Knowing Scholars as they Are. 37 I. YOU MUST KNOW WHOM YOU ARE TO TEACH. Why You should Know Your Scholars; Absurd Teaching; Well-informed PART I. The Teacher's Teaching Work. CHAPTER 2. Essentials of the Teaching Process. To begin with, as a teacher, you must know whom you are to teach; not merely know your scholars by sight, know them by name, know them so that you can greet them as acquaintances, but know them in their individual capacities, attainments, and needs. On the face of it, this knowledge of your scholars is essential as preliminary to any intelligent teaching on your part. It may be, they are blind. That fact does not forbid your teaching them; but it does forbid your reliance on ordinary Your necesmaps, pictures, and the blackboard, as teaching ing. agencies. Possibly your scholars are deaf and dumb. If that be the case, the agencies which you would reject for the blind come up into added prominence as helps to teaching. Even though you are sure that your scholars can both see and hear, you need to know also that they are capable of under sity of know. PART I. CHAPTER 2. A sheer absurdity. standing your language, and that they are reasonably familiar with the words you employ; otherwise their eyes and ears might as well be closed, for all the good they get from your utterances. It is a sheer absurdity for you to attempt to teach another, unless you and your scholar are acquainted with a common language. It is a literal "absurdity "—more literally than, perhaps, you have had occasion to consider. What is an "absurdity"? The root idea of that word is ab and surdus-from a deaf man; such responses as would come from a man who could not hear your remarks, but who wanted it to appear that he did. All of us have had, or have heard, "absurd" conversations of this sort. You meet a man on a country road, and, saying, "Good day" to him, you ask, "How far is it to Wilton, please?" He nods back a good-day, with the "absurd" response-for he is a deaf man“Well, no; I haven't got any Stilton cheese, but I've been making some good Young Americas." That man understood your question quite as well as many a scholar in the Sunday-school understands his teacher's ordinary language; and if there were more outspoken answering in our Sunday-school classes, there would be more of these absurdities apparent to all. Socrates said that a knowledge of our own ignorance is the first step toward true knowledge; and it was Coleridge, I think, who supplemented this truth Recoiling from Goodness. with the suggestion that, "we cannot make another comprehend our knowledge, until we first comprehend his ignorance." So long as we suppose a scholar to know what he does not know, we shall refrain from causing him to know that, and in consequence we shall be unable to cause him to know anything beyond that-anything to an understanding of which that is a prerequisite. Woful mistakes are constantly making in the Sunday-school, because of a teacher's failure to know his scholar just at this point-to know his scholar's ignorance. A good illustration of the danger of a lack just here, is that given by Mrs. Horace Mann, in her story of a district school where, on the occasion of her visit, those boys who wanted "to be good" were asked to rise in their places; and all but one stood up. When that solitary little fellow was urged by his teacher to rise with the others, he began to cry, with a whimpering "No"-"no"-between his childish sobs. At this, Mrs. Mann stepped down alongside of him, and putting her arm over his shoulder tenderly, she asked, "What do you think it means to be good, my boy?" "Ter-be-whipped!" was the sobbing answer. The poor boy had been told when he was flogged, that it was to make him good; and his untutored mind recoiled from an added supply of that kind of "goodness." That boy understood his teacher quite as well as many a scholar has understood your wisest words spoken for his teaching. 39 PART I. CHAPTER 2. A knowledge as a means of of ignorance more knowl edge. A boy's reluctance to be good. PART I. Teaching CHAPTER 2. There is no mistake about this. The experience of the best teachers abundantly confirms this truth. An intelligent Bible class teacher in a New England church had before him ten or twelve adults, all of whom were church-members, and one of whom had long been a church-officer. In considering the opening verses of the Book of Acts, the teacher asked what was meant by the "passion" of Jesus there mentioned. Not getting an answer at once, he repeated the question in a leading form, "Why, what events in the story of Jesus are referred to, when he says here that he showed himself alive after his passion'?"—but that also failed to bring an answer. Thinking that the lack must be in his mode of questioning, or in the hesitation of his scholars to speak out, he set himself to get an answer What a Bible to that question. After following the matter until he was satisfied, he found that not a scholar in his class had any proper understanding of the term "passion" as applied to the closing sufferings in the human life of Jesus. That discovery changed utterly the methods of that teacher in his teaching work. He now for the first time comprehended the measure of his scholars' ignorance; and thus, for the first time, he was ready to begin their teaching. And his class was, in general intelligence, far ahead of the average class in the Sunday-schools of America. Not all scholars would stumble at the same term, but most of them would be ignorant of the mean class did not know. Unknown Tongues. 66 ing of some word in quite as familiar use as passion." 41 PART I. CHAPTER 2. An observant and faithful teacher in a Philadelphia Sunday-school, told me of his being surprised by the question, from a bright scholar who was about twenty-five years old, "Who was 'the despised Galilean'?" On one occasion I found myself, as a visitor for the day, teaching a class of New York City lads, from fourteen to seventeen years old, bright lads, out of the better class of Christian homes in that city. In the lesson for the day, the differences between the teachings of Moses and the teachings of Christ the Law and the Gospel-were touched upon. I questioned those lads familiarly as to their More understanding of the terms "Law" and "Gospel," ignorance. and, to my surprise, I found that not one of them had any other idea, in either case, beyond a statutory civil enactment on the one hand, and certain books of the New Testament on the other. Is it strange that there are "absurd answers, or no answers at all, to questions put by Sunday-school teachers, to scholars who have no better understanding than in these cases, of the words employed in their questioning? cultured words. There are none of us but are using words con- Using strange tinually, in ordinary conversation, which are not understood by those whom we address by means of those words. Thus, at another time, I was pointing out to one of my little daughters the beauty of the |