A Teachers' Handbook in Geography, Vol. 1: North and South America (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from A Teachers' Handbook in Geography, Vol. 1: North and South America The real problem in our geography teaching is now, as it always has been, how to incorporate the text-book in our scheme so that it shall prove a helpful factor rather than a limitation and a handicap. The notion is happily obsolete that a teacher plus a text-book constitute the conditions for a geography course. Every teacher nowadays appreciates, to her sorrow, the abysmal hiatus between the text-book in geography and the specific needs of the geography lesson. The radical expedient of dispensing altogether with the text-book is sometimes attempted, under especially favorable conditions such as obtain in some normal schools and colleges. But none of these departures has ever proved itself adequate, to the satisfaction of schoolmen at large, in the matters of scope and continuity. We are learning to regard coldly the sporadic schemes whose application calls for special conditions, among the latter being an ideal teacher, an ideal pupil, and a made-to-order environment. Those whose vocation lies in the shaping of material for teaching cannot realize too keenly that their real audience must for all time be the average teacher, toiling in average surroundings. Laying theories aside and addressing ourselves to the actual conditions, we find a vast herd of teachers doing what little they can for a vaster herd of pupils, under circumstances which, in the cities at least, could not readily be worse. And the future holds forth no promise that this herding aspect will be materially modified. In the light of these things the much abused text-book, be its failings what they may, is an indispensable boon to the grade teacher, and might well prove a safeguard in the experimentation higher up. The limitations of the text-book are defined in its name - text: something to be elaborated, developed, worked out. The material included is a geography course in a potential sense only. Every text-book author is mindful of this limitation of his work. And he devotes certain captions, chapters, or appendices to the outlining of collateral material which he hopes will be utilized by the user of the text. The author thus makes a definite requisition for a collaborator whose duty it shall be to develop the text into material suitable for lesson-giving. By general consent this task of collaboration has heretofore fallen to the grade teacher. And it is at this point, I think, that we shall find the fundamental weak spot in our teaching of geography. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.