I shall not go into details concerning the arrangement of courses of study, textbooks, and lesson-plans to make desirable connections between arithmetical learning and sports, housework, shopwork, and the rest. It may be worth while, however, to explain the term _self-management_, since this source of genuine problems of real concern to the pupils has been overlooked by most writers.
By self-management is meant the pupil's use of his time, his abilities, his knowledge, and the like. By the time he reaches grade 5, and to some extent before then, a boy should keep some account of himself, of how long it takes him to do specified tasks, of how much he gets done in a specified time at a certain sort of work and with how many errors, of how much improvement he makes month by month, of which things he can do best, and the like. Such objective, matter-of-fact, quantitative study of one's behavior is not a stimulus to morbid introspection or egotism; it is one of the best preventives of these. To treat oneself impersonally is one of the essential elements of mental balance and health. It need not, and should not, encourage priggishness. On the contrary, this matter-of-fact study of what one is and does may well replace a certain amount of the exhortations and admonitions concerning what one ought to do and be. All this is still truer for a girl.
The demands which such an accounting of one's own activities make of arithmetic have the special value of connecting directly with the advanced work in computation. They involve the use of large numbers, decimals, averaging, percentages, approximations, and other facts and processes which the pupil has to learn for later life, but to which his childish activities as wage-earner, buyer and seller, or shopworker from 10 to 14 do not lead. Children have little money, but they have time in thousands of units! They do not get discounts or bonuses from commercial houses, but they can discount their quantity of examples done for the errors made, and credit themselves with bonuses of all sorts for extra achievements.
INTRINSIC INTEREST IN ARITHMETICAL LEARNING
There remains the most important increase of interest in arithmetical learning--an increase in the interest directly bound to achievement and success in arithmetic itself. "Arithmetic," says David Eugene Smith, "is a game and all boys and girls are players." It should not be a _mere_ game for them and they should not _merely_ play, but their unpractical interest in doing it because they can do it and can see how well they do do it is one of the school's most precious assets. Any healthy means to give this interest more and better stimulus should therefore be eagerly sought and cherished.