y teaches a truer conception of interest: a
feeling accompanying self-expression. Interest has been defined as a
feeling of worth in experience. Where this feeling of worth is
aroused, the individual expresses his activity to attain the end that
he perceives. Every act, every effort, to attain this end is
accompanied by a distinctive feeling known as interest. When a class
is quiet and gives itself to the teacher, it is obedient and polite,
but not necessarily interested. The class that looks tolerantly at the
stereopticon views that the instructor presents, or listens to the
reading of the professor of English, is amused but not necessarily
interested. But when the students ask questions about the pictures or
ask the professor of English for further references, then have we
evidence of real interest. Interest is, therefore, an active attitude
toward life's experience. Rational motivation is almost a guarantee of
this active attitude of interest.

Intelligent motivation in teaching has far-reaching values for both
student and teacher. It stirs interest and guarantees attention and
thus tends to keep aroused the activity of the students. It
establishes an end toward which all effort of teacher and student must
bend. It enables the student to follow a line of thought more
intelligently, and occasionally to anticipate conclusions. For the
teacher it serves as a standard, in terms of which he reorganizes his
subject matter, judges the value of each topic, and omits socially
useless matter which has too long been retained in the course in the
fond hope that it will in some way develop the mind.

=Beginning at the point of contact=

The instructor who strives to motivate the subject matter he teaches
usually begins with that phase of the subject which is most intimately
related to the student's life and environment. Every subject worth
teaching crosses the student's life at some point. The contacts
between pupil and subject afford the most natural and the most
effective starting points in the teaching of any subject.

The subject matter in a college course is too frequently so organized
that it presents points of discrepancy between itself and the student.
To the college student life is not classified and systematized to a
nicety. Experiences occur in more or less accidental but natural
sequence. Scientific classification is the product of a mature mind
possessing mastery of a given portion of the field of knowledge. To