prone (and,
under certain circumstances, older students also) to drag into the
lessons interesting side issues that have been suggested by some phase
of the work. As a rule, it is advisable to follow closely the straight
and narrow road that leads to the goal of the lesson and not to permit
digressions into attractive by-paths. If a pupil attempts to introduce
irrelevant matter, he should be asked what the problem of the lesson is
and whether what he is speaking of will be of any value in attaining
that end. The necessity of this will, however, be seen more fully in our
consideration of the next division of the learning process.

=B. Organizes the Lesson Facts.=--The adequate recognition of the lesson
problem is valuable in helping the pupil to organize his knowledge. If
you take a friend for a walk along the streets of a strange city
engaging him in interesting conversation by the way, and if, when you
have reached a distant point, you tell him that he must find his way
back alone, he will probably be unable to do so without assistance. But
if you tell him at the outset what you are going to do, he will note
carefully the streets traversed, the corners turned, the directions
taken, and will likely find his way back easily. This is because he had
a clearly defined problem before him. The conditions are much the same
in a lesson. When the pupil starts out with no definite problem and is
led along blindly to some unknown goal, he will be unable to retrace his
route; that is, he will be unable to reproduce the matter over which he
has been taken. But with a clearly defined problem he will be able to
note the order of the steps of the lesson, their relation to one another
and to the problem, and when the lesson is over he will be able to go
over the same course again. The facts of the lesson will have become
organized in his mind.

HOW TO SET LESSON PROBLEM

=Precautions.=--If the teacher expects his pupils to become interested
in a problem by immediately recognizing a connection between it and
their previous knowledge, he must avoid placing the problem before them
in a form in which they cannot readily apprehend this connection. The
teacher who announced at the beginning of the grammar lesson, "To-day we
are going to learn about Mood in verbs" started the problem in a form
that was meaningless to the class. The simplest method in such a lesson
would be to draw attention to examples in sentences of verbs showing
this c