"Child of God" by President Eyring of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was a talk given at Brigham Young University about what makes us great learners. He detailed four attributes that all great learners possess: they welcome correction, keep commitments, help other people, and expect resistance and overcome it. I thoroughly enjoyed reading his talk, and these characteristics are going to become part of my soul, but I also enjoyed getting advice for my future position: a teacher.
I plan on becoming a teacher when I finish college. In Pres. Eyring's talk, he told us the four main attributes that great learners have, and so he told me what attributes I should try to get my future students to develop.
Welcome Correction: Great learners welcome correction. Pres. Eyring says "the wise learner cares more for the jottings than for the grade at the top of the page." I had a teacher once who ran her class this way: you could rewrite any paper as many times as you wanted. In this way, she made us focus more on the corrections and not the grade, since that grade was easily raised. When I run a classroom, I want to follow this same pattern to teach my students that grades don't matter; improving through corrections is what is important.
Keep Commitments: My freshman year of high school, our English motto was "Challenge the System". Pres. Eyring asserts that learning to keep our commitments is important in our respective discipline because each discipline has rules that must be followed. However, he also states that great learners have "a deep appreciation for finding better rules and a commitment to keeping them." So my freshman class motto started me down the path to becoming a great learner as it put into my mind the curiosity and means to challenge the set system and find new and better rules. Keeping my commitments will lead to success in my discipline and it will help me improve my discipline as I keep my commitment to find a better way to do anything. In my own classroom, I will allow my students to challenge the system, including mine, to find ways to improve everything around them.
Work Hard: Great learners work hard. This makes sense; we've known learning takes a lot of work since middle school. Pres. Eyring says that when we quit working, we quit learning. I would liken learning to going up the down escalator. It takes work, and it's much harder than going up the up escalator, but when you get to the top, you feel much more accomplished. Another point that Pres. Eyring draws is that those great learners who always work hard do it for non-academic reasons. Same way with going up the down escalator. If it was a logical argument, that much work is completely illogical. It's illogical to work hard for education, by worldly standards, since you can have pretty good life by dancing through school. Great learners motivate themselves, and they get more out of life since they are engaged. When I am a teacher, I want to teach my students to work hard, but this is one of the hardest things to do. Students do not want to work hard, and pushing them will just make them angry with you. I had a government teacher who got us to work hard. He inspired us to be more than we thought we could. Inspiration is the method teachers use to persuade students to work hard; I want to learn this skill so I can help make great learners.
Expect Resistance and Overcome it: According to most Christian beliefs, and most definitely according to my beliefs, there is opposition in all things. This includes education. Learning is hard, especially if the subject doesn't come naturally to you. Even if something came naturally to you, it is almost certain that you will meet a piece of that subject that is difficult for you to grasp. Great learners expect this, but they are determined to work through the challenges. They have this determination because they know the value of the knowledge that lies on the other side of the hardship. Pres. Eyring counsels us to not get discouraged and to work through whatever comes at us until we overcome it. That is the mark of a great learner: perseverance. I took French in high school. Learning a foreign language is difficult enough, but I also skipped the second year of it. On top of all that, they hired a new teacher to teach the third year, and she was horrible. She was a really nice, interesting person, but she did not know how to teach to our class. She was a by-the-book teacher who was used to having students who were by-the-book learners. My high school was not a by-the-book high school so we all struggled in her class. I considered dropping her class, and then even quiting after the drop date, but my dad told me to keep going. My friends in the class and I started working together to try and learn the information; we persevered. And you know what? All of us passed that class and moved on to fourth year. I even got pretty good at reading French, though my speaking still needs some work. The point is, when we persevered through her class, we came out on the other side with knowledge that was special to us because we had fought hard against the odds to gain it.
This, again, is a difficult trait to teach my students without becoming that teacher that they strongly dislike for the rest of their lives. I don't want to be that teacher, but I do want to teach them perseverance. Luckily, our school system at least partially teaches this concept by requiring tests and papers and finals that many students see as opposition. Opposition is also inherent in ourselves, as we learn what are our strengths and what are our weaknesses. This concept is what I will use to teach my students perseverance. I want to teach math. I'm sure half of you out there just sighed in disgust or spit or something. I'm hoping you did because that means you faced the opposition many, if not most, people find in Math. I plan on helping my students overcome this difficult subject, not by giving them step-by-step instructions for every little problem they encounter, but by giving them general guiding principles that they can apply to math, and anything else that opposes them in life.
President Eyring's talk "Child of God" is food for the thought, but it was also a list of suggestions for me in my future career as a teacher. I hope that you will read this talk and see what it says to you, and what knowledge you gain for your future happiness. Thanks for reading.
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