Education Paper #1

As promised, I am posting my first education paper. It is an autobiographical platform, speaking to why I want to teach, and how it fits into my direction on life. So it very much relates to Doxa Church. I would greatly appreciate comments, questions, critiques, and an all around open dialogue about it. What are possible weaknesses and misconceptions? what are parts that you could envision opening things up to a further conversation about faith issues? I am still trying to find my footing on a lot of things, so it will be accepted humbly and with all due consideration.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My name is Andrew Heffner. I am a Church Planter. Pursuing a teaching career may seem counter-intuitive to this self-professed designation, but it is an extension of my discovered calling in life: teaching. My vision is to be simultaneously and equally dedicated to church planting and education. While each is characterized by distinct goals, they are unified in their purpose: to transform lives through teaching.

My professional development as an educator is a key component in achieving these goals. There are several surface reasons why I have chosen teaching as my avenue of societal contribution. First, I have a strong background in science, attested to by an Engineering degree from Grove City College. My skill in and love for science led me to pursue such an education, and though I have not professionally used it, I have always felt that someday it would prove to be meaningful. This was confirmed by the discovery that my degree covers all but one of the prerequisites for Physics Education. Second, I have regularly interacted with teenagers for almost a decade now – mostly in churches, but also through private tutoring in various subjects. I have found that I work well with high-school students and have a talent for taking difficult concepts and making them understandable, whether it be a spiritual matter or a scientific one. Thirdly and finally, I believe that education is a fundamental cornerstone to bringing a better future to all areas of Pittsburgh, regardless of their economic status. In fact, World Vision, a non-profit relief organization, identifies education as one of the 5 key components to breaking the cycle of poverty. There is no greater gateway to transformation than through a concrete education provided by passionate and caring teachers.

With my background and passions considered, you might be able to identify the reason why talking about the importance of social justice and eco-justice in the classroom doesn’t really bother me. In fact it excites me. Those concepts are at the very core of why I am opting for teaching above any other of the many careers from which I could choose. I see them as extensions of the kingdom that God has called people of faith to be a part of building. Not a theocracy, mind you, or a Fallwellian Utopia of moral superiority, but a passionate concern for those who are deeply affected by a world that is not quite as it should be. Of course, seeing things this way affixes me with two distinct and often contradictory labels.

Left-Wing Social Justice Advocate
Right-Wing Evangelical Christian

And at the intersection of the two are guys like me who actually listen to the words of a guy named Jesus who told us that taking care of the poor, needy and marginalized was one of his top priorities, and if we truly love him, we will love them and stand up for them. Theologian N.T. Wright puts it best in his book, Simply Christian:

“We dream a dream of justice. We glimpse, for a moment, a world at one, a world put to rights, a world where things work out, where societies function fairly and efficiently, where we not only know what we ought to do but actually do it…The reason we have these dreams, is that there is someone speaking to us – someone who cares very much about this present world, and who has made us and this world for a purpose which will indeed involve justice, things being put to rights, ourselves being put to rights, the world being rescued at last.”

So I am somewhat an enigma of conviction. Bizarre career moves seem to embody this personality trait. Call it the 5 year-itch, call it aversion to complacency, call it outrageous and un-American, but comfort makes me uncomfortable. I simply find a job with a steady paycheck and a nice house with nice stuff and an uncomplicated life fairly non-compelling. I had all of those things, and I just left them to pursue this vision. There is more to live for than comfort, which inevitably woos us into an entitled sense of perpetual self-gratification. Such a myopic view of the world causes us to miss out on the adventure of becoming part of a greater story that is being told – one of rescue and redemption and restoration. My educational matriculation outlined earlier betrays this same aversion to the average. My life at different times has gone in many comfort-consuming directions, and I have embraced it, albeit with varying amounts of trepidation. Yet in the midst of the pursuit of the noumenal, I have consistently and ineffably come back to this: of the thousand other things I could have done with my life at this moment, I must teach - Because I am a teacher.

This morning I was slow to get up, and so was eating breakfast and watching the History Channel. A commercial came on for a new Language learning tool, called Rosetta (or something equally obtuse). Their big gimmick was that their computer program taught words by accompanying them with bright and cheery pictures of the object or action in question. The tagline was, “just like you learned language the first time.” My mind immediately begged the question, “What benefit is that? Do we still learn language in the same mode we did as toddlers? Should we also learn to eat new foods by pureeing them and eating them out of a little jar? And why am I saying we? Is there any one method of learning that would be universal for adolescents or adults? Is it possible to put a perfect learning tool in a mass-produced box?” By the time I wound down from my little inner monologue, I realized that I was mentally yelling at an inanimate object, completely annoyed by the word Rosetta, and personally vowing to never learn a language using their software. Why? Why did I snap into tirade mode over a fleeting 30-second promo spot during an actual learning show? Because at heart, I am a teacher. And bad teaching bothers me.

Bad teaching occurs when all that happens is instruction. I never wanted to be taught, I wanted to be taught to learn. Better yet, I wanted someone to help me discover my personal learning style, and then let me do the learning. Is there a teacher willing to learn how to better their instruction by listening and giving merit to the thoughts of students, turning the whole process into a joint venture where the ontological lines are just slightly blurred? That is how I want to teach. At the risk of becoming universalistic myself, I believe that IS teaching. Leave the monologue-ing to the evil villains in action movies, so the good guy has enough time to figure out how to escape while he is not paying attention to the treatise. It’s not teaching. Leave the simple dissemination of facts to Dwight Schrute who annoys his office mate Jim with his incessant babbling about beets, bears, and Battlestar Galactica. It’s not teaching. Instead, be conversational and personal. Be observational. Be conceptual and captivating. Be interesting. Kind of like this paper is meant to be. I have said very little about views on teaching methods and philosophies of education. But hopefully you were engaged in the story, and learned something important about my philosophy anyway. Is that not teaching? No matter what the pedagogy, if it is engaging to all and amongst all and presented with conviction, teaching has occurred. The rest is just filler. Although you might want to watch Battlestar Galactica. Man, they know how to tell a story… and that’s good teaching.