A teacher of English in the old days, when literature was used chiefly as a clothes-line on which to air grammatical linen, was once guilty of giving out a lesson in Washington Irving—so many constructions, figures, analyses, so many pages, and no more. The end came in the middle of the ride of the headless horseman. But by the time the next class studied Irving the teacher had met with a change. The limit of the first lesson was set according to the structure of the story. The pupils were told to read the story.
"Only read it!" said they. "Aren't we to do anything with it?"
"No," said the teacher, "you are to read it for fun."
Should one be in danger of being misunderstood in saying that we do not have enough of reading the Bible for fun, for the pure enjoyment of its stories and of its matchless pictures? The rest will come in due course. It will come just so surely as the story is realized.
But important as reading is, telling is incomparably better. The eye of the teacher is then fixed on the class, not on the book; the tone is conversational, the hand is free to gesture and to draw. One can grasp the whole of the story and the whole of the situation. One can bring out dramatic power. For there are few stories that do not have some dramatic quality, both in the making and in the telling. The following points kept in mind will aid the teacher:
1. The story must have a beginning, concrete, interest-compelling, curiosity-piquing. "All things have two handles; beware of the wrong one."
2. It must have a climax, properly led up to, easily led down from; and that never missed.
3. Many good stories have rhythm, recurrence, repetition of the leit motiv. "The Three Bears" is a favorite for this reason, among others. The commands of the Lord to Moses were regularly repeated thrice in the Bible story; in the book of Daniel the sonorous catalogue of flute, harp, sackbut, and the rest, comes in none too often for the purposes of the story-teller.
4. All good stories have unity; parts well subordinated; the main lesson unmistakably clear; the point, whether tactfully hidden or brought out by skilful questions, never missed.
This use of stories by exactly reproducing them is naturally the teacher's first method. There follow naturally the adaptation of stories and the making of original stories. The latter way must be dismissed with a single word of caution. Beware of a certain fatal facility in reeling off "made-up" stories. Have you not heard such teachers and such stories? The latter at least are not true, or healthy, or wholesome. They are about unreal people who do unnatural things. They are a poor, ragged device for covering the nakedness of barefaced moralizing.