by Aleta Samford
Synopsis: Teachers, we need to put as much time and effort into planning how to open our students' minds for the message we have prepared as we do the message itself.
We have established the fact that the teacher and the learner both have individual responsibilities. It is time to move on now to ways that will bring them together in each teaching moment, which brings us to communication. Before children can add to their bank of spiritual knowledge and grow in wisdom and understanding, they must hear and receive the message the way it was intended.
First, how does God intend for the message to impact us, the messengers? Let's go back to the moment when we sit down with our Bibles and read the text of the lesson. We read it, ponder it, reread it, and analyze it (suggested methods to be in later lessons). Suddenly, points and connections become clear as day. We say, "I know it now." We get excited as it stirs our souls: "I feel it now." And we change our actions as yet another truth finds its way into our hearts: "I will do it now." (Please reference my article, March 2016).
God's word has provoked a change in us; now, we must provoke a change in our students by putting it into words they will understand. Perhaps our high-spirited students act out, and our quiet students do not respond at all because we haven't gotten their attention in the first place!
"Children do not always ask for explanations, discouraged sometimes by fear of the teacher, or shame for their own ignorance, and too often they are charged with stupidity or inattention when no amount of attention would have helped them to understand the unfamiliar explanations" (The Seven Laws of Teaching, 64).
The Law of the Language simply states: "The language used in teaching must be common to teacher and learner." Here is how God expressed it, as seen in the basic rules of 1 Corinthians 14:9-11, which says, "So likewise you, unless you utter by the tongue words easy to understand, how will it be known what is spoken? For you will be speaking into the air. There are, it may be, so many kinds of languages in the world, and none of them is without significance. Therefore, if I do not know the meaning of the language, I shall be a foreigner to him who speaks, and he who speaks will be a foreigner to me."
Word for word, we want to communicate the life message God intended, but there are challenges in language itself that could interrupt our good intentions. First of all, language is a system of signs or words that look nothing like the things they signify or suggest. A word is a sign of an idea only to the one who has the idea and the image in his mind. For example, the word "exit" is merely a sound without meaning, if no image of exiting has been assigned to it. This is not as complicated as it seems; working through this process is something we all have done from infancy, placing images behind the words we heard, thus building our vocabulary.
Our vocabulary became as large as the number of images behind every word. As teachers, we have many more images in our minds than the students do, and it is a great temptation to speak over their heads. We're going to have to get out of our ocean liner sized vocabulary, and into their small boat of words and start there if we want to place in our students' minds what we picture in our own. Word for word, we will have to discover their language and use it to place us into their smaller boat. (Please reference my article, February 2016).
We will continue these thoughts in our next article, but please keep this in mind: When we sit before our students in class, it must not be to require them just to sit and listen to the answers we found in our own investigative studies. Frankly, that is just plain boring. We must make sure that "word for word" and "thought for thought," they take the same rewarding journey. Only then will we have their complete attention.
Author Bio: Aleta is the wife of Gene Samford who preaches for the church that meets in Kemp, TX. She has taught Bible classes for 42 years and, to help other women join the ranks, presents a series of lessons based on God's Word, The Seven Laws of Teaching and her own experiences. She can be reached at aletas10@sbcglobal.net.
