110
carefully recapitulating and summarizing the facts. I admit therefore that many, though not specially prepared, are well up in their subjects. But I noticed also others (particularly Chinese Masters) not only coming to their work unprepared and strangers to the particular subject they teach, but going through their work with a drowsy treadmill sort of perfunctory labour, having evidently fallen a prey to that deadliest enemy a teacher has to grapple with, viz, monotony. And this is the enemy who is most surely defeated through careful preparation by means of notes or memoranda.
III. Again, when entering a class room unobserved, I have on several occasions noticed that a Master engaged, say, in an arithmetic lesson, gives his boys five sums to work out and whilst they are so engaged he busies himself in correcting, say, the history exercises of the previous day, leaving, while thus engaged, his boys at full liberty to copy from each other or to wait in utter weariness till he has finished. Again and again I have seen whole classes utterly neglected for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time because the masters were engaged in some other work, being either work which they ought to have done at home or returns required of them by the Headmaster but which might...