GRADED LESSONS IN LANGUAGE BOOK ONE BY ROSA V. WINTERBURN FORMER SUPERVISOR OF LANGUAGE AND HISTORY, STOCKTON, SOUTHEAST PUBLISHING COMPANY NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE PREFACE Most newspaper editors condemn severely the results obtained from the teaching of language and grammar in the elementary schools. Usually, they place the blame on the teachers. Many of these editors say that the boy who runs the linotype machine can correct the communication received from the average teacher so that its appearance in the paper will not be a disgrace from the standpoint of language and grammar. This is true, they say, in spite of the fact that teachers can recite more rules of grammar than can members of any other profession, while the boy who corrects their manuscripts may never have looked inside a text-book on grammar. While this wholesale condemnation by editors and publishers of the language work done in the primary and grammar grades is too severe, there is no denying the fact that something is radically wrong with that work. But the teachers are not wholly, nor even mainly, responsible for these results. To what then are these poor results due? They are due mostly to the two extreme methods that text-books and school officials have compelled teachers to follow. The older of these methods, as laid down in the text-book, made language and grammar work consist mainly of memorizing the terms and rules of technical grammar. No provision was made for real constructive work in conversation and composition. The object was to have the pupil remember the dry V |