adopted the term "commands." But with normal children these "commands" were gradually multiplied and evolved. They are no longer entrusted to the teacher's ingenuity; nor are they dependent solely upon her dramatic sense—something essential if she is to stimulate the weak nervous reactions of little defectives and so gain and hold their attention. The "commands" to-day are written and may be read. They are combined with the card-exercises where the cards are read in silence and interpreted through actions—a method which grew spontaneously and with such great success from the work in the "Children's House." That is why, to-day, we speak in the elementary courses of "reading commands" or even of "writing commands."