Chapter XV
Serial Teaching
There are short-story writers who are able to hold our attention charmingly for an episode, and there are other minds which are able to lead us entranced through the varied scenes of a long serial. So also there is short-story Sunday-school teaching and serial Sunday-school teaching. Short-story teaching treats each lesson as a separate unit; serial teaching considers each lesson a part only of a great, united whole.
Short-story teaching is far easier than serial teaching. It is concerned with but one set of circumstances, persons, and principles. For the serial teacher, on the contrary, every lesson must include a review and a prospectus. He must learn to see things in their relations. He must have a good memory, and a better imagination, to make his memory buoyant. This is not easy; and therefore it is that short-story teaching is much commoner than serial teaching.
And yet serial teaching is the right kind of teaching, for the following reasons. Just as a fine serial story adds to the enthusiasm for good numbers of a periodical, and tides over poor numbers, so, if you can get up a serial interest in your teaching, it will increase the interest of the good days, and will tide over with full seats and bright eyes the rainy, or cold, or hot, or sleepy days.
Besides, Christianity is a whole, and each of its many parts interdependent. We must not teach it, therefore, as if it were a patchwork, capable of being taken apart and put together as men will. We do wrong to the great system we teach, if our lessons do not leave the impression of a vast, coherent fabric,—too vast for one lesson to disclose, too coherent for one lesson to stand out apart.
Besides, however our lessons may change, our scholars are still the same; and this continuity of listeners should impart a serial interest to the teaching. Cause the scholars to feel that each lesson is to make definite contribution to their growth in knowledge and character. It won't hurt them if they are as mechanical about it as Peter, and enumerate, lesson after lesson, as in the apostle's famous addition-table, the virtues those lessons may add to their lives.
For these three reasons, then, our teaching should contain some strong element of serial interest. Many teachers err in using only one sort of connecting link, year in, year out, and are as likely to fail as the periodical which always prints serial stories of the same kind of plot, scenes, and characters. I will mention several serial elements which a wise teacher will use in turn, holding to one long enough for profit, but not too long for interest.
In the first place, it is often well to make the serial biographical. Your serial has then a hero. Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Daniel, John, Peter, Paul, Mary,—what glorious groups of chapters these names bind together! If we are zealous, patient, and imaginative, we can easily, with this magnificent material, construct for our classes serials whose absorbing interest will vie with any in their pet weekly story-paper. We can lead them to eager study of a man's development in character and in fortune.
At other times it is better to trust for the serial interest to history,—to study the evolution of a nation as before of a man. The wondrous tale of the rise of the Hebrews from Abraham, their metamorphosis under Moses, their consolidation under judges, their expansion under kings, their division, their downfall, their restoration, their subjugation, their new birth in Him who was before Abraham,—this story may be made to have a deep and constant serial interest.