Rema est CREATIVE TEACHING e Ge THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORE - BOSTON - CHICAGO - DALLAS ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO: MACMILLAN & CO., Luarrep LONDON » BOMBAY - CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lm. TORONTO w\ ~ wh " Si aye Gisti srs ER RID ~VUHUA Creative Teaching Letters to a Church School Teacher BY: ies JOHN WALLACE SUTER, Jr. Hew Bork THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1927 All rights reserved CoprricHt, 1924 Br THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and printed. Published October, 1924. Reprinted September, 1925. June, i927 4 Printed in the United States of America by THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK. To My Brst TracHEr I AscriBp Aut Tue Goop Inzas In Tuts Boox Anp Att Irs Errors To My Brst TEAcHER’s Most GrRateruL Pupit ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author is grateful to Professor George A. Barton for permission to use the verses (author unknown) which appear in Letter 13, and which are quoted in his book, Jesus of Nazareth; to the Sunday School Times Company for permission to quote in Letter 13 from the Rev. C. S. Beardslee’s Teacher-Training with the Master Teacher; to Houghton Mifflin Company for permission to use in Letter 64 a quotation from Fellow Travellers, by Mr. MacGregor Jenkins; and to Charles Scribner’s Sons for allowing the inclusion i in Letter 72 of The Good Teacher, by Dr. Henry Van Dyke. Very special thanks are due to Longmans, Green and Company for their permission to print here a number of the Prayers and Meditations of Professor Henry Sylvester Nash, for the ideals of this great teacher and scholar, so nobly expressed in these prayers, have con- stantly fortified the author in the writing of this book. PREFACE This book sets forth in a non-technical manner cer- tain principles of teaching. It is not a textbook, but is intended to be read by an individual rather than studied in a class. It is intended for people (whether young or old) who have never studied pedagogy or had any regular course of teacher-training, and is designed to prepare such persons to make their first studies in that field. The principles here described apply to any age of pupil, and to pupil or teacher of either sex. For convenience these letters assume that the reader teaches a class which meets on Sunday, but the sug- gestions made are equally applicable to weekday schools of religion. The letters are intended to help teachers of religion in any Christian communion. Even a casual reader will see that the book does not attempt to cover completely the subject of principles and methods of teaching. Its aim, on the contrary, is to arouse in the reader a thirst for knowledge. S os le s& Pr okay YOUR JOB LETTER PAGE MANY HAM ISA 1 ACUI sce) ei itahes te cgiie valticday Wigan el arte 17 MAL ESBIA DIE oie k ho eaa noir haus uke iain etn. NIL ocd SOU Pe 17 Se BOLD IDRA AND THE IND ls ce We CA ee 18 MESES ESTED cry gv os eee MA OE eee otal ANT ce ehtan ne 20 5. Your MANUAL oR LESSON QUARTERLY. ........-6 21 VAULTED CO WIN, ERBIAGION 3) oi. eee pte VAIN Mica ant a Hinata weenie 21 PAR SPIRISU AT CARMND tie ari etr lcetie sl tan wo elead (ero eh oonst tis 22 Bee, TON D) cual eMule ae hie te ees ONO ona Bre a mL Lana Res ih oe 24 VERE tA TD LITA IOS: chi release PEN RN eke age 25 ADE ES ITON OOM rn Ue ctn ee et oy een Sh RL ME ACN cy ie ON Ook 26 ME SEU RID MDE NDS Foe coe LAT eee oo Oe ake eel ge Goat ati 26 PIA DOROOL AND READING {6 2) S80. ah bade he ee aes 29s 13. Way Know So Many Tuoinas? .........628 29 POURS GI UNG Pee Cleo TN a Reh Se uly ara) 7g hekU ie) AON gc lihy Leia nema mne kane 31 “ YOUR PREPARATION LETTER PAGE ct EM et aT WS Oy nal NN, SON ne eA A OR cer aN Wo 35 LE GS 2 See Ream Ik CaN ea ea oak Sec Ae MOC MoD 39 MMAR MTC IR ESR hes Coe he iad gL O artic Lei hg De all's Mia eey ak 43 MP RPIS RELI RE Gt ace 8a ILM e Seine a Pa gs ba oe Lee ite ae ah ccar ality 45 Po NS Fai Sy ie Taek oan a eet i UR PS oe ray et a 46 IMM MRSORRC ER recat tun. Gh rene cites wiie Pro Wl Wet, Ge Nl aie Br rae an 47 LATOR CSUTEINW AG re foe ol ceeeedd ge by bec Seen eh eae 50 PO WHOUTLINES: VARY o>6oe ego bird te Mel Wile eee whats 53 YOUR LESSON LETTER PAGE DOAN TE: A UBSGONT (6d eles ek elles eC dele eee alte 59 Ee he aS Die ae Oa A Gua Re NS Se Ea 65 SD eT eOUORTSOAND LRDDS 2. 6 6 ids bide OS ei ue eels oka ne 66 Me RIE TING choc tuto hic boise bei rac ieh oo a ote Potala 66 Pipe DEMMETAT CL MAGES hhc sitet a ek ade lb dk as otha eae Aca 68 PAP ETVIPURELTEDUENY ORB NSC aU ee ye ho kee hi eal elas ds vats os feee ok Mate Bak oe 69 Dasa CM ITISEANTIATN TT 0 Poorer ht Song RANT Rrra og etn ep 72 12 CONTENTS YOUR PUPILS > LETTER ' PAGE 80.4}How:A LBARNER LRBARNS OS ey od aier Chie be ee aie ane TL OL. LHARNING VERSUS HIOCHOING Fi. LMR aia MN i a 81 32. How A LEARNER FINISHES THE LEARNING PRocESS .... 82 BOs (AUX PRESSION AL, ACTIVEDY 305 Wek Mins Wien BOM to ee Curae oy ee SAE) MOVEMINE Shee Pe Ty Baia te is Dee ah aes ee 85 St RETA CTE Cor cian: eke al alee ne EER hare herent 4 86 36. Interests BEGET INTERESTS ....:. 0.6 26 ee eo es 87 Qae AITVERTIORS e578 glee Uy eRe gr alk Wai haat Rite a ea 89 BSH AL WARNING Spo 2 en ae NORE id Se AOS ae ne 90 DOP ELA BUTS yess Ga eter ea ety ee CL Ngo artes» tai bags is SR NN Bn 90 ADS TAA NGUAGHIS ii eid bie ee ENE Oe OR Tin EE Nak Ona os a 91 Aly Tan Diericont ONE Kos UEC lies cok ee ate 91 AO THe JOY OF DISCOVERY vais. ak eee eel sane ee 92 LETTER PAGE BAS STOO RIS SS Mite Dy SON Mish IN a Gea, ec 97 44> TRAINING TO DHRVE | itil aul ies, co uee gak ohana ine Se a ater EE A OOTIOT YL acces Gaul Cael May ut at NEB pi Lue Mina aa ae a ag UR BE SLABS POBTRTE Se) ay aig Ue Tan bok dhe ta oe te or tats Gio 3 Peal ot ee AF IVLONBY 0 a ayy fap RoR glee ta eas ae ok eee 101 48,))' MISSIONARY-MINDEDNESS «| 0.035 Oy CIA aa ee eee 102 49 RAV IOR AHS ie Ma Rear ane pak icles Mog uel Hing cota ie Nae Rane aed a 103 BOs WORSHIP 1S A OTT VM si) a sae ian anh lee cick ating ee ete 107 5D) TRACHING How TO. STUDY. |. fa a eolah ee ee 107 62.) HOME WORK ah ies ae ie ae ee i ae 108 Gade MVIABRING We) bi be USE bil oh A ot acre 109 YOUR SCHOOL LETTER PAGE 54. Tur ScHoou 113 55. AGUARDIAN ANGELS .°). Oecd a PEE Td hed ee eat eee eee 117 5G.) | SPONSORS 15 8)'5.) ari ot een) saa ai kt a eee eee etn ae 118 YOUR CHURCH LETTER PAGE $7.) tA Taacnina Gaureai ies. oa 0 tet ok Gee ieee ce eee 123 58. , Tan TmAceine SACRAMENT: ; oa hd eer ae 124 59; PROGRRSS YS en ne OT Pe i ae koe a ae Ge ae 125 O02 “ReraGran Ts ACHE ors oy ee TiN ky 126 CONTENTS YOUR READING LETTER EPA TICE EING ho ce eis hy iim ange Mes eat k ert Shit STUN ae VATU Ura Tite VED aay eae YF dye laity Cruel gitar te PAAR bre NG Cn ence Ra dCi a a UR a wet DUETS Dn] > SMP ORCA ASH ACL IG OS) BC UR CURLING aR ER ee YOURSELF LETTER eNO ARM AN FRTIOT Tul he lum eutalietcg tawny g GMA OOS L MACHR i ee im gi Al etcdo teuaacselk lita Pee NEE TA DT TRESS Cea ar ake eI ed eee kN A Wital ented DU ALAC MEA BIBTOO GAs SMe or uy os enloaluae Va idree aida wig PION OUT SAVIOR fii viel atiare eae FM ible ries baci Meal s STERILE 2 Cero roe fa ent am LOA eee fetes Case RCRA BEA IISEB cy. yer reese Kal pia han ws etelteee e FRE OMSL EY hy si as hoe a ce ar hela itelsen ahaa Pra ebae SRO We LHIRIBT, Oy ay Pei tat Ce ae ean cal Saiee Wine i t¢ 13 YOUR JOB YOUR JOB 1 WHat Is A TEACHER? I am impressed by a general failure to understand what a teacher of religion is. Many of the mistakes that teachers make are due to the fact that although they know a good deal about the Bible and personal re- ligion, they do not know the answer to the simple ques- tion, What is a teacher? And this is really the first thing you ought to know. 2 A LEADER A teacher of religion is a leader. By placing in your hands a group of children, the Church commissions you to lead them through a series of typical religious experiences. You and they are members of the Church. But you are older, they younger; you more mature, they less. This means that you have had more experi- ence than they; and it is by reason of this distinction that you are set among them as their leader. The typical experiences of the Christian religion are chiefly those of worship (public and private), and what we call social service or neighborliness, playing the part of a brother to our fellowmen. Your task, then, as a teacher of Christ’s religion, is to take these particular children by the hand and lead them on the adven- 17 \ 18 CREATIVE TEACHING tures in worship and neighborliness which constitute the Christian life. This emphasis on leadership in putting what is . taught into practice is comparatively modern. A gen- eration or two ago the task of a teacher of religion was not conceived in these terms. The teacher of that day was expected only to impart facts and ideas, only to instruct and exhort. 3 Tue Oup IpkA AND THE NEW If you would understand in its fulness the contrast between the older method and the new, consider the old and the new way of constructing a system of lessons for Church-school work. Fifty years ago when any Church body created a committee to devise Sunday-school courses of study, the members of the committee came together bringing large sheets of paper on which were written the various items of Christian Truth to be imparted to the pupils. In their judgment their problem was to decide what portion of the total should be taught to a child at each stage of his development—the Life of Christ in one year, certain Old Testament characters in another, the Catechism in another, the history of the early Church in another, and so on. The entire deposit of Christian Truth had to be parcelled out and, as it were, fed to the children during their twelve school years. In sharp contrast to the older method, such a com- mittee today sets to work very differently. The first thing it does is to secure as true a description as pos- sible of a typical child at each age from six to eighteen. What is a normal American six-year-old like? What YOUR JOB 19 are his habits of thought, his mental and physical abilities, his spiritual faculties? What are his likes and dislikes? What are his characteristic temptations and joys and sorrows? How does he spend his days? What can he do best? In other words, What is he? These questions and others like them the committee asks concerning the seven-year-old, the eight-year-old, and so on up to eighteen. In other words, they draw twelve psychological portraits. Having done this they next undertake to describe the normal religion of a typical child at each age. What does it mean, for instance, to be religious at the age of six? How does a six-year-old boy who is a con- scious disciple of Christ differ from a six-year-old boy who is not aware of any personal relationship to Him? What does a six-year-old boy do to show his religion? What are his typical religious experiences? What does he give’ and what receive in a congregation where he engages in public worship, and in private when he says his prayers at night? What is God like to a six-year- old? What is conscience to him? What to him are neighborliness, sacrifice, service, loyalty? The same questions and others like them the committee asks in relation to the seven-year-old, the eight-year-old, and each year up to eighteen. As you can well imagine, it requires a great deal of study and investigation to obtain reliable answers to these questions. The trained psychologist is called on for help, and even the physiologist, as well as the student of religion. Sometimes it takes a committee on courses of study as much as five or six years to secure a reliable and impartial description of whole- some, cheerful, intelligent religion at each of the twelve years from six to eighteen. \ 20 CREATIVE TEACHING 4 Your BIsLe Let us assume that our committee on courses of study has done the preliminary work described in my last letter. What does it do next? It says, “We know how the ten-year-old child who is to enjoy religious good health should live. We know what we want him to experience. We know how we want him to express his loyalty to Christ. We have a definite notion of what he ought to be doing in his worship of God and in the service of his fellowmen. Let us now look in the Bible to see if somewhere between its covers we can find stories, parables, songs, letters, chapters of history, sermons, or other passages which if understood and enjoyed by this ten-year-old will have the tendency to make him want to be and do those things which constitute the Christian religious life at his age.” Whatever the committee succeeds in finding in the Bible which meets this test, it puts into its course of study for the ten-year-old child. But if it cannot find all that it needs there it must seek elsewhere. In other words, the Bible is used not so much for its own sake as because of its power to affect the lives of the chil- dren in question. We do not teach the parable of the Good Samaritan because it is in the Bible: we teach it because it 1s the best of all stories for strengthening the impulse to neighborliness and for preventing the formation of artificial barriers between class and class. The story has proven effective in changing lives. It tends to build up good habits of thought and action. That is why we use it. The committee finds that the Bible contains more material that is good (in this YOUR JOB 21 sense of the word) than any other collection of religious writings in the world. It meets the test of experience. It works. But we do not confine our lesson-material to it altogether, for we find by applying the same test to other and later writings that God reveals Himself through them also. 5 Your Manuvat or LESSON QUARTERLY Coming back now to our original statement, I think you may be able to see more clearly than before what I mean when I say that a teacher of religion must be a leader. Specialists have determined what, on the whole, your class of ten-year-old children ought to be doing this year in the way of religion. This conviction they have expressed in extended form in your Manual or Lesson Quarterly, which they place in your hands very much as a chart and compass are placed in the hands of a sea captain. ‘This is the way,” they say, “in which ten-year-olds should go. Here are passages of sacred literature for study and conference which we think will tend to set them in motion in that direction. With the Holy Spirit as your chief Guide, and this ma- terial as an aid, take these children and lead them into a life where they may follow the example of their Saviour Christ and be made like unto Him.” 6 THEIR Own RELIGION ¥ You must lead your pupils to live their own religious life and not yours. You must let them have their own experience of God and not yours. Remember that there 2s such a thing as a ten-year-old religion. \ 22 CREATIVE TEACHING There is also such a thing as a twelve-year-old and a thirteen-year-old religion, and so on all the way up and down the line. The religion of ten-year-olds will not | be the same as yours. Of course it goes by the same name and has the same central ideas. Theirs is the Christian religion and so is yours. But their way of expressing it must be different from your way if both | are to be genuine. Never try to lead them into a twen- ty-five-year-old religious experience. In other words, study them more than yourself, more even than the Bible. O Almighty God, who hast inspired thy Church through the teaching of thy holy Apostles; Grant that standing fast in the unity of the faith we may all come unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ; to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, both now and for evermore. 7 A SPIRITUAL PARENT As the religious teacher of children you must aim to be their spiritual parent. This will mean that you will not dismiss them from your mind when the closing bell rings on Sunday. It means that you carry them on your mint and in your heart during the entire week and throughout the year. The attitude of every man toward his class in the Church school should have in it something paternal, and that of every woman something maternal. You must be greatly concerned for the spiritual welfare of your pupils. If one of them should encounter a major crisis, like a bereavement YOUR JOB 23 or serious illness, be one of the first persons on the spot. Drop everything and go immediately to his home and stand by him in his trouble. More than anything which you may be able to do in the way of rendering tangible help, your presence there will be eloquent. The child will know that you are to him in spiritual matters something very like a parent. The fact that a parental attitude is necessary when you are trying to lead children into the religious experi- ences appropriate to their age is one main reason why we do not place a girl of seventeen in charge of girls of, say, fifteen. A superintendent who made such an assignment would show that he failed to under- stand the true nature of the work of teaching religion. + Religion is not a topic, but a life. You teach it not by explaining it but by imparting it. In a sense it is almost wrong to speak of “teaching” religion at all. You do not so much teach it as cause it to grow in the lives of your pupils. If religion were simply a topic, like algebra or history, teaching it would be a merely mental process. On this assumption it might be proper to have a seventeen-year-old girl teach fifteen- year-olds, or even girls of sixteen. In fact she could manage a class her own age by keeping a week ahead of them in the knowledge contained in the textbook. She would only need to be bright, and keen to share her knowledge with others. But the whole situation changes when we realize that religion is not a topic but a life; for no one can maintain toward pupils only two years younger an attitude that could be called parental. Girls in their ’teens, no doubt, have a par- ental feeling toward kindergarten children, and it is these only whom they should assist in teaching. / 24 CREATIVE TEACHING O God, our heavenly Father, who hast © blessed us with the joy and care of children; Give us light and strength so to train them, that they may love whatsoever things are true, and pure, and lovely, and of good report; fol- lowing the example of their Saviour, Jesus Christ our Lord. 8 A FRIEND As a teacher of religion to your pupils you must be their friend. You may say at once that this idea is already contained in that of spiritual parenthood. It is in a way, yet friendship includes certain other ele- ments. It is possible to be the parent of a child and not his friend. Not infrequently a man or woman ful- fills most of the duties of parenthood without ever really meeting the child in comradeship through games and those other phases of life where friendship grows. | What, after all, is a friend? Perhaps there is no better definition than the one given by a school boy who said, “A friend is a person who knows all about you and still likes you.” *You must know all about your pupils. This is es- — sential because as their teacher of religion it is your business to set at work influences that will change their lives for the better, give them the power of God, and make Christ live in them. Inside knowledge is therefore one of the essentials to the right performance of your work. It is not an extra part. You must know all about them. But what, in detail, does this | mean? What must you know? You must know the games they play. Play is one YOUR JOB 25 of the golden keys to the life and character of a child. It will not be enough to know the names of their favorite games, you must know how to play them. Have you ever played what they play? If not, you may perhaps be able to learn. But if the character of a game is such that you cannot play it, then be sure that you watch it played until you really understand it. For play, to a child, is not something frivolous or incidental. It is not a pastime. It is one of the most important things in his life. You never heard a six- year-old boy speak lightly of his railroad tracks and train of cars, or a fourteen-year-old speak carelessly of his football team. So you must know all about the games your children play. Are they playing games which they ought not to be playing? (Some are against the law.) If so, you certainly ought to know about it, for the games which they play are their very life. “You must know about them so that your lan- guage and illustrations and ideas may be taken from that same world. You cannot influence them until you meet them, and you cannot meet them unless you move mentally on the plane where they are living. 9 LIKES AND DISLIKES You must know your pupils’ likes and dislikes. This is another key. In a class of girls, one will like sewing and reading, another athletics and reading, another will dislike reading but enjoy nature-study and the theater, and soon. These things you must know. One of the indications of the excellence of the teaching in a class which I was visiting the other day was that the teacher, while telling a story, paused a moment in the Ul 26 CREATIVE TEACHING middle of it and catching the eye of one of the pupils, said, “You would like that, wouldn’t you, Tom?” Tom smiled back without saying anything, and the story proceeded. ‘The interruption took only a sec- ond. The point is that the teacher knew the likes and the dislikes of her pupils, and was on really friendly terms with them individually. I have heard that she influences strongly the lives of the children in her class. 10 HoMESs You must know something about their family life. You will have to do something more than call at the home of each child once during the school year. You will not know all that you should about any pupil of yours until you can see in your mind’s eye a picture of the interior of his home. You must have an idea of . the temper of his family life; the personal standards of his parents; the books they read; the pictures on the wall; and the general character of the family interests and routine. | 11 FRIENDLINESS Probably you will not be able to visit the pupils in their homes as much as you would like. Here is one opportunity, however, to supplement this visiting, which you ought not to neglect. Arrive at the place where your class meets at least ten or fifteen minutes before the opening hour. There will be plenty of things to attend to: writing something on the blackboard possibly, or putting up one or two pictures for the day, or other similar arrangements. If YOUR JOB 27 you make this a regular practice you will find that some of your pupils will begin to come a little early, too. Naturally they will help you with your work, and thus a very fruitful companionship will grow up between you. At these times you will come to know individual pupils much better than you could if you met them only during the more formal class hour. You can find out many things about them which you would not care to talk over before the whole class. If the lesson hour comes after instead of before the Church service, you can probably make the same op- portunity at the close instead of at the opening of the lesson period. At all events miss no chance to talk with your pupils informally as a friend. 12 Day SCHOOL AND READING You must know what your pupils are doing in their day school. I know of a certain room in one parish house that contains a wall of book-shelves holding all the textbooks used in the public schools, grade by grade. Here are found the current textbooks on geography, history, literature, and other subjects which school children study: The Church-school teacher who has a class of eighth-grade children visits this room occasionally and looks over the eighth-grade books, and so with the other grades. By consulting one or two of the day-school teachers and securing from them their annual lesson schedules it is a simple matter to find out what the pupils of your class in Church school are occupying their minds with during the week. If you will get hold of one or 98 CREATIVE TEACHING two things that they have been learning recently you will find that in the lesson in religion for the day you can frequently make cross-references to the weekday lessons. It is a good thing for your pupils to realize that you are conversant with their day-school work. If you find out that during the past month your pupils, studying Greek history, have seen pic- tures of Corinth, it will be a simple matter for you to draw information from them on the subject of Corinth before you tell them about St. Paul’s letter to the Christians of that city. The further you proceed in your work the more will these illustrations and eross- references abound. The main reason for making these cross-references is not to make your teaching more interesting, but that — the pupils may come ‘to understand that God’s crea- tion is all of a piece, and that His truth is a unit. Strictly speaking there are no secular subjects and no ~ secular schools. All knowledge is sacred. All truth is of God. The laws of mathematics and history and chemistry as they are learned in day school are simply descriptions of the way things happen; and they happen that way because God made them so. Your business as a Church-school teacher is not to teach a separate subject, but to help children interpret all subjects. Incidentally you will find that your pupils will become much more truly your friends if you can talk with them easily in terms of their day-school experiences as well as in terms of their prayer life and their play life. I have mentioned a few of the outstanding fai about your pupils which you ought to know, but I have not by any means exhausted the list. Many other things you will think of yourself. One can really say YOUR JOB 29 that you ought to know everything about them. Be- fore I leave this subject, however, let me remind you of certain specific things that you need to know about their physical and mental equipment. Is one of them weak in eyesight? Is one of them hard of hearing? Has one of them an unusually slow, though perfectly sound, mind? Is one of them undernourished? It is a great injustice to a child with a slight defect of which the teacher is not aware, to treat him as if he were either lazy or stupid. 13 Wuy Know So Many Tuincs? The reason for knowing so many things about your pupils is not, as commonly supposed, that you may supply yourself with a bagful of apt illustrations, or that you may be furnished with what pedagogical ex- perts call “points of contact” to make your teaching bright and colorful and concrete. All these minor reasons are good enough as far as they go. But the more real and deeper reason for knowing these things is that they are the very stuff of which the pupil’s every-day life is made, and it is precisely that life which a teacher of religion aims to influence. It was undoubtedly in obedience to this principle that Jesus, the greatest Teacher, filled His sermons and | discourses with homely references to field and garden, fishing-boat and kitchen. Perhaps you have been thinking of these as pretty figures of speech, or quaint old-world analogies. But they were nothing of the sort. There is nothing quaint to a fisherman about fish or to a shepherd about sheep. To a sower of seed there is nothing pretty or far away about sowing ‘ 30 CREATIVE TEACHING or reaping or seed. Our Lord addressed His words — to fishermen, artisans, and housekeepers, and got His teaching understood by references to their daily business. He did this because it was their daily life that He wanted to affect. He wanted to make the fishermen honest and brotherly fishermen; the farmers just and merciful farmers; and the housekeepers generous and thoughtful housekeepers. It may be a rather shocking thought, but I suppose a true one, that if Christ came in human form to us today He would talk to our industrial laborers about machine-shops and factories, and about vacuum-cleaners, automobiles, and newspapers to all of us. “He spake of lilies, vines, and corn, The sparrow and the raven, 7 And words so natural yet so wise _ Were on men’s hearts engraven. “And yeast and bread and flax and cloth And eggs and fish and candles— See how the most familiar word He most divinely handles!’ “Christ was always in the thick of life. He dealt with beating hearts, active wills, current deeds, vital states. He kept to things in easy reach. “To show God’s care He points to flowers. To show God’s grace He heals the blind. To teach humility He points to a blushing child. To show a miser’s folly He talks of barns and feasts and lazi- ness. To show fraternity He eats with publicans. . . To intimate the fitness and potency of prayer He points to a hungry boy. To show how honor may shine in lowly deeds He washes His followers’ feet. 1 Quoted by G. A. Barton in his book Jesus of Nazareth. Mac- millan. YOUR JOB 31 “See His parables. Now they paint a king, now a sheep, now a vine, now a debtor, now a marriage feast, now an ox, now a band of angels, now a hum- ble herdsman, now a house rock-fast, now a traveler in distress. “He always keeps in touch with things in easy sight. And yet He is never shallow. Here is prime counsel for all who teach. Christ could be both vivid and profound—a twinship none too common in the teaching realm. . . . He was a supreme inter- preter. He could make familiar, things that men thought strange. He could show that distant things stand near; that transcendent things lie within our range; that common things are precious; that humble things can be sublime; that each day’s hues are heavenly; that every man is God-like,”’ ? 14 LIKING You remember the boy’s definition of a friend as being a person who knows all about you and still likes you. I have been enlarging on the first part of it, that is, knowing all about your pupils. The second half is equally important. Do you realize that it is part of your work to lke every child in your class? This is not always easy. There will be the popular child, and the attractive one, and the one who happens to “hit it off’ with you and appeal to your instinctive interest and affection. But there may be at least one in your class whom you find ‘it difficult to like. You may think that if there is only one such out of eight or ten, you are doing pretty 1 Teacher-training with the Master Teacher, by C. S. Beardslee. The S. S. Times Co. 32 CREATIVE TEACHING well. Eighty or ninety per cent success is considered very good in most undertakings. It would be good in business. But in the matter of liking the pupils of your class anything short of one hundred per cent is tragic. For this is a spiritual and not a commercial enterprise. To try to be the leader and spiritual par- ent and friend of a child without learning to like him would create a very abnormal situation. There are no rules for learning to like a person. You will have to resort to prayer and the grace of God and the will to like him. The only reason why I men- tion this at all is to warn you against a feeling of satis- faction if you find yourself liking all but one or two of your pupils. I realize that I am setting before you an ideal; but if I were not, what would be the use of writing to you at all? | O God, day by day lead me deeper into the mystery of life, and make me an interpreter of life to thy children; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 1H. S. Nash. YOUR PREPARATION ares Leite 7 ETL Ew rei YOUR PREPARATION 15 TooLs You have asked me how you ought to set about preparing a lesson. Let us suppose that next Sunday you will have to teach the lesson for the day to a class of eight boys. Two hours is the minimum length of time which you ought to allow yourself for the preparation. As you get more and more interested in your pupils and in your subject undoubtedly you will often work longer than two hours. Let that be your minimum. It may be necessary occasionally to set aside two separate one- hour periods. This plan is not so good as doing two hours’ work at one sitting, but it is sometimes more feasible. It will probably help you to set aside a certain day each week, and the same hours on that day. Perhaps you will decide on Tuesdays from 7 to 9 o’clock in the evening, or possibly some morning regularly. The point is that if you settle upon a regular time it very soon becomes a part of your routine, and the other members of the household respect it and adjust them- selves to it. Your friends and acquaintances will come to regard you as “hopeless” during those two hours on that particular day of each week. This is as it should be. Incidentally it increases their respect for the 35 36 CREATIVE TEACHING work in which you are engaged, and. perhaps for re- ligion and the Church. You must have a quiet place where the sienen ings and atmosphere are conducive to concentration and study. You cannot properly prepare a lesson where other people are conversing, or where a radio or sewing-machine or victrola is active. Possibly your own room will prove to be the best place. On — the other hand it may be necessary for you to seek the official silence of the public library. Many teachers prefer this even to the best possible room at home. There is an air of earnestness and purpose, and you are surrounded by all the reference-books, Pi and maps that you can possibly use. What books and materials should you take for the preparation of an approaching lesson? First of all, the Bible. I mean the whole Bible, containing both | Testaments and not omitting the wonderful books of — the Apocrypha. It makes no difference what course you happen to be teaching. It may be the life of our Lord, or Old Testament heroes, or Christian ethics, or Church history, or Missions. Whatever it is, you need the Bible at your elbow when you prepare a lesson. If you do not feel the need of the Bible there is some- thing wrong with you; the trouble is not with the ~ Bible. In the second place, take your Prayer Book. No matter what subject you are teaching you will need this, and if you do not feel the need of it there is something wrong with you and not with the book. The reason why you need it I will explain more fully when I write of your opportunity and duty as a guide in the devotional life of your pupils.’ All I need say * Letters 49 and 50. YOUR PREPARATION 37 here is that the boys in your class go to Church and participate in public worship, that this is one of their main experiences in religion, that you are their leader in religious experience, and that therefore you will naturally find opportunities in your Sunday lessons for cross-reference to these experiences of public worship. | In the next place take your Hymnal. The same reasons for taking the Prayer Book apply to taking the Hymnal. Incidentally, much of the memory-work of your class will be found in both’ these books as well as in the Bible. Naturally you will take your teacher’s Manual or Lesson Quarterly, for this is your special guide-book. It tells you with some detail what to do week by week and month by month. The time of lesson-preparation is precisely the time when you need this book. You.should have also whatever reference-book the Manual or Lesson Quarterly requires. Nowadays most Sunday-school guides prescribe at least one reference- book in the course of a year for parallel reading. Some- times the reference will be to a single chapter, or per- haps a dozen pages, for a given lesson. These reference-books, together with all the other educational tools of your course, your parish provides for you at its own expense. When a parish gives you a group of boys or girls to teach, it places upon you a very solemn responsi- bility and elevates you to the highest lay position in parish life. The service of teaching is the most sacred of the lay ministries. It is also an exceedingly difficult task, making heavy drains on ingenuity and spiritual 1In some cases the Services of Public Worship and the Hymns form two parts of a single book. 38 CREATIVE TEACHING power. The parish which places this responsibility upon anyone, therefore, naturally gives him every aid and encouragement. The least that it can do is to place in the teacher’s hands every possible help in the way of educational tools. These include a textbook, a quarterly or manual, the reference-books to which the manual refers, and whatever other paraphernalia is necessary in teaching the particular course and group in question. In providing these minimum things at its own expense the parish is not generous, it is merely just. You should also take with you one complete outfit of the pupil’s material. This will vary from grade to grade. It may include a small textbook, a question- and-answer notebook, and a set of pictures; perhaps more, perhaps less. Whatever it is, you should have one set by your side in the work of preparation. If there are eight boys in your class the parish must pro- _ vide you with nine pupils’ outfits, the ninth being for your personal use. This you take with you for your preparation because whatever work you assign to your boys next Sunday, whether reading or writing or any- thing else, you should first do yourself; and the time to do it is while you are preparing your lesson. Never set your pupils any task which you have not | already done yourself. ‘There are several reasons for this. One is that it enables you to gauge the difficulty of the task. You may find on trial that what the — Manual or Lesson Quarterly suggests for an assign- ment is too easy for your boys. You know these boys, and the editor of the Quarterly does not. If the assign- ment is too easy you must lengthen it. Or you may find that it is too hard, and then you will have to shorten it. Furthermore, you may discover a misprint in the pupils’ material. This is not infrequent. It is YOUR PREPARATION 39 better for you to discover it first than leave it for the boys to find. You can then have them correct it when you make the assignment. But the most important reason for your doing the pupils’ work is that it places you and them on a plane of mutual understanding and comradeship. They know that you know what it feels like to do the work.t. They also know that they can examine your notebook as a model. They respect you for being able to do well what they themselves are try- ing to do well. It makes them feel that you are play- ing fair, and this attitude alone is worth all the trouble involved. Finally, take your pen and a blank notebook. This notebook may be of the loose-leaf variety, or bound, and will probably be of standard size. The important thing is that it should suit you. Let it be the kind you like—any shape, any size, any color. But let it be a good one that will stand wear, and worthy of your best work. You will see that this is quite an armful: Bible, Prayer Book, Hymnal, Manual or Lesson Quarterly, reference-book, pupil’s equipment, notebook. Seven tools! But after all, the important question is not, How many tools? but, What does your task require of you? 16 PRAYER Having arrived at the quiet place where the atmos- phere of study prevails, with two hours at your dis- posal, and having deposited these books and materials on a convenient and comfortable table, what do you do first? Pray. You cannot begin this task of lesson-prepara- 1 Letter 51. 40 CREATIVE TEACHING tion without first seeking God’s special help. That is, you cannot do so if you rightly interpret the nature of the work. People who undertake the preparation of a lesson without prayer are not irreligious or lack- ing in piety; what they lack is an understanding of the nature of the Church-school teacher’s business. Consider for a moment what is going to happen next Sunday. These boys will come into the Church school and sit in a group under your leadership. They will be there just forty minutes. Forty minutes once a week, and only for about thirty-five weeks out of the fifty-two! A little mental arithmetic will show you what a small fraction of their waking hours, in the course of a year, is spent in learning about their re- ligion. Contrast this with the other influences that pour into their lives. The influence of their homes is continuous. It is daily. The opportunity of the pub- lic school extends perhaps over an even greater number of hours per day, but its influence, even so, may be ~ less powerful than the home influence. Then there are the playground, the street, the movie, the magazine, the gang, and the other factors that constitute what. the boys call “regular life.” Against this large array of agencies occupying prac- tically the entire time of these boys, your chance lasts _ forty minutes every seven days, perhaps thirty-five times a year. How precious those moments become when seen in this perspective! They are more than precious—they are critical. In the course of a year you are allowed to make thirty-five impressions on these boys. As a Christian warrior, the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God is placed in your hands, and the Church bids you wield thirty-five strokes for the kingdom of God. Each time you meet your class - YOUR PREPARATION 41 is a crisis. It is an experience for the boys which is so rare as to be almost unique. Everything depends upon how you acquit yourself, how you conduct the class. If you do nobly you will put into the lives of eight boys the impetus of thirty-five impulses toward loyalty to Christ. You will bring their souls into touch with a power which in the day of trial may just save them from calamity. On the other hand, if you manage the class badly through lack of preparation, if you stumble aimlessly through the forty minutes, if your work lacks purpose and intelligence and you lack poise, if you are nervous or distracted, or even only lazy and vague, you will not — only lose your opportunity, but, worse still, you may do positive harm. I mean that by your carelessness and poor workmankship you will say to them, in deeds which speak louder than words, that the whole enter- prise known as the Christian religion is of so little account that it does not win the enthusiasm and kindle the best efforts of an adult who teaches it. Remember that the boy makes the comparison be- tween his day-school teacher and his Sunday-school teacher. In the day school he finds himself in an institution where everything is well planned and mi- nutely prepared. The teacher is held responsible to someone higher in authority who in turn is respon- sible to someone else. She knows her business. Her » work commands respect. Her purposefulness and con- secration and efficiency confer prestige upon her. The boy feels all this and responds to it. He respects the subjects taught by her because he sees that grown-ups prove by their works that they consider them impor- tant. He says, “Mathematics and literature and geog- raphy are such important subjects that my grown 42 CREATIVE TEACHING people get me up a first-class school in which to learn them, a school that means business, where good work is rewarded and bad work penalized.” Imagine then what happens when the same boy, having gone to Sun- day school, adds, “But religion is so unimportant in the eyes of grown people that they do not bother to get me up a real school in which to learn it. They only give me a makeshift. Nothing seems to matter there. It is a joke.” | In other words, by observing the contrast between the attitude of the men and women of the Church to- ward education in reading, writing, and arithmetic and their attitude toward religious education, the boy draws the inference that Christ’s religion must be a matter of little consequence. | It is a great mistake to suppose that a Sunday school is sure to do good just because it is a Sunday school. It is the easiest thing in the world for such a school to do harm. Carrying on a Sunday school at all is a very dangerous thing for a parish to do. It is a necessary thing to try, and done right it is very glorious. Like most glorious things, however, it is dangerous. It is dangerous because it is sure to wield a strong influence either for good or bad, just as physi- cal force is bound to be either constructive or destruc- - tive. Looking at the same problem more narrowly as it applies to the teacher instead of the school, you will see that neither does a teacher of religion necessarily do good. He does either good or harm, according to the way he behaves. Your boys, for instance, are coming to you next Sunday. You cannot “turn off” your influence on a given Sunday because you do not feel up to your task, for whenever people meet together the forces of influence are brought into play YOUR PREPARATION 43 even if no words are spoken. Influence them you must next Sunday, whether you wish to or not. The only question is whether you will influence them in the direction of Christ-likeness or in some other direction. Therefore you must make sure that you are fit. You cannot do this work without God’s help. Ask Him to help you to lift these boys nearer to Him, so that they may receive His power and the touch of His spirit. Do not pray for childhood in general, but think of each one of these boys personally and individually; call each one by name, and beseech God to give you the strength and skill to help each one in the way that he most needs help. When you have done this you will be ready to go on with the work of preparing the ap- proaching lesson. Teach us, O gracious Lord, to begin our works with fear, to continue them in love, and to finish them with hope; looking with cheer- ful confidence unto thee, whose promises are faithful, and whose mercies endure for ever- more; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 17 READING First, open your Teacher’s Manual or Lesson Quar- terly and read the chapter that explains the coming lesson; read it through from beginning to end without pausing to make notes or to draw up plans in your mind. Read not only your textbook, but also whatever references it tells you to consult. This will probably include a passage or two from the Bible and a dozen pages from the required reference-book. You may have to read this matter twice. One reading suffices for some people, and others need two. This does not 44. CREATIVE TEACHING mean that the second type of person is less bright than the first but simply that there are two distinct types of mind, equally useful, of which one retains the sub- ’ stance of a chapter after a single reading while the other requires two. Find out which type of mind you have, and act accordingly. While you are doing this reading keep yourself in a receptive frame of mind; let the story, or character- sketch, or poem, or chapter of history sink into your understanding. If it is familiar, possibly repetition has - dulled the edge of its interest and you have become callous to its beauty and force. Then use your imagination and pretend that you have never heard it before. Let. its true unconventionality surprise you; let its vigor stir and refresh you; let its mystery awaken in you burning thoughts and searching ques- tions. Remember that when this story first burst upon the world it was startingly informal, vigorous, and fresh. A few years ago a Japanese at the age of twenty came for the first time in contact with the four Gos- pels. He read the account through, then turned back to the first page and read it through again, and then once more, before he put it down. He was thrilled and shocked and amazed to learn that such words could | have been spoken and such deeds done. ‘Try to feel the way this man felt when you read over the lesson- material for next Sunday. O God, whose only Son opened unto his disciples the Scriptures, making their hearts to ~ burn within them; Inflame our hearts, we be- seech thee, with such devotion to thee, that we may know thee as thou art; through the same, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. YOUR PREPARATION 45 18 Your Aim The next thing to do is to choose a definite aim for the meeting of your class next Sunday. That 1s, you must decide precisely what you wish to accomplish in the experience of those particular pupils on that par- ticular day. What do you want that forty-minute period to mean in their lives? What are you going to make it your aim to do for them? In the technical parlance of education the word “aim” means, What you propose to do to your pupils. Here are some aims that have been used by teachers on various Sundays: To make these boys more generous. To make them more loyal to Christ. To make them worship with more intelligence. To awaken in them more moral courage. Now you see what I mean by saying that your next step is to choose a specific aim for the lesson that you are preparing. If you will look in your Manual or Lesson Quarterly at the beginning of the chapter or lesson for the day you will probably find that an “Aim” has been suggested by the editor. By a singular coin- cidence his aim may happen to be identical with your chosen purpose for these pupils next Sunday. In that case you will adopt it as your own. This, however, will not usually happen, nor is this fact any reflection upon the editor or author of the book. It simply means that he does not know personally Henry and John and Tom and Richard, the boys in your class. You do know these boys. It is your special business to know them well. You know what they need, what their special weaknesses are, what their enthusiasms are, and their 46 CREATIVE TEACHING interests, and their spiritual gifts. Setting this knowl- edge and the lesson material side by side, the final responsibility rests upon you to decide what the ‘“‘aim”’ (in the technical sense) shall be of your next Sunday’s work. It may take you fifteen minutes or more to think this out and select the best possible aim. Fif- teen minutes thus spent is well spent. When you have made your decision, write it in your notebook at the top of the page reserved for that particular lesson. 19 AIMS I have said that in the field of education the word “aim” has a special or technical meaning. It refers to the formative influence that you are trying to exert on ‘your pupils, the changes that you are trying to bring about in their characters or attitudes or feelings. Whatever it is that you desire to do to them is, tech- nically speaking, your aim. Every lesson is supposed to have an aim in this sense of the word. Similarly, you will have an aim for your year’s work which will be more inclusive than the aim for a lesson. Carrying this scheme higher you will see that there is a general aim for the entire Church school; one for religious education as a whole; and indeed one for education as a whole. Returning to the foot of the ladder, I think you will understand what is meant when educators say that by its aim every lesson you teach must contribute toward the total aim of your year’s course, and that the year’s course must have an aim that will contribute toward the total aim of the school, which in turn must con- tribute toward the accepted aim of all religious educa- ee - - YOUR PREPARATION 47 tion. In some public-school systems this “theory of aims” is so carefully worked out that a supervisor who visits your class makes a record of what you are doing in order to meet you afterward and challenge you to defend your practice in terms of the aim which you had chosen for that lesson, challenging you further to de- fend that aim in terms of the year’s aim, and so on. This whole idea of educational aims, though it can be carried too far and made too mechanical, embodies a very sound principle. It keeps before our minds the fact that it is the children that we are supposed to teach and help. (This warning is popularly expressed in the epigram, “You are here not to teach a book but to teach children.”’) Never lose sight of the fact that the main business of the teacher of religion is to in- fluence lives. Another reason why the emphasis on aims is good for you,js that it guards you against the sin of aimless- ness. More teaching is hurt by aimlessness than by almost any other defect. Class after class that I have visited was suffering from this malady. I have been in classrooms where the teacher had a pleasing per- sonality, plenty of intelligence, a good book, and an in- teresting subject, but where all of these advantages went for nought because the teacher was not aiming at anything particular, and the class drifted like a ship without a rudder. 20 WRITING When you have done the necessary reading and pre- liminary thinking and have selected your “aim,” open your notebook to a blank page and write out your lesson-outline or teaching plan. This written outline 48 CREATIVE TEACHING is the crucial and final step in your lesson-prepara- tion. By an outline I mean a skeleton program indi- eating just how you expect your class to spend its forty-minute period next Sunday under your guid- ance. It is a forty-minute time-table of the activi- ties of the group of which you are the leader. It resembles the order of business of a meeting of a club or committee. It should include everything that is to take place in your classroom—not only the mental work, but the other features also. I am sorry to say that some teachers, with uncon- scious humor, entertain the idea that they are sup- posed to conduct the lesson as laid down in the text- book or Lesson Quarterly. Nothing could be further from the intention of its author. What is labeled “Lesson 12” in your Manual may be compared to a mine. Into it you are supposed to delve. You are expected to discard what you cannot use to the benefit of your particular pupils, and to keep only what to them will be “gold,” hammering it into a form suited to their needs. You will also put in, as all goldsmiths do, other material not contained in the original ore. It is the alloy added to pure gold that makes it strong enough and pliable enough for use. The alloy in your case may be some anecdote or illustrations drawn from your own experience or from your reading; some refer- ence to an event in the life of your parish or your town; a reference to an approaching holiday; or other matter of this kind which no editor of a textbook could possibly provide. For your job next Sunday is intensely local, concrete, and specific. It concerns a certain handful of boys in- habiting one little spot on the map, and it falls on a particular date in a particular year. But the men who YOUR PREPARATION 49 compiled your book had to consider not specific pupils, but the generality of children; not one town but the United States; moreover, they wanted the book to last at least a decade, and therefore could not fix their at- tention too concretely on any given year of grace. I am sure that you begin to see now that what will give your lesson color and a tingling sense of reality are the things that you will personally add. | If you get the measles and send for a doctor, what you want of him is not a book on “The Treatment and Cure of Measles,” but a prescription. Of course you want him to know everything about the treatment and cure of measles, but you pay him to reduce this knowl- edge to the one prescription that fits your case. When you wish to go to Washington you visit the railroad Information Bureau and expect to receive a time-table, not a treatise on “American Trains and Their Habits.” Yet you want the railroad official to know those other thousands of facts which for the moment you care nothing about. Otherwise you would not care to de- pend upon him for the particular facts that bear on your proposed journey. The difference between the printed Manual or Les- son Quarterly and a teacher’s original outline for her own particular pupils is a good deal the same. Your Manual is like the book on the treatment of measles, or the treatise on American trains. Your outline cor- responds to the prescription or the time-table. It con- cerns itself with a particular group of boys and with the special contingency which will take place in your classroom next Sunday. These are a few of the many good reasons why you must make out your own written lesson-outline. Do not write every word that you will speak. It is an 50 CREATIVE TEACHING outline. The lesson is not a lecture, but an event. Construct it, therefore. Build it up step by step. Create it. Give it the stamp of your own personality. Hundreds of Church schools are using the same text- book that you are using. We may assume that next Sunday a thousand different teachers will teach that same “Lesson 12” to a thousand classes. If this be the case, these thousand teachers ought literally to follow a thousand different lesson-outlines. Much of the material will be identical, but the lessons will still be different, for each will have its own creator in the person of a certain man or woman who is the teacher. What you “teach from” will therefore be your out- line in your notebook. It will not matter very much if you leave your textbook at home. What you must take is your notebook containing your original outline. This you will have open before you on the table, and from it you will conduct the meeting of your class. 21 WHAT AN OUTLINE Is You have asked me to tell you “concretely” what a lesson-plan or teaching outline ought to contain. nee me name some of the usual items. In the first place there is the important matter of the opening prayer for the meeting of the class. After the statement of your aim this should usually be the next thing which appears on the page of your note- book. Every class session should open with a short prayer. This takes about thirty seconds or perhaps a minute. It corresponds in a way to grace before meals. The object of it is to ask God’s blessing on the work in hand. In this act you and your pupils conse- YOUR PREPARATION 51 crate yourselves for the forty-minute period which is just beginning. It is a dedication of yourself to the undertaking in which you are jointly to engage. Even if the entire school has just come from a service of public worship in the church, the opening prayer for the individual class is necessary. The Sunday morn- ing Church-school service is a large public affair, com- paratively general in its nature. The opening prayer of your class is a small, comparatively private affair, specific in its nature. We are still imagining that this is, say, a Tuesday evening, and that you are preparing your next lesson. This is the time when you must decide upon the open- ing prayer for the class next Sunday. Who is going to say the prayer? There are several possibilities. Perhaps you will say it alone; perhaps the pupils and you will say it together in unison; perhaps one of the pupils-will say it alone. These are all good ways. The point is that you must choose now the method for next Sunday. If you are going to say it alone, now is the time to select it. If it is to be said in unison, it must either be a prayer which the class knows by heart (possibly a class prayer), or one which they can read. Perhaps you will have to write or typewrite copies. If so, this is the time to do it. If a pupil is going to say it alone, that constitutes an individual assignment of work of which he must be informed in advance. The opening prayer may be taken from a prayer book, or it may be an original prayer. There are many possibilities. The whole field is open to you. Whatever you decide to do, write your decision in your notebook. This will be the first main heading in your outline, the first step in your program. A 52 CREATIVE TEACHING typical example of an actual entry in a teacher’s note- book would be: I. PRAYER Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as are right; that we, who cannot do anything that is good without thee, may by thee be enabled to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Said by heart, by Henry Jackson. As you see, while the preparation of your first step has taken a good deal of thought on your part, it has resulted in a brief entry of only a few lines in your notebook. : The second heading in your outline will perhaps be, “Review Last Week’s Work.” On the other hand it might be assigning the work for the week to come, or — an oral recitation of memory-work. There must be no set formula for the sequence of steps in a lesson period. A lesson-outline contains many items. Review, Recitation, New Assignment, Class Business (attend- ance, etc.), Writing, Story-Telling, Map Work, Distri- bution of Pictures, Discussion of Plans for the Coming Week, The Asking of Prepared Questions, Voting on some Definite Plan. Others occur from time to time. You must see that these items do not come in the same order every week. There should be variety from Sunday to Sunday. This is where your ingenuity and creative power come into play. ¥Teaching is an art, and every teacher an artist. You must mould and shape and color your work in such a way as to make it most appealing and effective. The people and cir- YOUR PREPARATION 53 cumstances which surround you in your classroom, and the literary and other materials at your disposal, constitute the medium through which you exercise your creative talent. You are a spiritual and religious artist, and with God’s help you are creating character. There is a hint for you in the fact that the word “poet” comes from a Greek root which means “to create.” The fact that there is some poetry in your nature is one of the signs that your minister did not make a mistake when he appointed you for the work of teaching. 22 How Ovutiines VARY As I was saying, your outlines week after week should not follow the same sequence. If they did your teaching would be monotonous. It would be a great mistake to have a mould into which to pour the differ- ent lessons. Unfortunately, some teachers do this. They always begin with the review, then give the as- signment for next week’s work, then tell the story, then mark the attendance, etc. The pupils become so used to this order that the classroom period soon grows dull and lacks life. You must vary your sequence. Remember that an element of surprise helps to arouse fresh interest and hold attention. You must also study the question of variety within a given outline. I mean variety of occupation on the part of the pupils. When you prepare your teaching- plan always do so from the point of view of the chil- dren in your class. Keep asking yourself how it is going to feel to them to go through the experiences that you plan to have them go through. Then you will see that variety is very important. For instance, 54 CREATIVE TEACHING part of their time will be spent sitting and listening; part will be spent standing and reciting; part in writ- ing; part in discussing; in performing class business and errands; in answering questions; in writing on the blackboard. You will notice that some of these expe- riences are comparatively active and others compara- tively passive, from the pupil’s point of view. It is a great mistake to lump all the active elements together, placing them next to each other in sequence, and then follow them with all the passive elements. This is an extraordinarily common error. It results in fatigue. Be sure, therefore, when you make out your teaching plan, that the pupils are constantly alternating be- tween one type of event and another. If they have been sitting and listening for some time, get them to stand or walk or write or speak for a while before they have to sit and listen again. Even if you have prepared the best possible lesson- outline you may still encounter a situation in the ~ classroom which will throw you off the track. This is sure to happen sometimes. Don’t let it discourage you. There is such a thing as a legitimate reason for being thrown off the track.’ Perhaps a pupil will bring up some genuinely important question which presses for an answer at the moment. It may be your golden opportunity. Remember that the ultimate purpose of teaching religion is to influence lives. The “aim” of your lesson may be furthered by this digression from your formal teaching plan. You must be the judge of this. There are three points to remember in this connection: First, you must be the master of the situation. If you decide to lead your class down a by-path, well and good, but you must keep the lead and it must be you YOUR PREPARATION 55 who decides when you have gone far enough and it is time to turn back. Secondly, be sure that before the lesson-period is over you take the class back to the main trend of the day’s work, gathering up the side issues into the chief topic, so that the work may be unified. Thirdly, remember that it is very important to have a track from which to be thrown off! There is all the difference in the world between this condition of affairs and aimless wandering in a trackless waste. Deepen and quicken in us, O God, the sense of thy presence. Make us to know and feel that thou art more ready to teach than we to learn. Grant us dignity in our own eyes by taking us into thy service, and by revealing thyself to us as our Counsellor, our Father, and our Friend; through Jesus Christ our Lerd.* 1H. 8. Nash. %, Ne ra a Ral 7 Wi ea YOUR LESSONS ; ny Pip sit bit Lo YOUR LESSONS 23 WHAT 1s A Lesson? After all, what is a lesson? To this question there are five possible answers. A lesson is a moral. This is the first and least adequate answer. We speak of telling a story and then adding a moral, or lesson. One often hears a teacher say, ““Now children, what lesson do we learn from this beautiful story?” It is permissible to use the word in this sense, though it is the most restricted and least helpful meaning. A lesson is a story told for a moral purpose. This is the second answer and marks a progress beyond the first. “Our lesson today is the story of the Prodigal Son.” In this sense the word is used to describe the official “Lessons” read in church. We speak of the First Lesson and the Second Lesson, meaning the first and second reading from Holy Scripture. This defini- tion, however, is also inadequate. A lesson is an outline or teaching plan showing how a forty-minute classroom period is to be spent. This is the third answer. Such an outline will cover all the events planned as a program for that one meeting of the class, and in it the story has its place as one of many items. It is a fairly good definition, but not the best. must first know its aim. A successful enterprise is one which fulfills its aim. Someone has said that the aim of a Church-school class is to induce a group of pupils progressively to acquire and progressively to put into practice definite Christian knowledge and ideals. It has also been said that a class should aim at the intelligent solution of the present spiritual prob- lems of its pupils. Or a Church school may be re- garded as an agency which “applies definite ideas to the solution of definite problems of particular pupils in such a way as to promote their growth into Chris- tian maturity.” Again, we may say that your aim should be to effect the formation of Christian char- acter in your pupils for the sake of extending the kingdom of God. These are all very academic and precise statements, but if you will think about them and will then try to answer fairly the question, “How are these boys different because they come to my class?” you may be able to get some idea as to how successful your teaching is. The level of a Church school can never rise above 97 ~. 98 CREATIVE TEACHING the quality of teaching which actually takes place in its classrooms week by week. We need to be re- minded over and over again that a school’s success is not measured by the efficiency of its administration, the excellence of its textbooks, the size of its enroll- ment, the heartiness of its singing, or any other stand- ard of the sort. The real test of a Church school at any given moment is the quality of the Leaching that goes on in it. Do not be discouraged because you cannot put your finger on results that can be put down and added up. You may be perfectly certain that you can never measure accurately the success of your class. Only God really knows exactly how much you are doing for your pupils. Very likely some of the finest things you do for them you will never know. Spiritual growth takes place silently. Grant, O God, we beseech thee, that in this our battle of life we may never faint nor be weary, but continuing steadfast in thy service may at length obtain the victory which thou hast promised to thy faithful servants; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 44 TRAINING TO SERVE Every Church-school teacher worthy of the name is | training young people to carry gladly their share of the load in social service. You are giving your pupils ideals which will make them better neighbors in what- ever community they happen to live. You must give them also practice in living a neighborly life. The YOUR CLASS 99 place to begin is in the life of the class itself. This class is a social unit. It is a little group within the kingdom of God. You must set the tone of this group and see that it conducts itself in a way that could be called a model for all other groups, ranging in size from a family to a city or nation. In your class you will find yourself confronted with such problems as courtesy, mutual forbearance, generosity, helpfulness, and self-sacrifice. Hach member will have to control his own private desires for the good of the whole class. The class as a unit will have to put itself out for the good of the whole school; the school for the parish; the parish for nation and Church and world. Great as it may come to be finally, it all has its beginnings in this one little group of which you are the leader. By the way you conduct the class and by the way you teach the class to conduct its own affairs, you teach the Christian life in its social aspect. The political ideas of these boys, their notions about fair play, their public spirit, their sense of civic re- sponsibility—these and other ideals will partly depend updn how they as a group conduct their group life under your guidance. In all your work of this kind be sure that your teaching makes use of real situations. Do not manu- facture situations or talk about imaginary ones. It is far better to take what really happens in the nat- ural course of events and deal with it and interpret it so as to teach Christian social living. © Master of men, set our hearts on fire with the desire to know thy blessed will, and send us forth amongst thy people to teach and to save; through Jesus Christ our Lord.* 1H. S. Nash. ~~ 100 CREATIVE TEACHING 45 A Society You ought to regard your pupils not primarily as a class, but really as a club or organization. I.do not make this distinction for the sake of the words, but because the words signify different things regarding the purpose of the group. The purpose of a class is usually.considered to be the acquiring of informa- tion, whereas the purpose of a club or of an organi- zation usually is to carry forward some cause. The lat- ter idea ought to control your group of pupils. They are a small part of the Christian Church, banded to- gether under your leadership for the purpose of pro- moting a certain cause and accomplishing certain results. | When you meet your pupils for the first time in the autumn I can imagine you saying to them some- thing like this: “You and I are going to form a sort of club which will meet here once a week on Sundays and occasionally on other days, sometimes at the | church and sometimes in other places. We have a very special piece of work that the Church has given us to do this year. A different task has been given ~ to each class in our school. Our work is going to be to find out what kind of a life Jesus lived on this earth, and then to do practice-work as a group living that kind of a life. That is our work for the year, and that is the purpose of our existence as a group. We shall try to find out what this lot of thirteen-year- old boys can do for our parish, and for our town, and for the world at large, that will be the kind of thing that Jesus would do; and we are not only going to YOUR CLASS 101 find out what it is but we are going to do it. Our aim is to make ourselves better servants of Christ.” 46 Cuass SPIRIT I have heard of a Sunday school in which a class of boys has kept a scrapbook for years, devoting a num- ber of pages to each member. Among other things the book contains pictures of each boy at different ages, facts about their school and college careers, and other matters of mutual interest. Today, although they are men in business now, it is an invariable rule that each writes to all the others on their birthdays. O God our Father, good beyond all that is good, fair beyond all that is fair, in whom is calmness and peace; Make up, we beseech thee, the dissensions which divide us from each other, and bring us back into that unity of love which is the likeness of thy sublime nature; that bound together in thy Spirit, we may “know that peace of thine which maketh all things one; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 47 Money Each of your pupils should give an offering which represents his own efforts, his own generosity. The money should be either saved or earned. Most chil- dren spend considerable money on themselves every week for candy, gum, movies, and other pleasures. They can earn money by shovelling snow, running errands, doing housework, etc. You must enlist their 102 CREATIVE TEACHING interest in the particular cause for which the money is given. This is easily done because the cause, when presented through actual cases and true stories, is in itself interesting, even thrilling. Your aim should be to train your boys in the Chris- tian use of money; to teach them stewardship. You want them to recognize the giving of money as a part of the worship and service of God. As each penny or dime or quarter is offered, the giver should say a prayer, if only the three words, “Thy kingdom come.” 48 MISSIONARY-MINDEDNESS Try to keep the “missionary note” in evidence in your class. Do not teach missions as if it were a separate subject, but inculcate in your pupils the feel- ing that the Church to which they belong exists every year of its life for a missionary purpose. Put a map — of the world shaded to show the Christian and non- Christian territory where they can look:at it often. Keep them familiar with a few very general and — striking statistics, in round numbers, showing what proportion of the human race knows about Christ. Let them understand that belonging to the Christian Church means that they belong to a spiritual army whose business it is to carry the light of Christ to all mankind, and to stamp out the powers of dark- ness represented by ignorance, or sin, or disease, or other forms of impotence. Our Lord said, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” This ideal has not yet reached its fulfillment. The Christian army exists to carry to its completion the avowed purpose of its Leader. YOUR CLASS 103 This attitude of missionary-mindedness is one which ought to be taken for granted by you and your pupils, and everything that you and they plan or do ought to be looked upon as a contribution on your part to this central aim. Try to make it the controlling and dominating idea which shapes everything you under- take. You must be a missionary yourself, and must make them missionaries. In fact you must give the word a new meaning, for your pupils probably have picked up wrong ideas from references to it which they have heard in the past. 49 PRAYER One of the central duties of a Church-school teacher is to deepen and enlighten the devotional life of the pupils. This applies both to public worship and to private prayer. You must induce your pupils to cul- tivate the faculty of prayer, the ability to worship. Together with them you must provide the climate in which these can grow. It is your business to give them new powers. I have said that the lesson must culminate in some special act of worship or service. A lesson that they finish learning by an act of worship enables the boys in your class to take part heartily and more intel- ligently in some regular service of the Church. Sup- pose you have a lesson on penitence, or the confession of sins. Your aim will be to teach these boys what they ought to do about their sorrow for the wrong things they have done; to make them feel the dis- loyalty to their best friend, Christ, involved in doing wrong; and to make them want to add their silent 104 CREATIVE TEACHING personal confession to the prayers rising from the Church service as the beginning and impetus of a new start. ‘These matters should be discussed in the class- room. Then arrange to meet the class by appoint- ment on a certain day and go with them to a Church service, either the Holy Communion or some other service of worship. Part of the classroom work was an explanation of the nature of true confes- sion. You explained the whole purpose and meaning of prayer in the work of bringing confession to a happy issue, showing its intention and significance not only for Christendom in general but for their indi- vidual, particular lives. In consequence, when you meet the class in church on that appointed day you and they have a special common purpose. During the moments of prayer you and they enter into that act more deeply, and with greater understanding, than usual. Then it is that your lesson on penitence reaches its culmination. This is only an isolated example. The point is that all through the school year you are making yourself their leader,* taking them through a sequence of ex- — periences in public worship, and shedding light on these experiences as you go. In the matter of private prayer your task is even more important because more personal. Here your work approaches very nearly to that of a parent,? for you are the private tutor of each pupil. If prayer is one of the most real factors in your own life it will not be difficult for you to prepare the way for it to take a like precedence in the lives of these boys. Do not be content to give them printed prayers and suggest that they use them. They have their Biases of 1 Letter 2. 2 Letter 7. YOUR CLASS 105 usefulness, but the important thing is to establish them in the practice of giving their help to one project after another through their prayers. Let it be obvious to them that your object is to secure their help. Sup- pose that your nearest relative or dearest friend is very ill; or that you are facing a most perplexing question and have got to come to a decision within a few days. Very well—you are a Christian. Noth-. ing could be more natural, therefore, than for you to turn to your friends and ask them to bring into play on this personal problem the power of their prayers. Sometimes a teacher lays the matter before the whole class openly. At other times the teacher will prefer to ask one pupil only, or all the pupils individually. Sometimes this is done by a written note handed to them in a sealed envelope. There are ever so many ways when it comes to the details of procedure. Think these out for yourself. Use your ingenuity and your common sense. Use variety. Do not always do the same thing in the same way. Whatever your method, the point is that by taking prayer seriously and using it in, the practical issues of life, you will implant both the theory and practice of prayer in their natures much better than you could by the best course of lectures in the world. Naturally the plan is meant to be reciprocal. Your pupils must be encouraged to ask you to help them with your prayers. Both you and they have a prayer life. This prayer life grows and matures and deepens from year to year, not only in the case of the boys but also in your own case, for in this phase of life no one ever fully grows up. Remember that a teacher is a leader and a spiritual parent and a friend. In the prayer life of your pupils you must be all these things. 106 CREATIVE TEACHING Find out whether the prayers they say at home are in keeping with their circumstances and age. It is a very serious mistake for a boy of twelve to use noth- ing but prayers for five-year-olds. It is almost as grotesque as for him to wear five-year-old clothes. It cramps and tires his spirit and prevents a. healthy circulation of ideas through his soul. It may teach him to look upon religion as a childish and UnWwOrUly. enterprise. Be constantly on the lookout for them and pass on to your pupils ideas for improving their command over prayer. Some things you have discovered for your- self have helped you. Tell them about these. One person whose daily prayers seemed to be going stale pulled himself out of the rut by the simple expedient of taking a pencil and paper and writing to God instead of talking with Him orally. Just this little change of medium made all the difference suddenly between the lifeless and the vivid and real. The letter, of course, was torn up or burned each night. There was no attempt at literary style. Some find it helps them to pray out loud every other night and silently on the alternate nights. Some people have found that it brings their minds to a focus to use a different lan- guage for prayer, for instance French. Anyone who knows more than one language has at hand this ready means of escape from vagrancy and unreality. You will be able to think of other plans yourself. Plans may come and go provided prayer goes on without any lapses. The principal thing is that you should be thinking about these things and talking about them with your pupils. Prayer is a great and fascinating field in which you and your boys should be fellow- explorers. YOUR CLASS 107 Almighty God, who knowest how often we sin against thee with our lips; Consecrate our speech to thy service, and keep us often silent, that our hearts may speak to thee and listen for thy voice; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 50 WorsHIP 1s ACTIVE In learning under your guidance to worship (either in private or in public) be sure that the underlying spirit of your pupils in their devotions is one of cheer and confidence. Never let them associate with wor- ship the ideas of dreariness or pathos or despair. En- trance into the presence of God is always an invigorat- ing and positively joyful experience. If it is not, then the worshipper has been taught the wrong things both about God and about worship. Be sure also that the pupils feel that in entering into worship they are entering upon an activity. Wor- ship is not something that is done for you or to you. It is something that is done by you. Each of us has to do his own worshipping. Be sure, therefore, when you lead your pupils, that they realize that it is they who pray, they who sing, they who give thanks or praise. In other words, be sure that their worship is real to them. It will be their very own, and active, and enjoyed, provided that God is real to them. 51 TEACHING How To Stupy Part of a teacher’s business is to see that his pupils learn how to study. Do not just tell them how and 108 CREATIVE TEACHING let it go at that. Show them how. In the early part of the school year it will probably pay to take at least half, if not whole, lesson-periods for exercises with this aim. Gather your pupils around you and say, “Now I am going to pretend that I am one of you, and I am going to study and prepare a lesson.” ‘Then go through the actual process, step by step, leaving out | nothing. Use every book and leaflet, paper or note- book, exactly as the pupil would do. When it comes to reading an assigned passage read it out loud. (This will be the only difference between what you do and what the pupil would do at home.) When it comes to writing, do the actual writing. In other words, give a perfect demonstration, and explain as you go the reasons for doing the different things and the best way of doing each. It may also be helpful to set one pupil the task of giving a similar demonstration in the presence of the class in the near future. You will modify this method in detail according to your own judgment and ingenuity. The point is that you must leave no doubt in your pupils’ minds as to what you mean when you tell them to study at home. 52 Homer WorkK Take up the question of assigned home work with the parents of your pupils and come to a definite understanding. In view of the real importance of: religion in the lives of the boys, and remembering also the amount of time available in an average week for their entire program of activities, decide upon a certain length for the home-study period—for instance, half an hour or an hour, according to circumstauces. YOUR CLASS 109 Once determined, make it a public and not a private concern. Let it be known throughout the parish and let the minister have his share in holding the pupils up to it as the standard. It helps very much if the entire Church-school faculty and all the parents in the parish come to the one agreement. This is a matter not for one teacher to struggle with unaided, but for a whole congregation to decide upon after careful public consideration. Make your assignment each week perfectly definite, and of such a nature that it can all be done and well done within the time-limit. You can then put all your weight into getting it done and done well. Do not assign too much, but have the boys exact of themselves every bit of what you assign. 53 MARKING A careful and simple marking system serves as a stimulus to good work on the part of pupil, teacher, and parent. It is possible to overdo marking and to let it wander off into intricacies of over-analysis. For example, a pupil should never be marked for attention or order. (If any one were to be marked for these it ought to be the teacher.) Do not give marks for the performance or non-performance of minor duties, such as bringing a lesson-book. On the other hand, in addition to recording the facts of attendance and punctuality it often seems wise to mark pupils for the quality of their work as students. In giving a pupil his rank or standing, take into consideration as many items as you choose, provided that you subject all your pupils to these same tests. Faithfulness and 110 CREATIVE TEACHING earnest effort should of course be recognized as well as actual results. Note all good work with approval. It is a mistake to give prizes or bribes, such as watches or baseballs or even books, for doing the ordinary work that naturally falls to pupils in a school. But a form of recognition which has no monetary value may be helpful. One teacher, after reading the written work of the pupils, places her initials in a certain corner of the page if the quality of the work justifies. it. This recognition is greatly coveted, and thus acts as a powerful incentive. Another method is for the school to take the notebooks which have reached a certain degree of excellence and have them stitched and bound in cloth-board, with the pupil’s name, the name of the school, and the date stamped in gold on the out- side. . O God, who hast taught us to trust in thee as our Father; Open our hearts to share the faith which thou hast revealed to us in thy Son, until the littleness of our knowledge be- comes lost in the greatness of thy love; through the same, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. YOUR SCHOOL YOUR SCHOOL 54 Tue ScHOOL What is a Church school and what is it for? The most complete and in some ways the best answer is this: A Church school instructs and trains children and youth to become mature Christians in action in the Church and in the community.2. Every phrase of this statement has been carefully chosen and stands for a definite principle. It must be a Church school, that is to say, run by the Church and paid for by it, and governed by Church ideals. If it is a Baptist Church school, it ought to bear the stamp of the Baptist communion; if it is a Congregational Church school, one ought to find in it the,.atmosphere and flavor of the Congregational Church. Every school ought to inculcate loyalty to the principles of its communion. And this should > be done in the interest of good education. I am not “«t< thinking now of the importance of the various com- munions in themselves. What I am concerned with here is the simple psychological fact that religious education is better as education if it trains children in a wholesome Church loyalty. The two extremes of half-heartedness and bigotry are both to be avoided. What we want is enlighteriéd loyalty. Loyalty is based upon affection. We begin with affection and 1G. A. Coe. \ fav wSleat> : TRANSL OS iM ov Case by Teton, 118 Caudls, , pricerea, Sane tue lls, WS hee and a | 114 CREATIVE TEACHING end with loyalty. This is a universal human experi- ence, whether you are dealing with individuals or institutions. It must be a school. It must be administered like a school, with proper responsibility all up and down the line from pupil to teacher, from teacher to super- visor, from supervisor to superintendent, from super- intendent to minister. It must educate. ‘T’o educate means to instruct and train. Instruction means im- parting facts and ideas. That is a purely mental process. It consists of exercises in thought. ‘Train- ing means teaching people how to do things. A per- son needs to be trained to row a boat or to knit or to sing or to live a certain type of life. Any institution which confines its efforts to instruction and leaves out training thereby ceases to live up to its name as an educational institution. On the other hand any or- ganization which merely trains without instructing thereby becomes equally non-educational. When you both instruct and train, then and then only do you educate. : Furthermore, to be a good school the teaching which takes place within its walls must be good teaching. A school is as good as the teaching that actually takes place in it, and no better. The character of the service rendered by a school can never rise above the level of excellence of the teaching that goes on in it. This is the paramount reason why your position as teacher is so important. You are one of the few most influential people in determining the value of your school. All this sounds very obvious, but you would be surprised if you knew how many superintendents and clergymen judge their Church schools by almost any stand- ard under heaven except that of the quality of the YOUR SCHOOL 115 teaching done in them. A school is called in splendid condition because it is big, or because it is administered without friction, or because it sings well, or because it maintains a good record of attendance. All these are important, and indicate a tendency to excellence; but they do not touch the heart of the matter. If a school excels in all these points and the teachers mismanage or bungle their work, it is not a good school. The important implication in the phrase children and youth is the fact that the school should take religious care of a child until he has graduated from High School presumably at the age of seventeen or eighteen. Post-graduate classes should be held for young people from eighteen to twenty-one, after which they proceed to the adult department where the unit of education is not the school but the class. Mature Christians. This phrase describes the prod- uct of a Church school. We use the word “mature” of every person, no matter what his age, who can qualify as a full-fledged Christian of his age. A six-year-old child can be a full-fledged six-year-old Christian, enter- ing ‘with all his heart and mind into the modes of religious expression appropriate to his age. On the other hand, if his religious training has been neglected or omitted he may to all intents and purposes be not a Christian at all, but a little human animal with a stunted and undernourished spiritual life. There are all too many religious orphans in the Church—children whose parents have let them go spiritually unborn. Others are religious weaklings, their parents not having trained them for the “good works that God has pre- pared for them to walk in.’ Such children have by no means reached the Christian maturity perfectly feasible at their own age. You see then that in these 116 CREATIVE TEACHING cases “mature” does not mean something reached at one fixed age, it means the normal spiritual stature for your own age whatever that age happens to be. Of course the word Christian is so full of meaning that it would take a whole book to unfold it. It is enough for our present purpose to say simply.that it means to follow the example of our Saviour Christ, and be made like unto Him. The phrase in action finds a place in our definition to remind us that a life of ideals, however high, which never get translated into active living, cannot be a truly Christian life. This point is discussed in the letter on ‘What is a Lesson?”* The phrase in the Church and in the community indicates the double necessity that Christian social behavior shall include both the fellow members of our household of faith and also all men, women, and children of every name and condition and race. To be a good neighbor to fellow Churchmen only, is to be less than Christian. The test of a Church school is found-in this ques- tion, “What difference has this school made in these children?” It is similar to the test of the work of a teacher which is measured by the question, “In what respects are these boys or girls different because of their experiences as members of my class?” Of course, they would be different in some respects each year from what they were the year before anyway. They are growing up and therefore changing. The question — is, What changes have been wrought in them by your school? What effect has it had upon them to belong to your class? In what directions has the experience made them grow? These are terrifying questions, as 1 Letter 23. YOUR SCHOOL 117 we have seen previously. It is quite possible for a Church school to do harm. It will certainly do some- thing. It cannot possibly leave its pupils just as they were before. The experience of a child in a Church school ought to be the experience of “progressively acquiring and putting into practice Christian knowl- edge and ideals, and thus growing in the ability to live like Christ.” If, you want to give yourself good intellectual and spiritual exercise, sit down some day and try to write out a clear statement of the aim of Christian religious education. Here are some attempts that have been made by various students in the past decade: To form Christian character for the extension of the kingdom of God. To enable a child to know his Father and to take his place in his Father’s house, the Church. (Or king- dom.) To cause Christ to live in all people. Send out thy light and thy truth, O God, and lead me through the mists of ignorance, “vanity, and fear, into the clear shining of the perfect day of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” 55 GUARDIAN ANGELS If you really undertake the spiritual guidance of your pupils along the lines suggested in the letters that I have already written, it may seem to you that six or eight boys are too many. When so much is 1 Letters 16 and 43. 2H. S. Nash. 118 CREATIVE TEACHING required of you, you may jump to the conclusion that one pupil would be enough to be responsible for. But you must remember that in this work you are not alone. Theoretically there surrounds each child a group of grown-ups who have his spiritual growth at heart. I mean his mother and father, his favorite aunt or uncle, his pastor, and his Church-school teacher. I am aware that too often some of them do not take their responsibility as seriously as they should. In any event the minister, the Church-school teacher, and one parent ought to have a conference at least once a year. It would take a good deal of time, especially for a minister, who might have to take part in two or three hundred conferences each year; but his time could hardly be better spent. We are so busy and our civilization is so complicated that we often fail to put the time in that we should on this kind of duty. Perhaps you can help to bring about meetings of this kind in regard to each of your pupils. 56 SPONSORS I wonder if you realize how very valuable god- parents can be to your child. I know one family where the mother has taken pains to place in each child’s room the pictures of his godparents. She talks about them to her children from time to time, and they exchange letters with them at least on their. birthdays and at Christmas. The children are made to feel from the very start that they can turn to their godparents any time for help and advice quite as readily as to their parents. Thus it is made and kept @ spiritual and friendly relationship. YOUR SCHOOL 119 At the service of Confirmation all the godparents of the candidates who can possibly do so should be present, being especially invited by the minister. In some parishes the godparents go forward and stand behind the class at the time of Confirmation, signifying the fact that they now lay down the responsibility which the children take on their own shoulders. I wonder if you are doing all you can to encourage the proper relationship between your pupils and their godparents. | O God, who makest cheerfulness the com- panion of strength; Grant us so to rejoice in the gift of thy power, that being freed from all fretfulness and despair we may glorify thee in word and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. (ear ent y SR Mai ies wy in A ’ MEay Tye tr YOUR CHURCE YOUR CHURCH 57 A TreacuHine CHURCH The Christian Church is essentially a teaching Church. This is because the Christian’s God is by character a teaching God. The most important thing about God is His character. Keep this in mind when you try to make Him more real to your pupils. For a great many centuries men and women had a mistaken or inadequate idea of what God is like. They knew of His existence, but their ideas about His char- acter were forbidding, and sometimes depressing. Ig- norance about God and sin against God were making a dreadful world. Finally God decided to teach His people what He was really like. He chose the method of the Incar- nation, that is to say, He became a Man, with all that belonging to humanity implies—birth, growth, work, suffering, death. It is perfectly clear that He did this in order to teach. It was in the strictest sense a lesson. The method was that of absolute and perfect demonstration. In order to teach man how to live He came down and lived a human life. In order to show man what God is like He came and achieved a human character which perfectly reflected the char- acter of God. The life of Jesus of Nazareth, meaning His entire life including thoughts, words, and deeds, 123 124 CREATIVE TEACHING constitutes the greatest piece of teaching that ever took place in history. These are the ideas that lie behind the naming of Christ as the Word of God. Therefore, the Church is a teaching Church, and practically everything that it does is done in the service of its teaching mission. 58 Tur TEACHING SACRAMENT The Lord’s Supper is a teaching Sacrament. If you recall the events which led up to the final meeting between our Lord and His chosen disciples in the upper room, you will see that the institution of the Holy Communion was a climax in a career of teaching. Jesus had come to show men what God is truly like and to induce them as God’s children to live the same life. During the years of His ministry He had ex- hausted language to execute this commission. By the use of every available means—sermon, parable, simile, exhortation—he had taxed the human vocabulary to its utmost. He now found Himself facing His special pupils in what one may call a last meeting of His class. There was absolutely nothing more that He could say to them in words. He had tried many, many forms of expression, and had found in them as in his larger audiences an almost unlimited capacity to misunderstand. Here was one last chance to teach His lesson in a way that could not fail to flash the light even into their darkened minds. And what did He do? He had recourse to a method which ever since the beginning of time has proved fruitful. He dramatized His message in a few simple acts. He took bread, and breaking it, said, “This is what I mean! YOUR CHURCH 125 The broken life is what God calls you to live. Take the spirit of self-sacrifice into your lives and let it control you.” Then He took wine and poured it, saying, “This is what I mean! The poured-out life given freely for others, as I am giving mine for you. Take this into your very souls and live it.” The disciples watched and listened. They ate and drank, and understood. And the power of that lesson is testified to by the fact that for nineteen centuries numberless disciples breaking bread together have repeated its teaching, in all languages and all lands. 59 PROGRESS I have already written of the need of motion or progress in the development of a lesson. There is a deeper significance here, however, than you might at first suppose. You must try to make your pupils realize that the whole Church is in motion. It exists for progress. It moves forward under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. When you join the Christian Church you become a member of a group which is not standing still but going somewhere. The most ancient symbol of the Church is a ship. A ship must have a captain, and our captain is Christ. It must also have a compass and chart and anchor for safety. None of these, however, is of much use while the ship is tied up at the dock. A ship that remained fixed and immovable would be indistinguish- able from a lighthouse or a pier. The purpose of a ship is to carry people to their destination. 'The wind needs to blow and fill the sails, and the ship bend to 1Letters 21 and 22. 126 CREATIVE TEACHING the breeze, as it squares away on its course under the leadership of its captain. Progress is essential to the Christian religion. We are on a quest, moving out of darkness into light, out of ignorance into knowledge, out of weakness into power. Our Lord said, “When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth.” 60 RELIGION 1s ACTIVE Anyone who is going to follow Christ must Think and Believe and Feel and Do. You see from this that Christ calls us to an active life. 3 We must Think. Since our minds come from God they are meant for use. We must consecrate our in- telligence and keep it alert to do its part in the work for God’s kingdom. It is not enough to have good impulses and intentions. We must also think out sound ways and means. We must be properly informed, not merely inspired. | , We must Believe. Loyal Christians can differ when it comes to the details of the faith, but it is a mark of Christian character to have convictions, and to believe what we individually believe not, only verbally but with our whole life. It is not a sign of intellectual superiority to believe little, any more than it is to believe much. In fact, a half-hearted or a small area of belief may indicate intellectual sloth, just as too large an area of belief (over-credulity) may indicate careless and indifferent acceptance. “It is as easy to be hoodwinked into believing too little as it is to be hoodwinked into believing too much.” We must Feel. Emotions form part of the best life. YOUR CHURCH 127 Joy and appreciation and compassion and mercy find free expression in the life of any true disciple of Christ. Our religion ought not to appear to pupils as if it were a cold-blooded exercise, or an impersonal proposition. We must awaken their enthusiasm. Finally, we must Do. I have already said a good deal in regard to this in other letters.’ If you will consider well, you will find that to fulfil -any three of these without the fourth is to engage in something less than true religion. A person who be- lieves wholesale and is full of emotion and busy as a bee all the time, without using his mind, will somehow be disappointed in the results. He fails to dedicate his whole personality to God. On the other hand, a per- son who feels things deeply and accomplishes a good deal within certain lines and thinks out many problems carefully, but yet never pays much of any attention to the matter of his religious beliefs, is living a hand-to- mouth existence, glaringly deficient in the element of permanence. Again, a person who is too cold-blooded to be thinking and believing and doing on the crest of a wave of deep feeling, knows no more of what’is going on on the heights than any other dweller on the plain. Finally, as our Lord pointed out in His parable about the rock and the sand, there is little or no genuine substance to the person who thinks and feels and believes copiously, but does not do anything about it. With these thoughts in mind, keep asking yourself whether the experience into which you are leading your pupils is really religion. 1 Letters 3, 23, 33, 44, 45, 50. { a ~ YOUR READING A ie SOV, v \ bh Mt ; } pan Ay YOUR READING 61 REAL CHILDREN Read books about children. I do not mean psycho- logical books on “The Child,” but real stories about real children. For instance: My Lirrtet Boy. Carl Ewald. Scribner. PauL AND FiamMMeEtTTs, L. Allen Harker. Scribner. Mary Lez. Geoffrey Dennis. Knopf. JEREMY. Hugh Walpole. Doran. Una Mary. Una Hunt. Scribner. 62 A WatcHFuL HyE Watch for appropriate articles and pictures. Cut thenr out, bind them between pasteboard covers, list them, and make a reference library of them. The National Geographic Magazine, for instance, often carries remarkably well-illustrated accounts of places where Christian missions are situated, and occasionally intimate descriptions of present-day living in the Holy Land. Pictures make splendid wall-decorations for your classroom. Keep your eyes open. Gather in helps from all quarters. Exercise your ingenuity. Ask, in regard to whatever you see or hear: Can this be made to serve my pupils? Literature can be drawn on, art, the 131 132 CREATIVE TEACHING theater, music, news, novels, museums, nature—there is no end! The world is your book if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, and a real teacher is known by her eyes and ears rather than by her tongue. Are you a teacher? 2 63 Books If you have read these letters and digested them you will be able now to study “religious pedagogy” or “educational psychology.” There are many inter- esting books on these subjects. Let me introduce some of them to you. You will find a great deal of information in CHILDHOOD AND CHaracter. H. Hartshorne. Pilgrim Press. 3 Three other books in the same field are LovE AND Law IN Cuiup Tratnine. Emilie Poulsson. Bradley. ; ; GuipE Book to Cu1~pHOop, William B. Forbush. Jacobs. Cuitp Stupy aND Cuitp Traininc. William B. For- bush. Scribner. A book which has helped many teachers, parents, and ministers is Tue TRAINING oF CHILDREN IN RBELIGION. George Hodges. Appleton. A small pamphlet which may be difficult to buy, but which you will find in libraries, and which is well worth looking for, is THE Sunpay-ScHoo,t TEacHER. George Hodges. New York S. 8. Com. A textbook very widely read and studied in the past YOUR READING 133 decade, which contains a great many suggestions well worth knowing, is Puriu AND TEAcHER. Luther Weigle. Pilgrim Press. Another book by the same author is Tatks To SunpAy-ScHooL TracHers. Luther Weigle. Pilgrim Press. Also, How to Tracu Renicion. George H. Betts. Abingdon Press. is a helpful study, well written and worth knowing. In the field of general education there are two books bearing on the subject of teaching which are so fine that one would like to require every Church-school teacher to own them and read parts of them from time to time. These are THe TracHer. George H. Palmer. Houghton, Mifflin. TaLKs To TEACHERS ON PsycHoLocy. William James. Henry Holt & Co. And do not deny yourself the pleasure of reading SHACKLED YouTH. Hdward Yeomans. Atlantic Monthly Press. This is a collection of brilliant essays dealing with the qualities of spiritedness and imagination in teach- ing. Unconscious Tuition. F. D, Huntington. Flanagan. is an extremely good treatment of the phases of teach- ing which cannot be reduced to rule. The following books by Elizabeth Harrison will be useful: WHEN CHILDREN Err. Macmillan. A Srupy or Cui~p Naturg. Macmillan. 134 CREATIVE TEACHING When you decide to take a self-administered course in the subject of teaching-methods, reading perhaps two books every month, or let us say 100 pages a week, try this list: How to Tracu. Strayer and Norsworthy. Macmillan. Tue Art or Treacuine. Joshua G. Fitch. Abingdon Press. ELEMENTS OF Reticious Prpacocy. F. L. Pattee. Methodist Book Concern. Seven Laws or TreacHine. Gregory-Bagley-Layton. Pilgrim Press. Tue Pornt or Contact In TreacHine. Patterson Du- Bows. Dodd, Mead. | SECURING AND RETAINING ATTENTION. J. L. Hughes. A. S. Barnes. Tue Art oF SecuRING ATTENTION. Joshua G. Fitch. Abingdon Press. Tue Art or QusestioniInc. H.H. Horne. Pilgrim Press. Tue Art or Qusstioninae. Joshua Fitch. Flanagan. How to Krep Orper. J. L. Hughes. Flanagan. THE Use oF Motives In TracuHine Moraus anp R&LI- gion. Thomas W. Galloway. Pilgrim Press. How to Stupy. Frank M. McCurry. Houghton, Mifflin Co. How to Puan a Lesson. Marianna C. Brown. Revell. Tue Metuop or THE Recitation. J. A. & F. M. Mc- Murry. Macmillan. Tue Recitation. George H. Betts. Houghton, Mifflin. HANDWORK IN THE SuNDAy-ScHOOL. Milton Lnttlefield. New York S. 8. Com. When you wish to add further to your knowledge of both education and religious education in general, read CHANGING CoNCEPTIONS oF EpucaTion. Ellwood P. Cubberly. Houghton, Mifflin. YOUR READING 135 Democracy AND Epucation. John Dewey. Macmillan. EDUCATION IN RELIGION AND Morats. George Albert Coe. Revell. EpucaTION For Democracy. Henry F. Cope. Macmillan. ORGANIZING THE CHuRCH ScHooL. Henry Frederick Cope. Doran. PHILOSOPHY oF Enucation. H. H. Horne. Macmillan. IDEALISM IN Epucation. H. H. Horne. Macmillan. Wuaris Epucation? Ernest Carroll Moore. Ginn. A Socitan THrory or Rexicious Epucation. George Albert Coe. Scribner. On the subject of worship and prayer this list will help: Wuy Men Pray. C. L. Slattery. Macmillan. How to Pray. C. L. Slattery. Macmillan. SetF-TRAINING IN Prayer. Alan H. McNeile. Long- mans. | A Book or Prayers For Stupents. The Student Chris- tian Movement. London. Srrvices oF Worsuip ror Boys. H. W. Gibson. Associa- tion Press. | A Daty Orrerine. Alan H. McNeile. Longmans. TRAINING THE DevoTionaL Lirgr. Weigle and Tweedy. Pilgrim Press. Tue Way or Worsuip. Hetty Lee. The National Society’s Depository, London. THe Art oF Pusiic WorsHip. Percy Dearmer. More- house Publ. Co. EvERYMAN’s History OF THE Prayer Boox. Percy Dearmer. Morehouse Publ. Co. THe Propie’s Book or Worsuip. Suter and Addison. Macmillan. TEACHER’S PrayeR Book. Alfred Barry. Thos. Nelson. Tue Book or ComMoN Prayzr. Samuel Hart. The Uni- versity Press of Sewanne. 136 CREATIVE TEACHING For Biblical topics there are so many books that it is hard to select a few for mention. First let me refer you to a printed list: SPECTACLES FoR BrsLE READERS. N ash, Whee & Clark. Wright and Potter, Boston. In addition here are just a few titles: How to Know THE Biste. George Hodes. Bobbs- Merrill. 7 HumAN NAtTurRE OF THE Saints. George Hodges. Mac- millan. Tue Source-Book FOR THE Lirm or Curist. H. Van Kirk. Revell. Wuy I Betinve in Rezicion. Charles R. Brown. Mac- millan. THE MannHoop or THE Master. Harry Emerson Fos- dick. Association Press. Tue InneER Lire. Rufus M. Jones. Macmillan. Jesus CHRIST AND THE Spirit or YoutH. Frank IIsley Paradise. Small, Maynard. THE Apostims” Creep Topay. Hdward S. DiGi Mac- millan. | THE CREATIVE Curist. Edward S. Drown. Macmillan. Jesus oF NazaretH. George A. Barton. Macmillan. In your library also it would be good to include RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE Faminty. Henry F. Cope. University of Chicago Press. Hymns You Oucut to Know. Henry F. Cope. Revell. Every teacher wants to know more and more about stories—not only where they can be found, but how one’s story-telling ability can be improved. To this end you will probably find help in some of the books here mentioned: MANUAL oF Stories. William B. Forbush. Jacobs. YOUR READING 137 Tue Usk oF StTorIEs IN Reticious Epucation. Margaret W. Eggleston. Doran. Wuat SHAut WE Reap To Our CuitpREN? Clara Hunt. Houghton, Mifflin. How to Treiut Stories to Cumpren. Sara C. Bryant. Houghton, Mifflin. In Strory-Lanp. Elizabeth Harrison. Macmillan. StorY-TELLING, QUESTIONING, AND Strupyine. dH. H. Horne. Macmillan. TELLING BistE Stories. Louise Seymour Houghton. Scribner. OFFERO, THE Giant. Elizabeth Harrison. Macmillan. Srories AND Strory-Tenuina. EH. P. St. John. Pilgrim Press. Pictures are closely associated with stories. Try reading: PIcTURES AND Picture Work. W. L. Hervey. Revell. How to SHow PicturEs To CuiupREN. Estelle Hurll. Houghton, Mifflin. 64 Worps In many of these books you will find described, ex- plained, and advocated much the same principles and methods which I have told you about in these letters. One difference will be that many writers of such books have a set of special words peculiar to themselves and to their topics. These words you will have to learn in order to be able to understand the books and to converse with their authors. It is a very good plan, however, to learn the ideas first and then give them new names if necessary. Psy- chology is one of the very newest sciences, and so it has not yet driven its roots very deep into our life or settled down very comfortably into our language. Per- 138 CREATIVE TEACHING haps it may truthfully be said that modern writers on psychology and education employ the most conspicuous language of all the students of our time. They are born vocabulists. Some of them could even be called “lexicontortionists.” | | “T am a profound believer,” says a contemporary, “in the theory so well expounded by Lewis Carroll, who put into the mouth of Humpty-Dumpty a phrase of undying significance when he made him say that ‘words should be made to mean what you want them to mean.’ The only people I know who adhere strictly to this principle are the psychologists: that is why I love to hear a psychologist talk. Of course, I under- stand not a word he is saying, but it is a noble and an inspiring spectacle to see a mere human being crack a whip over an entire vocabulary and see the words jump up on their little red chairs like so many trained seals.”’* A good deal that the psychologists have written is really a systematic and somewhat scientific presenta- tion of ideas almost as old as the race. Psychology is a name for the patient observation of how the human mind conducts its activities, and the most orderly and connected account of the results of these observations. Many ideas which for generations have been a part of ordinary household rule-of-thumb wisdom and com- mon sense are now being dressed up in the precise language of science and we find it hard to recognize them as old acquaintances. Mothers and fathers have always been psychologists, that is to say observers and (as far as possible) influential formers of character. When you read modern books on psychology, there- 1 [nterature with a Large “L,” and Fellow Travelers, by eae Jenkins. Houghton, Mifflin Co YOUR READING 139 fore, do not be content to familiarize yourself with a lot of new words, but go beneath the surface and get at the meaning. Try to distinguish between old familiar ideas in a new dress on the one hand, and really new ideas based on sound inferences from them on the other. 65 “INFALLIBLES” OLD AND NEw Do not make the naive blunder of supposing that science is infallible. Neither psychology nor any other branch of science is free from error. An infallible science is just as impossible as an infallible Bible. People are wonderfully credulous, and love to accept a thing (no matter what) wholesale. There is just as good ground for giving your allegiance to an “infalli- ble” Bible as there is for an unconditional surrender to a so-called infallible science. The second is just as illogical as the first. What we really mean by science is a method: im- partial observation, comparison, and analysis; exper- imentation; careful tests; and so forth. There is no doubt that the scientific method is more conducive to an increase of knowledge than any other known human method; far superior, for instance, to magic. This is like saying that a modern rifle is superior to a bow and arrow. But to say that science can never go wrong would be like saying that you can never miss the mark with a rifle. When people tell you that a certain fact has been “scientically proved” there are still many things that you ought to want to know about it. What science proved it? Who was the scientist? Was the man who did the proving a reliable scholar? What was 140 CREATIVE TEACHING his aim? What were his prejudices and his general tendencies? Do other scientists, with other back- grounds, agree with him? Even statistics are not infallible, for they are the fruit of man’s labor. Supposing someone asked two students to gather the data and make a chart show- ing how the citizens of a certain town were divided according to the color of their hair. One of the two students might report 96 people with red hair and the other 99. The point is that one man would con- sider the hair of a certain individual red and the other would call the same hair brown or auburn. Behind every set of statistics there is the judgment of some person who had to decide in what column to enter each item. Statistics may be scientific, but they are not always invariable or accurate, because they are of human manufacture. A color-blind student would have a difficult time gathering statistics of the various colors of hair. Yet there are students today who undertake to do things almost equally foolish. What else is a scientist who tries to make an analysis of the religious and spiritual factors of human life who has never experienced religion himself? Freely admit that no one ought to turn to a religious book like the Bible for facts on geology, but acknowledge also that no one ought to turn to the methods and text- books of the physical sciences for the facts and prin- ciples of religion. 66 HicHer Crrivricism You have asked me how you ought to deal with the difficult matter sometimes called “higher criticism.” Be absolutely frank. Whatever your attitude YOUR READING 141 toward the Bible happens to be, reveal it without subterfuge to your pupils. Take them into your con- fidence. You and they are to study the Word of God together, and it would be ridiculous to suppose that you could look at it from one point of view for your- self and from another in your work with them. If you believe that there are scientific inadequacies and errors in parts of the Bible you must explain the case to your pupils, but show them also how it is possible for you to maintain great reverence for this wonderful Book as a guide in religion while openly admitting that it can- not possibly contain the last word on scientific matters. Show them that the fact that you do not go to the Bible for light on geology does not render it any less valuable to you as a book on religion. Or, we will say, you understand that there are many conflicting ideas about God in the Bible, and that the earlier ideas of His character are less complete and less satisfactory than the later. If this be your conviction about these points, or other similar matters, you must make them clear to your pupils. Remember that between you and them there exists a partnership. Nothing could be worse for them than for you to conceal or evade these points only to have knowledge of their existence forced upon them later in circles that are unfriendly to Christianity. There are many fantastic and untrustworthy books about the Bible, and it would be a mistake to think that every book which is recent and which tries to be scholarly is on that account good. We must. use our judgment in all things and select the best. It is possible (and of course very harmful) to put into the minds of children an exaggerated attitude of *Letter 4. 142 CREATIVE TEACHING reverence and awe toward certain things in Scripture which the authors of those parts of the Bible would be the first to deplore. The Old Testament contains some stories retained partly for their human interest and partly for historical reasons not very closely as- sociated with religion. Children ought to be: allowed to enjoy these on the level at which they were orig- — inally written. We ought to smile with our children over the incongruities; we ought not to frown upon their recognition that the long bow has been drawn in the extravagant deeds of valor recorded in such tales as those about Samson. We ought to coach our chil- dren in a poetic appreciation of the story of the Garden of Eden, opening to them also its moral valué, its great simplicity and beauty, finer beyond all comparison than any other equally ancient description of the beginning of things. | The point which I am trying to make clear is that in these high matters it will not do to have any secrets from your pupils. There must be no pretence and no shams. Nothing but the naked truth as you see it is good enough for the children of our God who Himself is Truth. “Since early times Christians have re- garded the Bible as insmred, that is, written by men of religious insight under divine guidance; and as revelation, that is, the record wherein God shows Himself and His truth. For centuries inspiration was thought to have guaranteed the Bible from scientific, historical, and all other kinds of error, all fallibility of its human authors being divinely removed; while revelation was so conceived as to deny YOUR READING all progress in the divine truth as re- vealed. The Bible was held to be a unit, literally and equally inspired from cover to cover. “A century of study more intense, more adequately equipped, and more histori- cally minded than Christendom had pre- viously known has revolutionized the two ideas of inspiration and revelation. We now know that we can appreciate the full meaning of inspiration only by studying the historic forces, and the men of reli- gious genius, that God guided to produce a Bible not literally inerrant but alive with religious insight. And we can under- stand the written revelation of God only when we view it as progressive, beginning _ with the record of simple and often bar- baric beliefs and practices of the early Hebrews, and after over a thousand years of growth culminating in the New Tes- tament’s presentation of the Person and teachings of our Lord. So studied and understood, the Bible retains its unique place as the Sacred Book of our religion.” 143 1N. B. Nash, in Spectacles for Bible Readers. Wright and Potter, Boston. 144 CREATIVE TEACHING | O Christ my Master, these Gospels are a portrait of thee. I follow thee because thou art the truth. Then must I be truthful. Be- cause I love thee so dearly, I must not tell the least, the whitest lie to thy glory. Thou need- est not that I should lie. Thy cause doth not hang on my arm. I must not then by dogmatic stratagem seek to win thy fight unfairly. Here am I set as one little candle in the midst of many stronger than I. Thy cause is to be main- tained by me in the face of doubters. But, unless I am sure that these others are not in thy confidence, why may it not be that thy cause is to be maintained in some measure by them against me? Since I know that my opinion of thee is profoundly unworthy of | thee, I must expect to be tutored by thee still in a thousand unexpected ways. Se Thou needest not my pious frauds. But I need thy love. O help me, for thy dear sake, to keep myself from all manner of untruth and un- truthfulness.* O Lord of all love and light, let me tread the temple of truth with reverent feet. Let me not desecrate its sacred precincts with brawling and brow-beating, nor defile its altar with scorn for anything my brethren have believed." 1H. 8. Nash. YOURSELF YOURSELF 67 You ARE AN ARTIST You see then that teaching is an art. (It is not a science, but like all arts it uses science.) If you are a teacher, you must be an artist. But “artists are born and not made.” So it is said; yet it is only a half truth. That is, it is true that artists are born. But they are made artists by dint of pains and toil and self-control and efforts most arduous. Artists not made? Ask any painter, sculptor, poet, singer, teacher. Such a fashioning and re-fashioning have they been through, such patient study, by such unconquerable will, as only they themselves know. The saying that artists are born and not made was not coined by an artist. The beautiful picture, the perfect song, the liber- ated pupil—emerging from the hand of painter, com- poser, teacher—are made if ever anything was made. Created, formed, given birth. Born again! And through no accident of circumstance, but by the grace of an artist’s untiring toil. Remember, O Lord, what thou hast wrought in us, and not what we deserve; and, as thou hast called us to thy service, make us worthy of our calling; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 147 148 CREATIVE TEACHING 68 Non-TEACHERS The exceptions you take to my last letter interest me. You have put the case well. It is true that there is another side to the story which my former letter did not touch upon. (Can every phase of any subject be covered in a single letter?) What I tried to say was that since a teacher is an artist he has to be made as well as born. For an art is nothing apart from its exercise. It is activity whether it be the art of painting, of singing, or of teaching. You do not have an art, as you have eyes and ears; you have a skill that is both an endow- ment and an acquirement, and you ezercise it. That is why you cannot be an artist without becoming one through practice. The painter becomes an artist by painting, and the more he paints the more of an artist he is likely to become. That is what I mean when I say that an artist is more “made” than “born.” So much for that. Ay But, as you suggest, there is another side. Some people are so constituted that they are not likely ever to make a go of the art of teaching. For while there is room for improvement in every good teacher, however richly endowed with natural gifts, which can be realized through effort, yet, no amount of effort can make every person a good teacher. There are people whom no amount of pains will avail to make into painters, and others whom no amount of training apparently will turn into real teachers. Something in their psychology seems to rule out teaching as a pos- sible achievement. They are and remain non-teachers, just as truly as glass is a non-conductor of electricity. YOURSELF 149 Perhaps we can sum up the whole matter by saying: Hosts of people are born with the minimum gift needed to acquire the art of teaching. All these people can become proficient in this art by practice. Others are born with tendencies or characteristics which make it unlikely, if not impossible, for them to become proficient in the art of teaching even if they try. There remains, however, one thing more to be said. Though teaching has many points in common with other arts, there is an important respect in which it differs from such arts as painting or music. I refer to the comparative universality of teaching as a human enterprise. Practically everybody does a little teaching. Each of us is a center of influence. Practically all the in- fluence we radiate is innocently pedagogical. Then, too, there is something instinctively parental in all of us. Every man possesses all or most of the abilities and tendencies which belong to fatherhood, and every woman the corresponding graces and powers belonging to motherhood. Teaching is one of the abilities natural to both motherhood and fatherhood. Every parent has to do some teaching, and every adult is at least a potential parent. Even this does not end the story, for a lot of teach- ing work creeps into our business and professional relationships. Really, there is an extraordinary amount of teaching done in business and perhaps an equal amount in most of the professions. You can see, therefore, that teaching does differ from the other arts. It is not true to say that practically everyone has to play the violin a little, or to paint pictures 8 150 CREATIVE TEACHING little; but it is true that practically everyone is teach- ing something incidentally to somebody all the time. No matter what the walk of life, a man is almost always more efficient if he has some ability in teach- ing. I think it would surprise you if you were to test this statement by actual cases. Take, for in- stance, the work of a carpenter, a doctor, an insurance agent, an actor, a housekeeper, a landscape gardener, a storekeeper, a dressmaker, a politician, a lawyer. Now a good teacher must be a leader, a friend; in- telligent, original, ingenious, sympathetic, far-sighted, adaptable, alert; able to like all types of people; humble, self-controlled, strong, versatile, and conse- crated. Above all, a good teacher must be able to look at a situation from many points of view, to under- stand how things appear and sound and feel to the other person. Is it not plain that these qualities are the very ones in a carpenter, doctor, housekeeper, lawyer, or dressmaker that would induce you to choose them to do your work? In considering the cases of men and women who have failed in various business and professional careers, I have often been struck by the fact that what they really lacked were some of the more obvious qualities that distinguish good teaching. 69 INTANGIBLE A good many of the factors which go to make suc- cess in teaching cannot be crystallized into rules or even principles. They are too intangible for that. Yet they are very important. For instance, every teacher creates a certain atmosphere. Your pupils will find you either likable or the reverse; either. ha- YOURSELF 151 bitually cheerful or habitually gloomy; either positive or negative; either fussy or calm; either distracted or self-controlled. There are no rules for making atmos- phere of the right kind except common sense and prayer and a good life. The reason why I mention it is to remind you of the fact that in your classroom work it is of the first importance. Whatever happens you have simply got to be at your very best during those forty minutes on Sunday. Even if you have a headache or a worry or some other disability, you must rise above it for those few minutes. In the eyes of your pupils you are an almost official embodiment of Christ’s religion, and you fail in every- thing if you fail to make goodness attractive. I have just said there are no fixed rules, but here are a few hints for what you may find them worth: Never hurry. Never be nervous. Never scold. Never let it appear that you are making a great exertion. Never place a barrier between yourself and your class, but say ‘““We” oftener than “You and I.” Be approach- able. Be habitually optimistic. Be agreeable. Of course you must have definite standards, and you will need plenty of backbone; but try to induce your group to make these standards their standards, and try to make any offense appear as an offense against the fellowship of the class rather than against you personally. It is much easier to tell you what are the right things to do than to tell you how to achieve them. There are two extremes to be avoided. One is the rigid, antagonistic schoolmarm, irritable and sarcastic, hard and bitter, who has been portrayed in some of the novels of a generation ago; and the other is the futile and silly faddist, who has not so often been described 152 CREATIVE TEACHING in books, but of whom a perfect picture can be found in a novel called “A Pocketful of Poses,” by Anne C. Parrish. 70 A Loose WRIsT Be sure that your teaching-method is flexible. In a well-taught class the children do not sit stiffly in rows and all do precisely the same thing at the same moment. A lesson is not a military drill. You ought to do different things on different Sundays, and the various pupils should often be doing different things at the same time on the same Sunday. Each one ought to contribute actively toward the success of the lesson, and in that case the contribution of one pupil will be different from that of another. One will be artistic, another musical, another executive, and so on. Be original. Think up schemes which no teacher has ever tried before. Remember that any method is good which brings about the desired result, which is that the religion of Jesus Christ shall flourish in the lives and characters of all your pupils. In watching different teachers at work with their classes I am sometimes reminded of two types of horsemanship. The novice who drives a pair of horses sits rigidly in his place, grasps the reins stiffly, and — holds the horses at a constant tension. At the slightest sign of wilfulness or caprice on their part he instantly draws the reins tighter. Nervous and suspicious, he creates nervousness and suspicion in his horses. The expert driver, on the other hand, sits at ease and holds the reins competently but lightly, allowing the horses plenty of free play. They move along gracefully and YOURSELF 153 with ease, for along the reins from the driver’s hand runs the invisible current of perfect control. Something like this is the way of a good teacher and her pupils. As teacher you control. But one of the indications of your competency is the fact that you allow your pupils a large freedom. O my dear Master, give me a deeper love for the minds of those I teach. Keep me from forcing my opinions on them. Let me rever- ence them, and so teach them to reverence themselves.' 71 Your BEHAVIOR A man was once asked if he would make an address to a group of Church-school teachers on the subject of “behavior.” He agreed to do so, but on the occasion, to the surprise of his audience, he spoke about the behavior of the teachers and officers. The fact is that nearly all misbehavior on the part of pupils is due to misbehavior on the part of their teachers or officers. Needless to say, the misbehavior takes an entirely different form, consisting in careless- ness and mismanagement, poorly-prepared lessons, nervousness, and aimlessness. Shortcomings of this kind on the part of the faculty breed corresponding disorder on the part of the pupils. In the same way, the quality of worship on the part of the pupils depends largely upon the “behavior” in worship of the teachers. Some people when they are in church worship God with all their heart and mind and soul, not making an unseemly display (for that would rob the act of genuineness) but being actually 1H. S. Nash. 154 CREATIVE TEACHING abstracted and lost in the business of the hour. A great student of religion has said, “People admire not that which you tell them is admirable, but that which they see you admire; they worship not what you tell them is worthy, but what they find you worshipping.” Any carelessness or half-heartedness on your part in the house of God will undo even the most eloquent and skilled verbal lesson on worship. 72 STRENGTH We have all had teachers, and we know the difference between weak and strong ones. Here for instance is a weak teacher. She is to teach drawing. The child sits at his desk with a pencil in his hand. Yonder is a vase of flowers which has been assigned to him to. draw, but his first work was too poor to pass. After several of these failures, the weak teacher finally seizes the child’s hand in her own, guides the pencil, and gets the picture drawn. The chief aim of the weak teacher is “to get the thing done.” Consider now the strong teacher. She makes the child believe that he can do better; she fairly supplies him with her own eyes so that he can distinguish be- tween his false lines and his true ones; she encourages; she is patient. After a while, fired with a zeal that lifts all his powers to a new pitch of concentration, her pupil draws a creditable picture and does it himself. In other words, the strong teacher develops ability in her pupil. The teacher who keeps her hands off is the able teacher. Power is not the same as force. The dominating power of one will over another is one thing, the gracious influence of one personality over another YOURSELF 155 personality is a very different and superior thing. The very climax of power is self-restraint. THE GOOD TEACHER? The Lord is my teacher, I shall not lose the way. He leadeth me in the lowly path of learning, He prepareth a lesson for me every day; He bringeth me to the clear fountains of instruction, Little by little he showeth me the beauty of truth. The world is a great book that he hath written, He turneth the leaves for me slowly; | They are all inscribed with images and letters, He poureth light on the pictures and the words. He taketh me by the hand to the hill-top of vision, And my soul is glad when I perceive his meaning; In the valley also he walketh beside me, In the dark places he whispereth to my heart. Even though my lesson be hard it is not hopeless, For the Lord is patient with his slow scholar; He will wait awhile for my weakness, ‘In the dark places he whispereth to my heart. O God, give me thy patience, thy respect for the rights of the spirits whom thou hast cre- ated. No thought so clearly sheweth thy majesty to me as the thought of thy self- restraint, that thou in thine almightiness canst bide thy time so patiently, canst shelter the flickering fire of human love and intelligence, fan it so kindly, blow it so gently. Oh, thy goodness is past searching! I, I make a bel- lows of my little wisdom and blow so vigor- 1 Henry van Dyke. Courtesy of Charles Scribner’s Sons. 156 CREATIVE TEACHING ously at the opinions of my pupils that I blow out the fire which I fain would make brighter. Make me more jealous of their rights. I am not set in my chair to thrust opinions into them, but to make them manly lovers of the truth. Should not a true warrior for God be glad when a younger warrior so mastereth the art of fence as to hold and more than hold his own against himself? Let my prayer be, “May these men come to all I am and overcome it.” Take the film from mine eyes, that I may see the empty spaces filled with the hosts of God. Then shall I be gentle, and then shall I be strong.? : 3 TEACHABLENESS Perhaps the most fatal weakness of a teacher is “cocksureness.”’ Anyone who feels that he knows all about teaching, that he can handle his class effee- tively week after week without much preparation, or that he has finished his teacher-training and has noth- ing more to learn, is on the decline if not already ruined as a teacher. Teacher-training, if by this we mean learning how to teach better, is a process which must never end. And with the best teachers it never does end. As I have gone about among teachers of all sorts and of varying abilities I have been impressed over and over again by the humility, the thirst for knowledge, exhibited by the ones who possess out- standing ability. It is only the ineffective and un- imaginative teachers who are contented with their present methods and powers. Those who with a touch of genius produce remarkable results in the 1H. §S. Nash. YOURSELF 157 lives of their pupils are always on the alert for better things, inquisitive about new ideas and methods, ready to learn patiently anything new that holds out a promise of improving their work. In other words, the best teacher is always the best learner. Give us, O God, the scholar’s conscience, that we may never, seeking for effect, go out- side our knowledge; and crown thy gifts with the prophet’s passion for righteousness and truth; through our Teacher and our Guide, Jesus Christ.* 74. HuMILITy Humility is one of the distinguishing marks of a real teacher. What after all is humility? It is a kind of wisdom. It consists in knowing the hiding-place of power. A humble person is one who seeks power not in himself but in the Source of all power, which is God. There are various reservoirs of power, situated on dif- ferent levels.. For instance there is the golden reser- voir of money, which holds considerable power. There is the reservoir of popularity or human friendship, on a higher level. There is the reservoir of one’s own private energy, and others which you can enumerate if you examine your own experience. One can draw on any or all of these, and there are times when one should. But the really humble and truly religious person draws ultimately on the highest and greatest, who is God, and whose power feeds and sustains all lesser reservoirs of strength. As a teacher it is your special privilege to let the power of God flow through your life into the lives of 1H. S. Nash. 158 CREATIVE TEACHING your pupils. This you cannot do unless you yourself are in direct contact with Him; unless you draw on Him as your chief Fountain of strength. To do this you must have humility; and if you have humility, there is at least the possibility that you may Denemne a teacher. O God, keep me from grieving that - Holy Spirit who would fain guide me into all truth, by any stubbornness of ignorance, by any pride of opinion, or by any prejudice in favor of my own conceits. Give me, O my Teacher, the lowliness and loftiness of mind becoming those who are thinking thy thoughts after thee.’ 75 SHow CHRIST The central duty of a teacher of the Christian religion is to show Christ. | First, this means to show Jesus, the Man of Galilee, as He really was. Try to stand out of the way so that His vivid life will strike your pupils with something of the surprising force and freshness with which it first electrified the folk of Galilee.2 Do not be eager to dis- cuss theories about the Lord Jesus, but show Him. If only you can do this, His majestic figure will do its own work in the lives of your pupils without further assistance from you. We teachers are too apt to stand between our Lord and His children. Never let it be possible for the boys in your class to say that they would have seen Jesus more clearly if you had not been so much in the way. Let it be your constant aim to put Jesus of Nazareth forward into the light where your pupils may see His face clearly and catch 1H. S. Nash. 2 Letter 17. YOURSELF 159 the clear outlines of His character. In order to do this you will have to spend hours in His company every week. Read all four Gospels repeatedly, and reflect upon the life and character there portrayed. In the second place, you must show them the living Christ. Only in the degree that you can truthfully say with St. Paul, “It is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me” can you be to them for Christ what Christ is to all of us for God. O Master of life and God of my salvation, fasten my attention on the things that are high and eternal. Keep me from the profanity of wandering thoughts, and the frivolity of sur- face thinking. Help me to live with Jesus and to think with Jesus, so that my message may be a word from him to men, winged with power to reveal and to bless; to thy honour and praise, and to the help of my fellow-men.' THE TEACHER ? Lord, who am I to teach the way To little children day by day, So prone myself to go astray? I teach them knowledge, but I know How faint they flicker and how low The candles of my knowledge glow. I teach them love for all mankind And all God’s creatures, but I find My love comes lagging far behind. Lord, if their guide I still must be, Oh let the little children see The teacher leaning hard on Thee. 1H. §S. Nash. 2 Leslie Pickney Hill. Date Due ‘ > Saudi i ae sh ae oe pee sl ee nm ¥ =u the Princeton ST | N ae Nm LO) © = © =" © N bo imi! a | geal oe : 2 om a cae ees . ~ 4 2 Ostet a aeih = Pop Ne > Ser ° d ——