Publisher's Synopsis
Roswell Chamberlain Smith's Practical and Mental Arithmetic: On a New Plan in Which Mental Arithmetic is Combined with the Use of the Slate provides readers with a historical glimpse into early teaching methods.
Practical and Mental Arithmetic is intended to be a teacher's guide for instructing arithmetic. The book is constructed so that an instructor could directly follow the contents and deliver an effective course on arithmetic. The work is intended for young learners who have had minimal formal teaching in arithmetic, emphasizing the use of a slate, a teaching method that is no longer used today. While Smith has not explicitly divided his book into lessons, there are clear breaks in the content that indicate where one lesson ends and another begins. Topics covered include the basics of arithmetic, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, using practical problems to assist the teacher in removing these concepts from the realm of the theoretical.
Practical and Mental Arithmetic espouses an outdated teaching method, and thus would no longer be valuable as an instructor's handbook. The real significance of the text for the modern reader is thus the historical snapshot it provides of pedagogy in the nineteenth century. Those researching educational history will find a wealth of information in this text about early teaching methods in American primary schools.
Roswell Chamberlain Smith's Practical and Mental Arithmetic: On a New Plan in Which Mental Arithmetic is Combined with the Use of the Slate was surely a valuable textbook at the time of it's original publication. While no longer practically useful, the book will still be of interest to students and scholars pursuing research into outdated methods of teaching mathematics.
About the Publisher
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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
