Jesus as the Master Teacher
CAROLYN PRENTICE,
Presented at the USUA
conference,
Why Teach?
The Urantia Book tells us: The universe is one vast school [412:2]. When I contemplate an artist's depiction
of the master universe, I think to myself, "What a great campus!
I can't wait to go to that school!"
But of course we are
already enrolled in that school and attending regularly. We look forward
to a long career of being a student in that school. What we forget sometimes,
however, is that we also have a long career of being the faculty
in that school. The universe plan, God's will for us, is to learn and
then to turn around and teach what we have learned (279:13). We have a
long universe career of being teachers as well as students. I think we
need to begin to train for that career in this lifetime.
I know that some of
you are anxious to take on the mantle of teacher, that you are ready to
begin, but others are sitting there, gripping the armrests of the chair,
thinking, "Who me? I'm not a teacher and I'd rather wait to begin
that career. After all, this is the only existence where I can use time
as a means of avoidance (551:3)!"
But all of us have
many opportunities to teach, even if we are not formal classroom teachers.
Most of us are or will be parents-and we know that that is very much a
teaching-and learning-experience! Most of us have other opportunities
with friends, co-workers, employees, etc., where we may be asked to teach
something. We can begin to train for our universe career of teaching right
here in this life.
But I know some people
will object. They will claim that their universe career will be about
teaching spiritual truths-and that is something entirely different
from teaching a child to tie his shoe or teaching a co-worker to use a
computer program.
But we learn in The Urantia Book that there is no sudden divide
between the spiritual and the mundane world. One of the purposes of education,
as indicated on page 806:1, is the acquirement of skill-the skill necessary
to navigate the world in the form one possesses, whether it is physical,
morontial, or spiritual.
People often think
of Jesus as the master religious teacher-and certainly he was that.
But The Urantia Book reveals that Jesus' teaching career was not
limited to religious/spiritual matters. He was, in fact, a master teacher
in general. He spent his entire life teaching-not just the last 3 years.
He taught his brothers and sisters how to read and write; he taught his
brothers carpentry and how to run a household; he taught Ganid
many things on the road to Rome, including some facts about the natural
world; he apparently taught his apostles how to fish better; and he taught
Zebedee how to build better boats.
Sometimes we as religionists
want to divide the world into two parts: the spiritual and the mundane
or practical. As religionists we somehow value the spiritual above the
practical. Most of us have probably thought about Jesus as the master
Religious teacher-but in actuality there is no dividing point between
the two. Education is about learning how to navigate as the being you
are. We exist in a physical world that needs to be explored and mastered;
we also have a spiritual side that needs to be recognized and nurtured.
They are both parts of being human. As we read The Urantia Book
we can learn how to teach anything-because all knowledge is one.
I have been a teacher
for 18 years, mostly teaching college students how to write, but also
teaching public speaking, business, and remedial math. About halfway through
my teaching career I began to read The Urantia Book, and in it, I discovered
much good advice about teaching, advice that I had already struggled to
figure out from my own experience. I have come to see through my experience
with teaching an underlying principle of teaching that is affirmed by
Jesus in The Urantia Book. It is a principle that seems sometimes
to be lost in the politics, economics, and industry of teaching.
The underlying principle
is this: Teaching is about something that happens between persons.
At the heart of teaching is a relationship between teacher and student;
it is a meeting of minds.
Now I want to be clear
that teaching and learning are two different things. People learn in all
situations; they learn without teachers, and they sometimes learn in spite
of the teacher. Sometimes what they learn has nothing to do with what
the teacher is attempting to teach. But teaching introduces another person
into the learning process. And that relationship is important. According
to The Urantia Book, relationships are ends in themselves (1228:3).
The ascension career involves not only an infinite number of learning
experiences, but also an infinite number of teaching relationships.
And so we can look
to Jesus as the master teacher to show us how to implement this concept
of relationship in teaching.
What makes Jesus the master teacher? Well, he was God - that has to help.
But we too have God within us, a God who wants to teach us, to be in relationship
with us, and to teach through us - and we can call on that God to help
us.
With the theme of teaching as a relationship between student and teacher
- and with the guidance of the God Within and the Spirit of Truth, let
us examine Jesus' life. We can glean six teaching techniques from Jesus
as the Master Teacher.
1. Prepare Thoroughly
Teachers need to prepare
for their career in two ways. First they need to be sure that they can
really do what they are attempting to teach, that they really know the
material. Most teachers of practical matters are usually competent in
their skills, but I sometimes wonder about people who undertake spiritual
teaching. I have met some people who have read two papers in The Urantia
Book and then they attempt to go out and teach it. I think we should
all be sure we have a thorough understanding before we try to teach something.
The second way all teachers need to prepare is to find out about human
beings. We are told on page1363:1 that Jesus' real education was learning
how people lived. He had a real interest in complete strangers-and he
learned about human beings from all over the planet. And this knowledge
prepared him to deal with all different kinds of beings. On page 1431:1,
Jesus tells Ganid: "To
become acquainted with one's brothers and sisters, to know their problems
and to learn to love them, is the supreme experience of living." And this is a key to his success as a teacher.
I recently read a
book about college teachers. For the most part, college teachers don't
get any training in teaching-they just study their field. One of the biggest
problems that they experience is that they simply don't understand why
their students don't understand. Usually teachers are people who found
school fairly easy-they understood it-but they have never stopped to question
why their fellow students struggled. Traditionally, teachers teach the
way that they were taught-and they never consider how a person might genuinely
not understand their supposedly brilliant lectures. A math teacher may
give what he considers a brilliant explanation of the quadratic equation,
only to turn around and see a sea of confused faces. The math teacher
simply can't understand what went wrong with his lecture. Most teachers-indeed
most people-would benefit from learning more about human beings and how
their minds work, and how they live, and how they see the world. That's
why Jesus took so much interest in other people.
And this is true if
you are teaching people about The Urantia Book or about some practical
activity. You must understand how they view the universe, what their experience
has been, and why they are resistant to the truth.
Any of these teaching
techniques of Jesus can be distorted by overusing them. In the case of
preparing thoroughly, one may spend so much time in preparing that one
may never begin to apply what one knows. Or, on the other hand, the prospective
teacher may become addicted to learning so much about other people that
he/she never applies this knowledge.
2. Use Teaching
Tales and Metaphors
We all know that Jesus
used a form of teaching tale called the parable. He took everyday experiences
of his students and turned them into a story that demonstrated or revealed
a spiritual lesson. His knowledge of people was a good foundation for
this technique because he was able to use an everyday experience that
was familiar to his students.
The parable is a form
of what I call "teaching tales" or "metaphors." Loosely
defined, a metaphor is using a familiar image or model to explain a more
complex concept. This technique can be used to explain a concept of social
interaction, religious truth, or physical law. Cultures all over the world
have used metaphors, teaching tales, to pass on knowledge. We call them
fables, myths, fairy tales, folk tales, poetry.
But metaphors also include scientific models and theories. And they are
a very effective way to transmit concepts. For example, understanding
how an electrical current works-something that is unseen-can be likened
to water running through a hose, with pressure and volume and power. The
nervous system of the body can be envisioned as the electrical system
of a house.
But Jesus also recognized
that teaching tales, metaphors, can be taken too far. In Paper 151 he
warns his apostles not to over-interpret his parable, that doing so would
lead to confusion and misunderstanding. And this is true in general when
we as teachers use metaphors. One of the biggest mistakes in using a metaphor
is to confuse the model with the reality. For example, the metaphor of
electrical current as water in a hose has its limitations. If you try
to find a short in your electric fence by looking for a leak as if it
were a water hose, you will never find the problem-because electricity
is electricity, not water. Another example from physics (and please remember
that I'm an English teacher, and so I am no great authority on physics):
In order to understand what light is, physicists first employed the metaphor
of light as a wave. And this theory worked pretty well and explained some
of the things that they discovered about light. But it also made some
of the things that light does totally inexplicable. And so finally physicists
had to come up with a totally different metaphor: light comes in little
packages, called photons. And this new metaphor helped explained other
characteristics of light. We ask ourselves, how can light be both a wave
and little packages? And the answer is: light is light. Our theory, our
metaphor, is only a means of understanding it, but it does not describe
it. To confuse the metaphor with the reality is to ultimately miss the
point the metaphor.
So as teachers we
should use teaching tales, metaphors, but recognize their limitations.
3. Learn by
Doing
Jesus taught his family
and his apostles by giving them the opportunity to do things. He taught
his brother James how to run a household by training him and then finally
just letting him do it. He taught the apostles, and then made them go
out and teach. When they had difficulty with John the Baptist's apostles,
Jesus didn't lecture them for long hours on how to solve problems, nor
did he try to intervene himself. He gave them the opportunity to figure
it out for themselves. And he did not hover over them.
Similarly we see Jesus
as always doing something. He himself learned to teach by teaching. He
prepared for his teaching career by making use of every opportunity that
life handed him, including teaching in the temple, teaching his brothers
and sisters, teaching Ganid. I myself never
understood English grammar, although I was good at it, until I tried to
explain it to my students.
The Urantia Book further emphasizes this technique of learning
by doing by describing how students are taught in the universe schools:
All the way in to
From my own experience
as a teacher, I have found that the only way to teach writing is to have
students write. They learn to give speeches by giving speeches. And they
learn about business or the stock market by attempting to run a business
or by buying stocks. The use of a real problem to solve requires that
students actually think about the facts they have learned and apply them.
They remember the facts in the context of the problem they resolved instead
of learning them only to pass a test.
Like the other approaches,
learning by doing can be distorted and overused. For instance, some teachers
don't provide their students with a foundation. Their attitude is that
the students will figure it all out themselves or that they can look it
up in a book. Other teachers make the project too difficult so that students
just get frustrated. Take the example of Jesus: After teaching his apostles
for several months, he then sent them out in twos to do personal teaching
for two weeks. Then they regrouped for a while, he taught them more, and
then they did a trial teaching tour. Only after the apostles had gained
experience at these smaller tasks, did Jesus send them to
4. Use the Positive
Approach.
In several places
we see that Jesus encouraged the positive approach to teaching:
By the beginning of this
year Jesus had fully won his mother to the acceptance of his methods of
child training--the positive injunction to do good
in the place of the older Jewish method of forbidding to do evil. In his
home and throughout his public-teaching career Jesus invariably employed
the positive form of exhortation. Always and everywhere did he say, "You
shall do this--you ought to do that." Never did he employ the negative
mode of teaching derived from the ancient taboos. He refrained from placing
emphasis on evil by forbidding it, while he exalted the good by commanding
its performance. [1401:2]
Later he tells his
apostles not to try to teach someone by pointing out what is wrong with
his/her ideas (1592:4). All of us know the rightness of the positive approach
because we have all been wounded at one time or another by a teacher who
has castigated us for making mistakes, called us a dummy, pointed out
so many errors that we began to think we could do nothing right. And yet,
many of us still feel that we can teach someone something by pointing
out all the errors. Perhaps parents are the most guilty
of using the negative approach with their children.
I know from teaching
people to write that many of them have been wounded by their earlier teachers.
Students complained to me of teachers that covered their papers with so
many red marks and corrections that the student didn't even bother to
look at them. The students were just embarrassed and frustrated.
I've found that it's
best to comment on what is good in the paper, and try to build from there.
Instead of saying, "Your point is so unclear that this paper is meaningless.
Your grade is an F," I say, "This is an interesting idea, but
I'm not sure I understand it. Can you give me an example?" Then students
begin to see that maybe the teacher is their friend, someone who is trying
to help them learn, instead of someone who is just trying to prove how
smart she herself is.
This positive technique
can also be overdone, and in modern American society, I have seen it overdone
often. We have come to consider that the self-esteem of a child is so
fragile that everything must be praised. We are afraid to offer corrective
advice lest the child realize that he has made a mistake. The child becomes
addicted to praise and thinks that every small action on his part is worthy
of praise. Using the positive approach is not the same as praising everything.
Self-esteem grows in person who realizes she is truly competent at a valued
skill. A person who is addicted to praise never feels genuinely competent.
5. Use a Personal
One-on-one Approach.
It's sort of a surprise
when we read The Urantia Book and discover that Jesus rarely taught
the multitudes. Once he had trained his apostles, they did the preaching-even
so, only a few of them were very good at preaching. The work of the master
was accomplished principally through personal, one-on-one work, e.g.,
the preparing of the teachers in
I've found the one-on-one
approach very effective in my own career as a teacher of writing. Like
most other subjects, writing is traditionally taught by standing up in
front of the classroom and expounding on the good writing of certain authors-certain
techniques to use, things to avoid. Then students are expected to write
a paper; the paper is graded and returned-and it's all very impersonal.
But I discovered that,
not being a long-winded person, I couldn't fill my class hours with talking
about writing. I believe that one learns writing by writing (that learning-by-doing
thing). But just having them write for hours is not very productive either.
So I added another dimension to this process: the students and I meet
one-on-one over their papers and talk about it. This technique completely
changes the process. It becomes obvious to them how a reader-a real live
person-reacts to their writing. Sometimes if I don't understand what they
are trying to say, we can just talk about it. And then I can say, "write down what you just said." Students understand the
ins and outs of grammar a lot better if it is applied to the mistakes
that they make-not some artificial sample errors. They remember the rule
of whether to use "I" or "me" much better when shown
on their own paper.
This personal technique
works in teaching math, in teaching electricity, in teaching just about
anything. People understand concepts better when they are applied to a
problem they are working on.
I know a lot of teachers
say, "I just don't have the time to do this with all my students.
I have too many students; I have too much material to cover." In
response my question is, first to the system that assigns so many students
to a teacher, what good is it to strive for efficiency if students don't
really master material? And to those teachers who think they have so much
material to cover: what good is it to cover more material if students
don't master the basics?
And again, as far
as religious teaching may apply: Why try to tell people all about the
Lucifer rebellion or the mansion worlds, when what they personally need
is simply encouragement that God loves them as individual children?
Once again, however,
personal one-on-one teaching can be overdone. Many concepts can be taught
to a group, with a personal follow-up with each student. A teacher has
to use time efficiently and simply can't repeatedly teach the same concepts
individually to each student. The personal one-on-one approach is designed
to help students apply the material to their own experience.
6. Reveal Your
Human Side
One of the great gifts
we have in The Urantia Book is the portrait that emerges of Jesus
as a real human being. We see his life struggles and get a glimpse of
the conflicts that he faced, which all of us also face. And thus he doesn't
seem like an unapproachable God who led a perfect life simply because
he had the advantage of being God. He seems like a real human being, a
person who struggled as we do.
This revealing of
the human side is an important component of the teaching relationship.
Sometimes teachers come across as haughty, arrogant, always
right. We begin to wonder if they are human at all, and we question whether
we ourselves can attain their level.
I'm currently studying for a doctoral degree. I had thought about pursuing
my Ph.D. for a long time because I enjoy going to school and I'm good
at reading and writing. The study part did not scare me. What did scare
me was that at the doctoral level I would have to work closely with my
advisor-and I was afraid of this relationship. I had a bad attitude about
people in the academic profession. My experience had been that they were
arrogant, haughty, always right. I wasn't sure that I wanted to enter a close
working relationship with them.
When I was accepted
at graduate school, I was excited about the person who was going to be
my advisor. She is well known in her field, her doctorate is from an ivy league college, and she is an associate dean in the college.
I knew that I could learn a lot from her. But I was really concerned about
the relationship. Next to her, I felt like a rough Galilean woman: 18
years of teaching at a tiny technical college is not exactly prestigious.
I live on a farm, where I start my day in coveralls and knee-high rubber
boots. I've milked goats and sheared sheep. I was really concerned that
we would not find much in common.
But the relationship
has gone well. I'm not going to pretend that we're great buddies or anything,
but my advisor has let me see her human side. She is a good teacher, and
she has revealed to me enough of her personal conflicts that I can see
that she too is a person who struggles. And that encourages me. If she
can struggle and continue, then maybe I can too.
This is a teaching
technique we often feel is somehow inappropriate because after all, as
teachers we think we have to be infallible. But just the opposite is true.
People, our children, our students, our employees, will learn more from
us if they can see us as people who struggle, who aren't always right
or perfect.
In The Urantia
Book Jesus gives another gift to us that reveals
his humanity. This gift is one that I feel has been distorted and misused
by almost all of Christianity-and even misused by us as readers of The
Urantia Book. It's an important gift, and so I'm going to digress for
a moment.
I'm talking about
the Remembrance Supper. I grew up Catholic; and therefore I have experienced
a lot of solemn communion services. I have also received communion in
other churches and have shared in Remembrance Suppers with fellow readers.
Most of these occasions have been very ceremonious, with solemn readings
and motions. There is a place for such formality and solemnity-and I don't
mean to denigrate these practices.
But I do think that
in establishing the Remembrance Supper Jesus meant it for more everyday
use. We are told that he specifically tried not to establish a formula
for a sacrament. His intention for everyday use is evident in the words
that he used. In true English-teacher style, I suggest that we examine
the text and look at what the words mean.
When Jesus had
thus established the supper of the remembrance, he said to the apostles:
"And as often as you do this, do it in remembrance of me." [1943:2]
The first question
an English teacher would ask is, What does the
word this refer to in the sentence? It is a pronoun without an antecedent.
This could mean, "This
solemn offering of unleavened bread and wine among a community of believers."
This definition is, of course, the narrow definition that most Christian
churches recognize. But this could also mean, "Sharing
food with friends," or even more broadly, "Eating."
I like these broader definitions. Let's use them in our explication.
Analyzing further,
we ask ourselves, how often do we eat or share food with friends? The
answer, of course, is very frequently. Our lives are punctuated by eating,
from the first day to the last. From the first day when a mother holds
a newborn baby to her breast, through all the days of childhood and family
life, old age and death, we eat almost every day of our lives. And we
celebrate major events by sharing food with people: birthdays, graduations,
weddings, even funerals.
So when Jesus tells
us that as often as we do this, do it in remembrance
of him, maybe he is telling us to do it everyday, several times a day.
He goes on to give us more explicit instructions about how to remember
him:
. . . And when
you do remember me, first look back upon my life in the flesh, recall
that I was once with you, and then, by faith, discern that you shall all
some time sup with me in the Father's eternal kingdom. [1943:2]
What does Jesus want
us to remember about him? He wants us to remember that he is human just
like us. He wants us to think about how we are feeling at that moment,
and to look through his life for a time that he shared the same feelings.
Jesus had a life that had many happy moments with his family and friends.
But he also had other feelings. There were days of awkwardness in the
family because he had been lost in the temple or because his brother Jude
had done some unacceptable thing. There were days when he was tired from
working so hard. There was that awful day when the family received word
that Joseph had been injured and Jesus had to remain behind with the little
children and give them something to eat while he waited with such uncertainty
and terror. There were the days he ate with his family, but he was wondering
how he could tell Rebecca that he wasn't going to marry her. And there
was the night he sat down with the people he loved best and knew that
he was going to leave them. He worried about them and he was also heartbroken
that one of these whom he loved best had already betrayed him.
When you sit down
to eat, everyday, stop and ponder that Jesus, the Creator Son of our universe,
sat down at a table just as you are now, and felt the same kinds of feelings
that you are feeling right now.
And if you do this,
you will begin to experience Jesus as a real human being who struggled
just as you struggle. He had the courage to go on, and so can you.
Conclusion
So there we have it:
six techniques given to us and demonstrated by the master teacher, Jesus.
Of course any of these techniques can be overdone. The whole concept of
teaching as a relationship can be overemphasized. The beauty of Jesus'
teaching is that he had a balanced approach.
All of these points
stand on the same foundation principle: at the heart of teaching is something
that happens between student and teaching. It is a relationship between
persons; it is a meeting of minds.
So maybe you're beginning
to see that you should reconsider what you've been teaching and how you've
been teaching. Maybe you're beginning to see that you do have both opportunities
and responsibilities to teach-on both the practical and the spiritual
planes. But maybe you don't know where to begin; perhaps you think six
techniques are too many things to remember. I leave you with one last
easy point to remember.
A present day master
teacher, an American, Parker Palmer wrote a book called The Courage
to Teach. I was surprised when I read this book because many of his
concepts about the teaching relationship seem related to those in The
Urantia Book. Although he is a university professor, he has taught
at many levels, and he directs his book to all teachers from kindergarten
to university.
One of the principal
points of his book is: you teach who you are. He emphasizes that
the lessons people learn from you-intentionally or unintentionally-are
about the person you are.
Most of us recognize
how true this is. The person that the teacher is impresses us for the
positive or the negative. Some of us have developed a lifelong aversion
to a subject because of a certain teacher. We decided years ago that we
did not want to have anything to do with, for example physics, because
one of our physics teachers was a person we didn't want to be anything
like.
But teachers can and
do have a positive impact. Many of us have chosen a career because we
wanted to be like a particular teacher. That teacher seemed like such
a rich human being who was living the kind of life we wanted to live,
and therefore we chose the same profession. For example, many of my English
teachers were interesting people with such insights into human behavior
that I wanted to be like them. In addition, the personality of Parker
Palmer that comes through in his book has further energized me to extend
my teaching career. I have learned from who my teachers are.
And of course, Jesus,
the master teacher, taught who he is. Two thousand years ago he told Ganid basically the same thing about teaching, but in a more
positive approach. He said:
"If we know
God, our real business on earth is so to live as to permit the Father
to reveal himself in our lives, and thus will all God-seeking persons
see the Father and ask for our help in finding out more about the God
who in this manner finds expression in our lives." [1466:2]
In other words: Be
what you teach.
It's something we
sometimes forget, isn't it? And yet it is so obvious. If we want our kids
to grow up to be responsible adults, we have to be responsible adults.
If we want our employees to be courteous and efficient with customers-we
have to be that way too. I've found that if I want my students to be writers,
I have to be a writer too, not just a teacher of writing.
If
we want to go out in the world and teach others about the fatherhood of
God and the brotherhood of man-guess what? We have to be family.
If you don't know
where to begin your teaching career, start here, a simple step to remember:
Be what you teach.
