TRAINING OF THE WORKING TEACHER 9 



far as she gives thoughtful attention to the working out of 

 lesson plans in her own school, she will be taking the best 

 part of a course in nature study method. She may be fol- 

 lowing a rigid outline of steps at first, but initiative is soon 

 born wherever real interest and persistence are present. 



Nature Study and Biology. — The conventional ele- 

 mentary courses in the sciences are inadequate for training 

 nature study teachers. County superintendents' examina- 

 tions include botany and zoology, but all the rather mis- 

 cellaneous information necessary for passing them helps 

 but little in grade work. It is common to meet the teacher 

 who says she has tried to make her high school or normal 

 school science fit the case of nature study and has found 

 that it does not fit at all. Students who have taken botany 

 and zoology may be scarcely better prepared to teach 

 nature study in the grades than those who have not. 

 They have facts enough, but little conception of how to 

 use them to fit the case; in fact, they are in constant danger 

 of spoiling the whole lesson by making it too technical. 



The difficulty appears to be that even high school 

 botany and zoology are taught as complete sciences; as 

 systematic courses reviewing large bodies of organized 

 knowledge. But nature study is not concerned with such 

 organization of its facts. It attempts no such bird's-eye 

 view of the whole field. It does not squeeze its facts into a 

 system, or study its objects according to a uniform labora- 

 tory plan. Each object reveals a plan 0} its own. It is 

 science only as science may be defined as a certain com- 

 mon-sense method of coming to conclusions. Here, then, 

 are two very different things, and training in one hardly 

 prepares for the practice of the other. 



