The Recitation

The Recitation

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Title: The Recitation
Author: George Herbert Betts

Release Date: June 26, 2006 [eBook #18698]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Riverside Educational Monographs

Edited by Henry Suzzallo President of the University of Washington
Seattle, Washington
THE RECITATION
by
GEORGE HERBERT BETTS, Ph. D.
Professor of Psychology Cornell College, Iowa

Houghton Mifflin Company Boston New York Chicago San Francisco
The Riverside Press Cambridge Copyright, 1910, by George Herbert
Betts Copyright, 1911, by Houghton Mifflin Company

CONTENTS
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
I. THE PURPOSES OF THE RECITATION
II. THE METHOD OF THE RECITATION
III. THE ART OF QUESTIONING
IV. CONDITIONS NECESSARY TO A GOOD RECITATION
V. THE ASSIGNMENT OF THE LESSON
OUTLINE

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
Teachers are not always clear as to what they mean when they speak of
the recitation. Many different meanings are associated with the term.

Some of these are suggestive but quite vague; and others, although
more definite, are but partial truths that hinder as much as they help. It
is not surprising that a confused usage of the term is current among
teachers.
From one point of view, the recitation is a recitation-period, a segment
of the daily time schedule. In this sense it is an administrative unit,
valuable in apportioning to each school subject its part of the time
devoted to the curriculum. Thus, we speak of five recitations in
arithmetic, three in music, or two in drawing, having in mind merely
the number of times the class meets for instruction in a particular
school study. A recitation here means no more than a class-period, a
more or less arbitrary device for controlling the teacher's and pupils'
distribution of energy among the various subjects taught.
From another point of view, the recitation is a form of educative
activity rather than a mere time allotment. In this sense the recitation is
a process of instruction, a mode of teaching, wherein pupils and teacher,
facing a common situation, proceed toward a more or less conscious
end. It is a distinct movement in classroom experience, so organized
that a definite beginning, progression, and end are clearly
distinguishable. Thus we speak of the method of the recitation, the five
formal steps of the recitation, or the various types of recitation. Such a
usage makes "recitation" synonymous with "lesson." Indeed, when we
pass from general pedagogical discussion to a detailed treatment of
special methods of teaching, we usually abandon the term "recitation"
and use the word "lesson." Although there is always some notion of a
time-period in the curriculum in our idea of a lesson, yet the term
"lesson" is more intimately connected with the thought of a teaching
exercise in which ideas are developed and fixed in memory. It is
through the lesson or recitation that pupils and teachers influence one
another's thought and action; and when this condition exists, there is
always educative activity.
These two ways of thinking of the recitation, one primarily
administrative and the other primarily educative, need to be somewhat
sharply differentiated in our thinking. However closely related they are

in actual schoolroom work, however greatly they influence each other
in practice, they require a theoretic separation. Only by this method can
we avoid some of the error and confusion current in teaching theory
and practice. A single instance will suffice to show the value of the
distinction.
No one of us would deliberately assume that the teaching process
required for the instruction of a child would just cover the twenty,
thirty, or forty minutes allotted to the class-period, day after day and
year after year, regardless of the subject presented or the child taught.
Yet this is precisely the sort of assumption that is implied throughout a
considerable portion of our current discussion of the teaching process.
We talk about a "developmental-lesson" or a "review-recitation" in, say,
geography, as though it began and ended with the recitation-period of
the day. The daily lesson-plans we demand of apprentice-teachers in
training-schools are largely built upon this basis.
Of course the fact that one must begin a theme at a given moment and
close at a similar arbitrary point affects the teacher's procedure
somewhat. He will always have to attack the problem anew at ten
o'clock and pull together the loose ends of discussion at ten-thirty, if
these happen to be the limits of