Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Teachers

  • Psalm 119:99 – Teachers

    Psalm 119:99 – Teachers

    I have more understanding than all my teachers,
    for your testimonies are my meditation.

    It’s nice to do a meditation based on a text about meditation!

    The advantage and disadvantage of a meditation, as opposed to exegesis of a passage is that your meditation can lead you in a direction other than what the writer was intending. I did that today. I meditated about teaching.

    The first question that crossed my mind was how could I, as a teacher, keep my students from deciding they are wiser than I am since they meditate on God’s testimonies. An immediate answer came to mind. If I, as a teacher, am meditating on God’s testimonies, doesn’t that keep me ahead?

    It wasn’t long, however, before I was asking myself whether I should be concerned if my students were, or become, wiser than I am. And there’s an immediate answer to that. If I’m worried about my students getting ahead of me in any way, I have the wrong attitude. I should be delighted if any student of mine is wiser than I am or learns more about the subjects I teach than I know.

    Some years ago my nephew introduced me to someone as “the person who taught him how to program.” That’s true in only a most minor sense. I helped him with a few things when he was just starting out. He’s now a senior software engineer at Google and knows things in depth that I have no understanding of at all. And I’m very, very proud of him.

    The possibility of seeding some small thing into the life of a student and then seeing that student reach heights the teacher has not imagined is, I believe, as great a joy as any teacher can have.

    Now there are those, especially in religion and theology, who think the task of a teacher is to make sure the student stays on the straight and narrow way. The student must learn to believe the same things and teach the same things as the teacher, or the teacher has failed. If that is the goal, then the Psalm 119:99 student would mark failure, and the teacher would forever have to deny the insights of the student.

    I was to teach at a conference on prayer many years ago. I expected to have an hour, and I had a good hour’s worth of notes. Those who know me will realize that I only use notes to keep myself on the program. If I don’t use notes, I can easily fill an hour, and then the next, and so forth. Notes are, for me, a necessary discipline, telling me when to shut up!

    In this case, previous speakers kept pushing things later and later, and I realized that unless I wanted to keep people from their lunch, which the conference leader would doubtless not allow, I’d have less time. I kept hearing the nudge of the Holy Spirit: “Let me do the teaching.” So I chopped my notes down to size, and given a half hour, I took 20 minutes. Again, those who know me, will realize the miraculous nature of this self-restraint!

    Following that session I was approached by one pastor. I won’t go into the details, but that contact became one of the most encouraging and helpful contacts of my life. I’m pretty certain it wouldn’t have happened if I had been my normal wordy self. And I would definitely say that pastor, my student for 20 minutes, has more understanding than at least this teacher.

    Who can you encourage today to go beyond your example, your teaching, or even your imagination?

    (Featured image credit: Jovanmandic, licensed via iStockPhoto.com)

  • And on the Other Side: Merit Pay for Teachers

    I marked this story a couple of days ago. In my view, merit pay is such an obvious idea, not to mention merit hiring, merit promotion, and lack-of-merit firing, that I don’t see why it would be controversial, except, of course, amongst those who lack merit.

    But there is one valid area of controversy–measuring merit. Whatever you tie merit to will be what teachers must strive for. If that’s graduation, you’ll get one result. If that’s success in college, you’ll get another. If it’s standardized tests, then you’re going to get people taught to pass the standardized tests.

    But in my view the value of paying people by merit is so important that we need to work through the controversy of how to measure it. That pay should be by merit should be firmly fixed. Then we should find a mix of standards by which to measure such merit.

    I’m personally not all that excited about standardized tests, but they do provide something that is less subject to manipulation. With a longer view, one could use measures of success after students leave school.

    I must leave one caveat–I don’t trust the school board around here all that much, so I’m not sure that they would be paying for merit. I’m not sure they’d recognize it. Hmmm! Maybe we should do some “lack-of-merit” firing on school boards.

  • Blocking a Federal Education Grant

    While I know that some forms of determining merit pay for teachers can be unfair, in general I think tying pay to performance is an excellent, indeed necessary idea.

    Now the Florida Education Association is trying to block $700 million in grants from the federal government because it’s tied to incentive pay.

    Bad idea, I’d say!

  • Practical Ideas for Teacher Training

    Well, Clix went and got all practical on me after she commented on a previous post here. She expressed some discomfort with my call for teachers to be one of the highest paid professions. What about people who are just in it for the money?

    Her post is about practical ideas for better teacher training and for teachers who want to make themselves better. I think it would be great to have quite a number of such posts and to see a discussion of improving teacher education, teacher quality, retention, and respect.

    In my professional life I deal mostly with volunteers, such as Sunday School teachers and small group leaders. It’s nice to have those who are professionally involved speak out!

    Go check it out.