Cf)e ^utrulion Societies; 



SCHOOL DEPARTMENT 



Edited by ALICE HALL WALTER 



Address all communications relative to the work of this depart- 

 ment to the Editor, 67 Oriole Avenue, Providence, R. I. 



ON IMPROVING METHODS OF TEACHING BIRD- AND 

 NATURE-STUDY 



More and more deeply a feeling is coming to thoughtful educators, as the 

 great war steadily takes its toll of men trained as teachers or scientists, that the 

 ranks must be filled in the near future by members of a younger generation, 

 by boys and girls now in high school or preparatory institutions. The question 

 arises as to whether these youthful scholars will attain a broad and careful 

 outlook upon the field before them, and become sufficiently well fitted for the 

 tasks awaiting them to take up and carry through the work of men who have 

 left the schoolroom or investigator's laboratory to aid their country in the 

 world-wide struggle for liberty. 



What can we do now, in the midst of so much outward strife, to improve 

 methods of teaching and to bring the standard of scholarship in nature-study 

 to a higher level? We can do this: actually exert ourselves to see and under- 

 stand more of what goes on about us in the world of nature. The simple 

 exercise, which follows, describing a sand spit, suggests some ways in which a 

 more intimate acquaintance with the interrelationships of a very circumscribed 

 area of plant and animal communities may be made. One serious trouble with 

 present methods is the detached presentation of facts about nature. Bird- 

 study has long been popularly taught by the simple method of identifying one 

 bird after another, usually by plumage, less frequently by song or flight, and 

 even more rarely by observation of habits. 



This is a most inadequate method at best, since birds are so bound up in 

 their life-histories with other forms of life, particularly with vegetation and 

 insects that the detached method in reality fails to give the proper background 

 for their activities or an adequate presentation of the part they play in the so- 

 called balance of Nature. When high-school teachers are satisfied to lay aside 

 a certain prejudice about college and university methods on the one hand, and 

 grade-school methods on the other, the question of raising bird- and nature- 

 study to its rightful place can be much more fairly met. One method should 

 underlie all phases of this work; namely, the method of getting at the truth. 



In the kindergarten and grades, children can learn to know animals and 

 plants in communities just as well as in detached groups, or one by one without 

 reference to relationship to their environment. It takes thought and time to 

 see the world as it really is, but how much more, for example, a bird means to 



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