Teaching and Notes (Student Choice)

March 26, 2022 

I was given a printout of a lecture that Joshua Gibbs, a former teacher of my classmate Luke Jackson, gave for a recent conference. In this lecture, Mr. Gibbs talks about the way that he taught his Bible class for eighth graders in his classical Christian school. Instead of teaching them facts about different biblical stories and getting them to memorize the twelve disciples, he took a different approach. He would have the students put away all of their things at the beginning of class, including notes and Bibles. He would then read them the Bible until the last five minutes of class. They would not be allowed to take notes or follow along in their own Bibles. At the end of class, he would have them write down a summary of the reading for that day from memory. Some days, he would ask a few of students to summarize the readings for their classmates too. 

 

Mr. Gibbs philosophy for not allowing notes or reading along fits some of the ideas that we have discussed in class about oral and literate cultures. He is trying to fight against this modern approach to learning comes along with a written culture. We take notes in class only to study them later the night before the test. These notes end up getting thrown away and are never read again. Thus, his structure of the class reminds me of how oral cultures, especially some of the groups that we have talked about with oral traditions, used to share stories. Instead of "Bible Studies" they would tell the story over the fire. It seems like these oral cultures know their creation stories and traditions much better than most Christians know their Bibles. Moving forward, I think it would be interesting to have more situations where the Christian tradition is approached from a more oral culture perspective instead of doing things like taking notes and reading on our own. 

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