Mental fatigue : a comprehensive exposition of the nature of mental fatigue, of the methods of its measurement and of their results, with special reference to the problems of instruction / by Dr. Max Offner tr. from the German by Guy Montrose Whipple.
- Offner, Max, 1864-1932.
- Date:
- 1911
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Mental fatigue : a comprehensive exposition of the nature of mental fatigue, of the methods of its measurement and of their results, with special reference to the problems of instruction / by Dr. Max Offner tr. from the German by Guy Montrose Whipple. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.
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![of assigned work or class work that lasts more than an hour. To use such long hours as a regular sched- ule would be a debatable proposition. Numher of periods per day and per iveeU. A new question arises when we discuss the total number of class-exercises per day. Instinctively, and quite prop- erly, most schools are inclined to limit the formal program to three forenoon and two afternoon periods [hours], and to allow a maximum of four, or at most five periods, only in the case of exclusively forenoon sessions. At the Hamburg Gymnasium^ however, as many as six periods have, for some time, been com- bined into a single ^morning' session—from 9 to 3 in the winter and from 8 to 2 in the summer—though, of course, in conjunction with suitable rest-pauses (Treutlein, 20). And the same arrangement is often followed in Sweden (Burgerstein, Handhuch, 590). A similar experiment (sixperiods of 45 minutes each) was made at Elberfeld in 1899, but after several years' trial, they returned to a five-period schedule, because the higher school authorities, who could not convince themselves of the advantage of the plan, for- bade it, and with right. Even the fifth period, despite longer pauses, is, at least with industrious pupils, of little value. When the pupils co-operate actively, four successive hours of required work constitute the maximum. Anyone who, in his student days, has at- tended lectures for four hours in succession will re- member that he was unable to take in anything more after the fourth lecture—and here all the periods were ' short hours' and he himself was a grown man. Kemsies' observations are in accord with these state- ments, and he proposes {Arbeitshygiene, 64) four](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21211632_0095.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
