actly, nothing can be easier
to understand. It is in the fulfilment of the rule that the difficulty
lies; for the difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher
consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able
to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dulness in
discovering such transitions which the other shows. One teacher's mind
will fairly coruscate with points of connection between the new lesson
and the circumstances of the children's other experience. Anecdotes and
reminiscences will abound in her talk; and the shuttle of interest will
shoot backward and forward, weaving the new and the old together in a
lively and entertaining way. Another teacher has no such inventive
fertility, and his lesson will always be a dead and heavy thing. This is
the psychological meaning of the Herbartian principle of 'preparation'
for each lesson, and of correlating the new with the old. It is the
psychological meaning of that whole method of concentration in studies
of which you have been recently hearing so much. When the geography and
English and history and arithmetic simultaneously make cross-references
to one another, you get an interesting set of processes all along the
line.

* * * * *

If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only
one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something
in their minds _to attend with_, when you begin to talk. That something
can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting
in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects
which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of
a logically associated or systematic whole. Fortunately, almost any kind
of a connection is sufficient to carry the interest along. What a help
is our Philippine war at present in teaching geography! But before the
war you could ask the children if they ate pepper with their eggs, and
where they supposed the pepper came from. Or ask them if glass is a
stone, and, if not, why not; and then let them know how stones are
formed and glass manufactured. External links will serve as well as
those that are deeper and more logical. But interest, once shed upon a
subject, is liable to remain always with that subject. Our acquisitions
become in a measure portions of our personal self; and little by little,
as cross-associations multiply and habits of famil