ic Fourth
11:15 Arithmetic Fifth
11:25 Arithmetic Seventh
11:35 Arithmetic Eighth
11:50 Reading Fifth
Noon Noon All

Appalling, do you say? What other word describes it adequately? There
are twenty-one teaching periods in the morning; twenty-four in the
afternoon. Forty-five times each day that teacher must call up and
teach a new class. The college professor is "overloaded" with fourteen
classes a week. This woman had two hundred and twenty-five. Will any one
be so absurd as to suppose that she can do them or herself justice?

Consolidation, among its many advantages, reduces the number of classes
per day, and increases the time which the teacher may devote to each
class. Note the contrast between that schedule of a one-room teacher and
the teaching schedule of a consolidated school teacher in the same
county:

TEACHER'S DAILY PROGRAM

FORENOON

Time Class Grade

8:30 Opening Exercises All
8:45 Desk 1-B
8:50 Phonetics 1-A
9:00 Phonetics 1-B
9:15 Reading 1-A
9:30 Reading Second
9:45 Rest Exercise All
10:00 Nature All
10:15 Rest All
10:30 Words 1-B
10:50 Words 1-A
11:10 Numbers Second
11:30 History 1-A

The "district," or one-room, schools in Montgomery County, Indiana, have
twenty-three pupils per teacher, scattered over six grades. The
consolidated schools in the same county show sixteen pupils per teacher,
in three grades. While the teacher in the district school averages
twenty-seven recitations a day, the teacher in the consolidated school
has eleven; but the time per recitation is: district, thirteen minutes;
consolidated, twenty-nine minutes. The number of minutes which the
district teacher may give to each grade is fifty minutes; the
consolidated teacher has one hundred and seventeen minutes per grade.
Badly sprinkled with figures as that statement is, it gives some idea of
the increased opportunities for effective teaching in the consolidated
school. No teacher can do justice to twenty-seven classes per day, and
an average recitation period of thirteen minutes is so short as to be
almost unworthy of mention.

Most consolidated schools, in addition to the ordinary rooms, h