Now that I are a teacher...

If you had told me in high school that I would eventually end up being a teacher, I would have laughed in your face. I wasn't the best of students. In fact I was a pretty poor one. It wasn't that I didn't have the potential, I just didn't have the motivation. I squeaked by in most of my classes with a C or less. A few F's here and there, not enough to fail the course, but it surely didn't help my GPA.

College was a bit different, but again I wasn't greatly motivated at first. It was just more school. Predictably, my grades weren't that spectacular. I did feel somewhat guilty about it since my parents were paying the tuition, and I eventually dropped out of school rather than waste their money.

When I returned to school several years later it was at my own expense, so I had some motivation for good grades, plus I was taking mostly classes that were of great interest to me. Not surprisingly, my GPA came up dramatically.

Now that I'm a teacher, those years of being a slacker are coming back to haunt me. I've discovered that motivating students to learn, to take an interest in what I''m trying to teach, is a real challenge. What works for one student doesn't work for others. And some students just don't respond to anything. I'm starting to realize how many of my teachers over all of those years must have felt. If you care about teaching, you care about your students, and you care about how well they are doing. If the student doesn't care, it doesn't help...you still care. It's hard to see a student continue to get poor grades when you've done all you can think of to motivate them.

I suppose that's sort of how God feels when He sees how we sometimes act. After everything He's done for us, all of the teaching His Son did, all of the Scriptures He has given us...we still don't seem to get it right. Will we ever learn? Most of us probably won't. Everything in this life is sort of like a series of labs, pop quizzes, and exams over the things Jesus taught. And you know what? There's a final exam...will you pass it? I suppose a lot of it depends on how motivated you were.