Excerpt from The Essentials of Geography in the Primary and Grammar Grades
This Bulletin is issued primarily for the use of the student-teachers in our Training School as a general outline and plan of geography teaching. It will also be of service to our graduates and to other teachers in the public school work.
Its purpose is to serve as a practical escape from the prevalent method of text-book memorizing which seems to have settled upon geography teaching by virtue of the ease by which lessons may be assigned and courses of study mechanically arranged, without serious regard to the educational results. The attempt to encompass within the covers of a single text the immense and varied materials of geography knowledge is manifestly impossible. Necessarily this knowledge is so hopelessly condensed and the language so general and vaguely abstract that mere memorizing can give nothing but words and conveys little real intelligence to the mind of the average pupil.
The main points of divergence upon which the work outlined in this Bulletin throws emphasis are:
1. The acquirement of visual images of the maps of the world instead of mere memory of words concerning these maps.
2. The acquirement of a mass of concrete and interesting details and reactionary feelings relative to the areas and countries of the earth. This material may be acquired by the pupil either from books of travel, read by the pupil himself, or told to him by the teacher. This material precedes the definite learning of the few essentials and general facts which may be deduced from these varied stories and descriptions. Once the details are covered, the essential facts should be given with as much insistence upon memory drill as now is put upon the texts without this preliminary cultivation.
3. The teaching of physical conditions by experimental means and in connection with the special area studied.
This plan may he used in two ways: In schools provided with sufficient library and supplementary books, the topical system of reading by the pupils may be followed. In schools which are not thus equipped, or only partially equipped, the teacher should do the reading and then tell the stories to her pupils. The materials for the experimental work in physical geography will be found simple and inexpensive.
The article in Chapter III, entitled "Pictured Relief," by Walter J. Kenyon, was taken from the New York School Journal by permission. With this exception the first four chapters were written by Frank F. Bunker. The last chapter is by Effie B.McFadden, supervisor of physical geography.
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