was frequently an unwise choice and developed into a colorless recital of events with the thrill left out. The recommendations degenerated into parrotlike fluency, so that I suspected the Penrods of stealing some small thunder from the Georgie Bassetts. I abandoned oral reports and tried reports in conference, with a time limit for the laggards. When the time limit was reached, those who had not been forehanded with their conferences wrote a little test on their books very little, and very informal. Mencken, however, made fun of the method once in the American Mercury, and I discarded it, too, recognizing more truth than fiction in his ruthless ridicule. There was always one week in the semester when I added an hour to my day's program, and those who had not yielded up proof of reading the required amount sat in my room, book in hand and thumbed it through miserably. Thus did I teach the love of literature.

My fond theory was that they should read much as Freshmen and Sophomores and that they should read discriminatingly as Juniors and Seniors. And how could they do the latter if they had never done the former? I was kept forever on the first step of my theory—which, like many theories, did not seem to work out in practice.

Last September, I had three sections of ninth-grade English given me a strong, a medium, and a weak section. It was two weeks before I got up courage (hope being at an unusually low ebb) to ask the usual question: "Do you like to read?" Oh, yes! From the highest to the lowest I.Q. they did! I concealed my skepticism. Had they read anything since school began? Oh yes, most of them had! "Well," I said, acting entirely on the inspiration of the moment, "write the names of what you have read at the end of your themes. Perhaps I can give you school credit for it." The result was interesting. It included everything, from The Black Arrow and Ivanhoe to Dick Merrivale's False Friend.

I decided that an insight into their untrammeled reading-habits might be worth having, and would—at any rate-be interesting. It proved to be both. Thereafter, every Friday was the day for handing in reading-lists, with the understanding that the reading would be used for maximum credit whenever possible.

For eight or ten weeks nothing particularly was done with these lists other than to transfer them to individual reading-cards. There were times when pupils lingered to ask about books or to talk of them, but this was voluntary with the pupil. No effort was made to check the thoroughness of their reading or their tendency to bluff. I assumed that they were honest; and in 81 cases out of 87, as it later developed, they were. There was no pressure put on them to read; nothing was said to them when they did not read; and no particular effort was made to guide their reading beyond keeping from 25 to 30 library books on the classroom shelves and within plain sight.

No teacher is more skeptical than I, however, of unsupervised effort. The reading seemed to be a pleasure to the strong section, to half of the medium section, and to many of the weak section. However, habit compelled me, eventually, to see whether all was gold that glittered, for really, this was proving to be a golden method of book reports. The lists were long, so they read much; they were regular, so they read often; they were varied, so they were not passing reports on from pupil to pupil. It is true that the lists were sometimes trashy; but more often they were what Dr. Phelps calls "the greatest common divisor" in fiction; and sometimes they were definitely good.

After 8 weeks, therefore, I arranged a 10-minute conference with each pupil. Some conferences were in class during laboratory periods; some were in the study hall; many were during my regular conference period. I went over the reading-list of each pupil with him, showed which books I was giving credit for and which I was not, and asked a few questions on a book or two chosen at random from his lists. If he could tell me with reasonable promptness who wore dough faces and why in The Hoosier Schoolboy, or why Madam De Farge hated Darnay in The Tale of Two Cities, I assumed that he had read his books on his list, and we spent the time in book gossip. They, the 81, were scrupulously honest. "Oh don't put that down yet; I have another chapter to read in it." "I skipped all the dry parts, so don't give me the full number of points on this book." Such remarks were common, and, I sadly confess, something of a surprise to me. It is an unfortunate com

ment on our old methods when we are surprised that youth is honest!

The zest and initiative with which they discussed their reading made me feel that it was worth while even with the trash included. They told me what they liked, offered me books from their own libraries to read, and gave me plenty of advice about choosing books from the public libraries. I reciprocated, with both advice and books. I read some trash to satisfy them; and they, too, read some things according to my suggestions. One clear-eyed, virilefaced boy brought me the Sport Magazine to read, "to see whether it was all right." I touched it gingerly, its cheap paper and gaudy cover shrieking to me of its literary status. I read it through, hunting-more intently with each succeeding story-for an instance of unsportsmanlike athletics, low morality, or a questionable situation. The heroes were all worthy the pen of an Alger; and the plots, clean and cheap, sped on with the raciness of youth and the excitement of jazz. Of course, a red-blooded boy whose psychology included the worship of football heroes, and for whom action, not artistry, made a good story, was enthusiastic about the magazine. What should I have said to him? What would you have said?

Among a few boys there was a run on a Merrivale series of which I had never before heard: Dick Merrivale's Ranch, Dick Merrivale's Regret, Frank Merrivale's Honor, and many others. "Why do you like them?" I asked Dan, who sheepishly admitted that his week's reading had been confined to the Merrivale brothers. "I don't know," he answered; "they're good." "How many are there?" I went on, looking at the goodly number on his card and wondering whether he would soon exhaust the series. He thought there were about two hundred; and at my skepticism concerning one man's ability to turn out two hundred books, he explained, "Oh, the author's dead now. He didn't write all of them. Somebody else has been writing them since he died."

I had some difficulty getting the slow section of pupils interested in reading. Most of them did not care for maximum credit; they did not read; they regarded me and my cheerful offers of extra credit as more or less of a bore. At last I brought library cards to class to supply those without them, and made the mini

mum assignment for the next day the bringing of a library book to class. In order to provide against such family relics as dog-eared copies of Elsie Dinsmore or the Henty Series, I specified that no book would do unless it had a public library or high school library pocket inside the cover. After three days, during which all class credit was held up for the delinquents, the last straggling little Pole brought in his library book, showed me his card in the front of it, and I proceeded for a week to make assignments in individual reading. Grammar was shelved for the time being. At the end of the week, all were reading absorbedly; but, being economical of effort and serious of mind, there were no Merrivale books in this class. Every new book was brought for my inspection before the reader read, accompanied by the hoarse question, "How many points you gif me on it?" At the end of the week we took up grammar again, but the reading progressed through the rest of the semester of its own momentum.

There were, unfortunately, a few (6, to be exact) who were ready to bluff. "Whom did Ben Hur marry?" I asked one boy. "A school teacher from south of Indianapolis," was his surprising answer. "Where were his mother and sister while he was in the galleys?" "At home-most of the time-sometimes they went out," he said. "Were they sick or well when he came back from the galleys?" I went on. "Well," he wavered, "they had a little cold, but it wasn't bad." The number of bluffers was so small, however, that it was not burdensome to quiz them casually and rather closely each week on their lists until I felt that they were likewise reading.

My purpose had developed into finding what Freshmen preferred reading, so that I might base my suggestions to them on natural tendencies, and into finding the influence which I.Q.'s and home conditions had on their reading-habits.

Magazine habits I found to be very unfortunate. Few magazines were read regularly; and most of those, as well as the magazines read occasionally, were of an exceptionally poor type.

Of the books, there were 636 titles, and through duplication, 952 books read. Of these, 242 books such as Tom Sawyer and Ivanhoe ranked as first class; 424 books, including such authors as Gene Stratton Porter, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Charles Major, ranked

from second to fourth class, and were given school credit; 284 books were given no school credit, either because they were entirely worthless, or because I could find nothing about them to verify their standing. Doubtless there are mistakes in ranking the books, as hard-and-fast lines in literature are rather hard to draw and as I had the pupils' as well as the authors' limitations in mind.

The natural choices show, as Table I indicates, a fairly even division into good, mediocre, and poor literature, with the percentage of mediocre choices somewhat in the lead. There is slight literary discrimination as yet, although many of the heavy readers are beginning to ask for good books and to inquire what distinguishes a good book from a poor one. The predominance in choice

*The value of books was indicated by points, ranging from 3 points for Gene Stratton Porter to 10 points for Victor Hugo.

is fiction. Of the collections kept in the classrooms from time to time, the non-fiction books were much more rarely read than the fiction.

Table I shows the relative amount and quality of reading done by the three sections. Checking this same phase of the question by I.Q.'s rather than by class grouping, I found that the 10 highest reading scores with one exception were made by pupils whose I.Q. ranking was above 110. There were 13 out of the 87 who earned only the minimum requirement of 10 points. Results showed that every pupil in the class whose I.Q. was below 90, was included in this 13. In general, the experiment showed what we might expect: that the strong pupil reads much more than the weak, although this is not an infallible rule.

An interesting fact is that the percentage of unacceptable books was much higher and the percentage of best books was lower in the