Lanterna Rally

Author: Sir Oliver Sir Oliver Lodge FRS

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2017-09-16

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 9781976468193

This book is written without the least regard to any demand but those of children and of life and mental activity generally. In places where the author is mistaken he cannot plead that he has been hampered by artificial considerations. His object in writing it has been solely the earnest hope that the teaching of this subject may improve and may become lively and interesting. Dulness and bad teaching are synonymous terms. A few children are bom mentally deficient, but a number are graduaUy made so by the efforts made to train their growing faculties. A subject may easily be over-taught, or taught too exclusively and too laboriously. Teaching which is not fresh and lively is harmful, and in this book it is intended that the instruction shall be interesting. Nevertheless a great deal is purposely left to the enterprise of the student and the living voice of the teacher, and the examples given for practice are insufficient. The author has usually found that examples and illustrations are likely to be most serviceable, and least dull, when invented from time to time in illustration of the principles which are then being expounded; but a supple- mentary collection of exercises for practice is necessary also, in order to consolidate the knowledge and establish the principles as an ingrained habit. Wearisome over-practice and iteration and needlessly long sums should be avoided; because long sums, other than mechanical money addition, seldom occur in practice, and especially because many kinds of future study, especially the great group of sciences called Natural Philosophy, will be found to afford plenty of real arithmetical practice; and even ordinary life affords some, if an open mind is kept. The cumbrous system of weights and measures still surviving in this country should not bo made use of to furnish cheap arithmetical exercises of preposterous intricacy and uselessness. There is too much of real interest in the world for any such waste of time and energy. The mathematical ignorance of the average educated person has always been complete and shameless, and recently I have become so impressed with the unedifying character of much of the arithmetical teaching to which ordinary children are liable to be exposed that I have ceased to wonder at the widespread ignorance, and have felt impelled to try and take some step towards supplying a remedy. I know that many teachers are earnestly aiming at improvement, but they are hampered by considerations of orthodoxy and by the requirements of external examinations. If asked to formulate a criticism I should say that the sums set are often too long and tedious, the methods too remote from those actually employed by mathematicians, the treatment altogether too abstract, didac- tic, and un-experimental, and the subject-matter needlessly dull and useless and wearisome. Accordingly, in spite of much else that pressed to be done, a book on arithmetic forced itself to the front. It is not exactly a book for children, though I hope that elder children will take a lively interest in it, but perhaps it may be con- sidered most conveniently as one continuous hint to teachers, given in the form of instruction to youth ; and it is hoped that teachers will not disdain to use and profit by it, even though most of them feel that all the facts were quite well known to them before. It is not intended to instruct them in subject-matter, but to assist them in method of presenta- tion; and in this a good deal of amplification is left to be done by the teacher. But it is of the first importance that the teacher's own ideas should be translucently clear, and that his or her feeling for the subject should be enthusiastic : there is no better recipe for effective teaching than these two ingredients.