366 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OP SCIENCE 



Excursions to stores are very valuable in this connection. 

 This kind of work is not the business of nature study. 



Personally, I believe that geography can well afford to 

 turn over to the teachers of nature study and langTiage 

 most of the work as outlined in home geography. There 

 is too great a tendency to crowd geography into the 

 grades below the eighth. I have a letter upon my desk 

 from a teacher of geography in the seventh and eighth 

 grades of one of our smaller villages. She states that 

 her Superintendent is requiring her to teach the seventli 

 and eighth grade work in one year and that he argues 

 that geography contains so much detail that part of the 

 work should be left out anyway. This opinion is all too 

 common. It is a school-room tragedy to see the sixth and 

 seventh grade children struggle with much of the mathe- 

 matical geography- which is outlined for them. Not long 

 ago I watched and listened while an eighth grade class 

 tried to wade through the work as outlined upon the 

 motions of the world and its shape. Their teacher was 

 as well informed as the average grade-school teacher, 

 in this phase of geography. The children ''Edisoned" 

 the words, oblate spheroid, aphelion, etc., back to the 

 teacher, but it took only a little questioning to show that 

 the whole story meant very little to them. Perhaps 

 skillful teaching and an extended knowledge on the part 

 of the teacher could have accomplished fair results, but 

 that is, of course, what we do not have in our common 

 schools. Geography must be pushed up through the 

 eighth grade and through a year in the high school, and 

 there is no better way to do it than by permitting nature 

 study to take its place in the lower grades. Geography 

 study calls for mature thought, and we teachers of the 

 subject should seize every opportunity to dignify the 

 work by dropping the duplication and pushing its case 

 into higher courts. On the other hand, nature study 

 should be taken out of the eighth grade and room thus 

 made for geography. Teachers of nature study can 

 afford to do this if they have the extra time of geography 

 elsewhere. 



