Methods
Contrary to the harsh methods common in some colonial schools, Dock preferred to use gentler techniques. He sought to build character in his students, using persuasion, discussion, and positive peer pressure to encourage the highest standards of behavior among them. He disciplined poor behavior and attitudes with thoughtfulness and understanding, seeking to make the punishment suitable to the student as well as to the infraction being addressed.
Dock was a practitioner of fraktur, the Pennsylvania Dutch folk art named after the fraktur typeface. Christopher Dock gave his students little illustrations of a bird or a flower, as well as "Vorschriften" (writing lessons), as rewards.
Read more about this topic: Christopher Dock
Famous quotes containing the word methods:
“Generalization, especially risky generalization, is one of the chief methods by which knowledge proceeds... Safe generalizations are usually rather boring. Delete that “usually rather.” Safe generalizations are quite boring.”
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“Parents ought, through their own behavior and the values by which they live, to provide direction for their children. But they need to rid themselves of the idea that there are surefire methods which, when well applied, will produce certain predictable results. Whatever we do with and for our children ought to flow from our understanding of and our feelings for the particular situation and the relation we wish to exist between us and our child.”
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“A writer who writes, “I am alone” ... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.”
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