DRILL IN MUSICAL HISTORY

Teachers of Musical History have found from experience that drill is a constant necessity if success is to be expected. In the School News and Practical Educator Mr. W C. Bagley, director of the School of Education of the University of Illinois, gives the following excellent advice upon this subject, which although designed for teachers of general history, is equally applicable to musical history. Those who follow Mr. Bagley's suggestion will surely reap gratifying benefits.

"The primary purpose of the teaching of elementary history is not to learn dates and events in a mechanical manner, and yet it is generally agreed that there is a place for some work of this type. The immediate and habitual association of certain events with their dates forms a framework or skeleton about which historical facts may be organized; events are thus given a time-setting that helps wonderfully in the study of the same events from the important standpoint of cause and effect.

"The best way to establish these immediate and automatic associations is through a careful explanation of the significance of the event and the date which is to be connected with it, followed by frequent repetitions until the association has become instantaneous. This is work that is similar in type and method to the drills upon the tables in arithmetic or upon difficult words in spelling lessons. In teaching arithmetic, for example, it has been found advantageous to devote five-minute periods daily throughout the grades to 'rapid-fire' drills upon the fundamental number 'facts.' We believe that three minutes of each history lesson devoted to similar drills upon the important dates in history would bring correspondingly good results, and at the same time furnish an effective 'warming-up' exercise for the more important work of the history lesson.

"Care should be taken, however, to choose the dates carefully. They should represent in every case 'key' events, events that have been turning points in national development. One difficulty with the older formal teaching of history lay in the fact that it did not always distinguish carefully between the important and the unimportant."