Monday, December 28, 2015

I Love to Teach

Our oldest daughter Andrea is a music education major in college. Which means she will be a music teacher some day. She loves the teaching environment. She hadn't been on campus two weeks as a freshman before she had been asked to be a tutor for music theory. Doing what you love and getting paid...what a deal.

I "get" the teaching part of this equation. You have an experience or expertise you want to share. Whether it is music, farming or personal finances the act of teaching holds incredible value for those being taught and society as a whole.

I don't know much about music like Andrea does. But we do share a common value of teaching.

I love to teach.

Here are 5 reasons teaching is important.
  1. You should share what you know. Even if most of what you know fits into the category of common sense. What you will find is that common sense isn't so common. For example, Dave Ramsey is often criticized because some of his material is just common sense. Exactly? He can make a living just sharing nicely packaged and well researched common sense. Works for me!
  2. The custodial chain of everyday knowledge is easily broken. We are one generation from reverting to a food system our great grandparents knew. Would we have the common sense to feed ourselves if calamity suddenly stripped away our technology and our prosperity. I submit for the average person it would be rough. Take away their microwave and the processed food, and they would be lost.
  3. Knowing something and being able to communicate it effectively are two different skills. It takes some natural ability to be a communicator, but mostly it takes practice to learn how to teach effectively and mastery of subject. I like environments like the farmers market where you can practice your "sermon" over and over with a friendly and willing audience. You can fine tune from person to person until you've got it perfect. Then write it down and put it on your website.
  4. Story telling is a lost art. Teaching is much more than just communicating facts and figures it is weaving concepts into a story. I'm sure the best teachers you had in school were story tellers. We had a debate over supper the other night about whether there would be written books in heaven. The text that Randy Alcorn used to support this in his book "Heaven" is where the Bible says, "My Word will not pass away". Well books are a fairly recent "technology" but story telling has been around a lot longer.
  5. The fabric of society is woven by its teachers. What you know and how it is interpreted in light of the social fabric of society is based on the teachers you have. We see many attempts at social engineering from the intellectuals in our society, but these will go no where if the teachers don't get on board. If you are a teacher whether public or private you need to be keenly aware of this.  Your stand on the principles of truth, goodness and beauty can contradict, countermand and correct these new thinly veiled attempts at manipulating our society away from its founding principles. 


  






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