InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network
In today’s Scholar’s Call piece, Paul Yandle meditates on how the experience of teaching shows him more about God, even in those moments when a student’s response is not what the professor was hoping for. [Read more…] about Scholar’s Call: The Student Who Walked Away
“Let not many of you become teachers, my brothers and sisters, knowing that we will experience greater condemnation. For we all stumble in many ways.” (James 3:1-2a my translation).
In James 3:1-2a, James gives a warning to those who are or would be teachers. One should be careful because teachers will be held to a stricter standard. As I teach biblical studies, I take this passage very seriously. James has in mind teachers within a church setting. The role of teacher, mentioned in Acts 13:1 alongside that of prophet, would have been a role that brought honor socially, much as being a professor in most disciplines does today. Apparently people, both fit and unfit, sought the role of teacher. James elaborates on the primary issue for teachers in James 3:2b-12: the tongue. Teachers have significant influence through what they say. There are at least two spheres in which this warning from James is important to me: the church and the classroom. [Read more…] about Bible-Believing Biblical Scholar, Part 2: Integrating Christian Faith and Biblical Scholarship (Scholar’s Compass)
The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. –James 5:16b-18 (NIV)
Learning a language is an exciting endeavor–the beginning of an adventure that leads to new relationships, opportunities, and experiences. As a German instructor, I have the privilege of being a guide in the early stages of this journey, when students progress from knowing almost nothing about German (beyond Bratwurst and Gesundheit) to conversing about their families, childhoods, and dreams for the future–in German! So despite piles of grading and lesson planning, I am thankful for my part in their education.
As significant as these adventures in German are, every semester I am reminded that my classroom intersects with journeys beyond German grammar and culture. In essays entitled “Meine Familie†and in conversations about childhood designed for practicing the past tense, students discuss the brokenness within their homes and hardships they’ve faced. This semester, I have already learned that one of my pupils battled cancer as a child. A young man from a previous semester explained that he was no longer sure where his father lived. Both discussed their situations within the context of a language exercise.
Have you encountered similar situations in your classroom? It is difficult to discern how to help students when their challenges lie beyond our job descriptions. But the New Testament writer James assures us that we have a “powerful and effective†means of supporting them. James goes so far as to compare the Christian’s prayer to the prophet Elijah’s prayer, reminding us that Elijah’s access to God was no greater than ours since he was a “human being, even as we are.†Prayer is powerful and effective because God welcomes his people into his presence–a privilege that Jesus bought for us with his blood (Hebrews 10:19).
So let’s pray diligently for our students. We may be the only ones who have ever prayed for some of them. God has led them to our classrooms so that we can not only support their academic development, but also bring them before the Lord’s throne of mercy. He is showing us–through homework assignments, essays, and classroom interactions–their need for his healing and grace. Whether we’re praying for growth in their knowledge of a subject or grace in difficult personal situations, we can play a significant role in asking for God’s generosity. Join me in praying for our students’ academic success and their physical and emotional health, and that they would love and follow Jesus Christ.
Are there students in your classroom this semester who are in urgent need of prayer?
How can you better integrate prayer into your practices as you prepare and grade?
Dear Father, thank you for the privilege of teaching and for the students you have brought into my classroom this semester. Please give me wisdom as I serve and pray for them. Bless them with academic success and with the peace of your forgiveness and love. Amen.
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Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning by Jose A. Bowen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The subtitle of this book actually explains the attention-grabbing title of this book. Bowen contends that the onslaught of technological resources that in the minds of many jeopardize traditional higher education can in fact enhance the basic thing professors and teachers do in the classroom–advance student learning. And the way this occurs is for those who teach to employ all these technologies outside the classroom, including those beloved PowerPoints!
These along with online lectures, podcasts, emails, Facebook posts, tweets and course management systems can be used to promote outside-the-classroom learning so that interactive and action-based learning in the classroom or lab can take the lecture (often described as the transfer of information from the notes of the teacher to the notes of the student without engaging the minds of either!).
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
– Description of prayer from George Herbert’s poem Prayer (I)
I certainly didn’t expect it. If someone had told me that a seventeenth-century poem called Prayer would capture the imaginations of my undergraduate British literature class, I’d have chuckled gently. My students that semester were thoughtful and full of goodwill, but they didn’t seem extraordinarily interested in seventeenth-century Anglican theology.
In fact, I taught George Herbert’s Prayer (I) mainly because I was also struggling to write my dissertation on Herbert and Donne at the time. I couldn’t resist sneaking a day for each of them into my syllabus, and I hoped that my research and teaching could dovetail at least for those two class periods.
But to my surprise, our classroom conversation about Prayer (I) was one of the most successful discussions all semester. As I read out quotations from the poem and asked what each image meant, thirty students tossed out insights with a fascination that surprised me. [Read more…] about Learning Prayer from George Herbert