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Describe a recent time when you’ve been discouraged with a student’s progress. Have you witnessed a change in the student’s life, or are you still waiting for that change to occur?
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Recently I started to watch a student grow immensely. They had struggled with math concepts at the beginning of the year, most likely due to Covid-19 interrupting the previous school, but had taken off the last couple of months before the school year ended. But just when I thought we had turned a page he started to regress again. No longer completing assignments and the parents left with no idea of what to do. The piece that concerned me the most was that he now understood the concepts but seemed to lack the motivation to complete them. It was heart breaking to see this student continue to make the decisions they did but I continued to invest relationally knowing that this wasn’t the end of their academic story.
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At the beginning of this school year, our small Christian school was one of the only schools opened to onsite education, as most schools were online due to COVID. As a result, we got many new students whose parents wanted them to have an in person teacher. Most of the new students did not come from a Christian background and one in particular was very firm in what he had been taught and believed, which is evolution. It was very discouraging because throughout his first week of being there it seemed like I couldn’t teach anything without him wanting to “prove me wrong” by raising his hand and then sharing evolution with the course. I quickly switched gears in what we were learning about in both Science and Bible course to help answer some of the doubts he had about Christianity and Jesus. By the end of the first semester, as he was preparing to transfer back to the now open public school, he shared that he now believed in who Jesus said He was and believed that God had created the heavens and earth. He admitted he had more questions and that he knew he should stay at our school so he can continue growing his faith. He did end up transferring it, but it was wonderful to see the transition in him and how his attitude changed from knocking anything I said about Jesus or the Bible to wanting to study it and learn more.
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There is a student at our school whom our youth pastor had counseled and shared the Gospel with last school year. He then emailed the faculty to pray for this young man. This student was not in my course but his sister was. I prayed for his salvation and one day had the opportunity to talk to his sister about her relationship with God and that I was praying for her brother. She told me she knew the Lord as her personal Savior and she deeply appreciated me praying for her brother. Toward the end of this school year, an email came out from our Bible teacher that this young man had given his life to the Lord as his Savior !! How wonderful it was to hear of this and how God had answered our prayers. What a change in this student’s life.
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The past school year, I had two students that discouraged me. Let’s call them Bob and Carl. Carl was new to a Christian school and didn’t know how to behave. He got in trouble a lot, and was very disrespectful. He was prayed over throughout the year. A few weeks before summer break, he accepted Christ as His savior. He still had some trouble but his behavior and attitude improved. Bob is a different story. He had a rough start in life and was adopted by a Christian couple. He is disrespectful, a course clown, and disruptive to the classroom. When you have time to spend with him individually, he has a great personality. He has an image to uphold and rejects Christ. He is soaked in prayer, and I pray that one day, I will be a brother in Christ.
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As rewarding as this field of Christian Education can be, there are certainly times of utter frustration and discouragement as well. One year I had a dear little child that had been removed from their parent at a young age, then removed from the grandparents care for the same neglectful practices. They were in the custodial care of a distant family member and struggling with disrupted sleep patterns and a diagnosis of ADHD. This child was creative and imaginative, cute as a button, but struggled with reading, language, and spelling skills. The child missed weeks of school at a time, some weeks for valid reasons, and some weeks for questionable reasons. While at school they would make slow but steady progress, but after every extended absence, very little work would be accomplished and the gaps in the learning were making it virtually impossible for the child to achieve success in even the smallest assignments. I poured as much encouragement and love into that young life as I could, emphasizing Gods love and purpose for their life. I do not know where this little one will end up in the years to come, but God does, and I am thankful that they at least heard the Gospel, memorized scripture, and were immersed in a Christian World View for the year that they were in my classroom.
