Tag: teaching

Thoughts on Modern Education

How do students best learn? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

It was in my Greek class a few semesters ago, which I did just fine in, that i started thinking about the education system. I remembered that before a test, I had been looking at the paradigms. I could recognize them, but when it came to writing them down, my mind went to a blank.

I have a good relationship with my professor so I saw him in his office after and showed him Parson’s Greek Tutor on my laptop. I went to the section that mirrored what we just studied and showed him how effortlessly I was able to recognize the paradigms. He understood and upped my grade some. I likened it to that if I am playing a game on my Switch or Playstation and you join in and ask me what button I push to do an action, I have to look and see what button I am pushing, even though I push it regularly on instinct.

This got me pondering about why it is that this was not working for me in Greek. If anything, Parson’s Tutor was an excellent program for me. I am currently trying to talk to some Greek experts to see if they would be willing to have some students make a Greek indie game so that students could better learn Greek.

Quick. Write down what slope-intercept form is.

When did the Battle of the Bulge take place?

What exactly is mitosis?

What is included in the definition of velocity?

Who crossed the Alps with elephants to attack Rome?

What is a gerund?

What is included in the 7th amendment?

Some of you may know some of these things. A lot of you are probably going to Google right now and looking them up. My point in asking these questions is that at some point, you likely did know what these are and you forgot them. Why? You learned them for a test in school to pass a subject. After that, you never used them again and they bore no relevance, so you forgot them.

Now think about these other kinds of questions.

What is the Konami code?

What are the stats on your favorite sports team?

When was your favorite TV show on the air?

How many songs can you sing by your favorite artist by heart?

Give me twenty people at Hogwart’s from the Harry Potter franchise.

Tell me ten planets in the Star Wars universe.

If I ask you about these kinds of things and they are things you care about, you know them like that. I could easily tell you the Konami code, a lot of students and faculty at Hogwart’s, and I can tell you most anything you want to know about Smallville. The last one I knew so well I could have easily fact-checked the magazine I used to read.

Notice this also. Many of these things you know, you learned without having to intentionally study for them or take tests on them. It was never the case that you said “I’d better bone up on my favorite football team statistics because my friends are going to quiz me when we get together.” You likely never stayed up all night memorizing all the lyrics to every Weird Al Yankovic song you could. (Not that that would be a waste of time if you did.) You learned these because they were presented in a way that engaged you and were relevant to you.

When students in school ask “What’s the point?” or “When am I ever going to use this?”, if we can’t answer those questions, they won’t likely take the material being learned seriously.

To compare when I was in this class, I had Nintendo Switch online and went through the original Legend of Zelda, both quests, and A Link to the Past. I never did formal study on these games and even though it had been years since my last playthrough, I could still go and find everything in them and finish them. You can say it’s useless knowledge, but the point is I learned it and I learned it because for me, it was relevant to me. Being good at games mattered to me. It still does.

It is my personal theory that if we want students to learn material, we need to make it engaging for them. That’s one reason I love the pop culture and philosophy series. I could introduce you to philosophy with a textbook that will likely bore you to tears, or I could introduce you by having you read something like Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul. If you are a Batman fan, then you are going to see philosophy in a way relevant to one of your favorite superheroes.

It’s also worthwhile to point out that we talk about that a professor gives in a classroom as a lecture. When we go to church, we hear a sermon. On their own, neither of those are positive terms. We tell people we don’t need a lecture or a sermon and not to preach at us.

This also has relevance to how we even spread the gospel.

But that is what I plan on for tomorrow.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

 

How To Ace Bible Trivia

Is answering trivia the goal? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

A few days ago at my workplace, I found an item someone decided not to purchase that had been left behind. It was a book for middle schoolers on how to ace a world history exam. As I saw it, I thought that is part of the problem with the education system today. We teach students how to pass tests. They are taught knowledge for the sake of knowledge. They are not taught how to apply it.

When we don’t see the relevance of something to our lives, we quickly forget it. I can remember how to get through levels on video games I played decades ago, but I don’t remember a bit how to do quadratic equations, with respect to my algebra teacher. Why is that? Because I have never once had to use the process to do quadratic equations, but I sure have played my share of video games.

Fortunately, this doesn’t go on in the church. In the church, we only learn what is relevant to our lives. We don’t just give information so we will know stuff. We show the relevance of….oh please stop laughing already.

Yes. This is exactly what we do in the church. Let’s take something simple. We teach our children the ten commandments. Okay. That’s good. Why do we follow them? Don’t murder? That seems like an obvious one, but why not? Why is murder condemned? How many of us as young children also cited “Do not commit adultery”, but we had no clue what adultery was?

We teach our children how to do Bible drills. Congratulations! You can look up Philippians 4:13 faster than anyone else in the church! What good will that do you if you don’t have a clue what the passage really means? If we teach them anything about verses, well, it’s all about them. Philippians 4:13 is not about the glory of Christ, but it is about winning football games.

Don’t forget the trips that we send them on! They go on these trips that are youth conferences and come back and get super excited and want to tell the world about Jesus and life is awesome!

For about a week or two if that long.

After that, it’s right back to the same old thing.

If all we are teaching our youth is the content of the Bible, we are failing them. This is nothing against said content. This is just saying that we need to know the relevance of the content. We don’t need just pieces of Christianity. We need a whole tapestry of Christianity woven together so the students do see the importance and relevance of it in their daily lives.

Otherwise, the guy is with the girl and they’re alone together and she starts coming on really strong to him. So here he has a hot girl that he will really want to be intimate with and on the other hand, he has a verse in his head saying “Do not commit adultery” with no reason why other than don’t. Which one is he going to listen to? Now imagine instead if he has a whole biblical worldview on sex and marriage and understands based on that the importance of waiting for marriage and how giving in to temptation dishonors the God He serves who is to be His king?

Folks. It’s not enough anymore to just teach our youth facts about the Bible. They will forget them just as quickly as we forget things in school we don’t deem relevant to our lives. They need to be taught a whole worldview, a whole curriculum. They need to be taught about how every facet of their lives intersects with Christianity. It can’t just be about them. We also don’t just teach them isolated verses. We teach them the context of those verses and how they apply.

In the end, they’ll have a greatly informed biblical worldview that does apply to them to help them in their lives.

And they’ll probably still rock at Bible drills anyway.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

By Their Fruits

Who will we recognize? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

My interpretation of this passage is really different from many others. This is the one that says you will know people by their fruits. Many of us apply that to regular Christians that we meet everyday, but I wonder if since the next section talks about those claiming to speak in Jesus’s name if Jesus has more in mind prophets claiming to speak for Him and that those you will know by their fruits.

In other words, look at the kind of lifestyles leaders will hold as those would also be seen as prophets in the sense of teachers who speak with authority. While Christian leaders should often lead the best lives, too often we seem to live the worst lives. Naturally, the media loves it whenever a scandal breaks out involving a Christian leader.

If a person is a Christian leader truly, their lives will reflect their devotion to Christ. This doesn’t mean perfection. None of us have that and it’s ridiculous to demand it. It means overall that that person produces far more in character with Christ than the other way around.

This would also I think include the reliability of their statements, especially along the lines of when someone claims to hear from God. My advice to you is when someone tells you God told them something or the Spirit is showing them something, be on guard. I wouldn’t believe it unless they tell you something specific, not vague, that they couldn’t have known any other way.

I would also include the more subtle ideas of this. I see no basis for the idea that the Spirit leads us through our feelings, but many Christians will say that regularly. I remember in an old church I used to attend that the associate pastor at the time of offering used to say “Give as you feel led” and I was tempted to go up so many times and very publicly put in a penny and say “That’s what I feel led to give.” Who could argue against me?

Jesus’s warning is a serious one. At the next entry, we’ll see that not everyone who claims to speak for God really is speaking for God. Look at the character of the person you encounter and the way they claim to speak. Do they line up? Many people have been damaged by people claiming to speak for God.

Above all, watch yourself. How is your life? It’s easy to complain about the rest of the church, but that just takes our eyes off of ourselves, the one person we can do something about directly.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)