Rocky Mountain College - Yellowstone / Poly Yearbook (Billings, MT)

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H ormal pDepar1fmeni r A GROUP OF NORMALS' The Normal department of the Polytechnictlnstitute has been organized with the be- lief that the child should be educated in a way that will enable him to live a helpful life: that more stress should be placed on his qualities of character, and his power to dog that the school life should be a continuation and enlargement upon the true home life, and not a training separate and apart. The slavish use of the text-book is a thing of the past. Half of the time spent in try- ing to learn a hard lesson out of a book is time thrown away, which should be utilized in doing some kind of work in which the pupil is genuinely interested. As the end of scholastic discipline is to get all of the knowledge and truth, thought and fancy, wit and wisdom from the printed page, the text-book must not be discarded but given its proper place in the scheme of education. Education is more than a training for life, it is life itself. All of the capabilities of the pupil should be brought into action. For this reason our Normal rooms are being con- verted into veritable workshops where mental, formal, and physical instruction supple- ment each other. Here the student has an opportunity to react upon society and to de- velop his own personality. The time which was wasted under the old system is given to the working out of some practical problem, the nature of which depends upon the needs of the people interested. Our Normal students are learning to weave rugs, caps, pillow tops: to do paper cut- ting illustrating some object in nature, or some story we have readg to make basketsg to do card-board construction work, which paves the way for the later work with tools: to do stencil and applique workg to do plain sewing and cookingg to do practical gardening while studying soil and plant life: to make booklets for cooking recipes, paper cuttings, drawings, poems, and stories: to bind magazines and books: to figure out real problems in plastering, papering, finding the capacity of tanks, finding the number of plants required Continued on Page One Hundred Thirty-seven

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ll .il-Hstory and Economicsl-.. During the past school year the students enrolled in the Department of History and Economics have shown a most remarkable interest in their work, and the progress made by the different classes has been unusually gratifying to students and instructors alike. This is due entirely to the manner in which the subjects have been handled. It has been realized that history, when it consists merely of a few tables of dates. names, etc., with the customary amount of blood and thunder stories thrown in, is at the best so dull an.l meaningless that the average student soon learns to hate it almost as much as he should. llut when history is taken to be the life story of humanity. and is studied with an eye to determining what have been the real underlying causes of human conduct: when we cease to be satisfied with what and begin to turn our attention to how and why : then history becomes the most fascinating, the most vitally interest- ing- of all studies. Treated in this light, it becomes necessary to place special emphasis upon the importance of the social, religious, political, and economic phases of historical cvcnts. Thus the understanding of history necessitates the consideration of sociology, with its complementary subjects-religion and ethicsg political and industrial economy, and fwlfsws of civil government. ' ' at have we done? XYe have taken the most unattractive subject on the list . 'cl it into the most entertaining. XYe have made of a heretofore meaning- Qi 'lure ation of facts. a course of study so intensely absorbing that once one starts L 'fs ocrusal he can never turn back. ' 2 rt--ults? XYell, instead of turning out upon society a crammed graduate, 'ii ing' the world an intelligent citizen capable of acting wisely in any matter of 1 ,M-. wilt. Ii athematics and Science XYe seldom stop to think that it has required centuries to develop the one branch of science which is so essential to every-day life, this being the branch of mathematics. If we look into the ages passed. we find that a crude form of arithmetic was in use over four thousand years ago among the Egyptians. The next marked progress was among the Babylonians where they applied arithmetic and the fundamentals of geometry to astronomy. Rapid and steady progress was not made until the founding of the, famous Greek schools in the sixth century B. C.. From this time on the great mathematicians made new discoveries until at the present day we have many different branches of this art. Among the most noted mathematicians are: Arabians, Hindoos, Greeks, and Egyptians. From this time on, the noted mathematicians from Egypt, Babylon, Hindustan, Ara- bia and Greece, made new discoveries, solved new problems, and developed numerous for- mulas till we now have several branches of this science. NVhile the people of ancient times had to have some knowledge of mathematics for their every-day life, it is far more important that the people of today should be a master of the fundamentals of this study. Continued on Page One Hundred Thirty-six

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H Engineering eparimenf EI Fl if if i QQFSLN Elf Je r j 'iii it 'Q 7' -N Z-, Eff:- I i f' . i 9. K fe ff ' term? 247, Y , ' - - ffff,-'EZ' J N I c. wilf- lillllttlllllllzilfllllIIMEMYHHIKYFMIHHIT The lingineering depaitment has been at a great disadvantage in having no equip- ment for shop or laboratory but we have now reached the time when we can have a part of the many things necessary to hold the interest and satisfy the ambition of the average engineering student. In the first place we have begun our shop building which, when fin- ished, will be among the very best in the XVest. We have enough of the building finished to accommodate every one at present. During the summer we expect to continue the work and will be rea-ly for a much larger attendance. ln the second place, our engineer- ing course is being changed. During the first term of each year an experimental course fffifida WILLING ENGINEERS in electrical engineering will be required of all engineering students to acquaint them with the more simple phases of the work and inspire thein to do their best in order to reach a point where they may go deeper into the science of engineering. Qthers may feed pigs, may ponder over jaw-breaking names, may argue from morning until night before the courts of justice, or may write long lists of balance sheets with an Continued on Page One Hundred Thirty-seven -24-