PRINCIPLES DETERMINING METHOD. 169 



or no attention to the intervening steps. When the 

 teacher assumes that her pupils can take the same leaps 

 of thought that she does, she either fails entirely, or, if 

 she is strong, pulls her pupils off their feet, and carries 

 them along with her, instead of training them to walk 

 for themselves. 



Only as the teacher analyzes her leaps, goes back 4 in 

 her experience to the time when she had to go step by 

 step, studies the steps by which her children progress, 

 and then adapts herself to them and tries to keep step 

 with them, will she be most successful in training her 

 pupils to take longer steps, and finally to leap for them- 

 selves. 



Such an analysis by the teacher of the successive steps 

 by which she gained her ideas or attained her present 

 state of knowledge is particularly essential in the case 

 of the teacher whose education has been almost entirely 

 an education of books. In mere book-work, pupils ha- 

 bitually make great leaps, accepting the ideas and con- 

 clusions of the author without looking at the steps which 

 lead up to them. For this reason, and many others, 

 the teacher should study* nature, not merely books, in 

 preparing for nature study ; she can best prepare by 

 studying with a child. She can then see just how the 

 children creep and step in their observation and thought. 

 The teacher who prepares for her lesson in nature study 

 by merely reading what "the book says," will almost 

 certainly fail in adapting her work to her pupils, and in 

 leading them to see and think for themselves. 



This tendency of the adult mind to leap is illustrated 



