But many a teacher, conscious of all that I have been saying, does not know how to pull the trigger. It is not so simple in the Sunday-school as in the school of the battalion. The artful teacher will find many ways of trigger-pulling, suited to the diverse and changing needs of his class and of his topic. Sometimes he will put in the scholars' hands paper and pencil, and set them to writing or drawing. Sometimes he will send them in turn to his blackboard. Sometimes he will elicit the entire story from one, sometimes from ten. Sometimes he will introduce pictures for them to talk about, or maps for them to travel over, or objects for them to group their words and thoughts around. Always, however, he will remember that his best trigger is the little trigger-shaped interrogation-point. He will ask questions himself with the effectiveness born of careful preparation. Better than that, he will get his scholars to ask questions. In all these ways, and as many more as there are Sundays in the year, the wise teacher will pull the trigger.
Let no one pass from big-gun teaching to trigger-teaching with the idea that the latter will prove the easier. It is far more difficult to make the cartridge than to pick up and carry the ball which the cartridge would propel; but, for effective and profitable teaching, better ten minutes' work done by the class than an hour's work done by you in the presence of the class, even though to do the latter is far easier than to elicit the former.
If—as those who have been doing it all themselves will doubtless find it—this trigger-teaching comes especially hard at first, let them begin with getting their scholars to do something at first hand, though only a little, and let them work their way slowly to the pedagogical perfection of getting their scholars to do everything.
And does any one fear that this will destroy the personality and personal influence of the teacher? On the contrary, the trigger-teacher has to put ten times more of himself into every lesson than the big-gun teacher. The scholars get more of his personality, at the same time that they are gloriously, though unconsciously, developing their own.
Chapter XIV
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.