Page 66 - Youth Discipleship Student Textbook

2. Be ready and prepared for a teaching event.

Let’s say you invite guests over for dinner, but really don’t have time to fix much of anything. After all,
life is busy, and you really don’t have time to fix a nice meal. So, they knock at your door, you seat
them, and pull out a bag of potato chips to serve them. What would they think? Have you really served
them like you should?

Many teachers take only a few minutes to read over the lesson plan and get an idea of what the lesson
is about, then stand up and add a couple of jokes to the lesson to make it more appealing. In other
words, they served their class some potato chips for a spiritual dinner.

Teaching is hard work! To teach you will spend many more hours, sometimes up to four or five times
the teaching time in preparation. It should be evident to your class that you invested hours of time
making the passage of Scripture come alive in your life. You should have done a lot of work parsing out
the Greek words, understanding the culture, geography, the history, and all aspects of the passage to
fully give them a spiritual feast.

3. Be creative; think outside the box.

We humans tend to get into ruts in our lives. When we get comfortable doing
something, we quite often keep doing the same thing, because it is always
safe. We socialize with the same people. Life pretty much becomes very
repetitive and mundane.

Teachers who have taught for some time tend to do the same thing. They will
use the same plan, the same methods, the same presentation repeatedly. If
they like to lecture, that’s pretty much what you can expect each week. If they like to ask questions,
well, every week more questions. Repeating the same methods tends to make your class presentation
boring and lifeless.

School classes tend to be this way. Students can pretty much expect what is going to happen during any
class period. This is a plague that teachers must resist.

Suppose you are a math teacher. One day in math class you decide to do something different. Your
subject is learning about interest payments, finances, obtaining automobile loans, etc. Typically, you
would have the class sit at their desks and tell them about all the facets of these financial transactions
by reading about them in our textbook. But today, you have decided to take the class down to an
automobile car lot and have each student select a car they want to purchase. Then have the students sit
down with the lending officer and fill out the loan agreement. You can use fake money to make the
purchase. They will learn that by financing a car, they will pay thousands of dollars more for the car
than if they saved up and purchased the car for cash. Of course, I you prearranged all this with a friend
at a dealer. But the class really will enjoy the experience and believe me, they will never forget the
information they will learn in the process.

Think outside the box!!!

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