The Girl in Her Teens Part 6

If the girl in her teens grown to womanhood is to be comfortable to live with she must be trained to be kind. Kindness is born in unselfishness, and if we expect her to be unselfish, the days of her teens must be her training days. She must be carefully guarded from daily a.s.sociation with women who speak cynically of life, and shielded from close contact with those whose conversation is invariably the criticism of their neighbors. She must be led to let her heart speak-the heart is rarely unjust and seldom unkind. Her thoughts must be continually turned, as were those of Frances Willard and Alice Freeman Palmer, toward her neighbors in need, until a world-sympathy is born in her, and the joy of helping makes her keen to help. The girl to whose lips almost involuntarily spring the words "Let me help you" will not find it so easy to utter the cutting word or the phrase that leaves a sting. A real interest in "the other girl" will tend to make her unselfish.

If she is comfortable to live with she must be thoughtful.

Thoughtfulness also has its birth in unselfishness. The girl wrapped up in thoughts of herself has little time to be concerned with others, and demands invariably that she be the center of the circle. She does not make others comfortable and is not good to live with.

The girl who is good to live with in the world of the everyday, shares her joys and pleasures with the family. How many times I have seen a tired mother forget her cares listening to the recital of her daughter's "good times"! Her petty little annoyances, her disappointments, she keeps to herself.

After all, when we sum up the qualities of the girl in her teens which endear her to every one, and make her good to live with, we can put them under the one word unselfish. If she is this, then she will apply herself to her studies; she will remember her mother's burdens and not add to them; she will think of all she owes to her father and show her grat.i.tude to him; she will be a helpful friend to the boys and girls with whom she a.s.sociates, and she will have a good time, as the unselfish girl invariably does. By frequent ill.u.s.trations taken from life, the Sunday-school teacher may hope to make her see how true these things are. An absolutely unselfish girl may be, as those in their teens say she is, "impossible," but the impossible can be made wonderfully attractive by the teacher who can picture the girl in her teens at her best.

In her life in the everyday, no matter what her circ.u.mstances may be, the girl is constantly tempted to live below her best. The temptation to be disagreeable about the household tasks that fall to her, to forget the errand she is asked to do, to be careless about her room, to leave things for her mother to look after and put away, to be impatient with younger brothers and sisters-all these things are so easy. Not to yield to them requires constant watchfulness and struggle, and the word of warning on the part of the teacher, through story and ill.u.s.tration each Sunday, helps the girl see these faults in all their miserable littleness.

In her school life she meets the temptation to neglect her studies, and to spend too much time on the social side. Many girls are tempted to yield to petty deceptions; some are tempted to copy or exchange work; many are discourteous, and many more do nothing to make school life happy for any except those in their own "set." Some whose parents are so unwise as to leave them without knowledge or protection fall into temptations from which they never escape.

The high-school girl needs from the earnest lips of a woman she admires the weekly word of warning, and the oft-repeated plea to keep herself pure and fine.

If the girl in her teens is in business she meets daily the temptation to let her own interests interfere with her employer's, to waste time, to give excuses, to indulge in pleasures that do not uplift, but mean late hours, little sleep, and physical unfitness for work. She needs every Sunday the practical words of warning and inspiration straight from the heart of a woman who understands her temptations and can help her to overcome them.

Wherever the girl in her teens finds herself she needs some one to make her want to be her best amidst all the things which tend to pull her down. She needs strong words that will show her to herself in all her weakness making her ashamed if she has yielded, and at the same time arousing in her the determination not to yield again.

When the teacher understands the girl in her teens and lives close enough to her to become her confidante, she knows how hard the fight to be good and fine and strong in the everyday is, and she realizes more and more as her experience broadens that while the girl's love for her parents is a great incentive toward right living, and desire to please those whom she greatly admires is a help, and while unhappiness and other consequences of evil-doing act as deterring agents, yet no one of these things, nor all of them together, will prove strong enough to keep her pure and honest and make her unselfish.

What will? Nothing will make her absolutely perfect. Only one thing, so far as I know, will keep her safe and strong in the life of the everyday. That thing is the consciousness that she lives in the presence of G.o.d, accepting Jesus Christ as her example and her _Helper_ in her effort to live aright.

A girl conscious that she lives out each day under the pure, kind eye of an infinite personality, interested in her efforts toward righteousness, and that she need not be afraid to ask for strength or for pardon, finds it easier to do right and harder to do wrong than the other girl who leaves him out of the struggle.

In all the hundreds of girls and women I have met, the most thoughtful, generous and unselfish, the purest in heart and mind, those richest in the finer traits of humanity, have been conscious of the presence of G.o.d in the world of the everyday.

They live as in the presence of a perfect father, and live aright, not because men see, but because he sees, and they are able to live as they do because they ask for help and receive it. If we are to be of real help to the girl in her teens, this consciousness of the _reality_ of G.o.d we must give to her.

I have so often seen it help in the lives of individual girls. I am thinking now of Vivian, whose parents had given her up in despair. She was careless, rude, and untruthful. In school her teachers considered her "a bad girl." The Sunday-school teacher who took her cla.s.s when she was fifteen was one to whom the Christ was very real. She talked about him reverently, as if he were a real friend and a great help in everyday life. She interested Vivian. At Christmas she gave her Hoffman's "Christ." Vivian put it on her bureau, dusted the picture every day, and thought about it often. The teacher loaned her books of the sort which made Christ seem a real friend. She began to think of him as such and to pray that he would help her overcome the things that everybody despised. She read "What would Jesus do?" several times. She began to feel that G.o.d saw and cared, and as she worded it, "I felt that in all these hard things Christ would help me, and I asked him many times every day to make me do as he would."

Her room showed that something had come to Vivian. A quietness came into her conversation. She treated her mother with a gentleness that was so different that her mother cried when she told the teacher about it. The girls saw the difference. Twice when she had been untruthful she went to her teachers and confessed it. She made a desperate struggle to speak accurately. Her father called her a changed girl, and his face showed his joy over the change. She is to-day one of the sweetest, strongest young women I know, prominent in her college and trusted and loved by scores of girls.

She is one of many whose lives I have seen changed, and as the years pa.s.s, and I see the power of the Christ still working miracles in girls' lives, I long for more teachers like that one who opened Vivian's eyes.

The greatest thing which the teacher can do for the girl in her teens is to open her eyes to a real Christ, for then all the incentives for pure, unselfish _living_ in the commonplaces of life's "everyday" will be hers.

CHAPTER X-HER TEACHER

When for a moment one remembers the girl in her teens, the long line that lives in the memory from those just thirteen up through the sweetest and prettiest at sixteen, to the beautiful, graceful, and dignified ones just twenty, it makes a picture hard to equal.

There is such evident joy in just living! When one catches a glimpse of the groups in their light dresses, with hair ribbons of every size and color according to the wearer's interpretation of the latest fashion, wending their way to the high school, he feels that life is indeed a glorious summer morning. Though sighs and complaints may be heard over lessons too long and too difficult, they are not very deep, and are soon forgotten; though low marks do make very serious students with minds concentrated on work for a few days after report cards are out, yet with the majority the depression is short-lived, and life is sunshine once more.

When as whistles blow and factory gates swing wide, one catches a glimpse in the early morning of the girl in her teens going to work, he hears s.n.a.t.c.hes of happy laughter and jesting. No matter how hard the work, it cannot crush out the laughter in the heart of the girl in her teens; the good times after work is over or at the week end when she puts on her ribbons and gay attire make easier the crash of machinery and less painful the aching muscles.

The girl in her teens is glad she is alive, and her evident and keen enjoyment of a world which some of her elders have found hard and a little disappointing does more to cheer and brighten the dull gray of the commonplace than she knows, or than we stop to remember.

As we think of this long procession of the girl in her teens which memory can so easily recall, and then see in imagination the host of those who call themselves her teachers, we are tempted to cry, "Her teachers! What manner of beings are they who pretend to instruct, enlighten and guide all this energy, this fascinating line of possibility and promise!"

It is easy to write or speak of the "ideal" teacher for all this fresh young life, filled with inexpressible longings for success and happiness. But the study of the very human and very real teacher, ideal only in the highest sense, in that she is struggling after perfection, will be much more practical and helpful to us.

Should the teacher of girlhood in the years of the teens ever be a man?

Yes, there have been many fine, successful teachers whose strength and manly qualities, whose sincere devotion to Christ and his teachings, have had a lasting influence for good upon the girl in her teens.

It is a good thing for the girl to see the world and its relation to moral and religious life through the eyes of a far-seeing man. It is a help to her to get his mental grasp of situations as from week to week they follow together the life of Christ and his teachings or seek to understand the characters of Old Testament days.

A fine man's frankness, sincerity, and general freedom from the annoyance of little things prove a stimulus and a help to the girl. It is almost unnecessary to say that he must be the right sort of man, large-hearted, strong, and free from all suggestion of the "goody-goody."

However, it has been my experience that while a man makes a most efficient teacher for the cla.s.s during the hour of the Sunday-school session, he cannot guide and influence a girl's life in the everyday as can the right sort of woman. Unless he has a home and a wife thoroughly interested in his work, or herself active in the work of the Church, he can do little in a social way during the week. If he is a successful, hard-working man he has little time to think of the girls or their needs except on Sunday, and unless he is a man of wide experience or has daughters of his own he does not understand girls, and must perforce deal in generalities.

In this matter, as everywhere in life, there are exceptions and no hard and fast law can be laid down, but my experience thus far has been that, all things considered, a womanly woman is best fitted to meet the many needs of the girl in her teens.

She must be a womanly woman, else she will have forgotten her own girlhood days and cannot come near enough to the girl in her teens to appreciate her need, nor will she have the personality that wins her confidence and love. The cold, hard, mechanical sort of woman one occasionally finds in charge of a cla.s.s of girls is not the one whose influence will be felt in the years to come.

We have seen again and again in previous chapters that the teacher of the girl in her teens must be in love with life. If she has found it hard, she must not let that embitter her. The fact that she has met hardships and conquered them, has met sorrow and it has only deepened her sympathy and broadened her outlook on life, makes her a real inspiration to the girls who meet her each week.

I am thinking now of such a woman, into whose life one heavy sorrow after another has come. At thirty she is alone in the world, having lost in ten years parents, husband and two children. Yet there is no bitterness in her life. She is not in any sense a cynic. More than twenty girls, from sixteen to nineteen years of age, who make up her cla.s.s, leave the presence of that sweet, strong woman with her tender, sympathetic spirit, and her calm, steady faith, able all the week to live better, more wholesome lives because they have been with her for one hour. She never speaks of herself, but often of courage, of hope, of making the best of things, of giving all one can in service to the world, of unselfish, cheerful living, and the girls listen and believe that all she says is true and possible.

The teacher must be an optimist. She is not self-deceived, she sees the faults of the girl in her teens. She is conscious of the thoughtlessness, the utter lack of courtesy, the love of the extreme in everything, and the greater faults of insincerity and pretense that characterize to so great an extent the girlhood of to-day. But while she is pained she is not dismayed. She is a good diagnostician. She examines her individual patients, finds the weak places, discovers the cause of the disease, and then goes to work systematically to eradicate it, trusting to the normal, unaffected organs and tissues to aid in restoring perfect health. She believes in and uses preventive measures and they pay.

The teacher must herself be an example in thoughtfulness and courtesy, respectful to those higher in office, and willing to co-operate with, instead of criticizing, those who have plans by which they hope to add to the efficiency of the school as a whole.

None of these things are lost upon the keen-eyed girl in her teens; indeed, the teacher's dress, even the condition of her gloves, makes an impression and has an influence.

It has become a truism that to be successful in teaching one must know the pupil; yet only last week I met a teacher anxious for a new course of study which would interest her cla.s.s of girls sixteen and seventeen years of age, who revealed in conversation the fact that she knew practically nothing of the girl's homes. She did not even know the section of the city in which many of them lived, had made no calls and could tell the occupation of only two of the fathers. She did not know for what the girls were preparing themselves, nor any of their hopes or desires, and she had taught the cla.s.s for two years. She said the girls were not interested, and did not prepare a.s.signed work.

This type of teacher is fast disappearing, but wherever she exists the fact that the cla.s.s seems to be "not interested" indicates very clearly that those who insist that _the teacher must know the girl_ are right.

In the series of studies of the girl in her teens an article appeared in _The Sunday School Times_[1] giving the opinions of several hundred girls as to what const.i.tutes "a lovely teacher," and according to the statements of these girls, a lovely teacher is, "pleasant," "fair to everybody," "treats every one alike," and "is interested in what you are doing." "She writes notes to you when you are ill," "calls on you," "is kind and patient," "makes the lesson interesting," "explains what you don't understand," and "knows a great deal."

Upon these as necessary qualifications of "a lovely teacher," the girl in her teens from all sorts of homes and from various parts of our country is agreed, and as we think about it we feel inclined to trust her a.n.a.lysis.

When the average teacher tests herself by these standards, she finds deficiencies, but they are not discouraging ones, because every characteristic named by the girls is possible to every teacher.

She can make things interesting if she is interested and takes time to prepare her lesson material. It is a never-failing source of surprise to discover what interesting material,-anecdotes, ill.u.s.trations, pictures and information,-can be found upon every subject when one is looking for it.

It is perfectly possible for the average teacher to be "pleasant"-to carry about with her the atmosphere in which work becomes a pleasure and difficult problems are just things to be conquered. This atmosphere of cheerful hopefulness makes everything easy. For many teachers it is the natural att.i.tude toward life and work, which comes from constant a.s.sociation with eager, buoyant youth. If it is not natural it may be cultivated.

"Notes" and "calls"-acts of thoughtful kindness on the part of the teacher when illness or trouble enters a home, may be small things in themselves, but they mean much to the adolescent girl, and they bring their own reward. They also are possible to every teacher.

The confidence of a girl is more easily gained if one, to use her own phrase, "really likes" her. If a teacher knows her pupil, that is, sees her as an individual, learns her ambitions, longings, hopes and fears, she does "like" her. It is almost impossible not to like the average girl when one knows her. Every teacher can learn to teach individuals, not cla.s.ses, and girls, not subjects alone.

The wise men of the past have told us, and experience and observation have proved, that we grow to resemble that which we admire. Admiration means imitation, therefore the necessity that those who are striving to awaken the best in the girl in her teens be those she can and does admire, and have traits of character she ought to imitate.

There never was a time in the history of religion when so many tools and such fine equipment for service were ready for those who want to be skilled workmen, and the teachers who desire the skill to make their work on Sunday really count in life every day in the week, have but to begin just where they are and progress as fast as possible.