223 



the student and of arousing his interest in it. Furthermore, it 

 is worth one's time to learn the real significance of the morphol- 

 ogy of the flower and to understand that it has a purpose other 

 than to furnish means for the identification of the plant. 



Carlton C. Curtis. 



Columbia University. 



OF INTEREST TO TEACHERS 



QUANTITATIVE WORK IN HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE COURSES 



By Julius Sachs 



From the general standpoint of the object of secondary 

 education, and not from the point of view of a science expert, I 

 offer you a few comments on the influence of quantitative work 

 in our high school science courses. It is claimed that no science 

 is worth teaching, especially no physics, that does not make for 

 quantitative accuracy ; the college officers, however, who imbue 

 the future teachers with this view, know very little of the hesi- 

 tancy and helplessness of our high-school students ; they do not 

 know, as teachers of long experience know, that the steps of the 

 students must be carefully directed in their experimentation, and 

 that there is much more than unaided performance in the obser- 

 vations they record. It is safe to say that even if the 

 students grasp the topics handled in this mathematico-physical 

 work, they certainly fail of seeing the larger relations of the 

 individual experiment to the world of physical phenomena. I 

 am inclined to reverse the usual estimate that teachers place on 

 the relative importance of their work in the high school ; to me 

 the most valuable and most important part of the work is that 

 effected with pupils who cannot or will not advance to the college 

 stage ; for them surely, and I should Hke to add for all high- 

 school students, it is important that they should be led to compre- 

 hend the physical, chemical, and biological elements that enter 

 into the various industrial, agricultural, and mechanical problems. 

 If then you wish to add a special fundamental training along the 

 line of quantitative work, let that constitute an advanced course 



