20.  What advantages are there in having variety in one’s plans?

21.  Why should one avoid the sensational in school work?  What are the characteristics of sensationalism?  Is the fact that a class is unusually aroused a reason for decrying a method as sensational?

22.  With what spirit should a teacher prepare to teach about the thirteen colonies?

23.  Why should a teacher have great joy in the teaching of science?

24.  Is interest in a subject as an abstract science likely to be an adequate interest?  If so, is it the best sort of interest?  Why?

25.  From what should interest start, and in what should it function?

26.  Summarize the ways in which the artist teacher will show herself the artist.

CHAPTER XIV

THE TEACHER AS AN IDEAL

=Responsibility of the exemplar.=—­If the teacher could be convinced that each of her pupils is to become a replica of herself, she would more fully appreciate the responsibilities of her position.  At first flush, she might feel flattered; but when she came into a full realization of the magnitude of the responsibility, she would probably seek release.  If she could know that each pupil is striving to copy her in every detail of her life, her habits of speech, her bodily movements, her tone of voice, her dress, her walk, and even her manner of thinking, this knowledge would appall her, and she would shrink from the responsibility of becoming the exemplar of the child.  She cannot know, however, to what extent and in what respects the pupils imitate her.  Nor, perhaps, could they themselves give definite information on these points, if they were put to the test.  Children imitate their elders both consciously and unconsciously; so, whether the teacher wills it so or not, she must assume the functions of an exemplar as well as a teacher.

=Absorbing standards.=—­If we give full credence to Tennyson’s statement, “I am a part of all that I have met,” then it follows that we have become what we are, in some appreciable measure, through the process of absorption.  In other words, we are a composite of all our ideals.  The vase of flowers, daintily arranged, on the breakfast table becomes the standard of good taste thenceforth, and all through life a vase of flowers arranged less than artistically gives one a sensation of discomfort.  A traveler relates that in a hotel in Brussels he saw window curtains of a delicate pattern; and, since that time, he has sought in many cities for curtains that will fill the measure of the ideal he absorbed in that hotel.  Beauty is not in the thing itself, but in the eye of the beholder, and the eye is but the interpreter of the ideal.  One person rhapsodizes over a picture that another turns away from, because the latter has absorbed an ideal that is unknown to the former.