A Personal Story About Teaching With Love

In this series of articles, we've been learning to tell a focused personal story.

Version 2:

About a year or so after joining the church at age seventeen, I was called into the Primary program, which, in those days, met on Wednesday afternoons during the school year. It was a particularly challenging class because it had enough students for three classes and included one blind student and two deaf students. I had to teach the class in sign language, even though I was still a beginner in the language.

A few days before I began, I was set apart. In the blessing, I was promised that if I lived the gospel and worked hard at my calling I'd become a skilled teacher. Having had little experience with blessings, and not having priesthood in my home, I didn't really understand how they worked. What I heard was not that I'd become a skilled teacher, with the word someday implied, but that I'd be the best teacher in the history of the church within moments of walking into the classroom door. This slight...disparity...in what was said and what I thought I heard was to lead to endless problems.

Even though I'd worked really hard preparing, I was not able to control my class. The moment the presidency member who'd helped me get the children to class left the room, the children leaped out of their seat and began running around. Even when I got them into their chairs again, they giggled, gave silly answers in silly voices, and kicked each other. I struggled with my beginning sign language skills and at the end of class, when the last child was gone, I slumped into a chair and cried. Week after week this continued. I didn't know how to get help and I was too embarrassed, given what I thought my blessing had said, to ask anyway.

One day a leader found me in my room in tears and slipped into the seat beside me. I poured out my frustrations and fears. She listened patiently and when I was finished, I dried my tears and waited for her to deliver the magic solution, one everyone in the church seemed to know already.

She did give me the magic solution, but I didn't recognize it. She asked me a single question: Do you love your students?"

I stared at her in shock. Love them? I didn't even like them. They were brats. They were rude, disobedient, and irreverent. Only today am I impressed that she didn't rush out of the room and get me released immediately. Instead, she accepted my answer and gave me an assignment. She asked me to write the names of each child in two places--on a notecard and on a blank sheet of paper in my teaching notebook. The notebook pages were to be filled with information about each child, so I'd get to know them. The cards were to be put in front of me as I prayed, so I could pray a personal prayer for each child, based on what I knew of his or her needs.

To my surprise, as I visited the children in their homes, played with them at ward activities, and quizzed them about their interests, their behavior improved. It improved because as I knew them, I learned to love them, and love is the key to being an effective teacher.

Notes:

Notice I started essentially the same way. The setting was again critical to the story, so I included it. However, when I mentioned the children running around the room, I didn't include the inspirational ending, because it didn't further the message I was sharing this time. This story is best suited to an inservice training, so it's a little longer. Explanation of how I misunderstood the blessing could be left out, but it added a touch of humor and showed why I was so upset over not being an instant teaching super-star. If I were using this in a talk on priesthood blessings, I would have left out most of the details from the Primary leader finding me to the end of the story, but would have included more about my misconceptions and what I've learned since on that subject.

Now you try it. Write out something uplifting that has happened to you, or a challenge, and see how many lessons you can pull from that single story.

What do you want to do next?

Return to the Talk Tips Listing.

Return to the topic listing.