Laboratory Teaching

Abstract

ONE of the most troublesome of the problems that confront the teacher in the laboratory is that of evoking the interest of generation after generation of students (and indeed, of preserving his own interest, and interests). The succession of familiar experiments on the law of moments, the simple pendulum, the refractive index of a prism and the like is, as usually presented, dreary and deadening enough in all conscience, and the present writer has never seen a determination of the latent heat of steam (and he must have seen some hundreds) which has aroused in the breast of a junior student of to-day any trace of the emotions (possibly) experienced by a student of Black. The truth is that the stereotyping of an experiment for laboratory use and the mechanical handing-out of a schedule and a mass of the relevant apparatus take half the life out of the exercise.

The Science Masters' Book, Series 2

Part 1: Physics. Pp. xvi + 273 + xv. 7s. 6d. net. Part 2: Biology, Chemistry, Experiments for Receptions. Pp. xvi+ 252 + xv. 7s. 6d. net. Being Experiments selected from the School Science Review by a Committee of the Science Masters' Association, edited and arranged by G. H. J. Adlam. (London: John Murray, 1936.)