Interest in a clock.
A boy who was pronounced incorrigible, and who had been transferred from school to school because he could not get along with his teachers, at last met a teacher who discovered that he could take apart and put together watches and clocks. She allowed him to fix her clock, and thus won his heart. She asked him to explain to the school the mechanism of instruments for keeping time. His interest in clocks she connected with the numbers twelve and sixty, then with the time-table, with denominate numbers, and finally with the whole subject of arithmetic. Interest in the exercises of the school converted the incorrigible boy into an obedient and studious pupil.[54]
There is no more important element of emotion for teachers to cultivate than that which enters into the feeling of interest. Interest sustains the power of thought, diminishes the need of effort in the direction of voluntary attention, and lies at the basis of all successful teaching, book-making, and public speaking. The teacher, the writer, the speaker who wearies us has lost his power over us. The lesson, the book, the sermon that interests us has found an entrance to our minds; the greater the interest the more potent and profound the influence upon the inner life.
Interest conditions ability to think.
The moment a teacher begins to lose interest in a subject, that moment he begins to lose his ability to teach that subject. From this point of view the recent graduate has a manifest advantage over the old pedagogue whose interest in the subjects of instruction has been dulled by frequent repetition. The latter can keep himself from reaching the dead-line by keeping up his studies in the allied departments of knowledge, and by watching the growth of mind and heart in his pupils,—a growth that always reveals something new and interesting by reason of the boundless possibilities that slumber in every human being. The interest in the growing mind is spontaneously transferred to the branches of knowledge which stimulate that growth, and, in ways that no one can explain, the interest which the teacher feels is communicated to the pupils whose minds are prepared to grasp his instruction.
Fiction.
By far the larger proportion of books taken from our free libraries are books of fiction,—books which appeal to our emotional life. It shows that even those who are habitual readers can be best reached through the emotions. Of course, the act of reading proves that their feelings are reached through the intellect; yet it cannot be denied that emotion is the element of their inner life which sustains the interest in the novel. Appeals to the intellect which do not touch the heart fail to reach the deepest depths of our being, and hence fail to stimulate in others the productive powers of the soul. Only thoughts which come from the heart can reach the heart. This is true of the child and the adult, of the reader and the listener, of the scientist and the man of affairs, of the author and the editor, of the orator and the philosopher, of the teacher, and, in short, of all whose duty it is to stimulate the thinking and to influence the conduct of their fellow-men.