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thorough study as to what ought to be done in a general revision of the course of study. That course of study, when it is formed, will be largely elastic, and you will still retain the power to modify conditions as they will be found by you to be needed in your districts.'

ABSENCE OF TEACHERS

New York is bothered, also, by too easy absence of its teachers from duty. The Superintendent, at his recent conference with the District Superintendents, warned that the rules "granting absence refunds to sick teachers may have to be made more rigid." A resumé of his remarks made public today discloses the fact that he informed the District Superintendents that he did not know how long that privilege will be allowed unless we do something to check the absence of some teachers who are absent nearly every year. "As far as I am personally concerned," he said, "the most liberal treatment should be accorded to a teacher genuinely sick, who has been regular in her attendance for a long period of time. If it were my private business I would give her two years' salary if she were sick that length of time, provided that she had many years of regular attendance at her work. We do not find fault with those people who have prolonged absence due to serious personal illness. We find fault with the absences of younger teachers who feel that they own their positions. Quite a few of them -more than a dozen-have told the doctors their opinion in this stereotyped expression: 'I am entitled to twenty days, am I not?' 'I am entitled to thirty days, am I not?'-thinking, firmly convinced of the fact, it is not by grace, but by right that they are entitled to sixty days' absence in the year, or one-third of the whole working year. They are not entitled to that and they should not stay away unless they are physically unable to do their work.'

""You should be very careful in following up the absences of teachers who stay

away often if you want to do a public service and render justice to the teachers who are honest, industrious and diligent The unwarranted absences of a very few may work a hardship on the large number of earnest teachers who never stay away unless it is physically impossible for the to go to school. Local School Boarc should take more than a perfunctory interest in the absences of teachers.'

"Dr. O'Shea told the District Superintendents also that teachers who are absent from duty on account of illness should send a doctor's certificate promptl to their principals and should make effort to get well by consulting their physicians promptly and as often as may be necessary.

every

"Among constructive suggestions of fered by Dr. O'Shea for improving

teachers' health and comfort in the schoo were: urging that District Superintendents recommend the establishment of rest rooms wherever possible, emphasizing the necessity of care in assigning newly ap pointed teachers and teachers who are infirm or have been seriously ill, to classes which do not require the expenditure c much nervous energy. Such teachers should not be assigned e. g., to slow progress or opportunity classes.

REST ROOMS

"Speaking of the value of rest rooms. Dr. O'Shea pointed out that at times a teacher who is slightly ill would recover quickly if she had the opportunity of resting for a short period while her class taken care of by the assistant to principal or other person; whereas, through lack of a rest room the teacher may be required to stay home for several days—a loss to the teacher and the city.

TEACHING TEACHERS HOW TO TEACH

"Dr. O'Shea emphasized again the necessity of giving assistance to young teachers, and said:

"I have always said that it is not necessary for the head of department to

visit every teacher under her supervision every day. Her time could be infinitely better spent by assisting the young teacher, until her authority is established -until she finds herself. It is much easier to teach a young woman how to go right than it is to let her go wrong and then try to correct bad habits.'

COLLECTIONS IN SCHOOLS

What Chicago has done locally the whole of New York State may enact generally:

"State Commissioner of Education Frank P. Graves has come out strongly against permitting financial drives in the schools of the State, even for such worthy purposes as the preservation of 'Old Ironsides,' the frigate Constitution. The State Commissioner, in the current Bulletin of the University of the State of New York calls attention to the action taken by the Board of Regents nearly three years ago prohibiting the soliciting of funds in the public schools of the State.

""This step,' he said, 'was not taken. through opposition to any of the projects for which funds were sought from the school children. It was recognized that most of the objects were worthy and that there was every desire to see that they were furthered. Collectively, however, the sums requested and secured by pressure were exceedingly large, and it was felt that methods of securing them voluntarily should be devised by the sponsors. The main reason for this exploitation of the school children seemed to be that numerous agencies found it a facile and convenient way of financing their particular interests.

"Each project seemed small in itself, but the sum total of the various objects was somewhat appalling. Not less than fifty or sixty such requests have been made within a comparatively brief period of time, and the purses of the parents cannot stand such a continual drain, small though each amount may be. It is to be hoped that the suggestion of further

collections among school children will

soon cease.

""There is, of course, no objection to voluntary gifts. The State Department of Education is always glad to have any worthy object mentioned in its semimonthly Bulletin, which goes to all the schools, and to have any teacher or pupil feel at liberty as an individual to give as much or little as he chooses. The collection should not, however, be made through the schools, but the contribution should be sent directly by the giver to the body responsible for the particular movement. Neither the Board of Regents nor the Commissioner wishes to stand in the way of contributions to any deserving cause, but financial drives cannot properly be permitted in the schools and children forced through social obloquy to give beyond the means of their parents. We must protect both the children and the schools.""

SPEAKING OF SPEAKING

I wonder whether you would be interested to know what I said to the principals about a pleasant opportunity I am missing: "The custom of Chicago principals of inviting visiting superintendents of the department to 'say a few words to the children, to meet the teachers, etc.,' is one of the courteous and agreeable incidents of school visits. Some of us enjoy speaking; for others of us it partakes of the nature of a show-off; some of us make our school visits more a matter of business than others do. For myself, there is not the slightest danger of offense at the omission of either of these courtesies. My visits to schools should be so much of an ordinary every-day occurrence as not to require any special attention. I am deeply concerned with the solid achievements of the schools. I feel that the artistic, musical, and dramatic specialities are so well in hand as to require little encouragement. You will not, I know, take it amiss that I would prefer inspection of the commoner school work to the delights

and entertainments which you are offering. May I say also that I never have found that these pleasant additions to the old-fashioned school curriculum interfere with the advancement of the so-called

fundamentals. The schools which shine with a moderate amount of dramatic and musical entertainment have, in my experience, done as good solid work as the others."

DIAGNOSTIC AND REMEDIAL WORK IN SILENT READING

A

By D. J. BEEBY, Principal, Oglesby School*

T the end of each semester all the pupils in the Oglesby School are given standardized tests in silent reading. In June, 1925, the pupils in grades 3B to 8A were tested with the Burgess Scale for Measuring Ability in Silent Reading, No. 4. Grades 2B, 2A, and IA were tested with the Haggerty Reading Examination, Sigma I. The IB classes were given the Detroit Word Recognition Test, Form A.

Table I shows the distribution of the scores of the classes tested with the Burgess Test. The classes marked with an asterisk are made up of pupils having high intelligence quotients. Those marked with a dagger are lowest in intelligence and those marked with a double dagger lie between the two groups mentioned. The last six columns represent rooms in a branch which is not organized into intelligence quotient groups.

The reader will notice that the scores are more "scattered" in the low I. Q. classes. This scattering is not so marked as in previous tests, because we have worked to bring up the laggards rather than to make high median scores. Notice also the overlapping in reading ability in such widely separated grades as 8A and 4A. This means that there are many pupils in 4A who are more efficient readers than some pupils who are in 8A.

Table I shows, on the whole, lower median performance than we obtained for tests given in January, 1925, or in May,

1924. We did not have our remedial work as well organized in previous semesters as at present so the higher median scores obtained from previous tests are not as healthy as they might appear to be. It is easy to get a high median score by working with the pupils who do not need attention.

It will be remembered that the Burgess Tests consist of twenty illustrated paragraphs of about equal difficulty. The pup reads the paragraph and makes a very simple addition to the accompanying picture. The tests call for careful reading. somewhat like the reading called for in an arithmetic problem. I have found that the results obtained from the use of the Burgess Tests correlate very closely with those obtained from the Monroe, Haggerty Sigma I, and the Thorndike-McCall. A good deal has been written about the effect of practice upon the results obtained from the Burgess Tests. No doubt there is a considerable carry-over if the tests are used too frequently. The pupils represented in Table I had not read one of the Burgess Tests since early in May, 1924– a matter of thirteen months-so I think the effect of practice may be called negligible.

In January, 1925, these same pupils were given one of the Monroe Reading Tests. All the pupils who were a year or more retarded in reading were placed in

*Read at the June meeting of the Chicago Pedagogica Club.

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remedial groups. Of course, this was a purely arbitrary arrangement. In the Monroe and Burgess Tests the steps from one paragraph to the next amount to a year when the results are converted into grade equivalent scores. That is, a pupil who read seven paragraphs correctly might be classed as a remedial pupil, while a pupil of the same class reading eight paragraphs would be up to grade. With this explanation the large number of remedial pupils will not be disturbing.

Sometimes a pupil with a high score was placed in a remedial class because the teacher thought he needed the individual instruction. The records of these pupils do not appear in Table II.

A peculiar thing about reading as a school subject is that occasionally a pupil will appear as a deficient for the first time as late as seventh or eighth grade. And there is no mistake about it, he has developed a real reading deficiency. Some pupils will show up in the deficient group just once in their whole school career. Other pupils will be poor readers all the way through the grades in spite of everything the school can do. These last are usually pupils of low mental ability.

The reader will notice that certain pupils made an improvement equivalent to one, two, three or even four years in a single semester. Others show slight improvement while others received lower scores in June than in January. The teachers agreed that many of the scores did not begin to show the real reading improvement of certain pupils as indicated by their new power to get lessons from books. In other cases the teachers said that the test results indicate greater improvement than the actual facts will warrant.

It is well known that varying types of reading matter have a profound effect upon a pupil's silent reading performance. Allowance must also be made for the inadequacy of the tests to measure a child's reading ability. We must also remember that a child's physical and mental condition will have much to do with his achievement. The statistical method is valuable if we do not take the results too seriously.

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Table II shows the results of remedial instruction with 344 pupils during the second semester of 1924-1925. Column. one contains the identifying numbers of the pupils. The number of remedial pupils in a room varied from three to seven in the high I. Q. rooms, and from twelve to twenty-three in the low I. Q. rooms. Column two in Table II gives the intelligence quotient of each remedial pupil. Column three shows the grade equivalent scores of the pupils as tested with the Monroe Reading Test in January, 1925. Column four contains the results of the teacher's diagnosis of each pupil's deficiency. For the explanation of No. the numbers in this column refer to the 18 "Suggestions to Teachers" on page 211. Column five contains the grade equivalent scores received in the Burgess Test given. in June, 1925.

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