Gerald W. Smith Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Gerald W. Smith 8 7
making harsh, hard judgrents (not harsh, sharp judgpnts) it can easily
lead to a catastrophe.
A. I think this is what they were looking for and was their guide.
(tape turned off and on)
Q. It's been a very interesting discussion Gerry. I think, tho@, now
wetre ready to mve on to the other item you said that you would like to
touch on.
A. Yes, there were two or three other thin@ in qy seven years at Alexls
that I feel I would like to add to the record. me was an idea that I had
that I thowt worked quite well, nwly that of providing professional
leadership to the faculty for the improvemnt of teaching and the improvemnt
of courses. I had finished masters dewe as the University of
Iowa in 1934 md , of course, in doing that masters clegree I had followed
the pattern of programs that had been set out. By the way, in w masters
degree I majored in secondaq education and minored in educational psycholofg
since undergraduate mjor had been in psychology. At Alexis, I had a
feeling that the school could be strengthened if the superintendant and
the faculty engaged in joint studies and discussions of matters related to
the improvemnt of the curriculum and, along with that, the related matters
of teaching. mewise, one of the responsibilities of the principalsuperintendent
in secondary school is the swervision of instruction in the
school. That meant that in a place like Alexis you were supervising the
teachers of English, you were supervising the teachers of science, the
teachers of agriculture, horn economics, foreim languages, social studies,
and it seerned to re that in order to provide leadership in that a.rea a
person ought to become somwhat literate in those flelds. So I went to the
University of Iowa and asked if I could enroll in special study, bependent
special study for the smr and develop a bibliogmphy as a preparation
to establishing a professional library in our Alexis Hi@ School and. , in
the pmcess of doing it, to engage qyself in a smr of reading in the
areas of the curficulum that were in our school. Dean Packer of the College
of Education tho@t this was a good idea and he assigml a young professor
there to work with me on it. So I went out and spent the s m r
and. my
procedure was to met with the dep-mnt head in one of those areas at the
university, in Agriculture or in business education, or in the physical
sciences or in the biological sciences, and discuss the professional literature
in the area. Fmmthat person I would get a reading list, then I
would go and spend two or three days in the library just totally re g
in that area, so that I picked up enough of it to understand what th
"%"
literature was and what it said and to build a book list from which to p w
chase. So I went through each of the areas of our curriculum that smr.
And them I cam back to Alexis and in the next year, on the basis of discussions
with these people and in the supervisory role, we built a very usablv and
viable professioanl library which the faculty involved themelves in and
used a mat deal. I ndght say that the people at the College of Edication
thought $hat was a good enou@ idea they decided to suggest it to at er people
who wanted to do independent studying. It was the first tim in q 'P
educational career I ever had an opportunity to direct crwn study for a
whole summer and exactly as I wanted it and felt that we had very poaitive
results. While perhaps they weren't concrete, it &irected thowt and atten-
tion to what I thought was a very basic ratter and certainly It mde lit pos-