The Girl in Her Teens Part 3

Nothing can so stimulate the teacher's own faith as to be brought, year after year, face to face with world-wide questions hurled at her from the lips of girls in their later teens. She learns at last to antic.i.p.ate the time when doubts will trouble by giving during the early teens definite constructive teaching that will strengthen faith and deepen the spiritual sense.

The girl in her teens is a wors.h.i.+per of the ideal, and the teacher's business is to furnish her with ideals so beautiful, so strong and so desirable that with irresistible power they woo her until she is ready to leave all and follow. If she is possessed by a great ideal nothing is too difficult for her to do, no price is too high to pay in the effort to realize it. Ideals are the things in life most real, for they determine action.

In impressing high ideals upon mind and spirit the teacher of girls in their teens has advantages over those of any other period. All nature is ready to help, the wealth of emotion waits to be stirred to action, the spirit waits to be led.

If the spirit of the teacher is to lead, it must itself be led. It must be dominated by great ideals.

The girl in her teens needs a teacher whose deepest longings are not all satisfied-then she understands. She needs a teacher who is not afraid to let her emotions speak-who knows that the greatest deeds possible to man have their birth in the emotions. She needs a teacher who sees amid all the joys and real pleasures of the world, as well as amid the petty cares and dark and puzzling problems which are our common lot, the Spirit of her Creator working out in man for ultimate good the great plan of which she is a part.

Such a teacher can open the eyes of her girls and help them to see the Father for whom the human spirit is ever seeking-and will not be satisfied until it finds.

CHAPTER V-THE SOCIAL SIDE

I have been spending the day with adolescence, surrounded by boys and girls in their teens and young men and women just outside. It is now the evening of Memorial Day, and I have spent most of the day at the popular pleasure resort just outside the city. My companion, a young woman just out of her teens, had taken her holiday to come to the normal school to arrange for entrance in the fall. She has worked hard for two years, saved her money, and now plans to take a full course at the school to fit herself to become an expert teacher in China. She wanted to spend the rest of the day with me and talk about it, and I took her to W. --, that we might enjoy the out-of-doors. We sat in a secluded corner of the big open dining-room, and during dinner she talked of China's need, of the great opportunity,-hurled facts about the darkness of China at me until I gazed at the animated encyclopaedia in astonishment. Her face glowed with enthusiasm; it is a sweet face, girlish and eager, and I could but wonder as I looked at her how China's need had gotten such a hold upon her.

While she seemed for a few moments lost in thought, my eyes wandered over the room crowded with youth. All sorts and conditions were there, but all young. It was Memorial Day, but they had not waited to see the short procession of those who still remain to us of the hundreds who went out with their lives in their hands at the country's bidding. The procession and all it signifies meant little to them. They were jolly, happy, light-hearted, rough and very crude, and yet-they were just the ones who, if the country should call again, would answer; the boys promptly, willingly, offering their lives, the girls laying their hearts on the altar of their country's need. But to-day was just a holiday. At the table near us was a group of four, none over seventeen. The discussion and final ordering of the dinner was most interesting. They talked over prices, too, with great frankness, "That's too much," and "we don't need coffee, that will take ten cents off for each of us." I have seldom seen four people enjoy a dinner as they did. The girls' dresses manifested the effort to attain "the latest thing," and the boys were not behind. When they left the dining-room and walked down toward the boat-house they tried to look so unconcerned! How they had saved for this day! This one little day!

At every table were groups just as interesting. The grounds were crowded with other groups, laughing and shouting and joking. The jokes no one save themselves could appreciate. The skating rink was crowded-the dancing pavilion-the open air theater-every incoming trolley brought more intent upon having "a good time." I forgot China until a direct question brought me back. Here she was,-my eager, intense, enthusiastic girl,-looking forward with joy to China with its crus.h.i.+ng weight of ignorance, its impossible language and its almond-eyed people neither asking nor desiring to be helped! What has made the difference between her and those all about me? Before I could answer her question or my own, three automobiles pa.s.sed, filled with laughing girls and boys, all in their teens. Their faces were different from those in the grove,-their laughter more musical,-the automobiles bore their country's flag, the girls wore flowers. I knew some of the faces-it was a "house party," and they were off for a "good time."

Suddenly it surged over me that this was but one little spot in the great country-and the rush of the other thousands, the shop girls, clerks, the office girls, the students, all in search of a good time oppressed me, and before my mind hurried back to a Chinese kindergarten, my heart cried, "Oh, Lord, how shall the world _play_ with real pleasure and profit?" Is _this_ the way? I heard no answer.

The problem is too big for me, yet I cannot let it alone, for the world must play, and always the most eager players are young,-and always the girl in her teens is the center of the game.

Man is social. He must have companions.h.i.+ps and pleasures in common with his kind. Only when physically deficient, mentally deformed, abnormal, does he become anti-social. This is true all through life and especially true in adolescence when nature is most keenly conscious of elemental powers and pa.s.sions.

It is true that the girl in her teens is often alone. Alone she dreams her day-dreams, writes her poems, floods her imagination with all the things that are to be. In common with all humanity she meets her deepest experiences alone. Yesterday a girl of nineteen tried to tell me of the happiness her engagement to a fine, strong man had brought to her. She said, "all that it means _can't_ be said." Last week a girl of eighteen tried to tell out all the loneliness and crus.h.i.+ng disappointment her mother's death had brought, but she ended her appeal for help with the old cry, "no one can really help, I've just got to bear it." Before the teens have pa.s.sed so many girls learn that great joy and great sorrow must be met alone.

But for the common life of the every day, man lives with others. He can neither work alone nor play alone, and with adolescence comes the realization of it sweeping into the life. "The gang," "our crowd,"

"our set," work and play together.

The girl who loves and seeks solitude continually is ill mentally, physically, or spiritually, and needs watchful, sympathetic care, which shall discover the cause of her morbidness and help her to escape from it.

Environment fixes largely the companions of the girl, and her place in the social scale predetermines to some extent how she shall play. If she is in a home where the family is closely related to the church in all departments of its active work and life, the church becomes her natural social center. Its entertainments, suppers, young people's socials, etc., furnish the means for her amus.e.m.e.nt and the place where she may form friends.h.i.+ps. If she is a working girl boarding in a strange city or living in a home in no way connected with the church, unless the Y. W. C. A. through the gymnasium or other cla.s.ses reaches her, where shall she find her social center where she may enjoy the society of other young people, form friends.h.i.+ps and have a good time?

In summer the public parks answer that question. In winter, the skating rink, "the dancing party," the moving picture show.

If the girl lives in a happy home surrounded by wealth, together with culture and refinement, her social life will be guided and guarded during her teens and she will be helped to have a good time. If she be that happiest of all girls, the one whose own home is the social center, where music, games and fun abound, and where friends are always welcome, she is safe. Such homes might solve the whole problem, but there are not enough.

When the teacher looks seriously at the social side of her girls in their teens and realizes the craving of the whole nature for companions.h.i.+p, laughter and fun, she finds it hard to say "Don't" even to the things of which she does not personally approve, because she must meet the question clear and frank, "What _can_ I do then?" That question has been answered, so far as the church is concerned, only here and there. Some splendid and successful attempts have been made that give us hope for the future.

Most Sunday-school teachers of girls in their teens have awakened recently to the fact that unless the demands of the social side be satisfied in a sane, healthful way, the girl's spiritual nature suffers, and the mental and physical as well.

When once the teacher really sees it she can no longer be content to meet the interested members of her cla.s.s just an hour on Sunday, to discuss the lesson of the day. The crowded parks, the trolleys, the "parties," the call of the great demanding whirl of amus.e.m.e.nts from Sunday to Sunday, presses upon her soul. She learns how her girls spend the week end and the evenings and then she throws herself, her knowledge, her skill, her time, into the scales, hoping where she finds girls in the danger zone to turn the balance in favor of clean, safe, sane pleasure.

Any teacher willing to make a little investigation will be surprised to learn how many of the girls enjoying the kind of amus.e.m.e.nts which do not make for sound moral health, were at ten or twelve regular members of the Sunday-school, and how many still come occasionally.

My observation the past few years of the social side of the girl in her teens, and especially the girl who has left school, has made me feel that if the opportunity to choose came to me as to Solomon, I would rather have the knowledge and power to give the young people of to-day sane, safe amus.e.m.e.nt than anything else I know.

The social side of the girl reveals itself not only in the desire to have a good time, but in the deep and ardent friends.h.i.+ps formed during the teen period.

While she enjoys to the full the society of the group, the girl in her teens invariably has a "dearest friend," who shares her joys, sorrows and confidences. This tendency becomes especially evident at sixteen and becomes more marked at the latter part of the period.

These friends.h.i.+ps may be the source of greatest blessings or may mean the lowering of the whole tone of moral life. Both mother and teacher need to observe carefully the formation of friends.h.i.+ps and be sure to encourage only the helpful ones. Public school teachers of experience can all testify to the rapid changes in girls which so often follow the development of a deep friends.h.i.+p.

I remember a girl of sixteen, dreamy, imaginative, and so much interested in her boy companions that lessons, home interests, and everything else were sacrificed. What to do with her, and what interests to subst.i.tute, were questions that both mother and teacher failed to solve. At a most opportune time a "new girl" moved into the neighborhood and entered school. She was practical, attractive, a good scholar, greatly interested in outdoor athletics. Because they were neighbors, the two girls were thrown much together. The companions.h.i.+p deepened into friends.h.i.+p. Soon the dreamy sixteen-year-old was playing tennis on summer afternoons, and reading aloud in the hammock afterward to rest. When winter came she suddenly decided that school and study were worth while, brought up all her averages, and made up her mind to try for college. Skating and the gymnasium made her a new girl. And all this transformation, fortunately for her good, came naturally and very rapidly through the influence of her companion. It comes almost as quickly in the other direction. Nothing can be more helpful to the shy, timid, self-conscious girl than the companions.h.i.+p of one who will encourage her and help her take her place with others in the social life of which she is a part.

Some of the bitterest suffering known to girls in their teens comes because they are "left out" and must go "alone." The misery of being left to oneself is registered in that familiar sentence, "Oh, I don't want to go alone!" The girl in her teens needs a "chum," a "best friend," a companion, and anything that the teacher can do to aid in the formation of helpful friends.h.i.+ps is worth while, for the friends loyal and true through the teen age are the ones who in later years, when the need is deeper and friends.h.i.+ps are tested, stand by. That there should be some way and place in which, surrounded by a Christian environment that makes for righteousness, girls in their late teens and just outside, who have no homes, or homes only in name, can meet and learn to know young men of the right sort is evident to all who have even considered the matter.

When the Great Teacher was here no need escaped his notice. All that he taught and did was in response to _need_. Many of the teachers of to-day are earnestly asking how far they can follow him in this great principle of his life.

When as teachers, interested in what we call the deepest things in the girl's life, we are sometimes impatient with her light-heartedness, with the giggles and boisterous fun and "silliness" of the early teens, and the social tactics and sophistries of the later period, let us remember that the natural, healthy girl is "whole." She is body, mind and spirit, and all three together make her a social being. All three speak in the pa.s.sion to enjoy,-to seek pleasure. And the teacher of girls in their teens is as truly in the service of the living G.o.d when she boards the trolley car and accompanies her girls to the lake for a picnic supper after a day of hard work or study as when teaching them on Sunday the splendid principles that governed Paul's life. She just as truly serves, some cold, rainy, February afternoon as, with two of the girls she wants to know better, she cuts out red hearts to decorate the room for the valentine social to which the members of her cla.s.s have each invited a girl not specially interested in the Sunday-school as when she talks over on Sunday, "Serve the Lord with gladness," for on Sunday she is telling them how to serve and on Tuesday she is showing them how through her own action. And they understand and are more willing to listen as she strives to impress upon mind and heart the facts and ideals that shall keep them steady, pure and true amidst all the distractions and temptations of the world's good time.

If the teacher once catches a glimpse of the significant fact that a girl can not play wrong and pray right, a new realization of the importance of the social side will stir her to action and send her out to seek help from all who are willing to aid in the solution of the world problem, of how to satisfy the social nature in ways that make for character.

CHAPTER VI-HER RELATION TO THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL

That the Sunday-school has no relation whatever to vast numbers of girls in their teens is a fact apparent to any one interested in the girlhood of that period. And it is a fact of tremendous significance.

It means that at the time when the religious sense is keenly responsive, when the mental faculties are alert, when the physical is a.s.serting itself with all its power for good or evil, the girl in large numbers is not getting definite, systematic instruction from the best book of ethics, morals and religion that the world has known. She is not being brought face to face each week with questions that have to do with her own welfare, and that of the world, nor is she being led to think definitely of her personal relation to the church and its work for mankind. Unless she is in some way led to think along these lines all the myriad little interests that call to her from the outside world slowly crowd out the more real and uplifting thoughts and influences.

Every one, even in mature life, needs to come regularly into contact with influences that tend to lift him up and woo him away from the domination of the petty and material, and even more is it needed during the years when character is taking definite form.

No girl can afford to lower her ideals or even to allow them to become tarnished. Life apart from contact with religion in some form seems to do that. Men in later years seem often to recover the ideals lost during their teens; women seldom do.

So even a glance at the problem shows one that the first thing for the Sunday-school to do is to establish a relations.h.i.+p between itself and the mult.i.tudes of girls in their teens.

The best way to do this, as any teacher knows, is to keep a strong hold on the girls who have been regular in attendance up to twelve years of age. With these girls as a nucleus, it is easier to make definite effort to gain new members and to make the cla.s.s so attractive that they will stay.

When the teacher has resolved to make the effort to reach out for the girl who is leaving the Sunday-school in large numbers, the clear and challenging question, "What makes a cla.s.s attractive to the girl in her teens?" immediately presents itself.

In the first place, the Sunday-school as a whole makes a great difference to the girl in her teens. She likes enthusiasm, the impression that the school is popular with its students, that indefinite atmosphere which makes her know that pupils and teachers alike enjoy the hour and come because they want to. A superintendent who is popular with young people, who is thoroughly likable, is almost indispensable in the teen age. The Sunday-school choir with fortnightly rehearsals, if impossible to meet oftener, is a great help, and after a year or two of training will do splendid work. I have in mind a school where the organized choir meets only once a month. The music for the next few Sundays is practised; those who are to be soloists or those to sing the duets are chosen; light refreshments are served by the committee from the choir, and a most enjoyable evening spent. The regular attendance of the choir at Sunday-school has been remarkable, and a number of new members gained.

The same methods can be used with a Sunday-school orchestra when there are enough members who play the various instruments.

The girl in her teens enjoys and responds to the well-arranged program when the prayers, the responses and the whole order of service are dignified and impressive. Just watch the college girl and her younger sister in the preparatory school at chapel and you can read her response in her face. She enjoys variety, too, and the program which remains in use so long that after three years' absence she can come back and go through it exactly as it was when she left, is not the kind likely to appeal to her.

We have seen in our previous studies that the girl in her teens is in love with real life. She likes people, and the Sunday-school lesson must discuss real people and present problems if it is to deeply interest her.

I was present recently in a cla.s.s of twelve girls about sixteen years old. Nine members of the cla.s.s were supposed to be "heathen" and three girls were to tell any one of the parables as if for the first time to these people, anxious and curious to learn of the Christian faith. The interest was very real. After the telling of each parable the cla.s.s discussed it and what it would mean to a people hearing it for the first time. "The Sowing of the Seed," "The Good Samaritan," and "The Ten Talents" were told. At the close the teacher told very vividly of an experience of a dear friend of hers who sat one day in the great plaza of a Mexican city, and told the story of the lost coin to a Mexican woman who wore a bracelet of old and curious coins. The account of the response of this Mexican who heard the story for the first time made a great impression upon me, as upon every member of the cla.s.s. The teacher then appointed three girls for the next week to tell any one of the experiences of Jesus on his preaching tours as they would tell it to a group of factory girls who had neglected church for years and almost forgotten how to pray. Several protested that such girls would not listen, and the discussion as to their needs, what they had to help them live pure, true lives, what had made them careless and indifferent, was brought to a close by the quiet question of the teacher, "Do these girls need Christ or his teaching?"

They said, "yes," with conviction, and in answer she said, "Then there must be a way to tell what he said and thought so that they will listen; perhaps next Sunday one of our girls will find the way, and I have a most interesting story to tell of a splendid factory girl who herself found a way."

That lesson did so many things for that cla.s.s of girls. It made them think. First they had to be able to tell the stories Christ told. The cla.s.s in discussion had to think of the adaptability of the story to the people who needed to hear it, and of all it could mean to them.

They felt the joy of the one who had the privilege of telling it to the Mexican for the first time. They said themselves that the great army of girls in our factories need Christ. They were to think for a week on how his words might be brought to them. The lesson was left with antic.i.p.ation for next week's story. It was a type of what every lesson should be. It connected the past and present; it touched life in their immediate surroundings and in the uttermost parts of the world; it gave opportunity for original expression and it led to discussion. It reached some conclusions. It appealed to the imagination and emotions and closed with a desire on the part of the pupils to talk more, and know more, and think more.

Perhaps in years to come we shall have good courses of lessons, six or eight weeks in length, which will help the teacher to do just these things. Courses which shall deal with church history for six or eight weeks, then with missions, with charities, with the history of the Bible, with the definite teachings of the New Testament and their relation to society to-day, dealing always with _life_ and always with Christ as the great helper and redeemer of man in his struggles to live aright. While we wait for such courses the individual teacher must attempt, with the material she has, to make real and vital connections with life, broaden the pupil's horizon and increase her desire for knowledge. New courses and better lesson material, either in public school or Sunday-school, never come through folding one's arms and spending one's time criticizing the material at hand, but by using it, changing it, adapting and experimenting with it until something is found which more nearly meets the need. Any teacher now reading this chapter may be the one to discover through her own experience just the material for which teachers of the girl in her teens are waiting. That is the reason every one may teach with courage and joy.