“The student is not above the teacher, nor a servant above his master.” Matthew 10:24
If I want to get my daughter to tell me about her day at school, I never directly ask her. Instead, I ask her to play teacher. Very quickly, I find out the day’s lesson and (bonus!) what the teacher told her during the day!
If my daughter doesn’t end up teaching in some capacity, I’ll be surprised. She’s seen her mom and dad do it enough in her first five years. The fact that she’ll eagerly play teacher says a lot about her heart.
Even more instructive is when my daughter tries to teach me something she learned at school that she thinks I don’t know.
Today, I got a soccer lesson from her. This school year, she switched her extracurriculars at daycare, going from dance to soccer. On Wednesdays, she comes home wearing a jersey and eager to show me the move she learned. Today, it was the pass and the stop.
“You’re doing good, dad!” she told me.
“Thanks!” I said, doing what I can.
I imagine that it probably feels good to teach me something seeing as her life probably feels like one big lesson that she has to learn. She has no younger sibling to boss around, no younger cousin to teach, and with two parents who hold Ph.D.s she’s going to have to work to know more than us, especially where books are involved.
But the role of student is still special. Disciples are students, and we never equal our true rabbi, Christ.
That’s true.
But Christ is the exception.
Sometimes the teacher becomes the student and vice versa.
A truism about the learning process is that if you want to really learn something, you should try and teach it. I have experienced this. As a teacher, I am constantly learning new things about what I’m teaching, and in many case, I’m positive I learn more than the students I’m supposed to be guiding.
Thinking about this connection between teaching and learning led me to realize that I will probably learn more about God’s word through the process of teaching it to my daughter than I have in years of private study.
My daughter will ask tough questions, demand that I live out the things I say I believe, and grant me insight into what childlike faith, unencumbered by education, really looks like.
If that’s the case, then she can play teacher all she wants.