Reading: How to Teach It

by Sarah Louise Arnold

For idle minds to do.”

So the old hymn might be varied by the experienced teacher who remembers unnumbered cases of discipline which have arisen from the monotonous drill exercises in which the wits of the majority of the class were unemployed. By all means, in such cases, drill a few pupils at a time, and let the others be profitably employed in conscious endeavor to accomplish something.

In older classes where the reading has passed the elementary stage, and the pupils are reading for information or enjoyment, neither length of lesson nor number of pupils need be considered. Here, without doubt, the interest in the subject will be paramount, and “method” may be forgotten. Now the children read for the love of reading, and the only gauge of time or number is the teacher’s power to interest her class. The one aim is to get the message from the book, and to make it plain to those who hear. Desire is the spur to endeavor, and attention is at the command of interest. The teacher’s one secret is the art of making her pupils book lovers.

Concert Reading.

To save time, in the hurried day with its crowded program, is the teacher’s constant desire, and it is not remarkable that, under pressure, achievement is measured by counting the minutes of recitation and numbering the facts learned or the questions answered. It is a common error to assume that mere lip repetition is valuable drill, and that “practice makes perfect,” even when the practice is indifferent or unwise. Quantity is carefully measured, while quality is ignored, in such drill.

To this mistaken estimate the wide prevalence of concert recitation is due. If thirty children read at one time, it would seem that the recitation accomplishes thirty times as much as would be accomplished by a single recitation in the same time. “I could not get through with the lesson,” explains the teacher, “if I did not have my class read in concert.”

The theory appears plausible to the mathematical mind. Upon inspection, however, its failings appear.

In what does the value of the lesson as a reading lesson consist? The exercise should aid the children in getting the thought or in expressing it fluently and naturally. The teacher should be assured that the mind of every reader is intelligently active in the thought getting, and that the practice in expression is such as will lead to independent skill.

But observe: in concert reading the individual difficulties are “skipped.” While John, who fails to recognize a word, falters, hesitates, and halts, Jane, to whom it is an old friend, marches triumphantly on. John takes breath, and plunges in again when his stumbling-blocks have been safely passed (by his comrades). John’s achievement was nil, likewise Jane’s, for she knew the word before. As a teaching exercise, then, the concert reading is ineffective. It is safe to assume that it is difficult if not impossible for any teacher to know that all of her pupils are really reading all the time during the concert exercise, or that a seemingly good concert exercise really proves that all the members of the class can master, or have mastered, the lesson.

Again, as a practice in expression the concert exercise is harmful, because it ignores the individual expression and aims at an average movement, inflection, interpretation. The product is not the expression of the thought as it appears to John, Jane, or Henry, but a composite which represents nobody. The sprightly Kate must wait for the ponderous Phœbe; the slow-moving James must lag behind the animated Jack. Let a dozen teachers attempt to read aloud in concert, without previous common training, and the statement will need no further argument.