I can almost hear some troubled teacher ask, “Where in the Sunday-school hour is there time for this?” It can not be done in a Sunday-school hour except incidentally. But those who are at work with girls in their teens must teach more than a lesson on Sunday. They are teaching girls to live, if they have entered whole-heartedly into the work.
Every girl in her teens is interested in her physical self. The ways in which she strives to satisfy her curiosity and desire for knowledge are often pitiful, often to be deplored.
From my experience I am convinced that anything which tends to center her interest upon the physical is unwise. For this reason I very much doubt the advisability of class instruction, except in general matters of hygiene. What the whole class is interested in they will discuss. It will be the main topic of conversation among “chums” as they separate after class, and the effect I am convinced is bad, simply because it centers thought upon a subject which to the girl in her teens should not be the chief interest. Then, too, the individuals in a class vary so much that the instruction to be given needs special wisdom, tact and comprehensive knowledge of girls which not every teacher possesses.
That instruction should be given, and that questions must be answered, is true. A girl’s mother is the natural and best agency through which knowledge should come to her, and the Sunday-school teacher may very easily enlist the mother’s sympathy, urge her to be true to her daughter’s need, and show her how necessary it is that she faithfully instruct her child in the things she needs to know. If the mother says, as is often the case, that she can’t, that she does not know how, etc., then the teacher may offer to help with suggestions, with books, or, if the mother asks her to do so, may talk with the girl herself. Such a conversation on the part of the teacher should never be forced, but introduced naturally and easily in some opportune moment. Sometimes, if there is real confidence and sympathy between pupil and teacher, the girl herself will open the way.
In a hundred ways, both in teaching and in conversation with the girls, the Sunday-school teacher may show her own respect for the physical side of life, the marvel of it all, and the need on the part of every woman to obey its unchanging laws, from which, if broken, there is no escape. In scores of ways she will frankly and naturally reveal to her girls her sympathy with womanhood everywhere, in every walk of life, and especially her respect for mothers, and her love for helpless childhood.
Girls learn so much more, and the impressions made are far deeper, through this almost unconscious influence of the teacher than through the “lecture” or “lesson.” I shall not soon forget the impression made upon a class of girls of eighteen years of age by the preparation of a complete outfit to be presented to a poor woman whose child was to come into the world in a tiny third-story room amidst deepest poverty. As one of the girls said, “It will be a lucky baby, after all, with eight of us to look after it.” Both teacher and girls felt new bonds of sympathy long before the last tiny garments were finished, and the girls had learned much.
It is not good for girls in their teens, especially in the latter part of the period, to be closely associated with women who are cynical, who have forgotten the tenderness of their own girlhood dreams, or who are out of sympathy with the great fundamentals of life.
The teacher may so easily reveal, too, her respect for the conventionalities of life. In her escape from the narrowing influences of the conventionalities of older countries, the American girl has gone so far into liberty that she does not realize the protection that lies behind simple conventionality. While it is perfectly true that a girl may travel alone from one end of this country to the other with safety, it is not true that it is wise for her to do so. Fathers are beginning to realize it, and daughters though not “in society” are enjoying the assurance that, if obliged for social or business reasons to be out late, their fathers will call for them. It will mean an effort on the part of the father, but it brings a reward, for his daughter, feeling herself guarded and protected, develops into a finer type of woman.
The girl in her teens is interested always in the influence of the passions and emotions upon the physical nature, and knowledge given in a simple direct way is good for her.
“Why do some people get very pale and others very red, when they are angry?” asked a fourteen-year-old girl one day.