Wednesday September 30, 2009
The joy of teaching
By Jim Taylor
Next Monday, October 5, will be World Teachers’ Day.
The United Nations launched the first World Teachers’ Day October 5, 1994. It has been largely ignored on the same date every year since then.
And that’s tragic. Because if our worldwide civilizations are ever going to drag themselves out of the slough of ignorance, prejudice, and bigotry they’re mired in, it will only be through education.
The most stupid thing the Campbell government in B.C. has done, in my opinion, was to pinch pennies on education funding. A school, remarked author Lon Watters, “is a building that has four walls, with tomorrow inside.”
Or as business consultant Andy McIntyre put it, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!”
(Confession: I filched several of these quotations from Education International, a federation representing some 30 million teachers in 172 countries and territories.)
Learning to learn
In the explosion of knowledge that has come in the last century, we are increasingly dependent on teachers. Few parents can adequately prepare their children for the modern world. The best that we parents, and grandparents, can do is to foster an attitude towards this mushroom cloud of information. But teaching how to make sense of that cloud, how to sift relevant information from irrelevant, requires professional skills.
Author John Holt – ironically, a proponent of home schooling – commented, “Since we can’t know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.”
Good teachers instill that love of learning. Bad teachers destroy it. I’m astonished how many people tell me they can’t sing, because their Grade One teacher told them to stand at the back and just move their mouths.
They also learn not to raise their hands, not to volunteer, for fear of ridicule – either from the teacher directly, or indirectly from classmates.
New kind of illiteracy
Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton has been often ridiculed himself for opening a novel with the cliché, “It was a dark and stormy night…” But he suggests wisely, “The best teacher is the one who inspires a listener to teach himself.”
Bad teachers tend to value order and discipline, believing themselves to be in control. Mark Twain famously described a classroom as “trying to hold 35 corks under water at the same time."
Good teachers, on the other hand, seem to revel in the chaos that often accompanies spontaneous discovery.
I know I’m coming close to treading on a landmine here, but our current pre-occupation with healthcare strikes me as a lesser concern. As American educator Ernest Leroy Boyer noted, “A poor surgeon hurts one person at a time. A poor teacher hurts thirty.”
One final quotation, this one from Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, The Third Wave, and Powershift: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn
Lots of mail about last week’s column, on whether the Bible is literally the “word of God” or not. I admit that I’m a little surprised, but grateful.
Sandra Sellars wrote, “Thank you, thank you, thank you! This is so helpful for me as I struggle with the Bible in the context of heaven and hell, Satan and God, etc.”
Similarly, this from Dave Klepper: “Really liked/resonated with your column.”
And this from Don Sandin: “Thanks for this statement on the Bible. I wish that there were more people who would seek to clarify the nature of the Bible and its many contradictions. Your statements are clear, logical and credible.”
Don also forwarded a comment by John Spong, in response to a question about how Spong’s beliefs might have changed.
“God is no longer a person, a being or an entity to me,” Spong wrote. “God is rather a presence in whom, to use words attributed to St. Paul, ‘I live and move and have my being.’ The ‘old man in the sky’ was the first image to go, then the heavenly judge who kept record books, and finally the father figure who desired praise and whose mercy I implored. The interesting thing to me was that while these old images were fading, the God intensity within me remained steady and steadfast. Today I am a God-intoxicated person, but my definition of God is anything but crisp and well defined. I struggle to find words big enough to use when I try to talk about God. God to me is now more of an experience of transcendence… God to me is a call to live fully, to love wastefully, and to be all that I can be.
“I now call myself a mystic because in my understanding of God I have gone beyond words into a kind of wordless wonder, awe and mystery. This is not where I was a decade ago. I doubt if it will be where I am a decade from now, but it is where I am today and it represents the evolving, growing frontier…”
Jim Henderschedt picked up on another element of the column: “I really appreciated this installment of soft edges. I would be interested in having you say more about ‘the freedom not to believe some of the things that no longer make sense.’ This is where I am on my spiritual journey, especially calling into question some of the things we recite without thought in both the Nicene and Apostle’s Creed. I also think it is time that it is realized by those who compose our liturgies that though we are sinful, there are times when by accident or design we are faithful to God, loving to our neighbor and do give a cup of water to a thirsty stranger.
“I also am intrigued by your view of the emerging paradigm of the church instead of the emerging church.”
Carolyn Terry sent some of her own story: “Many years ago, I went to a lecture on Hinduism, and the lecturer said, ‘Christianity is essentially a set of precepts which you have to believe, whereas Hinduism is an experience which you have.’ How ever did that come to be? Jesus never said anything like that!
“Many years ago, I became an atheist. Some friends gave me a very convincing argument against God’s existence. But I wasn’t able to give up praying! When I was scared and anxious, I begged God for help. So I had to stop being an atheist.
“There is a kind of belief that is deeper than intellectual assent,” Carolyn concluded, “and that’s the kind of belief that matters. It’s not reciting a creed, ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble.’ It’s more like, ‘Lord, I want to be like Jesus, in-a my heart.’ It’s how you behave when everything is going wrong.”
Amen.
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About My Paraphrases
Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
If you know someone else who might like to receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to jimt@quixotic.ca. Or, if you wish, forward them a copy of this column. But please put your name on it, so they don’t think I’m sending out spam.
For a lighter look at life, faith, and the lectionary, I recommend my friend Ralph Milton’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it by sending a note to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
For other web links worth pursuing, try
- Charlene Fairchild’s United Online site,
- David Keating’s “SeemslikeGod” page
- The Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity home page
- Dan Strizek’s Gathering Place for Creation Spirituality
- Alva Wood’s satiric stories about small town attitudes and bumbling bureaucrats are not particularly religious, but good fun anyway; write alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
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