Almost Obnoxious - Part 4 - Academically Equip, Challenge, and Inspire

Last week, I talked about how our school spiritually equips, challenges, and inspires our students as part of our mission statement.  We are aware, however, that our school is not a church.  It is a school.  Thus, the other part of our mission, to academically equip, challenge, and inspire.

Equip
The academic equipping of students is the mission of all schools, and it is no small task.  Let's first address what it is not.  Academically equipping students does not mean teaching them every skill they may need in life.  We are not in the business of teaching them to cook and sew buttons (though I have nothing against a good home ec class).  We are not teaching them to repair a transmission (again, no problem with schools offering a shop class).  If you are a parent who wants your kids to know those things, please teach them to your children.  We are also not attempting to teach every piece of content they need to know for any career they may choose.  For one thing, that isn't possible.  There would just be too many things to know.  Also, they may have careers that do not currently exist. 

What does it mean to academically equip?  It means teaching them how to learn.  A few years ago, our graduation speaker said, "An educated person doesn't know everything; but in a pinch, he can learn anything."  That perfectly sums up the way I see my job.  In the same way you don't lift weights because the weight needs to be off the ground but because it trains the muscle, academic content, while important, mostly serves as a vehicle for the training of the brain.  Equipping students with the ability to learn is how they become prepared for whatever life may throw their way.

Challenge
What does it mean to academically challenge?  Again, I would start with what it is not.  Academically challenging students does not mean giving them more work or harder work to do.  While GRACE does have a rigorous curriculum, our mission to challenge them comes from asking them to raise their level of thinking.  Creating a base knowledge is important in any subject, but asking them to apply that knowledge to the problems of the world is what creates the challenge.  Our science department asks students to examine their impact on the environment, create a plan for growing crops more efficiently, and propose solutions to some of the problems in the developing world (lack of access to clean water, electricity, etc.).  Our math department challenges them to design a tiny house and decide whether it might be a feasible solution for people experiencing homelessness.  Last year, our 8th-grade English teacher allowed students to put the book they were reading "on trial" to defend whether or not it should remain a part of the curriculum.  These sorts of projects push the knowledge students have learned far beyond the surface level of understanding that a simple multiple choice test measures.

Inspire
As I mentioned last week, inspiration is not something we can accomplish.  We can't write academically inspire into a lesson plan.  It's something that happens because of the magical combination of the right student having the right teacher learning the right content.  What inspires one student won't necessarily inspire the student next to him.  Every teacher has some students who think they are the best while others in the same class can't stand them (which is why you can't base your feelings about your career on their feedback).  God brings the right teacher into a student's life at the right time to help shape that student.  It's something that only He can plan.

Next week, I'll address the ultimate goal of all of this, that our students "impact their world for Christ."

Almost Obnoxious - Part 3 - Spiritually Equip, Challenge, and Inspire

Our mission statement hangs on three walls of my classroom.  It hangs in the school lobby.  I walk past it a couple of hundred times a day.  In case you haven't been reading this series, it says,

"GRACE Christian School is a loving community that spiritually and academically equips, challenges, and inspires students to impact their world for Christ."

Read again.  There are parts of it that I am skilled to do, and there are parts of it that WE are skilled to do.  There are parts of it, however, that are, in fact impossible.  That doesn't mean we should change our mission.  Quite the contrary.  It means, we have to call in the big guns.  The portion of our mission statement that says we will "spiritually . . . equip, challenge, and inspire" is not within our power.  It is only possible if we are daily putting this part of our mission in the hands of God.

I don't know if you have ever written a mission statement with a group of people.  You wouldn't believe how long it takes to dissect each phrase and word.  The first draft of this statement only included the word "equips."  Some of the teacher in the room felt that word was too small, that it made it sound like we only did the minimum.  While I disagreed, I certainly understood how, if they thought that others might as well.  We spent several minutes brainstorming other words with the intent of replacing the word equipped.  When we were through, the three favorite words were "challenges and inspires," and there were a few people who still fought for the word "equips."  We ended up keeping all three words, not because it was easier, but because each of those words means something different that we agreed we wanted for our students.  Let's look at each of them.

Equip
 As I said earlier, there was a contingent in favor of this word because it means giving students what they need.  Imagine that you are an astronaut being sent on a mission.  You would expect NASA to equip you with training time and manuals, a suit, oxygen, biomonitors, etc.  You would expect that the ship would be equipped with fuel, safety devices and procedures, food and water that can be consumed in microgravity, waste disposal equipment, electrical systems, and guidance computers.  As you can see, equipping is hardly a small thing.

When we set out to spiritually equip students, the job is daunting.  We have chapel and Bible classes.  Our English classes teach students to analyze literature, and those skills are useful for Bible analysis as well.  We converse with our students often about spiritual issues.  Tomorrow, our high school students leave for a spiritual retreat, in which they will hear sermons but also be broken into smaller groups to discuss topics that have been specifically chosen for them by the faculty and staff.  While there may be people who thought of this word as small, you can see that God must be the one who does the equipping because it is too big a job for us.

Challenge
Challenging students comes with the job description of any teacher.  English teachers challenge students to raise their level of writing and increase their vocabulary.  Science teachers challenge students to ask big questions and draw conclusions from things they observe.  Foreign language teachers challenge students to speak when it is not comfortable to do so.  In Christian education, all of those things are still there, but we are also tasked with challenging our students to stand up to the influence of their culture, one that is increasingly secular and even militantly atheist.  Sometimes, it feels a bit like we are standing in a raging storm with the culture flashing lightning and blaring thunder, while we shout at our students to fight back.  It would be easy to give up on this if it were up to us.  Fortunately, God will challenge their hearts.  We, their teachers, are merely the tools he uses to do so.

Inspires
If there is any word in the mission statement that I know for sure I am incapable of achieving, it is this one.  I can teach.  I can talk.  I can design lessons.  I can give students opportunities.  I cannot inspire.  Only God can do that, so we as teachers should pray each day that he will.

Almost Obnoxious - Part 2 - Loving Community

GRACE Christian School is a loving community that spiritually and academically equips, challenges, and inspires students to impact their world for Christ.

Last week, I began a series of posts on my school's mission statement, explaining what it meant to be GRACE Christian School.  This week, I continue with the next phrase - Loving Community.

The faculty and staff at GRACE are all in, completely committed to creating a loving community for our students, for their families, and for each other.  I'd like to give a few arenas in which this happens and then address one big challenge.

In Our Classrooms
This is the first place a loving community must start.  Students must know that their teachers love them.  That will look different in a high school class than it does in a first-grade class.  It will involve different activities in math than it does in history.  In some classes, it looks like holding to a strict standard even when a student is asking you not to (which may not feel loving to them at the time but comes from the teacher knowing what is good for the student in the long term).  When teachers love their students, there are a few things that are ALWAYS there, no matter the grade level.

1.  We make decisions that have been well thought through rather than just reacting to the moment. It is unloving to give them what they want rather than what they need.
2.  We take the time to plan lessons that matter.  It is unloving to waste their time.
3.  We listen to students.  It is unloving to talk at them all the time rather than conversing with them.

4.  We give students the opportunity to grow.  It is unloving to give a student a good grade because you have held low expectations.  If they aren't better when they leave you than they were when they came, you have not loved them.

In the Cafeteria, Athletic Events, Concerts, Plays, etc.
Because our classrooms are places to do business, there is little time to have deep conversations with students about how much we care about them.  (I'm not saying there is no time, but you can't spend so much class time discussing personal things that we don't do what we are there to do.)  When you are at a game, however, there is a built-in assumption that this is a more casual time when we can chat.  I'm not teaching a science lesson in the bleachers (well, sometimes, I do talk about the physics of the sport because I just can't help myself).  Lunch duty is a great time to compliment a kid's taste in clothes or joke with them about a mutual favorite tv show.  Attending their activities, outside of the school day (or even outside of the school), communicates love in a way words cannot.  I'm not saying you need to devote every night of the week to your students, especially if you have a family; but if you attended something once a month of the school year, you would have shown love to your students at nine events.  Maybe your family would enjoy the Christmas concert.  Depending on the play, your kids might love to attend a production.  Some of our teachers bring their spouses to chaperone dances.  I don't know about the kids in your school, but GRACE kids seem to really love it. 

In Your Prayer Life
I am fortunate enough to be in a school where I can pray with my students.  You may not be, but you can pray for them.  It is the ultimate loving act.  It is also a way of finding a way to love the kid that drives you crazy.  My English teacher friend tells her own personal children that you cannot hate someone while you are praying for them.  You can pray for them when they are sick or injured, of course, but you can also pray that God will use you to help them find and develop their gifts. 

With Your Colleagues 
GRACE teachers love each other in an almost obnoxious way.  When one of us has a problem, we rally around each other like you wouldn't believe.  We enjoy each other, laugh together, pray together, and encourage each other's lessons.  You may be in a less supportive environment; but if you can find even one colleague to enjoy, support, and be supported by, you will be glad you did.

Teachers helping each other on graduation night

THE CHALLENGE
Creating a loving community is hard work.  A school is building full of sinners, so there are personality conflicts, egos, gossip, etc. just like there is anywhere else.  That's challenging enough just among adults.  Add to it the fact that we are spending our day with kids, and it is an even bigger challenge.  You can't have a loving community if the kids don't invest in it as well.  This requires implementing policies, activities, and programs that give kids the opportunity to exercise love.  It means modeling love for them and apologizing to them when you fall short.  It requires calling them out when they fall short and giving them opportunities for redemption.  None of this is easy, but it is rewarding.

Almost Obnoxious - Part 1 - GRACE Christian School

In a recent meeting, the head of school said that we should be almost obnoxious about carrying out our mission.  I like this phrase and kind of want it on a T-shirt.  I would put the mission statement on the back; it would be great.  Since that would be pretty expensive, I'll have to be almost obnoxious in other ways, like having the mission statement displayed in my classroom in three places (every wall seemed obnoxious, so three seemed almost obnoxious) and using my blog to really dive deeply into our mission by dissecting it into phrases and discussing how each one plays out in the classroom.  Let me begin with the following disclaimer:  I have not run any of this by my administration.  These thoughts are completely my own.

Our mission statement says, "GRACE Christian School is a loving community that spiritually and academically equips, challenges, and inspires students to impact their world for Christ."

Let me start with the first phrase - GRACE Christian School.

Grace is often defined as getting something good that you have not earned and, therefore, do not deserve.  It's difficult in modern culture to know when you are receiving grace because you are told that you deserve good things a hundred times a day.  If you won't believe me, watch daytime television for a couple of hours; the phrase "you deserve" is in almost every commercial.  Students at GRACE get unearned blessings every day in the form of their teachers, their friends, their education, field trips, and a variety of other things.  

Our school is distinctly Christian in staff, goals, and methods.  Someone at an open house asked us to break down our emphasis on the Bible and academics into a percentage balance - "like is it 70/30? 50/50?"  I was pretty shocked when I heard about this because I don't believe I can separate the two.  The percentage breakdown is 100/100 because every teacher at GRACE is a Christian all day long and carries that with them into everything, whether it is being stated verbally at each moment or not.

We are a school.  We are teachers, not camp counselors or youth group leaders.  A student will receive a solid education from me and my colleagues.  We will make decisions that are in their best interests, not those that are easiest for us or them.  

In the coming weeks, I will discuss our loving community and how we carry out this statement, which is, on our own and outside of Christ, impossible to fulfill.  It is far too much for one post, so stay tuned.