S. H. Clark

“ The most important fact to be borne in mind in endeavoring to develop the pupil’s sympathy with what he describes is this: imitation of sounds, and of gestures, and of movement, is a very low order of art. We can not imitate thunder, but we can show in our voices the awe that it inspires. When we unconsciously hurry our reading under the impulse the imagination receives from contemplating, let us say, the rapid movement of a cavalry charge, we do so not in imitation of, but in sympathy with, the picture. ”

“ The sound is far more sublime than that of Niagara, because of the preceding stillness in those Alpine solitudes. In the midst of such silence and solemnity, from out the bosom of those glorious, glittering forms of nature, comes that rushing, crashing thunder-burst of sound! If it were not that your soul, through the [23] eye, is as filled and fixed with the sublimity of the vision as, through the sense of hearing, with that of the audible report, methinks you would wish to bury your face in your hands, and fall prostrate, as at the voice of the Eternal. ”

“ If the student has not the imagination, he must develop it. There are many loud voices, but few with soulful quality. But what avails this loudness? Certainly it enables one to be heard above the din of voices and the roar of the waves, but it never stirs the nobler emotions of an audience; and unless one can do that he is anything but an orator. Mere loudness is rant—nothing less. ”

“ The beams of the rising sun had gilded the lofty domes of Carthage, and given, with its rich and mellow light, a tinge of beauty even to the frowning ramparts of the outer harbor.
When, for any reason, we do not desire to assert strongly; when what we have to say is trite, trivial, repetitious; when we are uncertain or doubtful; when we entreat; when we ask a question to which the answer yes or no is expected, we also use the rising inflection. ”

“ The more sources of interest we have, the richer is our life. To hold any portion of truth in a vital way is better than to have its whole baggage stored merely in one’s memory.” And, again, “He who thinks for himself is rarely persuaded by another. Information and inspiration he gladly receives, but he forms his own judgment. Arguments and reasons which, to the thoughtful, sound like mockery, satisfy the superficial and ignorant.” And there is no better way to develop such a thinking person than by careful training in reading. ”

“ It is a common experience to hear a pupil read a passage one way at one time and a different way at another. It would therefore seem to be better to read a passage incorrectly with some reason behind the error, than to read it correctly as a matter of accident, with the chance that the next time it is read the expression will be quite different. The greatest value of such analyses is found in the improvement in the student’s power of discrimination. The melody, which manifests the purpose, the motive, is the very life of good reading. ”

“ We are so anxious to get on that we are content with skimming the surface, and do not take the time to get beneath it. The reading lesson should be, primarily, a thinking lesson, and every shade of thought should be carefully determined, no matter how long a time may be consumed. The habit of hurrying over the page, which is so prevalent, is clearly an outgrowth of schoolroom methods. Careless of all the future, we are too prone to push the pupil along, ignoring the simplest and most evident of psychological laws, that thought comes by thinking, and thinking takes time. ”

“ A few lessons can seldom make a reader, and where that plan partially succeeds, so much greater is the hypocrisy; for the reading stands for the work of the school rather than for that of an individual teacher. ”

“ We have learned that, when a pupil has the proper motive in mind and is desirous of conveying his intention to another, a certain melody will always manifest that intention. The melody, then, is the criterion of the pupil’s purpose. We expect a certain melody with certain phrases. When that melody is heard, we are scarcely conscious of its presence; when another is heard, we are struck as by a discord of music when we expect concord. The moment a pupil loses sight of [76] the exact meaning of a phrase and its relation to the other phrases, that moment his melody betrays him. ”

“ Be not too tame either, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of Nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first, and now, was, and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to Nature, to show Virtue her own feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. ”

“ Ours is an age of thought. Hearts are stronger than swords. That last fortnight! How sublime its lesson! the Christian one of conscience,—of truth. Virginia is weak, because each man’s heart said amen to John Brown. His words,—they are stronger even than his rifles. These crushed a State. Those have changed the thoughts of millions, and will yet crush slavery. Men said, “Would he had died in arms!” God ordered better, and granted to him and the slave those noble prison hours,—that single hour of death; granted him a higher than the soldier’s place,—that of teacher ”

“ The best way to learn to love good literature is to study only good literature, and to study it again, again and again. What is truly great art cannot be apprehended at a glance, but requires time for its fullest appreciation. We believe, however, that it is good pedagogy, in a work of this kind, to [232] lay before the teacher certain examples of what careful analysis may reveal. The effect of such analysis upon the reading must be evident to all.
We have already discerned that all analysis preparatory to reading aloud is virtually literary analysis. ”

“ Perhaps it would not be advisable to use selections in our reading lessons that call for an extremely difficult exercise of imagination on the part of the child, but since these selections are found in our reading books it is well to know how to do the best possible under the circumstances.
The most important point of all is that children must be brought into contact with nature. We cannot expect them to delight in a description of a sunset, or a robin’s nest, or a bunch of pansies, when they have never delighted in sunsets, or robins’ nests or pansies. ”

“ When we tell him to read louder, he braces himself for the effort and kills the quality, which is the finer breath and spirit of oral expression, and gives us a purely physical thing—force. Put your weak-voiced readers on the platform; let them face the class and talk to you, seated in the middle of the room, and you will get all the force you need. On the whole, we have too much force rather than too little. Let the teacher learn that we want quality, not quantity, and our statement of the mental action behind force will be of much benefit in creating the proper conditions. ”

“ But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocion for the Greek, and Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, La Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown as the ripe fruit of our noonday, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L’Ouverture. ”

“ We discern a speaker’s purpose quite as much in his melody as in his words. For example, if one were to ask, “Are you going out?” with the object of acquiring information, he would use instinctively a rising inflection on “out.” If he were surprised at our intention to go out, he would use a wider rising inflection. And if he had asked the question several times without receiving a reply, and were now insisting on an answer (his motive now being to assert his right to an answer) he would use a wide downward inflection on “out.” ”

“ One may safely assert that thousands of children would be better readers, even with the present faulty methods, if their teachers had a genuine interest in the best literature. Of what avail is it to put good literature into the schoolbooks if its merit does not appeal as well to the instructor as to the pupil? The stream can rise no higher than its source. There is, however, a rapidly growing sentiment against the substitution of parsing, history, philology, or ethics for genuine literary training. We are coming to recognize that literature is art, beauty, spirit ”

“ There is a school of reading pedagogy, with lamentably extended sway, that argues, since there are found various kinds of stress in our speech, therefore we must drill our pupils on these. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Stress denotes a state of mind. If our philosophy of stress is sound, it should teach us that the mental state finds instinctive expression in one form of stress or another, and consequently we must get the state before we can get the stress. We might add that this is true of Time, Pitch, and Quality, as well as of Stress. ”

“ The imagination must lead, otherwise we shall have big voices without big quality. That peculiar quality expressive of enlarged feeling is not necessarily loud. In fact, the voice may not be strong, but, at the same time, it may suggest grandeur and sublimity far better than a voice that has sheer loudness. But, if the student will practice faithfully, he may be assured that his voice will receive more genuine training through these exercises than through a whole volume of merely technical drills. ”

“ If the student has the thought, his emphasis may be trusted to take care of itself; where he has not, the rules are confusing and misleading. Mr. Alfred Ayres says facetiously, but truly, “There is only one rule for emphasis—Gumption.”
It is understood that emphasis has a much wider meaning than that of merely making a word stand out distinctly by means of force; it includes any manner of making a thought prominent. What we are here studying is simply that form of emphasis which is manifested by inflection or force, or both. ”

“ In many class rooms, reading becomes a lesson in composition, spelling, definition, and the like.
The method in vogue in certain districts of telling pupils about Inflections, and Time, and Kinds of Emphasis, is certainly faulty. On the other hand, very little more progress has been made by those who, in a very general and vague manner, tell the pupil to get the thought. As a result of the methods heretofore in use, it has been found impossible for the teacher in any given grade to determine how much real knowledge of reading a pupil has who has just been promoted from a lower grade. ”

“ The mental attitude formed by the method urged will cause the student to approach the printed page warily, prepared to deal with its difficulties, and will thus produce better reading.
A word to those who ride the sight-reading hobby too hard. It is only the experienced reader who can read well at sight. To ask an immature pupil to read at sight is to do one of two things: if he is timid, it frightens him; if he is a poor reader it simply fastens the careless habits upon him, by leading him to believe, by implication, that reading is merely pronunciation. ”

“ Let the teacher not worry because this process is slow and threatens to leave the work outlined for a given term incomplete. It is not the quantity but the quality we are after. But by this method we shall in time cover more ground than we now do in a given period. If we continually offer such criticism as will impress the pupil that thought-getting is everything, that reading is but the expression of that thought, he will go to his history, and geography, and arithmetic lesson for thought; so that the time spent in the reading hour is virtually just the training for every other lesson. ”

“ Complexity may be defined by illustration. A phrase may be read fast or slowly; in high or low key; with one melody or another; with loud or subdued force; with this quality of voice or with that. Now all these elements are present at one time; so that, without proper training, the teacher is unable to discriminate between them and hence unable to give the needful correction, without which there can be no progress.
Intangibility may be explained by showing what is meant by a tangible subject. The spelling lesson is tangible; the arithmetic lesson is tangible. ”

“ Quality manifests emotional states. By Quality we mean that subtle element in the voice by which is expressed at one time tenderness, at another harshness, at another awe, and so on through the whole gamut of feeling.
In order to prove that the quality (timbre, the French call it) of the voice is the result of emotional conditions, we must first understand what we may term the physics of quality. The number of air waves striking the ear in a given time determines the pitch; the width of the waves determines the volume of sound; the shape of the waves determines the quality. ”

“ We think in ideas, not in individual words, and these ideas are separated in our minds by pauses of varying length. We do not stop to consider whether or no we shall pause between the phrases of a sentence; the pause, as has been stated, comes instinctively, and is a manifestation of psycho-psychological action. In the second place, the pause is made as the result, to a greater or less degree, of collateral thinking. In other words, any given idea may call up another train of thought, with which the mind may engage itself, and such engagement would find actual expression in the pause. ”

“ One’s temperament may be of such a nature that he cannot express a single sentence without, say, the greatest insistency. The insistency is temperamental, and it shows in everything the speaker does. By a careful study of “Stress,” he is introduced to his own consciousness, soon recognizes his weakness, and his delivery is improved through improving his mental action. If this is true for the creative speaker, the orator, how much more is it true of him who reads or recites the words of another. ”

“ The reply to teacher, superintendent, and school board is, we have no time to teach a subject poorly. If thought-getting—genuine thought-getting—were insisted on from the outset, without doubt the work which now requires six or seven years to accomplish could be done in five. How much thought power has the public-school graduate? Very little. And yet, if all lessons—history, geography, [14] arithmetic, and the rest—were made thought lessons, a child of fourteen would be on the road to educating himself when he left school. ”

“ It is hardly to be believed that there is so much ignorance as to the meaning of inflection. During the past two years, in schools of our largest cities, the author has heard teachers reprimand their pupils for allowing their voices “to fall at a comma.” As if commas were intended to indicate vocal [77] expression! Once when a bright lad used a falling inflection on “want,” in such a sentence as “What do you want?” a class nearly shook their hands off in their endeavors to attract the teacher’s attention, in order that, when he said, “What’s wrong?” ”

“ This process may seem slow; but let us bear in mind that we are dealing with fundamental principles of thinking, and too much time cannot be spent in building our foundations strong and solid. Furthermore, if the rate of utterance is not the instinctive manifestation of the child’s thought measurement, it is nothing at all. To tell him to read fast or slowly is but to make him affected, and incidentally, even if unconsciously, to impress upon him that reading is a matter of mechanics and not of thought-getting and thought-giving. ”

“ Herein lies the great value to the teacher of a knowledge of the psychology of the criterion of pitch.
Suppose a pupil reads, “Up from the meadows green with corn,” using a rising circumflex on “meadows.” This would show at once that “meadows” was contrasted in his mind with something else. Remove the contrast, direct his mind forward from that word to the next phrase, and the proper melody will come. Some teachers, especially those engaged in the teaching of young children, have a somewhat patronizing melody in all they say and read. ”

“ Now we have a clear picture. What do we learn from this? We learn that a single word does not give us a clear picture, and that it takes three, and four, and sometimes many words, to give us a picture. We can think “I saw a man” or “in a steam car,” but we get a complete thought only when we put these two groups of words together. We notice also that while it takes just a moment to see a picture, it often takes many words to describe it.
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What we have done is called grouping; that is, reading several words together just as we read the syllables of a word. Let us try some examples. ”

“ Any selection may contain the simplest problem and the most difficult in one paragraph. The pupil must be trained to get his ideas from the printed page in groups, and such training can surely be gained better by using carefully selected passages than by the present aimless wandering among a labyrinth of words. It is admitted that a good teacher of reading may be able to get along without calling the attention of the class to grouping as a definite step; but he must certainly have that step in mind as part of the development of a reader. ”