Page 20 - 1916 February - To Dragma

TO DRAG MA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI 99

with overwork in correcting papers. Saturdays and Sundays used
to be hateful to me because a large stack of compositions always
stared at me from my desk. I f I had felt that I was getting an
adequate return for my work in the increased ability of my classes
to write plain English, I should not have minded so much the drudg-
ery, but I failed to see the slightest improvement. The same mis-
takes were made over and over again.

Finally, I evolved this plan, which I have been using now for
some years, and which has given me comparatively satisfactory re-
sults. I took the composition textbooks we use, Woolley's Hand-
book of Composition, D. C. Heath and Co. publishers, and care-
fully selected the thirty or so rules that are habitually violated.
The rules are all numbered, and constant use of the book has made
me perfectly familiar with the number of any of the rules commonly
broken. This memorizing of the numbers of these rules was for
my convenience and speed in correcting. Then I required each pupil
every day to hand in one paragraph (not more than a hundred
words). These paragraphs could not be reproductions of anything
they had read, for I found some would copy verbatim i f allowed to
hand in non-original work, but must tell of some experience that
had happened to them, or of some happening that they had witnessed.
I carefully checked off each composition to see that no one was
shirking and selected six or seven papers to be corrected each day.
Thus I got around the class once a week.

The work of correction went quickly, for the papers were few,
short, and interesting. I n the margin at the left of the paper on the
same line with the mistake, I wrote the number of the rule violated,
and then in the composition I underlined the place where the mistake
occurred. You who are not English teachers would be surprised at
the number of mistakes that can be made in one paragraph by a High
School Freshman. While correcting, I made a memorandum of im-
portant violations found on the papers I was correcting, and the next
day, when the corrected papers were returned, I put the sentences
containing the mistakes on the board, being very careful to give no
hint as to the author of the sentence.

"Where is the mistake in the sentence?" I asked.
Very soon the class learned to detect errors. Then I said, "Find
Rule 278 in your books." The rule was read and explained, and
some child showed how this particular sentence broke Rule 278. I n
this way, gradually all the important rules in the book were made
clear.

The pupils who had had their compositions returned were not re-
quired to write a new composition that night but were to correct their
old ones, write every misspelled word ten times, and every rule once