Sunday, October 9, 2011

Hard work for the older students.

I had two in the older class today and I had several things up my sleeve as possible lessons: continuing Acts, working a little on the Spirit in the Old Testament, and learning how to read a psalm.  I chose to present to them from my presentation on three tools for reading a psalm.  See the post here for a brief summary.  We talked a bit about gardening tools and the three tools for 'seeing' a psalm and therefore learning to 'hear' also. I used some of the slides from my presentation (PDF here)that I will give at the University this week (Wednesday at 10:30 at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society - if anyone is interested.)

What struck me about 'teaching' was how critical it is to learn how to hear and how to see (think Isaiah 35:5 which strikingly uses the same language as Genesis 3:7) before one is into teens and twenties. Being a slow learner myself, or else too much running on momentum all my life to stop and think,  it took me till age (somewhere between 40 and 66) to get this lesson clear. (Of course, such obedience of faith is a lifelong process.)

Anyway - my two students stayed awake and were very polite. They answered the questions I asked them during class, and after my call from the choir leader (to whom many of the psalms are dedicated) to come back for the anthem, they both remembered the big words for three tools... parallelism, prosody, and recurrence.  They likely thought this was more like school than usual for Sunday morning!

2 comments:

Elodie said...

Just catching up with the scholarly side of St. B's Sunday School program.
Interesting to hear you intervened at UVic, You must be coming along in your studies, that's what self-will and belief and faith can do for you!
Elodie A

Bob MacDonald said...

Delighted to hear from you Elodie - how's the work coming? Have you things on line? Uvic goes well - I have some posts on my results here.

But you would get a kick out of some live performances I have done this week here