Every summer I tell myself to just let my courses be. I can keep the syllabus, I reason, but tweak the in-course execution of my overall plan.
It never works, however. As I pray and read and think about what my students struggled with during the previous year, I always end up changing something. This summer was no different: new assignments, new course schedule, and a new assessment approach.
The tension I felt acutely this week was that my focus was supposed to be on living out God’s commandments rather than simply learning about them or passively believing them. What did that look like for me as I put together my assignments and assessment percentages for the new semester?
One of my commitments this semester will be to ground my assignments in real biblical principles. I tend to think about this after fact rather than ahead of time, and this semester I want to start with what’s most important.
- The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
- We should love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
- We should love our neighbors as ourselves.
- We were created to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
- We should never despise God’s good gifts.
- Here we understand in part, but in eternity with God we will understand completely.
Now it was easy for me to find ways to apply these principles to particular assignments, but was I taking the time to make sure that my syllabus and basic purpose for the course were explicitly biblical?
Here are the biblical warrants for the courses I teach.
- God reveals himself through words and revealed himself to us as The Word.
- Our use of words—in reading and writing and speaking—reflects the fact we’re made in God’s image.
- Words follow rules.
- Truth is rewarded, and falsehood is punished.
- God’s word, the truth, will prevail.
Can I live this out? Can I take God’s word seriously and love others well in my reading and writing? Can I seek truth, confident that God’s truth will succeed? I certainly believe learning to love the truth and using words to convey that truth will help my students. May God give me the grace to live this out.