12 NATURE STUDY REVIEW [«):l— Jan., 1913 



"The lack of good apparatus and a convenient school house for such 

 work are some of the difficulties which I have met in my teaching agri- 

 culture." 



"Lack of time to apply to the work; insufficient apparatus; lack of 

 suitable texts; school closes too early to do the amount of outside work 

 that should be done; hired for but for the school year." 



"Lack of good types of stock; lack of real interest on the part of the 

 farmers." 



"Lack of time according to our own course of study; much of our 

 work must be done after school hours, but have no difficulty with com- 

 plaints from patrons for so doing." 



"The pupils take great interest in it, but unless it is disguised under 

 the head of language, etc., the parents are much against it." 



"Lack of time to give to it and to the practical work in it as we would 

 like to do owing to the demand of our high schools that our pupils be 

 well grounded in true discount, bank discount which, if they were better 

 prepared to earn a living, they would have little demand for in after life."" 



"My own lack of special training. The lack of good text-books. 

 The fact that there is no definite syllabus in elementary agriculture." 



"Never had any. Everybody likes it. Can't get time enough." 



"Lack of agricultural sentiment in the community; lack of text and 

 reference books for the pupils. School in session at the time of year 

 when practical work cannot be done." 



"Our teachers are high school graduates who do not know the differ- 

 ence between a silo, whether a silo is a machine or kind of sheep, and our 

 greatest difficulty is teaching them, and putting them into the right atti- 

 tude." 



"The principal one is that each part of the country presents dif- 

 ferent problems and it is hard to be posted on the needs of different parts 

 when you change so often." 



Tn the selection of topic or units for instruction, most teach- 

 ers were guided by local or community interests, some followed 

 the text-book, others a course of study prepared by state or 

 county departments of education. 



While getting the experiences of so many teachers who were 

 actually engaged in teaching agriculture in the rural elementary 

 schools it seemed desirable to get an expression from them re- 

 garding a course of study in agriculture. They were asked to 

 indicate what would be most helpful to them. Many valuable 

 suggestions were made in response to this question, among them r 

 arrangement of subjects in the order which they should be taught, 

 a summary and explanation of experiments to be performed, 

 some scheme to meet local needs, some definite statement of 

 correlation with other subjects, means of securing illustrative 

 material, and sources of information on various topics. 



Although this summary includes responses from less than 

 two hundred teachers it is representative of the most successful 



