Galvanic Teaching
In his exceedingly suggestive book entitled "Before an Audience" Mr.
Shepard insists strenuously on what he calls "physical earnestness" in
a speaker. It is not meant by this that we are to go before our
scholars with our nerves a-quiver, with headaches coming on, with our
brains throbbing and our muscles drawn tight. A speaker must be, as
Mr. Shepard insists, an animal galvanic battery on two legs. He must
be at something corresponding to electric tension. He must be in
earnest with his body, not lazy with it. No teacher who is not
spirited will succeed with children, or with any one, long.
Nothing will more quickly win and permanently hold a child's attention
than earnestness. Children's capacity for serious thinking is greatly
undervalued. There is more philosophy in them than you dream of. They
are very much in earnest themselves, and they rejoice to see other
people very much in earnest.
I do not mean by this that one should always be serious with them.
Nothing will gain their attention more than a joke; but joking with
children is as dangerous as feeding them candy. They have no more
taste henceforth for anything else, and to keep their attention you
must continue to feed them candy and deal out jokes. The most
successful teachers of children, judging not by the interest of the
children so much as by permanent spiritual results, are those that are
always deeply in earnest; and yet their earnestness is shot through
and through with the sunshine.
The intensity I am advocating must not be the intensity of an auger,
that bores. Oh, if teachers only knew enough not to teach too much! If
one good idea is got into the heads of the children as the result of
the lesson half-hour, then you have scored a victory. If you try to
get in eight good ideas, you will not score one-eighth of a victory.
Some teachers that I know want to get the whole body of theology and
the entire system of ethics into each lesson. They skip with haste
from truth to mighty truth, crowding into a lesson twenty weighty
points, each one of which would be amply sufficient for the half-hour.
The result is an impossibility of attention, for not enough is given
about any one thing to fix it and hold it down.
Our Sunday-school teaching reminds me sometimes of a daily paper--all
cut up into paragraphic articles; and if there is any topic of
universal knowledge omitted, it will appear in the evening edition. A
confirmed newspaper reader has become incapable of following an
extended discussion, or of reading a book. I have stood before
Sunday-school classes to which their teacher was in the habit of
propounding a series of disconnected questions from a book or paper,
and I have found it quite impossible to hold the attention of such
classes for any length of time on one matter. They were anxious for
another paragraph, for fresh head-lines, for a change of subject.
Most Sunday-school lessons are fruitful of multitudinous suggestions.
Let us not teach so much that we teach nothing, or, worse than
nothing, instruct in mental dissipation instead of mental
concentration. We prepare for teaching with the lesson hour in view;
we should rather have in view the hour following the lesson hour. What
impression do we intend the lesson to make? How are we going to make
the lesson stand out in relief?
I must now set off against the law of intensity the complementary law
of motion. A mesmeric patient is sent into the hypnotic trance by
continued staring at the same stationary object. This looks like
perfect attention, but it results in sleep. There is a verbal
hypnotism that is very common when teachers are trying to impress an
idea by holding it up stolidly and persistently before the eyes of
their scholars. That is not what I mean by intensity, and it is one of
the commonest ways of destroying attention.
If you are anxious to impress a truth and yet hold attention, you must
do it by presenting now this side of the truth and now that, now with
parable and now with allegory, now with appeal and now with testimony,
experience, quotation, objects. Arrived at the end, do not press the
point against the scholars and stick it into them, but if they do not
see it, go back and pass over the matter in a different way.
Moving bodies draw and hold the eye. Every one must look at a shooting
star, a jumping horse, a running man, a flying bird, a rising kite. To
keep attention, our lessons must have what the critics of novels call
"movement." There is to be no still life in our pictures. Everything
must be stirring, dramatic.
An accomplished teacher must have the power of painting word-pictures.
It is not a difficult art. Hard study and zealous "putting yourself in
his place" will accomplish it. Some way or other we must get the persons
of the lesson clearly before our scholars' eyes, the scenes as if the
scholars were surrounded by them, if we would maintain their attention.
And even if the lesson is impersonal, we must dramatize it, we must
invent situations and persons to illustrate the abstract thought, or we
must draw illustrations from real history. These must all be real to us,
or they will never be real to our scholars. Pictures always hold the
attention of children. Let us remember this when we talk to them.
Children are fond of motion. Let our teaching move briskly, then.