thers may rejoice not only in his own workmanship but also
in the thought of the service and delight he is giving to others. That
is, his pleasure is twofold. The teacher who is deprived of some
response of joy in the work he is doing is a workman deprived of his
rights. To those girls who are thinking of becoming teachers this should
be a sobering thought.
Missionary teachers, with their students eager to get anything they have
to give, are not to be pitied. Our schools and their groups of teachers
in isolated and uncultivated parts of the West and South are not to be
pitied. Even if education is with them shorn of much that gives it
charm, the opportunities that come are prized. Students and teachers
have intellectual joy in the work they do, and without that the greatest
university in the world might as well, or better, be a district school,
for then the work done would be truly useful. It is the teacher who has
to put much of her time and energy into making a subject superficially
attractive enough for a student to elect it, who is to be pitied. A
classroom full of blase girls whose minds need to be tickled before
there is the least expression of intellectual mirth upon their faces, is
an ordeal not lightly to be met except by the professional joker or
academic tumbler.
Girls often become impatient with themselves, and that is one reason why
there is so little joy in work for them. Think of Helen Keller as a
famous example of this joy in work under the most adverse circumstances.
What could be greater than her handicap? Shut away from the world by
deaf ears and blind eyes and, for a while, by inability to speak, she
has nevertheless shown a keenness of pleasure and intellectual
acquisition that shames us who have all our senses in their fullness.
Think of her patient, unremitting delving, of the digging up, up, up to
get to the light which most human beings are privileged to enjoy with
no effort at all! The mind that accepts this wealth with no thought, no
sense of responsibility, is a trifler with riches that are about us for
God-given purposes. Think of the way in which Stevenson and John Richard
Green and George Eliot rose above their ill-health and did their work in
despite of it! Perhaps some of us have superb health and have never made
any conscious effort to use that gift for a high end.
Girls grow impatient with themselves when they wouldn't be impatient
with a little child. Yet the mind has to be train
|