isa-normaladvance-1914-00029

Description:	a room full of other peoples babies. The train¬ ing you will acquire before and during your teaching experience is a good one to carry into the family. I am always glad for her sake when I bear that the schoolmaam is married, provided only that she has found a clean, honest husband, even though he is not so smart as she is.I like to think that a fair proportion of you young men and women are destined to make teaching your vocation. Teaching is a good or a bad business, according as you make it. It is possible to realize in it the highest ideals of enthusiasm and noble service. It is also possi¬ ble to outdo the quackery of the medical char¬ latan and the chicanery of the legal shyster. If you have any disposition to emulate the quack and the shyster, go into some other busi¬ ness. The only rewards possible to such are pecuniary and are not to be won in the profes¬ sion of teaching. The teacher must have money, but his best compensations are more varied, permanent and satisfying.The teachers work is intellectual and not physical. The man who works with his brains is of more value to society and to himself than the man who works only with his muscles. From your neck down you are worth two dol¬ lars a day. From your neck up you are worth a sum practically unlimited. The worth to the world of any work done is proportional to the amount of brains and character that are put into it. With such a standard of values, the work of the teacher may rank high, for no man has greater opportunity than he to use brains and character.The teacher enjoys more than other men the privilege of being always a student, of living in a large measure the intellectual life. If he has the hunger to learn and to know—and no one can be a good teacher without it—his daily business leads him to investigate something, great or small, to acquire broader views of the world and humanity. He who undertakes to be a teacher without being at the same time a more diligent student than any whom he teaches, misses the high possibilities of his call-THE NORMAL ADVANCE29ing. Research on some plane, high or low, is the life blood/teacher. Nothing can compen¬ sate for the lack of it. There may be people who so enjoy the act of teaching as to find pleasure in going over exactly the same ground with a new class every term, in perpetually rolling the stone of Sy/iphus to the top of the 5 hill of commencement, seeing id roll down and fc cheerfully beginning the task over again at the bottom. At least we can get out of our old ruts and roll the stone up some of the way by a new path to a higher summit. There are as many good ways of teaching a lesson as there are of playing a piece of music or paint¬ ing a picture, and if, out of a fulness of new learning, you try a new way, the chances are you will find it a better one. The teacher is not a mechanic or an artisan, but an artist, to whom the highest ideals are realizable, and who can never reach one so high that there is not a higher one in sight beyond.The teacher has the privilege of meeting every morning a mass of young and vigorous life, to which he may respond as to a fresh stimulus, a source of new vigor, which will keep him young and alive and defend him from acquiring the inflexibility of the fossil. His life is regulated above that of almost every other calling. He knows each day and hour substantially what lies before him the next. He cannot escape the blessing for which Charles Kingsley thanked God every morning, that he had something to do that day which must be done whether he liked it or not.The teacher may have the consciousness that he is not living unto himself, but in a very large sense for humanity. However, much of devotion to high ideals the individual lawyer, farmer or merchant may put into his work, his business is primarily to make money. The teachers business is to make men and women. If anyone goes into the schoolroom with only such purposes as the lawyer takes into court or the business man to his shop, he is doomed to disappointment in results and rewards. If you have not something of the missionary spirit, the capacity to feel satisfaction in the
Source:	http://indstate.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/isuarchive/id/32469
Collection:	Indiana State University Archives

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