Today was Orientation for the entering students at the seminary. A great bunch of folks. I was intrigued by the diversity in the group, including the span in ages and life experiences. The group served to confirm the reality that the term “non-traditional student” hardly means anything in theological education any more. God is at work calling people from all walks and stages of life for the Kingdom. And it is humbling to witness that people are responding. And more humbling still, the realization that for some of us, the calling is to prepare those who’ve answered the higher calling.

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It’s back-to-school time! Teachers and educators across the land are in the process of setting up classrooms, reviewing class rolls, brushing up on curriculum, participating in in-service seminars, and stocking up on school supplies. Refreshed from the summer break they are setting their hopeful faces toward the promises of a new year with a fresh start.

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Recently I ran into one of those perennial educational sticky questions that operate on different levels. The question operates on a range from the philosophical to the pragmatic, and, regardless of the level at which the conversation takes place, emotions can fly high. The question takes several forms, but basic variations are, “Can everything be measured?” or, “Can every kind of learning be measured?” One unspoken question is, “Should learning be measured?”

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An Episcopalian priest played golf regularly with the local Baptist minister and two of his members. The priest kept inviting the Baptists to visit one of his services until they were embarrassed at not having gone. So they committed to being good neighbors and picked a date to visit, but arrived late to the service.

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We’re just at the start of the new fall Christian Education year in our churches. But it will not be long before most resident Christian education staff and program leaders will begin to hear complaints about the curriculum. Most of those complaints will be along the lines of “It’s too hard to use,” “The kids don’t like it,” “I don’t like it,” etc. Admittedly, while whether one likes something or not does not necessarily have anything to do with whether it is effective, the pragmatic reality of having a volunteer corps of teachers means that one needs to give due attention to such complaints.

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As we gear up for a new academic year (where did the summer go?!) I thought we”d recycle some past educational blogs this week.

For some years I’ve been working with a group of teachers who have been motivated to improve their courses and their classroom performance. These teachers were in a teaching in-service seminar I gave some years ago (almost a decade ago!). It was one of those rare experiences when everything seemed to click: the right people in the same room at the same time sharing the same interest and serendipitously finding the right seminar. A small group from this seminar has continued to pursue their work of becoming excellent teachers, and it has been gratifying to see.

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I was able to make the last meeting of the GRACE group monthly meeting for the year (we’re on hiatus for the summer). Schedule conflicts have prevented me from attending this year. It’s ironic that now living in Richmond I’m having trouble making the meetings. When I lived two hours away in Northern Virginia I hardly ever missed a meeting over the course of six years. The friendship and rich discussion served only to remind me how much I’ve missed this monthly gathering with peers.

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After ten years of formal teaching at seminary, at the graduate level, it is becoming apparent that students will always be students—and despite references to “students these days,” teachers will gripe about the same things. The more things change. . . .

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Some years ago I took a seminar with communication guru Edwin Tufte. He concluded his seminar on communication and design with a film of a magician’s performance. The short film was a clever and effective way to demonstrate some of the principles of how the brain “sees” and interprets “information.” More specifically, it demonstrated how understanding these principles of perception, and applying them for their purpose, magicians are able to fool the brain through intentional misdirection, deception, and obfuscation.

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Today’s brain and learning concept: the brain learns through conscious and unconscious processes. A great deal of the insights we acquire and the patterns that we grasp are a consequence of ongoing unconscious processing, perhaps more than we realize or care to admit. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux (1996) wrote that he processes of the “cognitive unconscious span many levels of mental complexity, all the way from the routine analysis of the physical features of stimuli by our sensory systems to remembrance of past events to speaking grammatically to imagining things that are not present, to decision making, and beyond.”

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