t of good management or organization
can redeem the school.

1. _The teacher and the recitation_

Teaching goes on chiefly in what we call the _recitation_. This is the
teacher's point of contact with his pupils; here he meets them face to
face and mind to mind; here he succeeds or fails in his function of
teaching.

Failure in teaching is harder to measure than failure in organization
and management. It quickly becomes noised abroad if the children are
not well classified, or if the teacher cannot keep order. If the
machinery of the school does not run smoothly, its creaking soon
attracts public attention, and the skill of the teacher is at once
called into question. But the teacher may be doing indifferent work in
the recitation, and the class hardly be aware of it and the patrons
know nothing about it. There is no definite measure for the amount of
inspiration a teacher is giving daily to his pupils, and no foot-rule
with which to test the worth of his instruction in the recitation.

And it is this very fact that makes it so necessary that the teacher
should study the principles of teaching as applied to the recitation.
The difficulty of accurately measuring failure in actual teaching
tends to make us all careless at this point. Yet this is the very
point above all others that is vital to the pupil. Inspiring teaching
may compensate in large degree for poor management, but nothing can
make up to a pupil for dull and unskillful teaching. If the
recitations are for him a failure, nothing else can make the school a
success so far as he is concerned.

_The ultimate measure of a teacher, therefore, is the measure taken
before his class, while he is conducting a recitation._

2. _The necessity of having a clear aim_

Any discussion of the recitation should begin with its aims or
purposes; for upon aim or purpose everything else depends. For
example, if you ask me the best method of conducting a recitation, I
shall have to inquire before answering, whether your purpose in this
recitation is to discover what the pupils have prepared of the work
assigned them; or to introduce the class to a new subject, such as
percentage in arithmetic; or to drill them, as upon the multiplication
table. Each of these purposes would demand a different method in the
recitation. Again, if your purpose is to show off a class before
visitors, you will need to use a very different method from what you
will employ if your aim is to enc