,
and who really finds great joy in music, will awaken and develop power
of appreciation upon the part of his pupils. The teacher who can enter
into the spirit of the child poetry, or of the fairy tale, will get a
type of appreciation not enjoyed by the teacher who finds delight only
in adult literature. It is of the utmost importance to recognize the
fact that children only gradually grow from an appreciation or joy in
that which is crude to that which represents the highest type of
artistic production. It is important to have children try themselves out
in creative work; but the influence of a teacher may be far greater than
that of the attempts of the children to produce in these fields.

_Lecturing_. Among the various types of methods used in teaching there
is probably no one which has received such severe criticism as the
so-called lecture method. The result of this criticism has been,
theoretically at least, to abolish lecturing from the elementary school
and to diminish the use of this method in the high school, although in
the colleges and universities it is still the most popular method.
Although it is true that the lecture method is not the best one for
continual use in elementary and high school, still its entire disuse is
unfortunate. So is its blind use by those who still adhere to the old
ways of doing things.

The chief criticisms of the method are, first, that it makes of the
learner a mere recipient instead of a thinker; second, that the material
so gained does not become part of the mental life of the hearers and so
is not so well remembered nor so easily applied as material gained in
other ways; third, that the instructor has no means of determining
whether his class is getting the right ideas or wholly false ones;
fourth, the method lacks interest in the majority of cases. Despite the
truth of these criticisms, there are occasions when the lecture or
telling method is the best one--in fact the only one that can accomplish
the desired result.

First, the lecture method may sometimes take the place of books. Often,
even in the elementary school, there is need for the children to get
facts,--information in history or geography or literature,--and the
getting of these facts from books would be too difficult or too
wasteful. In such a case telling the facts is certainly the best way to
give them. A teacher in half a period can give material that it might
take the children hours to find. By telling them