Learning to Be a Schoolmaster

by Thomas R. Cole

6. Teachers’ meetings, 5%.

III. In personal relationships.

1. The higher human qualities, 60%.

2. Constructive criticism, 16%.

3. Poise, 7%.

4. Helping teachers in self-analysis and mannerisms, 1%.

I shall discuss briefly some of the main suggestions made by the teachers.

I. How the principal can help the teacher in a professional way.

a. Assistance with the exceptional child. In these replies it will be noted that thirty-seven per cent of the teachers advocated assistance with the exceptional child. This gives further emphasis to the need of greater attention being given to the classification of pupils in the public schools. The use of tests and measurements has demonstrated the wide range of abilities that can usually be found in different pupils of the same grade. The teacher with from thirty-five to forty-five pupils must handle the work of her room more or less in groups, which often fails to reach the retarded or the accelerated pupil. Too often the teacher through her efforts to give extra assistance needed by the backward pupils gives them a disproportionate amount of time. The entire class suffers from such a procedure. It is unfair to the ninety per cent of pupils of average ability to have one fourth of the teacher’s time given to the other ten per cent of the pupils in the room.

How to care for the special pupil is a difficult problem. No plan thus far advanced seems to meet it entirely. The ungraded room with an auxiliary teacher has proved to be fairly satisfactory in schools sufficiently large to justify such an arrangement. The principal in the smaller school as well as in the larger must give greater attention to the use of intelligence tests as an aid in classifying the pupils so that they can be better graded according to their ability. No teacher should be required to keep a pupil in her room indefinitely who is not mentally able to do the work or who is a constant disturber. The “ninety and nine” who “can do” are more important to save than the one lost sheep who may never be able “to do” if saved.