The Teaching of Elementary Botany 195 
interests are paramount to all other considerations, and at once set 
about making the students partners in the course. This does not in 
the least mean abdicating the functions of the teacher, but on the 
contrary giving them full scope, since in return for his knowledge of 
what is possible and how to do it, he gains the student’s view of 
what is most worth while and of the most interesting manner of 
attack. Moreover, once he approaches the matter sympathetically, 
his own experience is invaluable in refining the students’ ideas and 
in helping to decide between various suggestions. To one who has 
run the whole gamut of experience from stereotyped courses in 
evolution and morphology in which there was not the slightest idea 
that the student’s viewpoint was a thing to be considered, through 
those in which there was a growing feeling that his interests should 
be wrought into the course, to the final stage where the student’s 
interests and needs are regarded as decisive, there seems no possibility 
of hesitation as to the proper method. Indeed, if the student is to 
be animated by the spirit of inquiry as the primary motive force in 
learning, his right to include the subject-matter of the course in his 
investigation cannot be ignored. 
In practice, the task of determining the content is an intrinsic 
and regular part of the course. It not only occupies the first period 
of two or more hours, but as much of succeeding ones as is necessary 
to determine the students’ contacts with the plant world, to organize 
these into a desirable sequence, and to give the students a clear view 
of the relation of the parts to the whole. While one may entertain 
natural doubts as to the student’s ability to “play up” in a game 
of this sort, these will quickly disappear when he realizes that his 
opinions and interests are being taken seriously. Of the several 
methods of approach that have been tried the most direct and 
successful is the one in which each student is asked what he most 
wishes to know about plants. This is done with the utmost informality 
in order to encourage the students to volunteer their views, and to 
make it possible to pass quickly from question and answer to an 
animated discussion in which the teacher appears a participant 
rather than an evident director. As the views are expressed, they 
are written on the blackboard in order to have them clearly before 
the class when it turns to deciding which of these represent best the 
interests of the class as a group. From this discussion results a 
sequence of projects in the order of their interest or importance, in 
which the teacher’s chief share is to see that one permits of a natural 
development into the next, and that there are no impossibilities, 
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