Literature in the Elementary School

by Porter Lander MacClintock

CHAPTER XIV THE PRESENTATION OF THE LITERATURE

In this day of reaction, not to say revulsion, against "methods" in teaching, it is with much misgiving that one brings one's self to speak of the practical details of teaching a subject, lest he be suspected of having a method or even a system, or lest those suggestions which he tries to give out as genetic and stimulating merely, be taken as a formalized plan. However, each body of material that has any degree of separateness has a handle by which it ought to be taken; disregarding the poor figure—paths by which one most easily comes to the center of it; certain points of view from which it looks most attractive and manageable. Some such handles, or paths, or points of view it will be the business of this chapter to indicate; and the suggestions to be offered are, it is to be hoped, so simple and so reasonable as to have occurred to many observing and growing teachers.

The somewhat small body of literature to be used in the classes should practically throughout the elementary period be read to the children in class, not read by them. The relation of the literature to reading-lessons will be discussed elsewhere. It may well be that in the last years of the period many of the members of the class will have reached the stage of reading needful for the interpretative and apprehensive reading of literature; but the majority of the class will not. They will master the difficulties of mechanical reading; they may achieve the plane of intelligent reading. But here the large majority of them linger. Vast numbers of people never push on to the next plane—that of appreciative reading. And it is small wonder; for the combination of mechanical, intellectual, and emotional processes that it involves constitutes it well-nigh the most difficult of achievements. Hosts of estimable and intelligent persons, respectable citizens, live out long years of greater or less usefulness, and never have a glimpse of this kind of reading. It is by no means true that even every good and useful citizen who teaches literature, can do this kind of reading; many times he cannot. But he can read better than the children. They, involved in the difficulties of their inexpert reading, cannot see the woods for the trees; they are obliged to go so slowly, and to absorb so much energy in what one may call the manual work of reading, that they miss the essentially literary things—the movement, the picture, the music.

Of course, when we say "read," we use the word in the broad sense of rendering the matter viva voce, whether it be actual reading from the text or reciting. While the person who is reading a story to children must be most concerned with spirit and meaning, he must not, if he suppose himself to be teaching literature, neglect the matter of style. If the story is a translated one, he must make or choose some beautiful translation. Everything that he reads to them he must work over beforehand, so that he can give it with effective certainty. He more than defeats his purpose who transmits to his children no matter how good a story in slip-shod sentences, commonplace phrasing, go-easy enunciation; or, worse than that, in the ostentatiously childlike language and manner that constitute official kindergartenese, or in the hilariously cheerful manner which marks traditional Sunday-schoolese; or, worst of all, in that tone of cheap irony that so many people see fit to adopt for all their communications with children. It is the tone of the average adult whenever he enters into conversation with any acquaintance under twelve—an underbred or quite uncalled-for tone of badinage, of quizzing, of insincerity. It is an unpardonable misunderstanding of the dignity and seriousness of children to offer them babble when they ask only simplicity, or to treat with flippancy what to them are the serious things of art. It should be quite possible to be serious without being solemn, and cheerful without being hilarious. This matter of a good style and form is so important that a teacher should achieve it at any cost of trouble and study. I like to use every opportunity to say that he should so thoroughly know his story or poem, be it the simplest old fairy-tale, or the veriest nursery-jingle, that he loves and respects it as art; and should so know and respect his audience and his purpose that a good and suitable literary form flows from him inevitably; or, if he is reading an actual text, that every sentence is both appreciative and interpretative. But, if he cannot achieve this, let him in the first instance write out a good form of his story, or find one and memorize it. There is no denying that in the hands of a cold and mechanical person this production will display some priggishness and false propriety. But the failure as literary training would be less disastrous in this case than if the same person gave a haphazard and commonplace impromptu version.

There is such a thing as literary reading as distinguished from the reading of matter technical in content and merely intellectual in appeal. Teachers, accustomed as they are to read for facts and intent upon the logical emphasis, are peculiarly prone to read literature poorly—missing the music and the emotion, rendering it all in the hard intellectual manner that is acceptable only as the vehicle of the colorless matter of a technical treatise. There is also such a thing as the telling of a literary story, as distinguished from the telling of any other story. A narrative of events in history, an account of some occurrence in nature or ordinary affairs, may be expected to proceed from point to point without arrangement or succession other than the order of incidents as they occur. The interest is the interest of fact; the thread is that of cause and effect, or any other plain sequence.

But in the literary story the incidents are sifted and arranged. Certain details are prophecies—foreshadowings of things to come; certain incidents are vital turning-points in the action; certain phrases are the key and counter-sign of the whole story; some paragraphs are plain narration; some are calm description; some are poetic interpretation; some roar with action; some glow with emotion; some sparkle with fun; some lie in shadow, others stand forth in the brilliant light; there are movements in the story, marked by a change of scene, a change of situation, a pause in the action—parts which would be marked in the drama as scenes or acts; there is the gradual approach to the center, the pivotal occurrence, the readjustment of affairs to ordinary life. Ideally, all these things will be indicated in the presentation that an accomplished story-teller makes of a literary story. This seems to set the standard very high—too high for the discouraged attempt of the overworked grade teacher. If so, she may reflect that it is triumphantly true that such is the affinity between the child and the story that he will get much delight and nourishment out of any telling of it. Who has not hesitated between a smile and a tear at the spectacle of a child or a class hanging enthralled and hungry upon a story rendered by a mother or a teacher whose every pronunciation was a jar, whose every cadence a dislocation, and whose every emphasis a misinterpretation?

And remember, the art of story-telling is not the art of the theater, not the art of the actress, but the art of the mother, the nurse; the art of the "spinsters and the knitters in the sun;" the art of the wandering minstrel, of the journeyman tailor, of the exiled younger brother; art designed to reach, not an audience beyond the footlights, but one gathered on the sunny bench of the market-place, on the hearth-stone, under the nursery lamp, in the shady garden, and in their own teacher's schoolroom.

As a practical matter, the teacher, in presenting a story or a narrative poem, should take advantage of the natural pauses, the end of one incident or movement and the beginning of the next, in dividing his material for the actual lessons, so that in a long story or in a drama, the end of the lesson coincides with the close of a series of incidents or the close of one of the larger movements. Nothing spoils a bit of literature more effectually than taking it in accidental or fragmentary bits. At any cost of time and pains, let there be a sense of completeness in each lesson, a feeling of repose, if only temporary, at the end of each instalment. And whether he closes his lesson or not, the teacher should at the close of every such movement in a class of older children pause to discuss, to review, or to summarize. When he makes this recognition of the close of a series of incidents, or of a movement, he accomplishes two things: he secures a certain amount of completeness, and he helps on in the children the desirable sense of organization, of composition, in their story or play.

The nature of the bit of literature chosen must guide the teacher in his first presentation of it. When it is a thing in which the movement is rapid, or the interest in the action or the plot intense, it will doubtless be best to go rapidly through the whole, not pausing for any details. Then go over it slowly again, pausing for appreciation and comment. It seems well to repeat here that if the story is long and the plot involves any intensity of suspense, it may be well to let the children know the issue early in the story; the wisdom of this step will depend largely upon the average nerves of the class. There may well be several readings of a thing worth reading once. Every teacher knows how well content the younger children, especially, are to go over a thing many times. The interest of the class of older children may be kept up through the many readings of a story or poem, by shifting each time the ground of comment or discussion, opening up a new question or revealing a new point of interest at each reading. In other pieces, the slower moving stories and lyrics, the children are willing to linger over the details at the first reading.