What to Teach | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 21, 1882

What to Teach.

THERE is a vast deal more in every lesson than you can hope to teach your scholars, or than you ought to try to teach them. A forgetfulness of this truth stands in the way of good teaching by some who study hard, and who gather material enough on every lesson for a dozen classes, and for a month of Sundays. The question, therefore, is not, What do you know of the lesson? but, What are you to cause your scholars to know of the lesson? Until you can answer this question explicitly, in view of your knowledge of your scholars, and out of your experience in their teaching, you are not yet through with your indispensable study as preparatory of your teaching of the lesson now in hand. Your study must include a great deal more than an acquaintance with all the multitudinous dishes on the extended bill of lesson-fare. You are to decide which of these dishes are suited to your particular scholars, with their tastes and needs as you know them; for unless you do this, you will cram your scholars without feeding them, or they will famish while you are expatiating on the merits of dishes which are wholly beyond their reach.

A good way of both perfecting and testing your preparatory study of a lesson, as a teacher, is for you to state to yourself in a few words the points of your proposed lesson-teaching. Some one has facetiously said, that in the average church prayer-meeting he would like the privilege of calling out at the close of a rambling speaker's remarks, according to the custom in deliberative bodies, “Will the gentleman be so good as to submit his proposition in writing?” In other words,

What have you been saying? What point, if any, were you trying to make? It would be well for every teacher to ask himself, before he sets out for his class, What am I now ready to teach my scholars to-day? His preliminary study should be made with that question before him for ultimate answer.—S. S. Times.

To FIND out one's own folly is the great point of wisdom.