Adapting Teaching Methods to Pupil Material

stressed the point that there must be an increase in the efficiency of German teaching, if German is once more to come into its own. They made it clear that we must subject our methods and aims to careful scrutiny, modifying and changing them to meet modern conditions, so that German teachers would once more lead the vanguard of progressive teachers of modern languages as in the halcyon days before the war. We do not think that Professors von Klenze and Fife meant to imply that German teaching is today less effective than the teaching of other languages in our high schools. What they probably had in mind was that German teachers must be more effective than their colleagues if possible, not only in their classroom teaching but also in solving some of the larger problems in the field of modern language study. Animated by some such spirit the German Department of De Witt Clinton High School of New York City offered as an experiment to accept as pupils in German boys (ours is a boys' school) who had been failed twice in the first term of a foreign language. It is customary in the high schools of New York City to force such pupils to drop foreign languages entirely, they being considered totally unfit for such study. In undertaking to teach German to these pupils, whom we shall call for convenience double-languagefailures, we asked that boys who had failed in more than one of their other major subjects should not be included. This did not prove feasible, because pupils failing in their foreign language were for the most part failing in a number of their other subjects. Pupils with a weakness for only foreign languages are, judging from our experience, rather rare specimens. It was not intended that boys who had not failed in a foreign language should be put into the same recitation classes with the double failures. Owing to the exigencies of program making, this plan could not be carried out fully, so that about 25 per cent. of the pupils in the five classes especially formed for our experiment had not failed in their foreign language the previous term. We

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