Notes and Suggestions to the Teacher

Chapter I

Go yourself frequently into the fields and woods, or into the city parks, or along the water front—anywhere so that you can touch nature directly, and look and listen for yourselves. Don't try to teach what you do not know, and there is nothing in this book that you cannot know, for the lesson  to be taught in each chapter is a spiritual lesson, not a number of bare facts. This spiritual lesson you must first learn before you can teach it—must feel,  I should say; and a single thoughtful excursion alone into the autumn fields will give you possession of it. And what is the lesson in this chapter? Just this: that the strong growths of summer, the ripening of seeds and fruits, the languid lazy spirit, and the pensive signs of coming autumn are all the manifold preparations of nature for a fresh outburst of life with the coming of spring.

Chapter II

I have chosen the fox in this chapter to illustrate the very interesting and striking fact that wild animals, birds and beasts, thrive in the neighborhood of man if given the least protection; for if the fox holds his own (as surely he does) in the very gates of one of the largest cities in the United States, how easy it should be for us to preserve for generations yet the birds and smaller animals! I might have written a very earnest chapter on the need for every pupil's joining the Audubon Society and the Animal Rescue League; but young pupils, no less than their elders, hate to be preached to. So I have recounted a series of short narratives, trusting to the suggestions of the chapter, and to the quiet comment of the teacher to do the good work. Every pupil a protector of wild life is the moral. 

Chapter III

The thought in this chapter is evident, namely, that love for the out of doors is dependent upon knowledge of the out of doors. The more we know  and the better we understand,  the more perfect and marvelous nature seems and the more lovely. The toadfish looks  loathly, but upon closer study he becomes very interesting, even admirable—one of the very foundations of real love. So, as a teacher and as a lover of nature, be careful never to use the words "ugly" or "nasty" or "loathly"; never shrink from a toad; never make a wry face at a worm; never show that you are having a nervous fit at a snake; for it all argues a lack of knowledge and understanding. All life, from Man to the Amœba, is one long series of links in a golden chain, one succession of wonderful life-histories, each vastly important, all making up the divinely beautiful world of life which our lives crown, but of which we are only a part, and, perhaps, no more important a part than the toadfish.

Chapter IV

There are several practical uses to which you can put this chapter, and the similar chapters, VII and XII: they can be made the purpose for field excursions with the class. Such excursions might be quite impossible for many a teacher in school hours; and we know how the exacting duties overcrowd the after-school hours; but one field excursion each season of the year, no matter how precious your time, would do more for you and your class than many books about nature read inside your four plastered walls. Better the books than nothing; but take the book and go with your pupils into the real out of doors.

Again, you can make these chapters a kind of nature test, asking each pupil to try to see each of the things suggested here; or, if these do not chance to be the sights characteristic of the autumn in your region, then such sights as are characteristic. So the chapter can serve as a kind of field guide to the pupil, and a kind of test of his knowledge of nature.

Again, you can make each item mentioned here the subject for a short composition direct from the pupil's experience—the only kind of subject for him to write upon. Or make each item (say, No. IV, the Ballooning Spiders) the beginning for a short course of study or collateral reading for the individual pupil particularly interested in spiders!

Chapter V

The real point of this story (but first of all it is a story and should not be spoiled with any moral) is the thought in the lines:—

"There were thousands of persons who could have gold eggs if they cared. But eagles' eggs! Money could not buy such a sight as this." Which means, that the simple joys of the out of doors, and the possession of youth and health, are better than any joys that money can create, and more precious possessions than all the money in the world can buy. One can get all the thrilling sensations of height by standing up in a quaking eagle's nest sixty feet from the ground, that one can possibly get from the top of the Eiffel Tower or on the peak of Mount Washington, or from a flying-machine among the clouds. And then who among the rich of the world ever saw eagles' eggs in a nest, or had eagles dig him with their talons? To be alive to all the wonder of the life, to all the beauty of the world about us, is the very secret of living. An eagle's nest to climb into is as good as a flying-machine.

Take occasion, too, at the end of the story to say how much better, how much more interesting, an act it was to leave the eggs to hatch than to rob the nest and thus destroy two young eagles. Some years later, for instance, two young eagles were taken from a neighboring nest and were sent to the Zoölogical Gardens at Philadelphia, where they may still be living for thousands of visitors each year to see. Who knows but that one of the parents of these two captive birds may have been in the eggs laid back by the boy in that nest?

Chapter VI

We hear so much of the drudgery of farm life, of its dreariness, and meagre living that this chapter, aside from its picture of cheer and plenty, should be made the text for a good deal of comment upon the many other phases of farm life that make for the fullest kind of existence; namely, the independence of the farmer; the vast and interesting variety of his work; his personal contact with domestic animals, his fruit-trees, garden, and fields of grain; his intimate acquaintance with the weather; his great resourcefulness in meeting insect plagues, blights, and droughts; his out-of-door life that makes him strong and long-lived, etc., etc.

If you are a country teacher it is one of your great missions to show the boys that they should stay upon the farm, or rather that the farm is a good place to stay on for life; if you are a city teacher it should be your mission to head many a boy countryward for life with the understanding that it requires more sound sense and resourcefulness to make a successful farmer than it does to make a bank president.

Chapter VII

Suggestions as to the practical uses to which this chapter can be put may be gathered from the notes to chapter iv and chapter xii , each of which is similar to this one.

Chapter VIII

This chapter and the next (Chapter IX) should be taken together as a single study of the provision of nature against the severity of winter's cold, Chapter VIII being a detailed account of one creature's preparations, while Chapter IX follows, showing how the foresight and care obtain even among the plants and trees. The two chapters together should give the pupils a glad thought for winter, should utterly change their conventional language and feeling for it as a time of death.  And instead of lamenting the season as a necessary evil, you must show them that it is to be welcomed as a period of sleep for nature from which she will waken in all the freshness of a springtime such as is nowhere to be had outside of the temperate zone. "It is not always May," wails the poet; but ask them: Who wants it always May? We want the variety, the contrasts of our four seasons, and as to winter, let the North Wind blow at will, redden our cheeks, quicken our step, put purpose into our wills and—it won't starve us; for we, too, like the muskrat, are provided for.

Chapter IX

Let the pupils continue this list of examples of winter preparations by watching and observing for themselves. Every field, every tree, every roadside, will reveal the work done or going on under their eyes. Without preaching you may draw many an interesting and telling parallel with their own preparation—in school for instance.

Chapter X

Perhaps you are in a crowded school-room in the heart of a great city. What can you do for your pupils there? But what can't  you do? You have a bit of sky, a window surely, an old tin can for earth, a sprig of something to plant—and surely you have English sparrows behind the rain pipe or shutter! You may have the harbor too, and water-front with its gulls and fish, and the fish stores with their windows full of the sea. You have the gardens and parks, burial-grounds and housetops, bird stores, museums—why, bless you, you have the hand-organ man and his monkey; you have—but I have mentioned enough. It is a hungry little flock that you have to feed, too, and no teacher can ask more.

Chapter XI

This is a chapter on the large wholesomeness of contact with nature; that even the simple, humble tasks out of doors are attended with a freedom and a naturalness that restore one to his real self by putting him into his original primitive environment and by giving him an original primitive task to do.

Then, too, how good a thing it is to have something alive and responsive to work for—if only a goat or a pig! Take occasion to read to the class Lamb's essay on Roast Pig—even fifth grade pupils will get a lasting picture from it.

Again— and this is the apparent purpose of the chapter—how impossible it is to go into the woods with anything—a hay-rake—and not find the woods interesting!

Chapter XII

Notice again that in the three chapters on things to see and do and hear a few of the characteristic  sights and sounds and doings have been mentioned. Let the whole teaching of these three chapters be to quicken the pupil to look for and listen for the dominant, characteristic sights and sounds of the season, as he must be trained to look for and listen for the characteristic notes and actions of individual things—birds, animals, flowers. If, for instance, his eye catches the galloping, waving motion of the woodpecker's flight, if his ear is trained to distinguish the rappings of the same bird on a hollow limb or resonant rail, then the pupil knows  that bird and has clues to what is strange in his plumage, his anatomy, his habits, his family traits.

The world outdoors is all a confusion until we know how to separate and distinguish things; and there is no better training for this than to get in the way of looking and listening for what is characteristic.

Each locality differs, however, to some extent in its wild life; so that some of the sounds  in this chapter may need to have others substituted to meet those differences. Remember that you  are the teacher, not the book. The book is but a suggestion. You begin where it leaves off; you fill out where it is lacking. A good book is a very good thing; but a good teacher is a very much better thing.

Chapter XIII

Let the chapter be read aloud by one pupil, with as much feeling as possible to the paragraph beginning, "I love the sound of the surf," etc.; for this part is story, action, movement. Do not try to teach  anything in this half. Let some other thoughtful pupil read the next section as far as, "Honk, honk, honk,"  beginning the third paragraph from the end. This contains the lesson, the moral, and if you stop anywhere to talk about bird-protection, do it here. Let a third pupil read the rest of the chapter. Better than a moral lesson directly taught (and such lessons are much like doses of castor oil) will be the touching of the child's imagination by the picture of the long night-flight high up in the clouds. Read them "To a Water Fowl," by Bryant; and also some good account of migration like that by D. Lange ("The Great Tidal Waves of Bird-Life") in the Atlantic  Monthly  for August, 1909. Read to them Audubon's account of the wild goose, in his "Birds."