I chuckled a little bit, "Where are you from again?"
The truth is, she's a French teacher from France. But, I agree with the idea. It's hard to teach your own language. When I was in Mexico, I taught a once-a-week conversational English class to a few mothers in exchange for a few extra pesos. It was tough! It's hard to explain what so many words we use mean. And grammar? I can conjugate a verb in Spanish in the imperfect, preterate, and subjunctive, just to name a few. But ask me to do that in English? I'd struggle.
The same way, I'm finding my Intro to Christianity class difficult to teach. It's a tough enough project: Take the world's largest religion, and teach it to a group of Hindus, Buddhists, Agnostics, Athiests, and a few lazy pastor's kids and missionary kids twice a week for one semester. How does one break that up? How do I explain why bread and wine or if Judas was created to be cursed? I'm definitely teaching my own language as a subject right now.
My current teaching tool, and I'm debating if it's a positive choice, is showing the Passion of the Christ. The kids requested it, mostly because it's a movie and they heard of it. It's definitely made for a Christian audience, and I'm trying to explain the mindset of a Christian. We'll see if it works. On a side-note, the movie is kind of 300-ish in it's slow-motion moving to normal-speed style.
Maybe I should just give them the homework of looking at one of my favorite blogs: http://stufffchristianslike.blogspot.com/ It's a pretty good de-coder of the mysterious American Christian sub-culture. Maybe it can conjugate the word "have" into the subjunctive too.
Sounds like a good time for relearning your own language and asking yourself the questions about things you might have been taking for granted. That's where I am now too. It sucks - but is right.
ReplyDeleteI am taking Perspectives right now and we have talked about the benefit of expressing Christianity though stories. The method is attractive to me because I feel discussions (and in evangelism: arguments often) about ideology don't bless either party very much. I know others may enjoy debating and it does have its place. However, I'd rather not focus on defending the idea of Jesus being Mighty God who is perfect in wisdom, love and power, and instead glorify Him through His story which can stand for itself. The problem is narrowing down the story to bite sized when the audience may lack context. Praise the Lord that He doesn't need much to touch a person's heart and whet their appetite. Plus Indian lore is so rich and so many Hindu traditions and scriptures are based on stories. As you can see, I am very excited about this way of expressing Christ.
ReplyDeleteagreed - I think sometimes we realize how many things we take for granted with what we believe until someone questions it and you're like... "huh... good point".
ReplyDeletePS also a huge fan of stuff christians like
BTW... Have would be "Might/Could Have" or "If I might have" in the Subjunctive ;)
ReplyDeleteI love your Blog Greg and I'm glad that Bethany pointed me to it.