I spend a portion of each week teaching & I love it.

Last weekend I lead a discussion with a bunch of college-age young adults on a difficult passage of scripture (1 Cor. 11), and afterword I got the following text from one of the participants :

“As much as it drives me INSANE, thanks for always making us fight for our answers and pushing us to go further than where we are”

It’s responses like this that keep me excited about teaching.

Now, I’ve learned some things about teaching and about teachers in specific. I’ve learned that there is a delicate balance to be kept as you teach.

This delicate balance exists in the space between teaching students how to think, and teaching students what to think.

I believe a teacher is in balance when he or she not only imparts knowledge, but also imparts the skills needed to discern whether or not the knowledge imparted by the teacher should be trusted.

This balance is delicate because if you get out of balance in either direction you are in trouble.

If, for example, I merely taught my students what to think, I would not in fact be teaching them, I would instead be indoctrinating them.

If, on the other hand, I merely taught them to ask questions without providing them with skills to synthesize the results and come to defendable conclusions, I would be like a general sending soldiers onto a battlefield with weapons they were never trained to wield.

I know that I am keeping things in balance when I get responses like the one above. I not only gave the students information, but I raised questions that threw them into enough tension that they had to wrestle with the information and come to their own conclusions.

It’d be a whole lot easier for me to just tell them what to think, but this would lazy on my part, and it would set my students up for failure on the day when they have to give an answer for why they believe what they believe.

So, if you teach, learn to love the delicate balance.

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