that such thoughts engendered, the teacher left the meeting.

The sessions with the new plan for grouping began. Intelligence tests formed the basis for classifying the beginners, but the grades won in high school determined the grouping of those who had been in Englewood one or more semesters. When "teachers' programs" were distributed the teacher we are writing about found that he had been given one upper, one middle, and one lower group. More gloom! Surely malice. had prompted that distribution! How else could one person have been given such a variety of classes! But work began in the usual way. At the end of two weeks the more rapid workers, in all three groups, began to show themselves; by the end of the fourth week three or four in every group were standing out prominently; by the end of the fifth week the teacher was more than willing to have them shifted. Each of the three classes resolved itself into three groups. The classes really were little different from the "unclassified" groups that the teacher had been teaching for a number of years.

At the end of five weeks a shift of forty per cent of the beginner's classes seemed necessary. Of the groups that had been graded according to grades made in school, the shift was barely sixteen per cent. But when the day for the shifting arrived the much-feared confusion did not come with it. Ten minutes was all the time it required to tell the "grade principal" how many "E's," etc., were in each class. Then the work went on as usual until a letter from the principal told the teacher where the pupils in each classification should go and how many should come to his class from other teachers. The day for the shift arrived; ten minutes sufficed to collect the books and tell pupils where to go. A five-minute interval was spent in talking to the pupils, and then the new ones came from the other teachers. In five minutes books had been issued and work was going on as before. During a vacant period the seating charts were arranged and work proceeded as if nothing had occurred.

And yet work did not go on as before. The work of the upper group was so well done at the first attempt that the teacher soon found it necessary to make more difficult assignments to keep the pupils busy. It was not so hard to keep them employed, however, as the pupils in this group showed themselves able to do almost any piece of work that was assigned them. The teacher found it possible to insist upon work of a higher standard with this upper group. But the middle group did not do so well. They could barely do the work which the outline in use in the school called for. And the lower group began to lag behind. By the end of the tenth week, one group was ahead of the schedule, one group was barely up with it, and the other group was hopelessly behind it.

In this teacher's classes all the work is individual work.1 Textbooks, with their artificial, stupid "exercises," and their inapplicable "rules" have never been a part of his class-room equipment for English composition. In place of them he uses principles of composition, and then writing followed by revision upon revision upon revision until work of an acceptable standard has been done. In the classes formed under the new plan this method of teaching worked better than ever before. Long before the end of the second ten-week periods the members of the upper group were doing a high grade of work with a thirty per cent revision; the pupils of the lower group were doing theirs, in a wretched fashion, with a three hundred per cent revision. The middle group was barely doing one piece of work in the same time. By the end of the fifteenth week the upper, middle, and lower groups were so far apart that they could hardly be considered as being in the same class. The separate plans for the classes did not require so much work as the individual plans had required before-every student in any class could do as much work as any other student in the same class. There was no longer any need for puzzling

"A Laboratory Experiment in English," The English Journal, January, 1925, pp. 25-31.

over the problem of finding a piece of work that would keep the fast workers busy and yet not be beyond the capacities of the slow workers.

There was, however, another way in which the work of these groups of children could be compared. The teacher keeps books in the room, to be read by those who are not engaged in writing or conferring with him.1 In this extra field the classes performed in a manner just as varied. The pupils in the upper group read three and three-fourths books a semester; those of the lower group did not read one book each in the same time.

The work done by these upper group classes was better than that done by the best pupils in the unmixed classes that this teacher had taught. The evenness of the abilities of the students in the several sections made insistence upon work of a certain uniforn standard practicable. If one pupil could reach a certain standard of work the teacher knew that all could reach it. Somehow pupils sensed that their abilities were known and they responded accordingly. Then too these pupils seemed to the teacher to be far happier than his pupils had been in former classes. There were no longer any slower ones to retard the progress of the work of the more rapid ones. In the lower classes there were no "model" pupils whose superiority only served to irritate those not so blest. In these graded classes bright pupils no longer chafed under restraints, nor did the slow one fret under burdens. Each pupil in each class felt that he could do each piece of work as it came to him and he worked in keeping with this feeling.

Thus after three years of experience with the Englewood system of classifying pupils one teacher of English feels: that it has made his work much lighter; that it has made his pupils far happier; that it has enabled him and his pupils to do much more work; that it has prevented the dis

1Ibid.

couragement of the slow pupils; that it has kept up the habit of industry in the rapid ones; that it has enabled him to lead his pupils to do a far better grade of work; that it has fostered in the pupils a confidence in abilities possessed that will prove incalculably valuable after school days are over.

But, we are constrained to ask, are his experiences typical? Do others have the same story to tell? If so, the system is abundantly successful!

This teacher feels, however, that it is not yet perfect. There still remains the problem of the varying standards of the teachers of the same subject. How can we reconcile the grades of the teacher who thinks that clear expression is all that is necessary in English composition, with the grades of the one who thinks it fair to ask a secondyear pupil, "In how many ways may a noun clause be used?" And when we have this problem solved we shall still have the teacher who requires a grade of ninety-five in a spelling list that contains such words as "eleemosynary." And there is also the teacher who demotes a pupil, "because he has been absent one week and I have two 'superior' classes that take up all my time. I can not give him the help necessary to make up his work." Then, too, there are sentimental interferences. Very real friendships spring up between pupils and teachers. When wholesome ones arise they are fruitful of much good. Are they to be disregarded? Must we take a boy away from the first teacher that is awakening him to his possibilities just because the awakening gives him a good grade? And what shall we say to the busy father who remains away from business an entire half day to come to school to ask the principal to let his son remain in Mr. Smith's class? That principals seldom refuse such requests is readily understandable. Until all teachers, pupils, and principals are perfect, perhaps we would better do, as we are doing now, let the human element outweigh the mechanical.