Sunday-School Success: A Book of Practical Methods for Sunday-School Teachers and OfficersWells, Amos R. (Amos Russel)
Religion
Sunday-School Success: A Book of Practical Methods for Sunday-School Teachers and Officers
Wells, Amos R. (Amos Russel)
Sunday schools
A wise superintendent will utilize all his officers to the utmost. He
will make the assistant superintendent assist. The theory is that the
assistant shall be able, in the superintendent's absence, to do
everything the superintendent would do. How can he learn, except by
doing everything, now and then, when the superintendent is present?
Many a superintendent has worn himself out doing five men's work
rather than train four men to help him. Elijah trained Elisha to be
prophet in his stead. If he had not done so, I hardly think Elijah
would have been carried to heaven in a chariot of fire. Every worker
should prepare his successor, should make himself unnecessary.
Let it be the superintendent's ambition, then, to create an automatic
Sunday-school, one he can leave to run itself. He must keep himself in
the background. He must test the matter by occasional absences, on
foray for ideas in other schools. He must do as little as possible
himself,--no danger but it will be enough!--and he must get as much as
possible done by others. So he will create, not a machine, but an
organism.
In the third place,--the superintendent and the teachers. He must
individualize them. As Garfield, the young school-teacher, was wont to
lie awake nights, tracing out on his sheet in the dark a plan of the
schoolroom, locating each scholar's desk and planning for that scholar's
growth as he did so, thus the superintendent should consider separately
and regularly each teacher's task and abilities, trials and successes.
It is his joyous work to encourage them, to note improvement in their
scholars, to repeat to them the kind words of parents, to give them a
cheer in their arduous and difficult and, for the time, thankless tasks.
When a superintendent has praised discreetly, half his work is done.
Of course, the superintendent will study his lesson as thoroughly as
any teacher; and this is not by any means an unnecessary remark,
though some may think so. Indeed, there are even many occasions when
he may teach a class, though usually he is best left free during the
lesson hour to greet the strangers, or, watching from some central
post like a general in battle, to fly to the rescue of some teacher
whose class may be getting mischievous, restless, or careless.
For the superintendent should feel at perfect liberty to sit quietly
down with any class in his school, and should do this so often and
easily that his coming ceases to be a disturbance to teacher or
scholars. If the superintendent is not welcome, it will be because he
does not know how to help unobtrusively, and he would better stay away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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