Kitabı oku: «Sunday-School Success», sayfa 3

Chapter VIII
Getting Attention

I was once sergeant of a college military company that was being trained by an officer of the regular army from the nearest barracks. In one evolution it was made my duty to march at the head of a long column, shouting at the top of my voice: "Hep—hep—hep—hep!" This was to give the time; we had no drum. I conscientiously obeyed orders and strutted off, shouting the required "Hep—hep—hep—hep!" But alas! at a critical turn, thinking more of my glory than of my duty, I marched to the right, while the column, more heedful, turned off to the left. So there I was, a long, lank figure, strutting off by myself over the field, shouting "Hep—hep—hep!" How many times since, when standing before inattentive classes, have I repeated that mortifying performance, less obviously, but none the less really!

How often teachers are bent on planning what they are to say and how they are to say it, but omit to consider how they may induce people to attend to it; just as if (to change the figure) a locomotive engineer should polish and oil his engine and turn on full steam, but forget the little coupling-pin that hitches the engine to the train! It is a very little thing, this coupling-pin of attention, and often the teacher goes puffing a long way before he perceives that it is left out; and it is a great humiliation, as well as a great loss of time and steam, to go back and hitch on.

The first thing to be considered, if we would win attention, is the room. Poor janitors spoil more Sunday-schools than poor teachers. You remember how the Peterkins tried to take their drive, shaking the reins, clucking at the stationary horse, whipping and coaxing him by turns, and all in vain until the lady from Philadelphia unhitched the obstinate beast. We make Peterkins of ourselves every time we try to take an intellectual journey with our pupils when they are tied down by hot air, poor ventilation, uncomfortable seats, and surrounding noise and bustle. All our pedagogical ingenuity will fight in vain against the fiendish ingenuity of a bad janitor.

Having made it possible for the children to pay any attention at all, the next thing is to get it. Attention has something to do with tension. Now it takes two to stretch a cord, and there are two parties to every act of attention. How about the second party in this case—the children?

Imprimis, when you appear before the children, leap at once into your theme. Older folks rather like to doze along through the preliminaries of a speech, economically saving their enthusiasm for the end, if not for next time; but the attention of children is lost or won for good by the opening sentences. Our sharp boys and girls discover very quickly whether a veteran or a raw recruit is calling "Attention!"

There are some beginnings which are sure to offend them. There is the bagpipe beginning—the long, droning prelude, which advertises a teacher set out on a mud-turtle to catch these lively colts. There is the jack-in-the-box prelude: "Eh! Now, children! What's lesson 'bout? Quick!" There is the crape-dirge beginning, which solemnly hopes the children have studied their lesson and will recite better than they did last Sunday. There is the plead-guilty beginning: "You'll have to teach me to-day, children. I've been unable to look at the lesson."

But it is by no means easy to give affirmative rules. The best of beginnings, if stereotyped, becomes inefficient. No general can plan a campaign in advance. And yet a general must understand the art of war, and a teacher must study his tactics.

In the first place, attention is won partly by position and attitude. Happy the teacher whose class is a semicircle, himself at the center! And luckless the teacher whose class, fixed on straight, fastened pews, sees past him the distracting background of a crowded, bustling school! He struggles against strong odds.

But whatever may be the position of the class, any one can see that his own attitude shall command attention. Let him be straight, alert, confident, quiet—not flabby, nervous, and diffident. Let his face and voice and bearing expect attention, and he will get it.

The opening sentences must be businesslike. There must be no indecision, no "puttering." The teacher must leap at once to that hand-to-hand combat with the theme which tells his scholars that there's purpose in it. The opening sentences may sometimes best catch the class by directly addressing one person in it, the most restless, indifferent one, and nailing him.

A paradox is good to begin with, some statement of the lesson theme so startling as to spur to discussion, possibly to opposition. Then the next Sunday, perhaps a quiet picture of the historical setting of the story, or a description of the landscape surrounding the event, or a compact review of the last lesson. Then the next day you might begin with a bit of personal experience bearing on the matter in hand. Nothing wins attention better than the first person singular. Or your introduction might be a whiff of fun, for which the youngsters are so eager that the most witless piece of jollity, if it spring from a merry heart, is certain to reach theirs.

You are sure of their attention if you can get them to do something for you—open their Bibles, repeat something in concert, find a verse, or look at something. For this purpose maps, diagrams, pictures, all material objects connected with the lesson, are invaluable. Scholars yield their wills to yours through their hands or their eyes more readily than through their ears.

And none of this must be done with manifest purpose. Surely in vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird. Woe to the teacher who shouts the word "Attention!" He will get nothing but the echo of the word from stony cliffs of indifference.

And finally, woe to the teacher who relies at bottom on any skill of his own to draw young hearts to his teaching; whose main dependence is anything but the attention-winning power of that incarnate Sympathy and Love who promised to draw all men—and children—to himself.

Chapter IX
Keeping Attention

We are likely to think that the attention of children is hard to get; but the very opposite is true. The minds of children, like their tongues, are hung in the middle. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn them in any direction. No teacher need spend much force on his introduction. Merely appear and begin to talk—that is enough. A fresh voice and presence and a new theme will draw all eyes and all hearts. If grown people are your audience, the situation is somewhat reversed. They are the heavy weights—hard to move, but just as hard to stop. An attention-forcing prelude will hold them attentive to a good half-hour of platitudes.

The teacher of children, however, flattered by the eager listening given at the start, is likely to relax his efforts and deem the crown of the children's interest already attained. But alas! soon here a little tot wriggles, and there another whispers, and yonder a third giggles, and now a fourth turns around to see what's up, and the teacher might as well be talking to a school of young fishes.

Demosthenes once said that if whatever a man got he took care to keep, he was grateful to the gods; but if he spent it, he spent with it all his gratitude. How many teachers are so prodigal of the attention given at the beginning that toward the close, dismayed at the listlessness, they forget ungratefully their initial capital of bright eyes and eager ears! There are many ways of squandering this attention capital. We may waste it on those long exhortations so very valuable (when omitted), on side issues, on quibbles. We may choke it with dullness, drive it off with scolding.

The only way always to keep attention is always to be expecting to lose it. Be prompt to note signs of its vanishing in drooping eyelids, wandering gaze, jerking in the seat, uncertain answers. The teacher whose ingenuity can always recall stray-away minds need fear few other recitation problems. How to do it?

The best provocative of attention is variety. The skilled teacher brings as many suits of manner to the class as the bulkiest clown wears costumes to the circus. Before one suit becomes wearisome he strips it off, and presto! a fresh teacher before the wide-eyed children. If he has been sitting, he rises; if erect, he leans eagerly forward. His utterance becomes rapid from slow, impetuous from drawling. He darts from generalizations into personalities. If motionless before, he begins to gesticulate. This is acting? No. It is only doing what the facile children themselves do on their kaleidoscopic playground, where no one goes to sleep.

Again, a teacher must learn to emphasize his important points, not by enlarging on them, but by reverting to them. Slight impression on a wall by holding a battering-ram against it! Nor can you impress a child's mind by holding a fact up against it. It is intervals which make blows possible.

So the child will attend to two things or three better than to one. Concentrate on one matter, burning-glass fashion, but only while the sun of interest is shining. With the first mist of indifference the wise teacher will drop the burning-glass. More teachers fail from having too few points to make than from having too many.

But to retain attention, you need less to multiply points than points of view. A teacher can usually fix the attention of his class upon one subject while using in succession six different methods of treatment. Passing swiftly from questioning to formulating principles and illustrating them, from Bible quotations to personal experiences and exhortations, he will hold his audience delighted, though a single method would have wearied it. Note how a skilled cook presents the Thanksgiving turkey on different days. It is a lordly brown biped, a plateful of nice slices, a salad, a pot-pie, hash. Teachers will be able to hold the youngsters' attention as well as cooks, if they learn thus to put things in different lights.

Furthermore, let it be remembered that no one was ever dignified with a child, and won its attention. And some teachers are too staid to be useful. Startle into inattention by a smart slap of the hands together, sharp extension of the finger, abrupt turns upon the floor. Preachers use such artifices when pews grow somnolent, and why not teachers? Never forget that the slightest inanimate object wins attention better than the greatest animation of the teacher. A pencil-tablet will rivet all eyes. A finger laid upon a map is cynosure for the most fidgety scholars. If you have a picture which can be brought into connection with the lesson, it is a pedagogical sin to omit it. A chart is as necessary to the Sabbath-school teacher as to the sailor, albeit the teacher's is best home-made. I used to hesitate to take time to use such helps; but I found that the poorest picture did better work than my most vivid word-paintings, and that my clearest statement was inefficient beside the clumsiest diagram.

The beginner in this fine art of attention-holding is likely to derive the word "attention" thus: from teneo, "I hold," ad, "on to"; attention, "I hold on to" him. He tries to hold attention, therefore, by main strength. He grapples with his audience as a bulldog would. His nerves are tense. His voice is imperative. His eye glares. He is rapid, impetuous, strategic. This is power, he thinks, and this is skill; but his audience astonishes him by going to sleep. Abashed, he tries milder means of holding on to them. He begins to buttonhole his audience. He uses soft and flattering tones. He coaxes. He wheedles. He jokes. He chucks them under the chin. And then his audience gets up and goes out.

The real meaning of the word "attention" contains an invaluable hint for all who are trying to win others by speaking or teaching. It is teneo, "I hold, I stretch," ad, "toward"; and it is not by any means applied to the speaker, but to the listener. To get your audience, whether of little folk or big folk, to stretch out toward the same goal of truth that you are seeking is the true art of winning attention.

This understanding of the matter implies that the teacher also is really in pursuit of truth himself. The failure of much teaching is because it cries "Go on" instead of "Come on." The speaker that you follow with most difficulty is the speaker who has the air of "knowing it all," while the speaker who succeeds best in holding your attention gives you the impression of a chase.

There's the game before you—that elusive truth slipping away through the thicket yonder. The huntsman's eye flashes. He whistles up the dogs. We all leap to the saddles. Off we go, over upland and vale, swamp and rock, fence and ditch, our leader far in the van, pointing here, waving there, and hallooing the huntsman on. And when the game is tracked down, and our leader stands above it, dripping knife in hand, our veins tingle with his, and we shout with delight at our triumph.

This is the first principle in the art of winning attention. The speaker must give the impression of a truth-seeker, if he would win others to seek truth with him. What Edward Everett Hale once said of a sermon applies to this. Every Sunday-school lesson should start out to prove something. It should have some goal. It should intend something. Intention must precede attention.

But though there must be this element of pleasing uncertainty and suspense, we all have difficulty in attending to a speaker who does not appear to have himself well in hand or to be quite sure what he is about. Have you not caught yourselves, teachers, talking as if in your sleep? Have you not sometimes waked up at the end of a sentence, a question, or a harangue, and wondered what you had been talking about? Did you suppose that any one else knew? Did you expect to hold on to them when you had no grasp of the subject? Can listeners pay attention to any one who does not pay attention to himself?

Teachers make the mistake of dividing attention between the class, to watch that they hear; and themselves, to see how they are getting along; and the little attention left goes to the theme. Not unnaturally, the attention of the class is divided in the same way—much to themselves, less to the teacher, and least of all to what is being taught. Of course it is a teacher's business to hold his scholars' attention, but he will never do it by worrying and wondering whether he is succeeding.

Nay, I even go so far as to say, if one of your pupils pays no attention, then pay no attention to him, provided the mischief is not spreading. A teacher should not fritter away his attention on inattentive pupils. If he cannot win their attention by his own interest in his theme, he cannot win it at all. Not that I would imply for a moment, however, that the teacher is to rest satisfied while a single one of his pupils remains inattentive. If your chicks are average chicks they are gregarious, and one stray-away is enough to carry the whole flock with him into foreign parts. While you have a single inattentive scholar you should conduct your lesson with a view to holding him. You will hold the rest then, as a matter of course. I am only speaking of the best way to win attention. It must be won, or you are beaten to some extent; and the attention of all will be won in the end if you are deeply enough in earnest yourself, if you do not allow your attention to be side-tracked by the inattention of a few. If you wish to win and hold the attention of others, win and hold your own.

Chapter X
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.