The Importance of Questioning
Ever since Socrates, conversation has been the soul of teaching, and
ever since Adam and Eve the question has been the life of
conversation. A teacher's success depends, in about equal measure,
upon inspiration, cogitation, and interrogation. Let the first be the
great gravitative forces; let the second provide the truth, the
liquid; then the interrogation-point is the curved siphon, which
transfers from the full to the empty vessel!
Many, many a teacher has failed, thinking himself not wise enough, or
not energetic enough, while in reality he has simply failed to be
wisely and energetically quizzical.
But what is a question? Is it not a fish-hook for pulling out, rather
than a siphon for putting in? Yes, later; but you cannot fish
successfully in a dry pond. Any bungler can examine and test. The nice
art is to use your interrogation-points as instruments of addition,
rather than of subtraction.
But why is it often better to insinuate instruction through a question,
in preference to pouring by direct harangue? Well, does not a question
imply community of interest, and hint at equality or similarity of
attainment? The question is neighborly; the discourse mounts a platform.
The helpful lesson commentaries fail, practically, to reach many a
class, because its teacher in reading has failed to translate from the
declarative into the interrogative. If Doctor Somebody writes tersely,
"A sin that is born of your own will is tenfold more dangerous to you
than your own sin that is born of your neighbor's will," Johnny will
not get the point unless the teacher transforms it somewhat thus: "If
you are out in the country all alone, Johnny, jump over a fence, steal
a pocketful of apples, is that a sin just as much as if some other boy
should be along and persuade you to do it? Yes? Well, now, which sin
is the more dangerous to you?"
So important does this seem to me that I always carry pencil and paper
to the perusal of my lesson helps, and write out, as a point pleases
me, the form in which I wish to bring it up in the class, ranging
these questions under the numbers of the verses to which they apply.
The teacher who does not write out his questions, or do the equivalent
of that work, is as sure to be defeated as the general who fights
without a plan of campaign.
Should those questions be read in the class? Not unless your ideal of
teaching is the company drill, instead of the conversation.
It is well, however, to ask the scholars to write out questions for
you on verses assigned, and read these questions before the class. The
teacher's work is grandly accomplished when he has induced the scholar
to ask his own questions, and work out his own answers.
I often find that a general call for questions on some apparently
exhausted topic brings the richest results of the half-hour.
Few verses are completely treated without Lyman Beecher's
"snapper,"--the appeal to experience. The question, "Is it I?" must be
raised, no matter by how direct urgings, in every heart. That question
is truth's barb.
There is a questioning face and attitude, indicative of a real and
personal interest in the thing considered, without which a question
will always fall dead, and deservedly.
Nor, on the contrary, will a live manner avail to foist upon the
attention of a class a dead question. And a question is "dead" to your
scholar which does not touch his own world of interest at some point, no
matter how close connection it may have with your life and experience.
The questions on the lesson leaves make a good aid in study, but do most
pitiably convict a teacher of unfaithfulness if he use them in teaching.
Most genuine of all questions, and most likely to be helpful, are the
doubts, perplexities, and difficulties which attend a thoughtful
teacher's first careful reading of the text itself. Then is the time
when the cream of that lesson should rise.
Leading questions are always better than harangue, and are not to be
despised, on a pinch. See what use Socrates made of them! And, by the
way, modern teachers could learn much as to methods from the dialogues
of that old pagan.
By all means we must learn to link our questions, naturally developing
one from the other. Read a page of miscellaneous proverbs, and you
will carry away from it the same bewildered brain much Sunday-school
sharp-shooting produces. Use the solid phalanx!
Infinite harm is done our teaching by "questioning down." Do you know
how tiresome it is to talk to a man up in a third-story window, you in
the street? Our "level-best" teaching must be on a level.
The novice at questioning, when first he becomes well satisfied with
himself in this line, will probably be making his chief mistake,--will
have hit upon an interrogative phraseology in which his thoughts run
easily, which he uses incessantly. The artful questioner will rack his
brains to the utmost stretch of ingenuity to devise striking and novel
ways of quizzing, to hold the restless young minds.
Of course, no skilled questioner will take the class in order. Of
course, he will name the person who is to answer, at the end, and not at
the beginning, of his question. Of course, he will understand the use
of long and attention-holding questions, interspersed with short, quick,
attention-exciting questions. Of course, he will be ready with a varying
form of the question if he has to repeat it, lest the class fail to
listen the second time. Of course, he will train himself to become ready
with a "catch" question,--a question with a quirk in it, to punish
mildly the inattentive. Of course, he will know when the class needs
unifying by the general question addressed to all, and when the subject
needs unifying by the general question reviewing all. And, of course, he
will have learned that the best teacher of this, as of all arts, is He
whose boyish questions in the temple grew to such mighty answers that no
man thereafter dared question him, save only his true disciples.