I
Correspondence STUFFING THE GOOSE
This is the way geese are prepared for market. When they are of full size the peasant woman feeds them with as much as they will eat and then stuffs them singly with all the food they will hold. This makes them fat and ready for market. M y wife saw this done in the old country when she was a little girl and has often described the process. While I was actively engaged in teaching chemistry I never thought of trying this process on my pupils although I taught chemistry for fifty years, which shows how dumb I was, hut now I see i t going on everywhere: which shows how modern we all are. My plan in teaching chemistry was founded on the supposition that i t would take my students as long to learn chemistry as it had taken me. I got along with the boys fairly well in working out this plan but found I could do still better when all my experiments worked and when, sometimes a t great trouble, I had succeeded in getting together and showing them interesting things they had not seen-cotton bolls when we talked about cellulose, sugar cane, and maple and beet sugar, and a great variety of other things new to many of them. It was sometimes an awful job to lug these things around but I thought it paid, and after a while I discovered that my course was much like the one a t Harvard, though they had been planned separately, except that their course was somewhat better than mine. I used my own textbook which was planned to contain as little as possible. Evetything possible was left to the second year. Then I took up the gas laws and the other elementary physical questions and went further in organic chemistry. When I had done my best with the chemists I gave them a subject and no help. They were learning to fly and I pushed them out of the nest. When they came to me I told them where to find the information they wanted. At the end of three months they very seldom had found any very new things in chemistry but, if they had been diligent, they had learned to fly. I cannot think my students were more than ordmarily stupid, so I have concluded that much that we see in undergraduate theses, and sometimes I fear from Ph.D. men, must really come straight from the professor's brain. When I look a t the size of the textbooks used nowadays I see quite plainly that the stuffing process is in full blast, and since the size of these hooks is growing as chemistry grows, must be constantly growing more strenuous. As much as ten years ago I found I had a few hours to spare each day and undertook an experiment: I went into the French and Italian classes
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JOURNAL O# CHEMICAL EDUCATION
JANUARY. 1928
of a very good teacher in our college here. I soon found the lessons were entirely too long for me. Of course I am slow, hut so were some of the hoys. On inquiry I discovered that my teacher was not setting the lessons; if he had been they would have been shorter: they were set by the head of the department. College boys come to college from very different environments. Some of them are very green-as I was and as Dr. Harvey W. Wiley tells us he was in the long ago. How can these hoys he expected to know the things a t the start that others have learned long ago from a better environment? Some of the finest men I have graduated were from these humble beginnings. We are sorting the men and refusing many nowadays. If we are not very careful we shall be making some serious mistakes in the very heginning. Perhaps there may he something in these psychological investigations, but I am very sure the quickest thinkers are not always the best thinkers. Teaching has always had faddists in plenty. I never could see much in their fads. When I was a boy, Brooks, with his mental arithmetic, was all the rage. He was a good seller of an idea and his idea was widely adopted. Physical exercise then had a chance. I used to get up a t 5 A.M., milk four cows, and help clean the stables. Then I went t o school and the woman teacher of elocution threw open the windows and put us through a gymnastic drill-but I had plenty of exercise and so had many of the others; only the teacher was suffering. And so it goes. I long ago discovered that a little common sense is necessary in teaching as in anything else. Indeed, I have slowly become convinced that common sense is the most precious thing we have, that those who do not possess it can never make good teachers and should never be EDWARD HART allowed to teach a t all. LAB'AYETTE COLLEGE, EASTON, PA.
