How To Fail As A Christian Teacher: Top 20
Feel free to add your ideas to my top 20 list of how you can fail as a Christian teacher (btw, this post is modeled after Derek Brown's post, How to Waste Your Theological Education, which I highly recommend that you read).1 Approach teaching as a job, and not a ministry.
2 Consider each student as a number, and not as a ministry opportunity.
3 Try to manipulate the students so that they will give you a good mark on your "course evaluation."
4 Don't spend any personal discipleship time with the students - you only need to teach them in class.
5 Try to confuse the students with difficult material so they will think you are really smart.
6 Have no compassion for less gifted students.
7 Do not show how your lectures glorify God or are applicable to ministry. You only need to disseminate information.
8 Don't work toward replacing yourself.
9 Try to get students out of your office as soon as possible.
10 Do not pray for your students.
11 Don't teach students the strongest arguments of their theological counterparts.
12 Teach them that your theological critics are naive and have devious motives.
13 Don't ever admit that you are wrong, and if you are asked a question that you do not know the answer to, then answer that question by responding to a question for which you do know the answer.
14 Always seek to have preference as a professor. If challenged, always be sure to say, "Do you know who I am?"
15 Make your students memorize irrelevant material. It doesn't matter if they will never use the material in ministry, or that they will easily forget it, but what matters is that you can say you tested them on that material.
16 Never make comments on your students' papers to help them become better writers, just put a grade.
17 Write for the academy, never for the Church.
18 Don't waste your time making your lectures interesting by using Keynote/Powerpoint, because your students aren't worthy to be your students if they can't simply listen to you reading your lecture.
19 Don't let your students think that their families are more important than school.
20 Don't care enough about minorities or women to correct them. Political correctness and the appearance of tolerance/openness is more important than love.
posted by Jonathan Moorhead at 6:57 AM
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(1) Dumb down your curriculum to about the sixth-grade level so you can brag about setting records on enrollment.
(2) Persecute solid Christian students who have exceptional gift(s) because you are afraid they might outshine you.
(3) Increase page requirements in assignments to make it appear as if academic standards are up, when in fact they are low as you could go.
(4) Teach future pastors through a massive workload that quantity is better than quality.
(5) Constantly poke fun at "our President" and refuse to allow his materials to be used in class, as if John Macarthur is an idiot whose writings cannot be trusted.
(6) Refuse conversations on John Calvin and other reformers so that the real Arminian stance of the seminary remains hidden.
(7) Promise financial aid to students thousands of miles away, and when they arrive, rescind your promises. Ruining their lives will teach them virtue and who's the boss.
(8) Practice personal favoritism at all times. You must demonstrate your authority.
(9) Weed out the best and the brightest because they might see the weakness (or lack) of your faith in Jesus Christ.
(10) Be accountable to no one. You are the Supreme Court above which there is no appeal. Make all decisions in secret. Let others deal with the consequences.
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