Sunday school teacher

“ Merely insist on adequate adult supervision. Above all be patient, practical and business-like and remember that old heads never grow on young shoulders. The Sunday school Teacher should take his place in the community by the side of the teacher of secular instruction. He is an educator, and is dealing with the most plastic and most valuable asset in the community—boyhood. Let him take his task seriously, look upon his privilege with a desire to accomplish great things, and always remember that the good of the boy is his ultimate aim. ”

“ Anyone can teach the scholar who is eager to learn; but to teach those who come to the class unprepared and careless, to send them away with a clear-cut understanding of the lesson, and an awakened intelligence and conscience—all this, under the conditions of the Sunday-school teacher's task, and in his peculiar relation to his scholars, requires not only ability, but also thoroughly trained ability. ”

“ The Sunday school teacher should govern the children, not by passion, by bitter words or scolding, but by affection and by winning their confidence. If a teacher gets the confidence of a child it is not impossible to accomplish every desired good with that child. ”

“ Teacher-training superintendents find a marked tendency in some classes to discontinue the work after the section on The Bible has been covered. It is a false notion that a knowledge of the Bible is the only thing necessary for Sunday-school teachers. Leaders should enthusiastically carry their classes past this common "dead-point" over into the sections on The Pupil, The Teacher, and The School; this special effort to arouse enthusiastic interest in what is to come after the Bible course will often prevent students from dropping out of the class. ”

“ It is not remarkable that Sunday-school teacher-training should be delayed so long after the organization of the first Sunday school, when it is remembered that in America the first Normal School for secular teachers was not founded until 1839. ”

“ When pupils dislike the teacher because he is weak or rude or petulant or unprepared to teach, it is difficult to keep these pupils in regular attendance. Each teacher should constantly ask himself, How may I personally add to the attractiveness of the Sunday-school? Careful inquiry and close supervision of the classes by the superintendent should compel good teaching or a prompt change of teachers. It is useless to expect pupils to love the Sunday-school well enough to endure a worthless teacher. ”

“ If he is not fit to be out after 9 p.m. he cannot be fit to be a Sunday School Teacher. One would think that it is less dangerous for him to be out after nine than for him to be a Sunday School teacher who would mould the character of tender children. ”

“ To teach a child reading, and not to follow up the service by providing him with good books, and giving him counsel how to read them, is but to prepare him for the most dangerous forms of temptation in which bad men have colluded with hell to ruin immortal souls. For this necessity our Sunday-school system has provided. The teacher is the child’s affectionate friend, and with him is sent a rich library of hallowed volumes, carefully fitted to inculcate the best lessons, while they lead on the youthful reader by their pleasing style. ”

“ But especially this practical application, to be successful, must be the work of a consecrated imagination. A Sunday-school teacher must think himself into the lives of others. "Bear ye one another's burdens." Now don't rake up from your encyclopedias [Pg 129] the story of St. Christopher, beautiful as it is, and try to twist it into an illustration of the text. No. Ask the bright scholar what he does to help his duller friends understand the knotty problems at school. Ask the merry boys what they do when mother is tired amusing the baby. ”

“ You are a Sunday School teacher; you are trying to teach a class of ten or twelve children, not one of them, perhaps, converted, and they go out from under you unconverted; you are trying to do a heavenly work in the power of the flesh and earth. Sunday School teachers, do begin to say, "I must be filled with the Spirit of God, or I must give up the charge of those young souls ”

“ Let us desire earnestly the greater gifts; but if God calls us to be neither missionary nor pastor, but Sunday-school teacher, even that calling is too high for us fully to attain.
It is an anomaly to which the Christian world is just awaking that workers permit themselves to enter on this sacred art with no apprenticeship. Indeed, if such untrained workers were not admitted, there would soon be no Sunday-schools in the world to admit them. Long as the seminaries for ministerial preparation have existed, it is only recently that training-schools for lay workers have been formed. ”

“ Finally she was set at some sort of work, and that girl, after three or four years, went out as a school teacher into a district where young men dared not go, where her eyes were blistered with the sights she saw—men shot down before her face and eyes by the whisky distillers—and she was asked to organize a Sunday-school there. When any one starts a Sunday-school he is expected to preach, and so that girl had to become a preacher, and to-day she is preaching the gospel of God and spreading the work there. ”

“ THE TEACHER ESSENTIAL IN SUNDAY SCHOOL WORK. One of the essentials to a good Sunday School is to have good, pure-minded, intelligent, noble, true and faithful teachers. If you will have a child develop to what he should be, he that teaches the child should be developed to what he ought to be, and until he is developed in intelligence, in faith, in works of righteousness, in purity of heart and mind and spirit, he is not in a very good position to elevate others to it.—Oct. ”

“ FOR many years, while serving as superintendent of Sunday schools, I saw hundreds of children grow up to young manhood and womanhood, and in a majority of cases go out from the school because they had reached such maturity. Every conceivable effort was made to retain them by securing the best teachers and offering such attractive social influences as could be introduced into a class. Occasionally some magnetic teacher with marked and strong personality would succeed for a time in holding a considerable number of young people in the school, but such teachers were hard to find. ”

“ The teacher in Sunday school cannot require his scholars to learn the lesson; the authority of the parent is rarely employed to compel home study; and as a result most of our scholars come to the Sunday school unprepared. This is not the ideal or the ultimate condition, but unfortunately it is still the real condition in at least nine out of ten Sunday-school classes. This condition makes the demand upon the teacher all the greater. Because his scholars are unprepared he must be all the better prepared. He must be able to awaken and arouse his pupils ”

“ The teacher ought to be a Christian hero himself. Out of missionary literature, out of the lives of great men who have lived, out of Bible characters, heroes must be multiplied. The Sunday-school lessons ought to be hero studies, not sermons. Heroic literature ought to be put into the hands of the children—either directly or through indirect suggestion in some curiosity-arousing reference to the story. This means the most effective type of instruction during all the week as well as Sunday. ”

“ It is the teacher's chance. He will never draw close to his scholars if not now; never see their nobility or their faults if not through the troubled lens of a rainy day.
It is the opportunity of the general school. Prayer-meeting workers often observe that the meetings held on stormy evenings are always the best, because every attendant feels it his duty to take active part. For the same reason a rainy day brings out the mettle of a Sunday-school. The bashful are impelled to greater boldness, the careless to stricter attention. Responsibilities are thrown upon unwonted shoulders. ”

“ We do not care to send our children to be educated by any and every schoolmaster. We not only ask, Is he capable? but we ask, Who is he, and what is he? If these questions may be very properly put concerning a teacher of geography and arithmetic, we may be pardoned for asking them concerning one who professes to teach Christian doctrine and morality. {301} Is he well versed in the truths of faith himself, and, if you please, what is his own moral character?
The Sunday-school is an excellent institution, a necessary institution in our times ”

“ The best teacher is one in whom the pupil feels the presence of religion as a concrete, natural thing. The best Sunday-school teaching is an initiation of the pupil into sacred things, and initiation is a process of admitting one to a society of persons and fellowship. ”

“ If we aim at having first-class Sunday-schools, which will not only teach the children their catechism, and encourage them in the practice of virtue, but also elevate and refine their manners, and educate them in that, for which, after all, Catholic children are remarkable, namely, Christian politeness, we must secure teachers who, like the teacher of the little child mentioned above, are so good, know so much, and are such gentlemen! We have every confidence that the Sunday-School Union, by its "social" character, will bring this about. ”

“ The teacher who ceases to grow ceases to teach. That is why a Sunday-school lesson cannot be crammed. That is why preparation for it must extend [Pg 23] all through the week. Growth cannot be ordered offhand. It comes from Father Time's shop, and he is a deliberate workman. You will lose your hold on your class if each Sunday hour does not begin with you a little above them, and end with them at your level. This advance cannot be won Saturday night, or during the space between the first and second bells for Sunday-school. ”

“ There are on the American continent not less than a million and a half Sunday-school teachers, who give to the gospel their free-will offering of time, and toil, and thought. They are not like civil engineers or the majority of public-school teachers, graduates of schools that have given them training for a special vocation. In every respect they are laymen, engaged for six days in secular work, and on one day finding an avocation in the Sunday school. ”

“ A Willing Worker. The teacher's love for Christ, for his scholars, and for his Bible is not to expend itself in emotion or even in study; it is to find expression in efficient service. A task is laid upon him which will demand much of his time and his power of body, mind, and spirit. He must be ready to meet his class fifty-two [101] Sundays in the year: on days of sunshine and days of storm; when he is eager for the work, and when he is weary in it; when his scholars are responsive, and when they are careless; when his fellow workers are congenial, and when they are anti-pathetic ”

“ The superintendent’s warning bell rang before Murray suddenly came out of that football game, and realized that something had been said about a “lesson”—that, in fact, the lesson had been supposed to be the principal thing for which they were here as teacher and pupils. It would not do to ignore that utterly. Some of these young scamps would be sure to go home and tell, and his good name, of which he was beginning to be a little proud, would be damaged if he made no attempt at all to teach something sort of ethical. That was his idea of Sunday-school teaching. ”

“ The children in their turn tell their parents how they despise their teachers, and say they don't want to go to school any more because the teacher is so cross. I have heard of these things and know them to be true. On the other hand, if children say to father and mother, "We think we have the best teacher in the world, in our Sunday school," or, "We have the best teacher in our district school that ever lived," it proves that those teachers have won the affections of the children, and the little ones are as clay in the hands of the potter to be moulded in any shape desired. ”