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Spurts Of Growth And Accomplishment: The rate of a child's development is uneven. There are spurts of growth and accomplishment between periods of relatively slow progress. Certain behavior becomes prominent for a time and then gives place to other preoccupations.
A child's development during the first two years of life is fascinating. He changes every day. His energy is enormous. When he begins to walk 6rst two years and more slowly until about fifteen years. At ages one to two the mean pulse rate for boys and girls was almost the same— 105 and 104 per minute.
If sequences are carefully worked out and the pupil starts at his present level of accomplishment, the number of failures, with their attendant discouragement, anxiety, and dislike for mathematics, will be reduced (38, p. 10, 1956). Time should not be wasted, nor failure invited, by attempts to bring all the children of a grade up to a common level of accomplishment. There are some pupils who cannot grasp the abstract astures of these people and hear or read true stories of how their money was used. A rewarding type of project is the exchange of drawings, pictures, letters, and gifts with individual children or classes in other parts of the world.
Abernethy (1, 1936) called attention to the rather low correlations between mental and physical measures, becoming still smaller after age fourteen or fifteen. Of the various measures studied, standing height was most closely related to intelligence. However, individual case studies reported by Millard and Rothney (106, 1957) show rather similar spurts in height, weight, mental age, and achievement patterns. Exceptions occur, of course, but more synchronization of different aspects of growth is evident in the case studies than in the mass investigations. |
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