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tunities must be chosen for indispensable visits to pupils who need assistance, but these visits should be very brief, and they should scarcely interrupt the work of the class, the members of which should in turn be made to feel that, although their teacher is a few yards further away, he still has their class well in hand. Except in an exceedingly well-disciplined school, a master's temporary complete desertion of a class is the signal for some kind of disorder in that class. 4. Silent Work. —ln the silent division, two kinds of work may be done— (a) practice in the carrying on of mental or mechanical processes that have been thoroughly explained to the children ; and (b) the driving home, by means of written reproduction and other devices, of the facts and principles that have been acquired in the course of the oral work. It may be said, generally, that silent work should not be of such a nature as to require very close attention from the master, or as to take very long to examine or correct. Transcription, mapping, drawing, and back-work in arithmetic are very good subjects for silent work. As a rule, two or three minutes stolen from the latter part of the oral lesson will give sufficient opportunity for comment on, and correction of, the silent work. 5. Clashing of Work must be careftMy avoided. —Of this kind of difficulty two instances may be given. (1.) If a junior class is getting an amusing lesson, or a very interesting one, from the teacher it is not advisable to have senior classes in the immediate neighbourhod; the chances are that under such circumstances the older children will neglect their own silent work and pay attention to what is going on in the other class. (2.) In a school in which the sewing mistress gives literary assistance, one may sometimes hear two reading lessons going on together, simultaneous reading, perhaps, being part of one of them. The effect is striking but undesirable. Under this head may properly be mentioned the necessity that exists for reducing noise to a minimum. The teacher himself should not, while teaching, make more noise than is absolutely unavoidable ; if he habitually speaks to his pupils in a low but distinct tone of voice his pupils will surely imitate him, and the comfort of both teacher and pupils will be greatly enhanced. 6. Mental and Physical Condition of Pupils to be considered. —When the order of work is being arranged care must be taken to assign the heaviest lessons to the time when pupils have not yet lost their day's stock of freshness and vigour; the lighter work should be done towards the close of the day, when mental and physical fatigue are coming on. Such a subject as arithmetic is suitable for the first lesson of the day ; writing for the last. If it should be found impossible to act on this principle throughout there should, as the next best thing, be alternation between hard and easy work. In some few cases it has been found that little attention is paid to the physical comfort of pupils. Children cannot work well on a hot summer's day if the schoolroom is so carefully shut up that fresh air is completely excluded, nor can they, in the winter, attend to their work properly if their teeth are chattering with cold because there is no fire. 7. Variety of Work. —Besides adjusting the order of different kinds of work with reference to their difficulty it is also desirable to secure for the children as much variety as possible. After pupils working for Standard I. have been engaged for- the first half-hour in making figures on slates, and the next in printing capital letters, it is rather hard on them to ask them to spend another half-hour in writing short words from the blackboard. If, however, the morning could be divided into six periods of twenty minutes each, and the first could be devoted to viva voce arithmetic, the second to making figures, the third to reading in class, the fourth to printing capitals, the fifth to ball-frame work, and the sixth to writing words from the blackboard, weariness of school work would not make its appearance. Quite generally, monotony should be avoided as far as possible. With this view, lessons should not be made too long. Twenty minutes is a good period. In the case of older children working at arithmetic two periods may be conjoined. Also, it is advisable that the work shall not be quite the same on two successive days. 8. Idleness to be guarded against. —lt is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that neither teacher nor pupil should have any spare time in school. The school hours are not long, and every moment of them should be taken up with school work proper. It would probably be fatal to a school if its master read newspapers or novels or wrote letters in school, or went out now and then to have a look round, and, possibly, asmoke. The pupils should have no time allowed for " preparation of lessons," unless the preparation involves writing. Time devoted to mere learning of lessons in school generally means an opportunity for conversation, and for the playing of certain indoor games known to schoolboys. Of course, preparatory work for almost any lesson may be written. Spelling, for instance, may be committed to memory by copying out the words on a slate or on paper. 9. Easy Subjects. —lt is implied in what has been said before that drawing, writing, sewing, singing, and drill should to some extent be made to serve the purpose of a kind of rest for the children from work involving greater mental tension, but he would be an idle teacher who should look upon a lesson in auy of these subjects as affording him a convenient opportunity for " taking a spell." No one could fairly complain of being expected to work faithfully for four hours a day on five days in the week, with eight weeks of holidays in the course of the year, even though Nativeschool work is undoubtedly very hard work when it is properly done. If, however, a visitor to a school finds five half-hours a week devoted to copybook writing when two, or, at the very utmost, three, would suffice, he can hardly help thinking that the reason why the subject is made to loom so large is that copybook writing can go on, after a fashion, without the teacher troubling himself much about it. This kind of suspicion is of course confirmed when the visitor finds that, in spite of the length of time devoted to it, the writing is very poor. Unfortunately, the combination— much time and bad results—is^not so uncommon as it ought to be. The fact is that hard work bestowed by a teacher on such subjects as writing and drawing produces palpable results with great rapidity, but no amount of mere practice by the pupils will do them much good. With regard to drill, it may be remarked that, while some attentiSn must be paid to it as a special and separate subject, it should also, so to speak, permeate and regulate the whole of the school work, to the extent of making it systematic. 2—E. 2.