=Appraisal of teaching expertness.=—­The teacher who requires thirty minutes for division of fractions which the other teacher compasses in ten minutes consumes twenty minutes unnecessarily in each recitation period, or two hundred minutes in the course of the day.  The efficiency expert would ask her to account for these two hundred minutes.  In order to account for them satisfactorily she would be compelled to take an inventory of her acquired habits, her predilections, her attitude toward her pupils and her subjects, and any shortcomings she may have in regard to methods of teaching.  She would, at first, resent the implication that the other teacher’s method of teaching division of fractions is better than her own and would cite the many years during which her method has been used.  When all else fails, tradition always proves a convenient refuge.  We can always prove to-day by yesterday; only, by so doing, we deny the possibility of progress.

=The potency of right methods.=—­A teacher of Latin once used twenty minutes in a violent attempt to explain the difference between the gerund construction and the gerundive construction.  At the end of the time she had the pupils so completely muddled that, for months, the appearance of either of these constructions threw them into a condition of panic.  To another class, later, this teacher explained these constructions clearly and convincingly in three minutes.  In the meantime she had studied methods in connection with subject matter.  Another teacher resigned her position and explained her action by confessing that she had become so accustomed to the traditional methods of teaching a certain phase of arithmetic that it was impossible for her to learn the newer one.  Such a teacher must be given credit for honesty even while she illustrates tragedy.

=The waste of time.=—­In explaining the loss of two hundred minutes a day the teacher will inevitably come upon the subject of methods of teaching, and she may be put to it to justify her method in view of its results.  The more diligently she tries to justify her method, the more certainly she proclaims her responsibility for a wrong use of the method.  Those twenty minutes point at her the accusing finger, and she can neither blink nor escape the facts.  The other teacher led her pupils into a knowledge of the subject in ten minutes, and this one may neither abrogate nor amend the record.  As an operative in the factory she holds in her hand one shoe as the result of her thirty minutes while the other holds three.  Conceding that results in the school are not so tangible as the results in the factory, still we have developed methods of estimating results in the school that have convincing weight with the efficiency expert.  We can estimate results in school work with sufficient accuracy to enable us to assess teaching values with a goodly degree of discrimination.