The Vitalized School | Page 4

that she must
teach it in such a way that it will be as much a part of themselves as
their bodily organs. She wants them to know the mathematics as they
know that the rain is falling or that the sun is shining, because the rain,
the sunshine, and the mathematics are all elements of life. Her great
aim is to have her pupils experience the study just as they experience
other phases of life.
=The teacher's attitude.=--Such a teacher with such a conception of life
and of her work finds teaching school the very reverse of drudgery.
Each day is an exhilarating experience of life. Her pupils are a part of
life to her. She enjoys life and, hence, enjoys them. They are her
confederates in the fine game of life. The bigness and exuberance of
her abundant life enfolds them all, and from the very atmosphere of her
presence they absorb life. Their studies, under the influence of her
magic, are as much a part of life to them as the air they breathe or the
food they eat. No two days are alike in her school, for life to-day is
larger than it was yesterday and so presents a new aspect. Her spirit
carries over into their spirits the truths of the books, and these truths
thus become inherent.
=College influences.=--She teaches life, albeit through the medium of
subjects and books, because she knows life. Her college work did not
consist in the gathering together of many facts, but in accumulating
experiences of life. Many of these experiences were acquired
vicariously, but they were no less real on that account. Her generous
nature was able to withstand the most assiduous efforts of some of her
teachers to quench the flames of life that glowed in the pages of books,
with the wet blanket of erudition. She was able to relive the thoughts
and feelings of the authors whose books she studied and so make their
experiences her own. She could reconstitute the emotional life of her

authors and gain potency through the transfusion of spirit. Her books
were living things, and she gleaned life from their pages.
=Reading and life.=--She can teach reading because she can read.
Reading to her is an experience in life. The words on the printed page
are not meaningless hieroglyphics. They are the electric wires which
connect the soul of the author with her own, and through which the
current is continually passing. When she reads Dickens, Tiny Tim is
never a mere boy with a crutch, but he is Tiny Tim, and, as such,
neither men nor angels can supplant him on the printed page. She
knows the touch of him and the voice of him. She laughs with him; she
cries with him; she prays with him; she lives with him. In her teaching
she causes Tiny Tim to stand forth like a cameo to her pupils, with no
rival and no peer. This she can do because he is a part of her life. She
has no occasion either to pose or to rhapsodize. Sincerity is its own
explanation and justification.
=Power of understanding.=--When she reads "Little Boy Blue" she can
hear the sobbing of a heartbroken mother and thus, vicariously, comes
to know the universality of death and sorrow. But she finds faith and
hope in the poem, also, and so can see the sunlight suffusing the clouds
of the mother's grief. Thus she enters into the feeling of motherhood
and so shares the life of all the mothers whose children are her pupils.
In every page she reads she crosses anew the threshold of life and gains
a knowledge of its joys, its sorrows, its triumphs, or its defeats. In short,
she reads with the spirit and not merely with the mind, and thus catches
the spiritual meaning of what she reads. She can feel as well as think
and so can emotionalize the printed page. Nature has endowed her with
a sensory foundation that reacts to the emotional situations that the
author produces. Thus she understands, and that is the prime
desideratum in reading. And because she understands, she can interpret,
and cause her pupils to understand. Thus they receive another
endowment of life.
=Books as exponents of life.=--She has time for reading as she has time
for eating and drinking, and for the same reason. To her they are all
coördinate elements of life. She eats, and sleeps, and reads because she

is alive; and she is more alive because she eats, and sleeps, and reads.
She taps the sources of spiritual refreshment, without parade, and
rejoices in the consequent enrichment of her life. She does not smite
the rock, but speaks to it, and smiles upon it, and the waters gush forth.
She descends into