Children’s Remarks: And their use in helping us to improve our Teaching!

Extract

Some children’s remarks are funny and some are sad, most people realise that, but what interests me most is their instructive value in showing us how to improve our teaching.

I remember once telling a class that I thought they ought to have learned one item in arithmetic before. Tom E., a bright little fellow, promptly replied—“Oh yes Sir, we did it before with Mr. H. last year, but as we didn’t understand it, we forgot it.” I asked him if he really meant what he had said! He looked at me puzzled, so I pointed out that he had said that if he didn’t understand anything, then he forgot it. The whole class laughed and agreed that generally speaking this was true.