With these cautions, the method here alluded to will be found to be of
very great advantage in many studies; for example, all the arithmetical
tables may be recited in this way; words may be spelled, answers to sums
given, columns of figures added, or numbers multiplied, and many
questions in history, geography, and other miscellaneous studies
answered, especially the general questions asked for the purpose of a
review.

But, besides being useful as a mode of examination, this plan of
answering questions simultaneously is a very important means of fixing
in the mind any facts which the teacher may communicate to his pupils.
If, for instance, he says some day to a class that Vasco de Gama was the
discoverer of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope, and leaves it
here, in a few days not one in twenty will recollect the name. But let
him call upon them all to spell it simultaneously, and then to pronounce
it distinctly three or four times in concert, and the word will be very
strongly impressed upon their minds. The reflecting teacher will find a
thousand cases in the instruction of his classes, and in his general
exercises in the school, in which this principle will be of great
utility. It is universal in its application. What we _say_ we fix, by
the very act of saying it, in the mind. Hence, reading aloud, though a
slower, is a far more thorough method of acquiring knowledge than
reading silently, and it is better, in almost all cases, whether in the
family, or in Sabbath or common schools, when general instructions are
given, to have the leading points fixed in the mind by questions
answered simultaneously.

But we are wandering a little from our subject, which is, in this part
of our chapter, the methods of _examining_ a class, not of giving or
fixing instructions.

Another mode of examining classes, which it is important to describe,
consists in requiring _written answers_ to the questions asked. The form
and manner in which this plan may be adopted is various. The class may
bring their slates to the recitation, and the teacher may propose
questions successively, the answers to which all the class may write,
numbering them carefully. After a dozen answers are written, the teacher
may call at random for them, or he may repeat a question, and ask each
pupil to read the answer he had written, or he may examine the slates.
Perhaps this method may be very successfully employed in reviews by
dictating to the class a