agine your disgust, if you had to do it. Let us try it just once. You had to drink coldes water, to bathe in coldem water, to admire the freshness of colden water, and admit that coldes water is the best beverage. Or suppose, you were obliged, in speaking English, to decline all the pronominal adjectives. You would have to have as many forms of the possessive pronouns, as the Germans, namely 32, where now you have eight. Or think for a moment of the chaos which the chapter of gender affords the observing eye; a chapter which is the most unruly you can think of. Thank your stars that you have nothing to compare with it. Or, please, imagine for a moment, you were to follow up the German conjugation to its fullest extent. Suppose that you would have to say, in conjugating "may," for instance, "I may, I might, I have might, I had might, I shall may, I shall have might." And now the subjunctive; "I maye, I mighte, I may have might, I might have might, I shall maye, I shall have mighte." This, of course, is all conjecture. Don't you think you have every reason to be thankful for not being obliged to do so? German etymology alone is enough to frighten the adult student from studying it. Whether it is preferable to have so many different forms for one word; whether this will promote thinking, I will leave out of consideration here. But it is a fact, that a great deal of talent, skill, study, and exercise is needed to master all these many difficulties. The child, whose mother tongue is so difficult, as I have stated, trains its mental faculties, or rather its linguistic faculties, by trying to master these difficulties. ⚫ I am inclined to think that this struggling with the language is helping the mind in its development wonderfully. But this assistance is denied the English speaking child. It grows up, stringing its words together like beads, or rather, building its sentences of unhewn stones, which (strangely enough) always fit, while the German speaking child is obliged to hew and fit the blocks before using them. It is unquestionable that linguistic talent is not developed where it is not exercised. We need not go to Darwin to hear that a talent, once strongly expressed in a minority of the race, seems to grow, till in the course of several centuries, it becomes at last a striking feature of the nation. Nay, in our own families we can remember incidents that bear witness to the truth of this natural law. In short, whoever has a difficult, finely organized mother tongue, and has been successful in mastering it, will find it costs him almost no effort to learn another idiom, and even two or three; and wherever the mother tongue flatly denies early linguistic training, there the learning of another idiom is (especially in later years) a task beyond the strength of the one who undertakes to perform it. Do you know of a grown person who learned a second language after his 25th year of age? He may have learned a little of it, but he certainly did not master it. It is not my intention to annoy the reader with many conclusions, that may be drawn from these statements; only this one: If children of English speaking parents are to study German, let them begin when young. I might stop here, but it occurred to me, you might probably ask: If the Germans are really such a linguistic people, why is it, that so many Germans in this country will, for instance, ask you to take a seat on the fire; or tell you it is 5 minutes behind 12 o'clock; or assert that one thing is quite "extinct" from another; or pronounce the smooth and beautiful "th" as harsh as a "tt"? There are two answers to this query: (1). They began too late after the organs of speech had lost their pliability; after the mind had developed so many other talents, that the linguistic germ had been stifled ; after their memory had grown strong in retaining other matters, and had become unfit for retaining linguistic matter. (2). They are not successful in learning English, because they never mastered their own (German) language. I have tried to demonstrate how enormous the number of difficulties that are to be surmounted. They come with no other instruction than that which a village or country school can afford them, and speak their simple and uninflected dialect, instead of the finely organized High-German of the educated classes of society. The German who never mastered his own language fully, of course, must be left out of consideration. TEACHING A PROFESSION. BY C. M. DES ISLETS, PH. D. There are in the United States, over 400,000 teachers in the public schools, of all grades, to say nothing of the thousands engaged in the higher schools and colleges under control of the churches and other bodies. There are millions of children and youth receiving the tuition of these teachers, and the money expended in their support is almost beyond enumeration when lumped into one sum. And yet, the school question is one that receives little attention in other than educational journals. There is a profession of law, of theology, of medicine; is there a profession of teaching? The skillful practice of any art is toward a profession; is there an art of teaching? Let us see. There is a widespread public sentiment that there is no profession of teaching; a tradition has been handed down from generation to generation, and is at full tide to-day, that any one who has been educated can teach. There is an impression that there is no art of teaching; that there are no principles underlying the practice of teaching, and hence, that there is no profession of teaching, and that no specific preparation is necessary. I freely confess there is some ground for this general opinion. For of the 400,000 teachers in the public schools, barely one-tenth have pursued a course of normal instruction; and of the remainder, some have gained something by practice in the school-room; but the majority have gained little, except the crystalization of a few, narrow, egotistical, empirical methods which they ply term after term. Never having walked the fertile fields where the true teacher culls his clearest ideas, they sneer at every attempt made to formulate the principles of teaching into a science. Nor is the situation in our higher schools and colleges much better. We cannot but look with painful interest at some of the colleges established within the past three years in the active, growing, exacting West. How often is it that men are selected to fill the several departments, not because they were practical teachers, but for some other reasons! There is a young school planted in a locality of unspeakable promise, a very garden, of possibilities almost transcending the imagination. The acres, inexhaustible, are being rapidly settled and doubling in value every few years. The people thrifty, frugal and energetic, are keen and intelligent and alive to the most exacting demands of a practical age. The school that you establish in their midst will have to stand on its merits and must be up to the demands of the times in or der to succeed. And yet, it is given over in charge of a man who has been a settled pastor for more than forty years! One who has grown old in an entirely different calling; whose modes of thought, sympathies, tastes, and aptitudes have become set in an entirely different m uld, and who, besides, is utterly unfitted to adapt himself to the new requirements of such a situation, so different from anything that he has seen. In a word, all this teaching is put into the hands of one who cannot teach, because he does not know how. I am not affirming that teaching is a more honorable work than preaching. I only say that they are different works, and that success in one is no guarantee of success in the other. Because a man can preach, it by no means follows that he can teach; indeed, it is seldom the case, for one to some extent unfits for the other, as every competent teacher very well knows. Teaching is not talking, as will appear further on. So then in the realm of higher education also, we find the same general opinion that "every one who has been educated can teach.” And yet, we can discern some encouraging signs in the horizon. At our educational centers, the opinion is gaining ground that education rests upon a scientific basis, and that, if there is not, there ought to be, a profession of teaching. The number of normal schools is increasing, and the attendance becoming larger every year. Colleges and universities have established chairs of pedagogics more or less successfully operated. Normal institutes and teachers' associations are multiplying in number and interest; school officers, too, are awaking and demanding that those seeking to be appointed as teachers shall first have learned how to teach. In a future paper I shall show that teaching is a science with clearly defined laws and well authenticated methods that cannot be ignored without injury or failure.—Interior. NOTES AND QUERIES. A GRAMMATICAL DILEMMA. Friend Findley:-Will you kindly ask some one of your older readers to assist a young teacher (of only twenty-two years' experience) out of a grammatical trouble? "The subject of a proposition is that of which something is affirmed." -Harvey. Ex. The horse kicked the boy. Teacher. Of what is something affirmed? Pupil.-Something is affirmed of the boy. Teacher. (Slightly disturbed.) What is affirmed of the boy? him. * * * * * * * * * * ** How shall the teacher, who reverences authority, convince the pupil who is ignorantly logical, that there is not anything affirmed of the boy? Failing to convince him, how shall the teacher enable the pupil to determine the subject of that proposition? Who will come to the relief of this young teacher ?-ED. HOW THEY DO IT IN INDIANA. H. OSSIAN, IND., Oct. 8, 1885. Editor Monthly:-Enclosed find postal note for $1.50. I must have the MONTHLY if I am working in another State. Perhaps a short ex planation of the Indiana school system may be of interest to some of your readers. Each county has a superintendent, whose duty it is to examine teachers, which he does the last Saturday of each month-the State Board furnishing the questions to all counties alike on same day. He visits schools, has the management of the county institute, and performs other minor duties. There is no examination fee. The State provides a book for the applicant to write his answers in-no oral examinations. Each township has its trustee who engages the teachers for all the schools of the township. He is sole manager of school affairs in the township. The trustees of the county constitute the county board of education, which adopts a course of study and text-books for the common schools. The county board elects the county superintendent bi-ennially. His salary is $4 per day for actual service. The trustee does the work of the township board in Ohio. He learns who the best teachers are and selects for a school as he thinks advisable. Pupils completing the common school course can attend the central high school. When the teacher engages with the trustee, a contract is signed, and among other things the teacher agrees to attend the township institute at each session, or forfeit a day's wages. The teacher of the high school is appointed township principal, to have full control. The State Board prepares an outline of work for six months, commencing with October. This is the second year of the Indiana Teachers' Reading Circle. The last hour of the township institute is devoted to the reading circle work. The first year's work is as follows: "Brooks's Mental Science, to page 319; first half year, "Hewitt's Pedagogy," last half, "Modern History," in Barnes's General History, to page 421; also Smith's Studies in English Literature. My position is that of township principal, so I have the whole work on my hands. Very truly, ANSWERS. B. F. REMINGTON. Q. 4, p. 462.-Rule to find day of week for any given date: Set down the year given less 1; divide by 4, disregarding the remainder, if any; add also the number of days from January 1 to the given date; divide by 7, and if o remains, Sunday is the day; if 1, Monday; if 2, Tuesday, etc. Will any of the readers of the MONTHLY show why such should be the case? Example: July 5, 1810 was what day of the week? |