5.  What types of companionship are assured him who teaches?

6.  As you now recall them, what distinct pleasures stand out in your teaching experience?

7.  Discuss Section 76 of the Doctrine & Covenants as one of the most valuable promissory notes ever given to mankind.

8.  Discuss the force of a duty done as a guarantee of joy.

HELPFUL REFERENCES

Doctrine and Covenants:  Slattery, Living Teachers; Sharp, Education for Character; Weigle, Talks to Sunday School Teachers; Betts, How to Teach Religion.

CHAPTER IV

PERSONALITY

     OUTLINE—­CHAPTER IV

The worth of a great teacher.—­Good teachers not necessarily born.—­Some boys’ observations on teachers.—­A high school survey.—­Clapp’s Essential Characteristics.—­Betts’ Three Classes of Teachers.—­His list of qualities.

   “A great teacher is worth more to a state, though he teach by the
   roadside, than a faculty of mediocrities housed in Gothic
   piles.”—­Chicago Tribune, September, 1919.

We may stress the sacred obligation of the teacher; we may discuss in detail mechanical processes involved in lesson preparation; we may analyze child nature in all of its complexity; but after all we come back to the Personality of the Teacher as the great outstanding factor in pedagogical success. That something in the man that grips people!

Very generally this Personal Equation has been looked upon as a certain indefinable possession enjoyed by the favored few.  In a certain sense this is true.  Personality is largely inherent in the individual and therefore differs as fully as do individuals.  But of recent years educators have carried on extensive investigations in this field of personality and have succeeded in reducing to comprehensible terms those qualities which seem to be most responsible for achievements of successful teachers.  Observation leads us all to similar deductions and constitutes one of the most interesting experiments open to those concerned with the teaching process.

Why, with the same amount of preparation, does one teacher succeed with a class over which another has no control at all?

Why is it that one class is crowded each week, while another adjourns for lack of membership?

The writer a short time ago, after addressing the members of a ward M.I.A., asked a group of scouts to remain after the meeting, to whom he put the question, “What is it that you like or dislike in teachers?” The group was a thoroughly typical group—­real boys, full of life and equally full of frankness.  They contributed the following replies: 

1.  We like a fellow that’s full of pep. 2.  We like a fellow that doesn’t preach all the time. 3.  We like a fellow that makes us be good. 4.  We like a fellow that tells us new things.

Boylike, they were “strong” for pep—­a little word with a big significance.  Vigor, enthusiasm, sense of humor, attack, forcefulness—­all of these qualities are summed up in these three letters.