Final Examinations

I have been in two or three schools lately in different counties where the pupils and teacher did not seem to be accomplishing anything. Somehow they didn't seem to be really in earnest, or really trying to accomplish anything. They were merely going through the motions-only marking time.

Why so?

Inquiring, I found that the County Board of Education had already been out and had given the final examinations, and that the remaining week or so of school was only a farce. The eighth grade was nearly all absent. Their work was over. The soul of the school seemed to have departed. They were all waiting listlessly for the last breath. After whistling to myself for a while, in hopes to raise a breeze, I fell a-wondering: Was this kind of an examination a good thing for this school? Did the children get enough benefit out of it to pay for the cost of two full weeks of school? To be sure, it is well to test the work-a good thing for the County Board to find out just how their course of study works out in practice. But isn't two whole weeks of worse than waste of time too high a price to pay for what the children got out of it? Is this whole thing managed in a sensible, business-like way?

My own guess is that a County Board can find out all it needs to know in about one day of examination, and that the last day of the term, or the one next to the last in case the youngsters need a picnic on the last day of the school.

True, the Board can't give an adequate examination in all the branches in one day. Well, what if they can't? Will any great damage be done if they are only examined in four branches this year by the County Board? Don't take yourselves too seriously, good friends. After all your days and days of examination are over and all the results laboriously tabulated, what then? You have no real, vital test after allyou are obliged to depend on the judgment of the teacher and your own common sense when it comes to the point, and not on what the youngster has or has not put down in his papers.

Yes, I know. There are difficulties and objections without number in the way of any plan we can devise for doing this work. It is the business of the County Board to decide what will be best for its own county. But this is always a fair question for anyone to ask, and one that the Board should ask itself at least once a year: Are we following an economical and business-like plan for finding out when our children are able to do high school work?

Off to the N. E. A.

While writing this I am getting ready to leave California on the 22nd for the National Educational Association at Cleveland, Ohio, June 29th-my first trip East since arriving in California more than a quarter of a century ago to apply for a remote country school at $55 per month. I got the school all right and taught it to the end-of the term, not the schooland was offered the same place for the next year-at the same salary. 'Twas more than I was worth. Excuse this emotion while I wipe away a retrospective tear and get my suitcase packed. The next paragraph wil perhaps be written many miles away, amid the humid, frozen, cyclone-thunder-andlighting infested atmosphere of the effete East.

Advanced Arithmetic

It is the duty of the State Board of Education at the expiration of a contract to either renew it or make a new one. When the Board prepared to do this it found that there was on hand. in the State Printing Office some 50,000 copies of the book now in use, representing in the cost of manufacture nearly $20,000. These books were ordered by the Text Book Committee in 1905. At the rate of sale for the past two years they will last for nearly two years into the future. That is, long before the present administration came into office, enough arithmetics were manufactured ahead to last about as long as the administration itself does. The first thought is that this was intentional, and done for someone's selfish interest. I have seen nothing to point to that, however. The first year's sales of that book were very large-nearly 100,000 copies. With that in mind the advance order was made; but the later sales fell off. It is difficult or impossible to see into the future.

All this illustrates how slowly these things work and how long it takes to produce visible results. There is as yet no text book in use by the schools that the present administration is in anywise responsible for. The first that we had any hand in making will be the advanced Geography, which will be out perhaps by Christmas-more than two years, more than half the term, after election.

Relations with Book Men

The State Board of Education is considering an interesting

question that of its own relation to the publishing houses and their agents. A committee of three has been appointed to study the matter and make a report. One party holds that the Board, its Text Book Committee and its Readers are in the position of judges and should hold themselves entirely aloof from any personal dealings, any friendships, any contact, with the interested parties in the case-the persuasive salesman, with pecuniary interests at stake. Another party holds that such proceeding is not business-like or wise. They say one of the best sources of information about books is the agents whose whole business in life is to handle them; and that it would be be very impractical and foolish to withdraw into a shell and shut off the real, active, business world from the whole matter. Plenty of things can be said on each side in this contention. When any result arrives, I'll chronicle it.

The Public and the Policeman

An interesting communication came to this office two or three weeks ago, in the form of a resolution adopted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. This organization held a convention at Detroit during the first week in June. The resolution was offered by the Cleveland chief. It commented at some length upon the unfortunate and unjust way in which the familiar figure of the policeman is made the target for the cheap wit of cartoonists, newspaper jokes (sic), vaudeville "artists" and the like; deplored the fact that society in general seems to have adopted in great measure this half jocular, half contemptuous view; called attention to the fact that children learn from their elders to hold lightly not only the symbol and guardian of the law, but law itself, to the injury of their own character and citizenship, and to the hurt of the nation; and after defending the courage and devotion to duty of the body of police of the country, closed with the resolution to communicate with school boards and superintendents in all cities having Chiefs of Police, in the endeavor to have the children taught to respect the policeman as one to whom respect is due.

Beware. Oh, Take Care

This thing of getting married seems to me a contagious malady. I should suspect that the microbe might be communi