Things They Didn’t Teach in School
I come from a long line of teachers. My grandfather taught languages on the high school and college levels. My dad earned a D.Ed. and was a high school principal. My mom and sister taught elementary school. My sister was born to teach. She taught me to read when I was three. She was five! My bent is different. I solve math and physics problems. I think in Excel. People are complicated.
Growing up, teaching was predominately fact-based. Teachers would give the right answers, and we would later give them back. This was comfortable. I had a good memory that carried me through most subjects. High school English was more challenging. The teachers did not give me the answers. I had to figure out what was important to them and then give that back. The formula was different, but the learning still involved an answer deemed to be correct by someone else.
Learning shifted through my two engineering degrees. Professors taught methods for solving problems. Although the focus was on the process, there remained a preferred approach as determined by someone else.
Growth
Seven years into my career, I enrolled in a full-time MBA program while I continued to consult on the side. I hadn’t yet learned how to read a book[1], so my typical day was 6am to 1am. I was not in school for career ambitions. Rather, I went to fill in the glaring gaps in my preparation, including communications, strategy, and organizational thought. In other words, I needed to learn how to relate with people, not Excel.
Rice used the Harvard case method of teaching.[2] There is no answer. Sometimes, there isn’t even a question. I would prepare a case by reading a business context, come up with my own understanding of opportunities and threats, and then be ready to propose and defend my recommendations in class. Learning was no longer about reciting the correct answer; it was figuring out the question. The emphasis was reasoning skills, not facts. It was preparing for what might be, not what is. The case method didn’t deliver truth on a silver platter. It let me discover truth for myself, something that was both personal and lasting. The case method was a threshold concept for someone who thought of learning as a straight and narrow path.
Harvest
At that time, I was teaching high school Sunday school at my local church. My style evolved during those two years of business school. In the beginning, the focus was on what we knew about God and His word. I’m sure I did a great job of motivating the converted and turning off the skeptical. Over time, I moved from giving answers to asking questions. I transitioned from narrowing the conversation to embracing the open-ended. Engagement skyrocketed. Conversations continued over road trips and late-night pizza. I occasionally hear from some of them decades later.
Tom Camacho’s book, Mining for Gold, took me back to those days of discovery.[3] Though his focus is on developing leaders through coaching, I saw many parallels with my efforts to develop future leaders from this group of high schoolers. He notes that leadership principles need to be adapted for kingdom work.[4] For the high schoolers, our case method discussions weren’t completely open-ended but incorporated some guard rails built on sound theology. Camacho’s four-point outline for coaching aligned with my Sunday morning preparations: listen, ask questions, and let the Holy Spirit guide.[5] Camacho stresses, “We don’t solve leader’s issues for them or tell them what they need to do next.”[6] Have you tried to tell a teenager what to do? I later realized that I was a high school coach rather than a Sunday school teacher.
Camacho says that many identify with Gideon rather than Moses or Paul, exemplifying our feelings of anxiety and inadequacy.[7] I broke my pencil underlying that page.[8] I absolutely love leading groups through the book of Judges. God is sovereign. He does as he pleases. Yet, He chooses to use ordinary people to accomplish the extraordinary as they learn to trust His power and authority. What a message for teenagers contemplating their futures. What a message for a 56-year-old doing likewise.
[1] Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Rev. and Updated ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
[2] “Case Method Project.” Harvard Business School, accessed January 28, 2025, https://www.hbs.edu/case-method-project/about/Pages/case-method-teaching.aspx.
[3] Tom Camacho. Mining for Gold: Developing Kingdom Leaders through Coaching. London: Inter-Varsity Press, 2019.
[4] Camacho, 22.
[5] Camacho, 59-60.
[6] Camacho, 63.
[7] Camacho, 73.
[8] For a better use of pencils, see Mike Hansen, “Learning and No. 2 Pencils,” Blog, Portland Seminary, January 23, 2025, https://blogs.georgefox.edu/dlgp/learning-and-no-2-pencils/.
About the Author
Rich
5 responses to “Things They Didn’t Teach in School”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Rich, you’ve touched on an important point for our cohort: Our pedagogical concepts need to be flexible. This ties into what Dr. Clark mentioned regarding feedback and the importance of self-awareness of our progress in class. We’re not just learning the correct answers; we’re exploring threshold concepts and developing our self-awareness.
Thanks for your post, Rich.
And I agree with you, Robert—what we think “teaching” and “learning” entail matters so much about how we invite ourselves and others into development. For instance, it’s fun in discipleship environments to see the “lights come on” when people begin to engage with the notion, “The Bible doesn’t tell us WHAT to think, it invites to a new WAY of thinking.” I feel like you both are pointing at formulating a learning that leads to wisdom even more than it leads to knowledge (though both are certainly important); thanks for those reminders!
Rich, you’ve hit the discipleship nail on the head. It is about asking questions and allowing questions. I have a great appreciation for my years of Vacation Bible School as a kid because those Bible drills helped me memorize scripture and know the location of books of the Bible. Yet, very few questions were answered. Like your Excel spreadsheets, it wasn’t relational. It was exciting to read the way those students responded as you shifted gears. What an inspiration.
Rich, you made me smile with reference to your MBA’s Harvard approach. Just last week, I tried to think of a way to use SWOT as a template for blog posts. Unfortunately, it did not work. I would love to hear your thought on why it seems we (the Church) seem to be naturally inclined to give answers instead of partnering with the Spirit in asking questions?
Darren, I think we have the wrong western mindset in what it means to be a teacher. A teacher needs to have all of the answers, right? This cultural baggage causes a teacher to pause before yielding control. It takes great courage to utter the words, “I don’t know.” I have also found those words to be incredibly helpful in building trust in a relationship. When, “I don’t know,” is viewed as the start of discovery rather than the end of an elevated position, then we are ready to truly make a difference.