When I carried a note pad into the
Anderson County High School gym for that first basketball game I
covered as a member of the media, I thought I would be writing about
sports and talking with sports figures.
What I quickly found out and am
reminded of nearly every day is the fact that my writing is usually
about people. There have been good people, shady people and people
who would fall somewhere in between on the character scale.
And most of those people are teachers.
My job is with a small-town weekly
newspaper. That means I spend a lot of time around high school
sports.
Make that A LOT of time spent with
teachers. They might be coaches to most people, but usually, they are
people who have what amounts to a second job at the field. During the
day, most are teaching history or science or math.
And I see the good ones in action doing
what they do best, which is impacting the lives of young people.
That's real coaching. It's real teaching.
I see it first hand almost every day.
My wife, Stephanie, is an elementary
school teacher. Just like those good coaches I had watched for years
before I met her, I found that her greatest desire is to positively
impact young people during the time they are with her.
From the number of hugs she gets when
we are out and about – “That's one of my former students,” she
usually says after one of those moments – I would say she is often
successful.
I'm partial to teachers, probably
because an aunt spent most of her life educating kids about reading
and writing – her specialty – and most importantly about life.
But things have sure changed in the
classroom.
For example, when a kid cursed a teacher in
my aunt's day the consequences were having a mouth washed with Lava
soap or a paddling – or both – along with a conference with a
parent who repeated the punishment, now a teacher can talk to a kid or have a conference with a parent, but little else. It's not necessarily a change for the better.
Through my elementary school years, we
started the day with a Bible passage and prayer. It was the same for
many people I know, but not now.
And while I lament that “secularists”
and “progressives” succeeded in removing those precious acts of
faith and the heritage of faith in our nation, it is still possible
for Christian teachers to be influential in the spiritual lives of
children.
Obviously, teachers can be an example.
Over the years, I have had several coaches share their desire to be
the light of Christ through their programs. The same can happen in
the classroom.
We live in a world where some kids
sometimes come to school from homes where one or both parents are on
drugs. Kids live in homes where one parent, sometimes both, is
missing. I could go on and on but
will refrain. It's depressing enough as it is.
It's why I have often said one of the
greatest mission fields in thew world today is the American public
school system.
Let me interject I have nothing but
admiration for the many Christian schools in America today. The ones
I am familiar with do a marvelous job. But theirs is a different
mission and different environment than the public schools. Parents
choose to send their children to the private schools where the
climate is friendly to Christianity.
Christian public school teachers serve
in an environment growing increasingly hostile to Christianity, yet
they somehow share the light of Christ the best they can.
Too often, we see stories of public
school teachers seemingly in the profession to further a political
agenda or more interested in the pay rather than performance. While
there are certainly educators who fit those descriptions – I have
met several – it is unfair to lump them with those hard-working souls who go
above and beyond what should be reasonably expected simply to make
the life of a child better.
And there are countless teachers who do
that with their commitment to Christ as the blueprint for their
mission.
Those people deserve our applause. And
our prayers.
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