It was only a year since I began teaching English at one of our better universities. As a new teacher I am not as confident as I project myself to be, and though it helps that I had earned a master’s degree, I am deeply convinced that it is not my knowledge that my students primarily need from me. They can get more knowledge from more experienced teachers, but what I bring into my classroom is exceptional: Emmanuel, who knows my students’ spiritual needs more than I do, and fulfills them through me in ways that even I cannot know. I believe that by just being in the classroom, performing my regular duties, I am being invariably used by God to reveal a special heavenly perspective even to those who don’t know Him. I may not completely know how it works, especially because I don’t directly mention the Bible or the gospel, but I’m sure that God moves liberally in my classroom—because I am living out His will for me, an anointed teacher in my classroom.
When I was a college student, I was severe in choosing my teachers. Not because I was a good student, but because of the opposite: I was slow, immature, and needy. It took me six years to finish a four-year Creative Writing course because I retook many classes, sometimes because I failed, sometimes because I childishly wanted to try another teacher. I was a maladjusted youth yearning for care, not exactly knowledge.
I went to a university that promised academic freedom. True enough, I had teachers who taught from various pedagogical, political, philosophical positions, and the true test of survival in that school was the student’s capability to navigate through a highly pluralistic intellectual environment. We had so much knowledge, but I had very little guidance. Or more appropriately, I became so choosy of the kind of guidance that I wanted that I ended up not having one at all. So that by the time I graduated, instead of emerging smarter, I only felt more inferior. I felt ungrounded, ill-equipped despite my clutching a college diploma.
At first I thought it was my fault because I didn’t hook up with any of my teachers, but then again I couldn’t remember anyone whom I believed in enough to be my mentor. I was, secretly, looking for a teacher who could make me sense more of God in my studies. I was secretly bothered by how my studies seem to be disconnected from God—for instance, I could not see God in my Anthropology classes that espouse evolution, or in my Philippine History class that felt depressing to study. Adding to that anxiety was my low ranking in class that made me cling tighter in desperation to God, for I was already a Christian then, and feeling very bad for not earning excellent grades for Him. I constantly condemned myself for that—how dare I carry His name around when I cringe at the possibility of losing to a debate? It is only now, in hindsight, that I appreciated what God was silently doing in me while I pitied myself for being such a miserable student.
First, He had placed me in a lowly position to make me see that knowledge in itself should never be ultimately desired; if I were grade-hungry I would have swallowed every bit of knowledge fed to me. I lacked bragging rights in the classroom, but in private I boasted of knowing God, even though He didn’t seem to be helping me out with my grades. I was developing an appetite not for mere ideas but for an inner compass, and until I acquired that I remained wary and scared of untested information. Oblivious to me, God was gifting me with sensitivity to the deep human need for Him as Teacher, Someone to safely take me through the convulsing world of multiple discourses. The pluralistic, postmodern world teaches us that we can sample every idea based on our reasoning and desire, but God was instilling in me, instead, the desire to be discerning.
Oblivious to me, too, God was training me to be a teacher rooted in Him at that naïve time when my dream was simply to get out of school (and get over studying). |
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Second, I developed humility from my feelings of emptiness and inaptitude apart from God. I know that my teaching is sheer gift—I didn’t plan on teaching as a vocation, and surely, I displayed no aptitude for it when I was in college. I was thankful enough that I graduated (without honors, from formerly delinquent status). This attitude affects me now as a teacher because I am more drawn to students who need extra support and encouragement.
After college, I took a boring job as a copywriter, transmitting both truths and lies through media, until God rocked me with a very strong desire to know the mechanisms of how ideas, both good and bad, work their way into daily life—through culture, history, literature, everything. It was the case of dreaming to know more than what the little mind can handle. Why be scared of ideas when you can deal with them head-on, at their source? What, God? Study again?
But ultimately, what led me to seek this new direction was my growing sense that there is a need for young, needy minds like mine to plant an anchor in the sea of ideas that confront and shape us on a daily basis. I knew that need, and I was Christian who wanted to be skillful at applying Biblical truths in engaging with every form of knowledge, be that from schools, media, or culture. I wanted to see God even in the most secular subjects that I studied. I desired that spiritual gift of wisdom that may bridge the gap between an ungodly learning system and God’s refreshing perspective.
While that can be done anywhere, I felt God telling me to aim for my former weakness—academics. Somehow, my ugly school record needed to be salvaged. I quietly carried that dream in me for two years, self-studying while copywriting for a living, hoping to be amply prepared when God finally told me to apply for a competitive international scholarship. Even my family, who knew me so well, was surprised when their lousy daughter got accepted at a prestigious graduate school overseas. I took up a master’s degree in Critical Theory, an interdisciplinary field of study about the forces of knowledge formation, which should lead to my developing critical thinking skills. While taking that up, I became aware of how the same information could make either atheists or Christians out of people, depending on how one is predisposed, so I have come to believe that it is truly the heart that leads us to what we want to know. If the heart is dark, the knowledge it receives will be dark, but if the heart is surrendered to God, knowledge will be sanctified, made holy and true. Because God’s Word commands us to be ready in and out of season, I have taken that as a task in school, where as a teenage student I had first felt the anxiety of not knowing how to connect God’s truths with what I hear from my professors.
It was a year since I left graduate school as a top student (my new transcript is prettier now) and started to teach in my own classroom, before a hundred college students a semester. I believe we all have that God-given need for an inner compass to direct us to the truth, and to the Author of truth. The pursuit of knowledge is meaningless without God, but if God is your Teacher, learning is immensely a delight because learning leads to knowing more about God. Because it was God who turned this formerly lowly student into a teacher, I know that He comes with me every time I enter my classroom; He works His way quietly in the hearts of my students, the way He quietly worked, and still works, in mine.
Ivery de Pano teaches Writing, Research, and Literature to college freshmen.
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