TEACHING OF BIOLOGY IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 121 



As a result of several years devoted to teaching' biology, I have had 

 ample opportunity to judge of the net product of the various methods 

 of biological teaching. I have tried the various different methods and 

 have thoughtfully considered the results, not only of my own teaching, 

 but of many other teachers as well. 



Very interesting and important facts were learned through close 

 personal and official relations with several hundred young men and 

 women who were fitting themselves to teach in the public schools. 

 These students had come chiefly from the country schools and high 

 schools, though man}^ were college graduates. Many of them had studied 

 zoology or botany, or both, in the high schools and colleges, and 

 " Nature Study " in regular grists had been ground out to many others 

 in the grades in the town and city schools. Still others were fresh 

 from the woods and fields, where they had studied nature without 

 being handicapped by books and public school teachers. Those who 

 had studied biology in the schools had been taught by various methods. 

 Interest in my own work led me to acquaint myself as fully as possible 

 with the methods of instruction employed in the different schools from 

 which my students came. This was done through visits to the schools, 

 conferences with the teachers, and a study of their printed courses of 

 study. The results of the methods were learned through an intimate 

 acquaintance with the students who came from the various schools. 



The methods in vogue in the different schools were various, — not 

 to say variegated. In some the teacher followed more or less relig- 

 iously some text-book such as Holder, Tenney, Orton, or Steele's Four- 

 teen Weeks' Course; in others, a little ;*' analyzing " of plants consti- 

 tuted the course; in others, the work was limited to such dissections 

 and studies as are provided for in such laboratory guides as Colton, 

 Boyer and Brooks in Zoology, and Arthur, Barnes and Coulter in 

 Botany; while in yet others, morphological studies were supplemented 

 by a systematic study of species in one or more groups, and of the 

 local fauna and flora. 



It goes without saying that the teachers following the first two 

 methods have no conception of the purpose of the function of biologi- 

 cal study in the high school. That of the third group is but little, if 

 any, better. 



The graduates from the schools where biology was taught by the 

 first three methods rarely, if ever, elected any biological work when 

 they came to the State Normal School, never manifested any interest 

 in biological subjects, and not one of several hundred that I have 

 known has become a teacher of biology, so far as I have ever learned. 



On the other hand, many of those who had learned more or less 

 systematic zoology or botany and something of animal and plant anat- 



