416 ^NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [11:9— Dec, 1915 



concrete materials in Nature-Study instruction. A teacher who 

 does not have a passion for nature, who gets his facts principally 

 from books and not from first hand observation, who is content 

 during his leisure moments to shut himself within four walls and 

 not be responsive to the call of the wild, is destined to be mechani- 

 cal and dry as dust. Nature-Study teachers must be inspired, and 

 in no other subject is this so easily done as in Nature-Study, if the 

 instructor of these prospective teachers is a well-balanced nature 

 enthusiast. Such an instructor will never be satisfied to use the 

 dead specimens of a musuem , or even the most carefully prepared 

 and beautifully colored stereopticon slides when it is possible to 

 take an excursion for a first hand study of the desired materials. 

 The beautiful campuses ornamented with trees, shrubs, and flower- 

 ing plants, so generally connected with teachers' training schools, 

 the greenhouses and the green rooms, and the school gardens of 

 these institutions are all indicative that the instructors are moving 

 in the right direction. 



Since the first hand study of nature is so very important, there 

 is one feature in which the prospective teachers need especial help. 

 This is in the conducting of an excursion with a class of grade 

 children. The writer, from his own observations and from reports 

 of others, feels that in no aspect of Nature-Study in the grades 

 have teachers so frequently failed as in the excursion. If this 

 sitviation has not been sufficiently appreciated it is due to the fact 

 that we have been in the habit of forgetting failures and heralding 

 successes. Some of the reasons that teachers fail in the use of the 

 excursion are that they, in a measure, share the impulses of their 

 pupils, a lesson out-of-doors means relaxation, more in the nature 

 of a picnic than real work. The teacher as a result plans her work 

 less carefully which always brings dire results. Some of the condi- 

 tions conducive to failure are beyond the teacher's control. Child- 

 ren can not as readily concentrate out-of-doors as in the schoolroom 

 due to the varied sensory stimuli to which they are constantly 

 subjected, and further they have not formed the habit of thinking 

 out-of-doors. The writer may be pardoned for mentioning a 

 device that he has seen used to bridge over the period of uncer- 

 tainty with the young teacher until he has gained the necessary 

 power and strength to hold pupils to definite things at the time of 

 the excursion. In the case in mind, the purpose of the excursion 

 was the study of the corn plant. It was undertaken by the teacher 



