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reading, and generally with excellent results. We should like to see a light ruled blackboard provided for this purpose in every school. It would not cost more than a set of reading sheets, and would last much longer. In the standard classes the improvement in reading, which we noted last year, has been barely maintained. In a great many cases the pupils do not get sufficient practice in reading, and the lessons are left before they are properly mastered. Teachers are singularly blind to this defect, and even when aware of it show little ingenuity in devising a remedy. The difficulty which pupils experience in dealing with new lessons is very largely due to this want of a thorough mastery of the work already done. To one who sees the every-day teaching of a number of schools this difficulty is most apparent; indeed, it is now and then positively painful to witness the floundering helplessness of even the higher classes in dealing with new reading lessons. In such circumstances, interest in the work, and pleasure and profit from it, are out of the question. If the pupils generally find the new reading lessons difficult teachers will do well to suspect that this is due to superficiality in the previous work. To give the practice in reading that is so much needed revisal of old lessons (for reading only) would be found very useful; and simultaneous reading should be regularly practised, but only at the close of the lessons, after they have been taught on the individual method as thoroughly as time will allow. We think it important that simultaneous readingshould be used only in this way. To use it before reading by the individual pupils is adequately practised tends to reduce the teaching of reading to parrot work, and sacrifices all training to make out and interpret by proper expression and emphasis new reading matter. Explanation of the language and matter of the lessons receives a great deal of attention, but the results, though they are improving year by year and are here and there good, are, on the whole, disappointing. It is only in a minority of the schools that the pupils are trained to give full and intelligent answers to questions in the matter of the English and history lessons, and in the subjects of instruction generally. Too often snatches and fragments of answers are received and accepted without demur, teachers either not aiming at training their pupils to give complete and satisfactory answers or failing signally in the attempt. From the day a child enters school he is subjected to constant practice in answering questions, and it is natural to expect that he should learn to give his answers with increasing readiness, fulness, and intelligence. So long as teachers do not make it a constant aim to train their pupils to answer well, and to feel the difference between a full and satisfactory answer and a mere fragment of one, children will never attain facility in the exercise of consecutive thought or in the expression of it. The habitual use of questions that can be answered by " yes " or " no " or by a word or two also retards the acquisition of fulness and readiness of expression. The English papers of the junior scholarship competitors, which should show the teaching of the schools at its best, give ample evidence of the prevailing indifferent training in English. Very few competitors answer intelligently and fully, and the majority betray ignorance of the language and matter of the lessons prescribed that gives us a fresh shock every year. We have on former occasions drawn attention to the very unsatisfactory training in English of these competitors, but our remarks appear to have been regarded as exaggerations. This is far from being the case, and we allude to the unpalatable truth because a recognition of our shortcomings is in itself an important step in the direction of improvement. One of the chief reasons why the English lessons are so indifferently taught is that teachers so seldom prepare and study the lessons they are to teach. That this is the case is often perfectly manifest from the way in which the lessons are handled—from the slavish adherence to the questions appended to the lessons, and the want of a comprehensive grasp of the matter or story. A teacher who means to interest his pupils, and give them the best training he can from the language and matter, will find it indispensable to study the lessons beforehand, and this more especially in the subjects of English, history, and geography. Dr. Arnold, of Bugby, had a most intimate knowlege of Boman history, but he never neglected to study and prepare notes on every lesson in the subject. When asked why he did this he answered with profound insight, " I want my boys to drink out of a running stream rather than out of a stagnant pool." The objects of the teacher's preparatory study in English should be twofold—first to qualify himself to question skilfully on the matter, and second to save time in hunting up words or passages to be discussed for explanation. The latter he would do well to mark beforehand by underlining them. In most schools the use of this simple expedient alone would save many minutes a day, and often make it possible to give something like adequate practice in reading. Spelling and dictation are nearly always well done, though errors in written papers that do not form part of the spelling test are more numerous than the excellence of the test exercises would lead us to expect. Drawing continues to be fairly taught. The number of failures in the subject would be considerable were not a good deal of latitude used in judging the tail of large classes that are on the whole satisfactorily taught. We think it very desirable that the drawing should be judged by a special test given on the day of examination, and not as hitherto, by the every-day work shown in the drawing books. This method of testing the subject is used in some of the other districts of the colony, and we have good reason to believe that it encourages more thorough instruction. In most of the Otago schools the practice of drawing is insufficient to give freedom and readiness of execution, and the slate or blank-paper exercises that are recommended in the instructions contained in the drawing books are generally ignored. In many cases two short lessons a week are all that are given. These might suffice for the work done in the drawing books, but they need to be supplemented by practice on slates or on blank sheets of paper. To make the training of the hand and eye, which drawing is designed to impart, effective it is indispensable that greater freedom and quickness of execution should be secured than is now aimed at. The slow, blurred, and muchcorrected work that is so often submitted gives evidence, not of free and rapid execution, but of the reverse.