PAGE TWO
SUMMER SESSION KANSAN
TUESDAY, JUNE 29, 1937
Comment
AN ASPECT OF READING
It is to be hoped that the state educational conference planned here this week will give especial consideration to the problem of word vs. phrase reading. It is a matter too often taken for granted or left to chance, and the results of such haphazard attention always are bad.
The decided advantage of the phrase method should be obvious. It gives several times greater reading speed, in addition to a more lasting impression of what is being read. But an alarmingly small percentage of readers in grade schools, high schools, and even colleges have mastered it. Many do not even realize that such a method is possible.
To clarify, the phrase-reader is one who has been trained (or who has trained himself) to grasp the content of a whole phrase at a time, while the word-reader concentrates upon each individual word, and plods through with a minimum of understanding and efficiency.
Picture the word-reader: Like the boy in the story, he fails to see the forest because of the trees. Each word drives itself into his consciousness, and the thought of the material—which the words as groups, or phrases, are meant to convey—frequently is lost. Often a word-reader struggles through a long, periodic sentence and finds himself forced to return to the beginning in order to pick up the thought again. Word-readers always find concentration upon the thought difficult. They frequently find themselves thinking of half a dozen utterly extraneous matters while plugging through a single long sentence.
Mastery of phrase-reading comes hard, but it is essential. The best place to tackle the problem is in the classroom.
No longer will the farmer jostle down the field to the music of rhythmically clanking implements, the squeak of harness leather, and the regular beat of horses' hoofs. There comes now a tractor with air-cushioned seats, muffled exhaust, pneumatic tires and (of all things!) a radio. Anyissy could plow corn with such an outfit as that.
LETTERS to the EDITOR
Editor Summer Session Kansan:
Some people have funny ideas of fun for the fourth of July. Little boys must play, must play, but when Joseph C. College starts suffering from the firecracker's bite, it's carrying a point a mighty long way. From all the noises that sound like blowouts, (but aren't) that break the beauty of silence when college men are about, it's most apparent that our University boys have the bug, and firecrackers must have their day. —S.B.B.
Editor Summer Session Kansan:
While it may not appear so on the surface, this matter of parking cars correctly is a life and death matter. Does the average student car driver wish to feel that he is responsible for some harrassed person's collapse under the blazing noonday sun? Such a thing is not unreasonable to expect.
An enraged car driver unable to get his car out of a parking area or one who has just removed a fender from his neighbor's auto, falls an easy victim to heat waves, sun strokes, high blood pressure, and other evils.
The situation is of the gravest kind and immediate remedies are called for. On a recent sunshine morning, three strong men, exasperated by
waiting for car drivers to amble over from the library at noon, shoved, pushed and lifted where necessary in order to move the car that formed a barrier across their path.
Such activity in the heat of the day is not conducive to the well-being of those who push or to those drivers who may inadvertently arrive on the scene of action. Certainly nobody wishes to take an active or inactive role in a murder drama during this hot weather. Always too is the thought that some innocent driver with his automobile correctly parked may be injured.
Of course, if it were autumn, the season of cool, crisp, invigorating days, it might be another matter. Then a good fight or a clean, decent duel would be just the sport to get a crowd. But Kansas summer just isn't the best time to fight the thing out. Apparently the better way is to extend a little courtesy, a little thought and consideration when we are parking our cars. S.
Editor Summer Session Kansan:
Isn't there one an anti-heat religion, you know—one where you repeat for minutes a day, “I will not be influenced by the weather, I will not, I will not.”
Won't the Kansan please start a campaign based on the psychological belief that it's only through the changement of heat that heat waves can affect one. Please!
Somewhere in the great wide, beautiful world there must be a prescription for keeping cool—(1) a warm bath at three in the morning, (2) a glass of cool water once every hour, or what?
I'm one of those queer people who simply can't keep cool. Your suggestions on the subject will be most sincerely appreciated.
With hopes for the future.
With hopes for the future.
Perspiring Penelope.
THIS and THAT BY KENNETH KITCH
"Raise more hell and less corn," said Mary Ellen Lease, while making Populist speeches in Kansas during the middle-nineties. And Kansas—figuring that a lady couldn't say "hell without meaning it—took her soberly to heart. The conscientious old state isn't much of a corn-raiser any more, but it certainly can and does raise bumper crops of hell at frequent and extemporaneous intervals.
It's an old maxim of the sea that "when everything's all right, you'd better look out!" As an old salt who has sailed the parched currents of Kansas for a right smart number of years, we're taking this occasion to drop a weather-eyed hint to the administrative officers of the state's several institutions of higher learning: "Gentlemen, the swell's too smooth; this is too good to last. You'd better hook your toes on the diving board and get ready to duck under."
Ordinary "hell-raising" gets tiresome after a while but the Kansas variety is intriguing—if for no other reason than that you never can tell upon what horizon it is going to originate. Perhaps, Gentlemen, there'll be an investigation of drinking and carousing on the campus. Maybe you're due for a trying session over wanting too much money for your school when there are so many roads and politicians that need "fixing."
On the other hand, the Altamont Journal may have been right in one of its recent issues when it said:
"What's the matter with our reformers? There hasn't been an investigation of Communism at
the state university this year, vet."
That last possibility, on the spur of the moment, holds promise. It's pretty fashionable in most "hell-raising" circles just at this time. "Flaming youth" and its moral ramifications are slightly out of mode and declasse. But in this period of social consciousness, the red rag of "Communism" gives the "hell-raisers" a real opportunity to go to town.
In the first place, a charge of "Communism" affords the professional politician his most cherished situation; a providential chance to make speeches, slap Bibles, wave the flag, tear his hair, organize committees, and spend appropriations. Secondly, "Communism" is gelatinous enough to allow almost anyone to define the term in his own way whether he knows anything about it or not. Thirdly, it gives almost anybody who has been looking for it an opportunity to arise in all his righteous wrath and slay Philistines right and left.
It is even attractive enough to intrigue an occasional Kansas editor—one of those principled beings who at every editorial convention loudly bewails the decreasing freedom of the press, a venerator of that saying attributed to Voltaire and which goes something like this: "I may not agree with a word you say, but I would lay down my life for your right to say it."
And while he screams and moans and shakes his typewriter like a ventriloquist's dummy at the mere mention of "freedom of the press," he moans just as loudly all the way from Tashish to Tishboth at the mere thought of youngsters in the University exercising the same privilege of thought and speech.
But you've probably been through this same thing, time and again, Gentlemen. You've probably learned that about every so often the state's institutions of higher learning have
to experience an epidemic of "hell-rash" which weakens the patient for a month or a year but which eventually passes on. You've been in such close contact with youth for so long a time that you undoubtedly know young folks' propensities for probing their elders' lares and penates with brutal frankness and naive, dismaying intelligence. . . only to kowtow in turn to those same gods upon reaching maturer years.
We have just received for your inspection a shipment of 200 new cool wash frocks — the very type of .dresses to wear while celebrating the 4th.
Priced at--- $1.98
You're probably well enough acquainted with education to know that no one can become educated unless he goes on a mental shopping tour; that if Kansas youngsters were forced to swallow a strictly defined course of prescribed doctrine willy-nilly whether-or-no, they would be laboring under a system of regimentation which would infringe most seriously upon the copyright of Brother Hitler and his gang; and which is just as opposite to Americanism as Communism could possibly be.
You're experienced enough probably to have learned that liberty and freedom are fine for the youngsters so long as they coincide with the old folks' ideas. . . that they are license, otherwise.
You undoubtedly have the situation well in hand and are prepared to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer. But we thought we'd simply give you a warning. It's too smooth; it can't last. Kansas "hell-raisers" have been holding-in so long that they're going to pop buttons from their vests and purple-off by way of apoplexy if they don't get a chance to go into action soon.
Summer Session Kansan
Address All Communications to
SUMMER SESSION KANSAN
EDWARD BARNETT ... Editor
Associate Editors
BILL TURNER ... BOBBY CASKEY
F. QUENTIN B . Business Mgr.
Telephones
Business Office K.U. 66
News Room K.U. 25
There's just one thing, Gentlemen, that we'd like to have you do besides hold the fort. Tell these "hell-raisers" for us that while they're playing Sampson-in-all-his-god-like - glory, the only Sampson-like property they possess—so far as we can see—is the jawbone of an ass.
Announcement has been mac of the engagement of Maxine Earhart, '37, to Elwyn Dees, ed.35.
GET OFF THE SHELF THIS FOURTH and get into circulation
If our customers are any barometers . . . everyone is going somewhere this Fourth and you won't want to be left alone.
And so that you may leap down off the shelf of the every day grind into the lake of liveliness . . . we have a store full of wonderful style items to spread before you.
PALM BEACH SUITS ___ $16.75
WASH SLACKS ___ $ 1.95 up
COOL SUMMER SHIRTS _ $ 1.65 up
STRAW HATS ___ $ 2.00 up
Complete line of Golf, Tennis, Baseball and other athletic goods.
Jantzen Swim Suits for Men and Women