So it will be copied and pasted into this document occasionally. It will be a collage for a while until I can get around to sorting all of it. Half of the purpose of the document is to get this information off of my desktop which is currently smothered in sticky notes. Some of this may change as I become less naive or more hopeful. Whatever the case may be. For example, I am currently struggling with a teacher mission statement I wrote about two months ago:
Mission statement as a teacher: to create an environment that is overflowing with art, from the fingertips, papers, sound waves, and walls of the school, and a place where acquiring a new mastery or knowledge is not seen as swallowing a hard pill but as an eager adventure.
I know I am incredibly interested here in art and the impact it has on students. The current struggle is how subjective all of this is. Practically, I could have a mission statement like this: to prepare students for life outside of the classroom by equipping them with critical thinking skills, deep reading comprehension skills, expressive and professional writing styles, and character skills to overcome adversity. These are far more measurable, necessary, and realistic. I am still in pie in the sky land.
I also have 3 statements I want to always have in the back of my classroom. For me, not for my students. I want to always be able to see these so I can avoid them in my teaching.
NO SARCASM
NO HYPERBOLE
NO NEGATIVITY
These are weaknesses of mine that are harmful to students and dangerous in a classroom. I want to say what I mean and mean what I say. I want my yes to be a yes and my no to be a no. I want students to trust my words always and speak life into the environment constantly. I lean towards sarcasm, hyperbole, and negativity a lot. They are my go to mindset and rhetorical default when frustrated or too lazy to really lay out an argument. They are to be avoided at all times. (That last sentence may have been hyperbole)
The last part for today is what we wrote a few weeks ago for Cultural Foundations. What is my Christ-centered response to urban education? Forgive the wordiness.
The knot facing urban education is a massive gap between how things should be and how things currently are. The gap is a system of despair, poverty, hate, prejudice, hurt, desperation, and fear. The gap is a culture divided. Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice said, “Leaders see a gap. They become disturbed. They go out of their way to respond to the gap. This is the beginning of leadership in reconciliation.” Leaders lament the gap and as urban educators, teachers must lament the gap as well. Lament is defined as a cry out towards God. It is a cry created out of seeing the gap, feeling the gap, and knowing that I do not have the answer to the gap. The final act of reconciliation belongs to God. Katongale and Rice said, “to learn to lament is to become people who stay near to the wounds of the world, singing over them and washing them, allowing the unsettling cry of pain to be heard.” The Christ centered response to the gap and to the brokenness found in urban education is to cry out to God, draw near to the gap, and draw near to God.
As a future urban educator, my final task is to relinquish sovereignty to God. Ultimately, it is Christ who gave me the grace and gifts to educate students. It is Christ who began the work of restoration on the Cross. It will be Christ who finishes the work of restoration at the end of time. A Christ centered response to education is just that: Christ centered. My observation of the gap is because of Christ. My response to the gap is through Christ. My lament of the gap is to Christ. My solution to the gap is Christ. In the meantime, until Christ returns, I am to be responsible for the task given to me. My task is teaching. In his book, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work, Tim Keller discusses the ministry of competence. He said, “If God’s purpose for your job is that you serve the human community, then the way to serve God best is to do the job as well as it can be done.” As a teacher, I must be faithful with the sphere of influence I have been given: my classroom. To be faithful with this sphere will be to teach as competently as possible. I cannot change administration unless Christ puts that under my influence. I cannot change legislation unless Christ puts that under my influence. I can change my classroom. My sphere may be small, but I must trust that God will be faithful in cultivating all things while I tend to my section of the garden.
Tim Keller puts forth an excellent example of how one must trust the completion of our tasks to the sovereignty of God. He does this through the short story by J.R.R. Tolkien called “Leaf by Niggle.” The story is about an artist who wishes to create a masterpiece painting of a tree but dies before he can finish the work. Ultimately all that he leaves behind is a beautiful painting of a leaf. Keller explained the story when he said, “Everyone is Niggle. Everyone imagines accomplishing things, and everyone finds him- or herself largely incapable of producing them.” This reality has been revealed in education as well. In the 1983 national study “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform,” it is revealed that the education system in The United States is falling behind the global average. However, in 30 years of education reform, there has been little success. Everyone is Niggle. Everyone is incapable. Keller went on to say, “Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever.” Teachers respond to God’s calling for education reform when they arrive in an urban classroom. Everything we do as teachers can matter forever: every lesson plan and every Do Now. The size of the task does not matter. All that matters is the size of God. Keller goes on to say, “Whatever your work, you need to know this: There really is a tree.” He connected it to the story of Niggle by saying any work may produce only a leaf when really we wanted to create a tree. We may feel we have missed the tree and failed in our task, but there really is a tree. He finishes by saying, “there is a God, there is a future healed world that he will bring about, and your work is showing it (in part) to others.”
My Christ centered response to urban education is to respond to the gap with a biblical worldview and trust in the sovereignty of God while I work to be faithful in the task given to me. I will trust that there is a tree and in the meantime I will work on my leaf.
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