Old Dog New Tricks

The past semester, the college where I taught for forty-two years invited me to help the department by teaching a course.  The course was Introduction to the New Testament, a course I’d taught almost every spring for those forty-two years.  Because the course was so familiar to me, I imagined I would teach it much as I had in the past. 

The four main sections of the course would be the same, so how hard could it be to teach the course once again?  But if it would be easy to teach the course as I had before, the course wouldn’t be a challenge for me either.   

My plans changed after several long talks with my older son, who teaches in the fine arts department at a university in Georgia.  The more I listened to him talk about his relationship with his students, the more I realized I was thinking about the course strictly from the perspective of what needed to be taught. 

What I hadn’t thought enough about was what students were curious about and what they were hoping to learn in the course.  My son’s advice reminded me of a survey conducted a number of years ago with students and professors in religious studies courses.  The top priority for professors was to cover as many aspects of the subject as possible within a semester.  A very low priority for professors was to address the spiritual questions of students. 

When the survey was given to prospective students in religious studies courses, the results were almost exactly reversed.  The top priority of students was that the courses would address their questions about religion and spirituality.  Covering as many aspects of religion as possible was a much lower priority. 

One of my favorite religious and philosophical guides, Martin Buber, would label that a “mismeeting.”  Professors would be teaching one thing, while students would be listening, hoping for something more personal.

Most religious studies professors understand that we abuse our role when we steer students to adopt our own theological or religious position.  Most of us accept that our responsibility is to present the wide variety of perspectives on any given topic and point out the strengths and weaknesses of each.

But my son made me doubt if taking such a neutral stance encouraged the kind of conversations that students wanted to have.  After listing in the syllabus that the two main goals of the course were to engage with the main issues in the New Testament from the perspective of the textbook’s author and also from my perspective as the professor, I added a third goal—to respond to students’ curiosity about the New Testament, the Bible, and faith.

After thinking about my goals, I decided to go all in with my son’s suggestion by making the third goal the first goal of the course.  I would invite students to email any question they had, and I would set aside time during the last class of each week to respond. 

The results were so amazing that I kicked myself for not taking this approach earlier in my career.  The questions were all over the place, but all of them interesting.  The questions ranged from what is my favorite part of the Bible to what does it mean to live a meaningful life.  There were many questions in between.   

It is every professor’s hope to challenge her or his students.  Thanks to my son, this was the semester I allowed students to challenge me.