148 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF ANIMALS 



At the close of the semester the two sections were 

 asked to rank the instructor on many different points. 

 Uniformly the students in the larger section rated 

 him lower than those in the smaller section, in such 

 matters as teaching skill, pleasantness of voice, neat- 

 ness of appearance and personal attractiveness! 



I have had a fairly extensive teaching experience, 

 which has included work in grade- and high-school 

 teaching, as well as over twenty-five years of teaching 

 at the college and university level, during which time 

 I have taught classes of almost all sizes, from those 

 of over six hundred at the University of California 

 to the graduate classes of three or four that come my 

 way; and I must confess to a personal prejudice 

 against these very large classes. Even when using the 

 same lecture notes, I do not give the same lecture to 

 five hundred students that I give to forty or fifty. 

 On the other hand, even with graduate classes and 

 advanced seminars I am prejudiced in favor of hav- 

 ing enough students, which means at least eight to 

 ten, to give a certain esprit de corps to the group. 

 Such personal opinions have their value, particularly 

 when they click with experimental results such as 

 those outlined by Hudelson from the experiments 

 at Minnesota. It is unfortunate that those experi- 

 ments did not test either the upper or the lower 

 limits of class size which are conducive to good class- 



