Errors in school : their causes and treatment / by John Adams.

  • Adams, John, 1857-1934.
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Errors in school : their causes and treatment / by John Adams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/344 (page 12)
    There is a limit here as elsewhere, beyond which the wise do not go. We have a right to enjoy a howler, and to get as much pleasure out of it as is consistent with our keeping an eye on its underlying significance for us as teachers. Sometimes teachers go about proclaiming their own defects by the howlers they cull from their class-rooms and gloatingly tell to the world. For howlers are of the boomerang type, and sometimes come home to roost with the teacher. In other words, they are sometimes the direct results of bad teaching, and a critical examination may bring out their parentage. Indeed, there is a certain parallelism between this aspect of the howler, and that aspect of the dream that has come into sinister prominence in the activities of the psycho-analysts. These read so much into dreams and learn so much from them, according to their own statements, that cautious people are inclined to be very reticent in describing their dreams in psycho-analytic circles. For the same reason teachers should be careful in retailing their catches of howlers, lest haply they may expose certain of their own professional weak¬ nesses. In an examination of a university extension class it was found that in the English Literature paper quite a number of the students had given Aberdeen as the answer to the question: “Where did the Canterbury Pilgrims start from?” Investigation showed that this remarkable blunder resulted from the indistinct speech of the lecturer. His repeatedly mumbled “Tabard Inn” conveyed no meaning to his students, who had never before heard of that Southwark hostelry, but who were familiar from