by Jason Byassee, May 19, 2014
Jason Byassee
May is Teacher Appreciation month. It is a good time to reach back out to teachers who influenced and blessed and loved us well. It is also a good time for our church to think about the God-given goodness of the vocation of teaching. Each week in May we’ll interview one of our teachers about their work and the ways they find God in it. I hope we’ll all learn more about the richness of the body of Christ of which we are all a part.
Ronald Holste
What got you into teaching?
After graduating from high school, I was unsure about my next move in life. My grades were below average, my attention span was short, and my drive was non-existent. All that seemed to matter was to get a job that provided a bigger paycheck than the one Winn-Dixie provided. I worked on the assembly line at Thomas Built Bus, but something was not clicking. My parents insisted that I continue with my education and strive for more. That next fall I enrolled in the local community college.
For some reason, that instructor in a required calculus course made me feel like I wanted do well, if not for myself, for his respect. I am not sure why I felt compelled to impress him, but that desire pushed me to study hard. After several classes with this teacher, I realized teaching at the Community College level was my professional calling. I wanted to be a teacher that had high expectations for every student and encourage them to do their best.
Tell me about a teacher you admired.
Rupert Nacoste at NC State was one of the most inspiring teachers I had. I could not wait for each new class with him to begin. His stories and lectures always captured my attention. I use his lecture/story method to teach my classes today. Dr. Nacoste’s showed me that students have their own role in learning. When teachers inspire students, students can take that information and transform it in ways they learn best.
How does your faith weigh into your work as a teacher, since obviously it shouldn’t explicitly do so in a public school setting?
Faith is a part of who we are. It is impossible for us to separate it from our lives. I cannot walk into class and preach the word of God to my Psychology students. I can walk into the class and accept every single student wherever they are. Whether I agree with their beliefs or values is irrelevant. God works within them, just as He works within me. Practicing acceptance allows me to be present, to encourage all my students, and push them towards excellence.
Tell me about a time when God surprised you with the goodness of your vocation?
My surprise at God’s goodness came when I received my current full time teaching position at CCC&TI. Although I had long felt called to teach, it took nearly 15 years before I was confident enough to place myself at that level. Growing up, my respect for teachers was very high. I felt unworthy to place myself at that level. When I finally earned the courage to place my name on the list to adjunct for CCC&TI, it took only one meeting with the chair to obtain a General Psychology class. I loved it! During that semester, a position for a full-time Psychology Instructor came open. The chair mentioned the opportunity, but was very honest that I was new and several other longer-term adjuncts were applying. I perceived my chances as low, but my calling was in the back of my mind and I could use the experience preparing for future interviews. I applied for the position. A month after the interview, I received the call: “We want you to be our next Psychology Instructor.” I was shocked. This was my first semester teaching a course and I got a request to teach full time. This was an actual classroom! That entire situation was clearly God’s work.
Ronny Holste is a full time Instructor of Psychology at Caldwell Community College & Technical Institute (CCC&TI). He has been a member of Boone United Methodist Church since 2010 with his wife, Gina, and 2 year old daughter, Ava. Prior to his work at CCC&TI, Ronny was the Substance Abuse Prevention Director for the Western Youth Network (WYN).
by Jason Byassee, May 13, 2014
Jason Byassee
May is Teacher Appreciation month. It is a good time to reach back out to teachers who influenced and blessed and loved us well. It is also a good time for our church to think about the God-given goodness of the vocation of teaching. Each week in May we’ll interview one of our teachers about their work and the ways they find God in it. I hope we’ll all learn more about the richness of the body of Christ of which we are all a part.
Tracy Smith (Part 2)
How does your faith weigh into your work as a teacher, since obviously it shouldn’t explicitly do so in a public school setting?
Teaching has been my ministry. Sometimes, I have felt guilty that my ministry is not more “religious.” However, for me, teaching is sacred. I have taught middle school, high school, undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty peers. As a middle school teacher, I read aloud often to my students, so that I could convey voices of characters to students and bring those characters to life. I knew eighth grade might be the last chance to bestow on them a love of reading. I wanted them to long to read, to experience literature and stories, as I had. I wanted them to feel the tension in the courtroom as Atticus Finch taught his children, his neighbors, and generations of Harper Lee’s readers what real courage is. Teaching is investing in the lives of others. But I am the one who has received the most. Over and over, my students show me their generosity, compassion, intellect, curiosity – evidence that they are made in the image of God.
Tell me about a time when God surprised you with the goodness of your vocation?
In 1996, I was teaching eighth grade. My students and I wrote in journals and we took some time to share our writings with each other. Students often wanted me to read my entries. I wrote about what a wonderful group they were. I wrote about specific students and their acts of kindness, moments of exciting learning in our classroom, and other moral lessons.
That year, my grandmother became chronically ill. I stayed with her in the hospital for thirteen weeks. Sometimes, I was called away to go to her house and reinsert her feeding tube. During that time, instead of writing about my students, I wrote about my grandmother. Each Monday, my students wanted to hear about how she had done over the weekend. They extended care to me. My grandmother died in March, just before my students and I were to leave for a spring break trip to Washington, DC. We had worked so hard together raising the funds for this trip. The funeral was scheduled for the day of our departure. The bus with my students and the volunteer chaperones would have to leave without me. It was spring break so I couldn’t get a flight. Through a blessed series of events, the father of one of my students arranged my flight with a friend of his on a private plane – for only the cost of the fuel. At my grandmother’s service, I had four blue hydrangeas waiting for me – all from my students, who knew hydrangeas were my favorite. [I have moved those hydrangeas to three different houses]. I left after the funeral for my flight to DC. When I arrived in DC, I turned to pay the pilot. He said, “No, don’t worry. Someone already paid me.” I met my students at the Lincoln Memorial. They showered me with questions and condolences. What a wonderful group of human beings. I will never forget the compassion and care they extended to me. I witnessed the power of human kindness budding and blooming. It’s almost funny to me that I was trying to use my journal writing to teach them moral lessons. Today, nearly two decades later, I am Facebook friends with most of those students.
We are connected forever–because I was their teacher.
Tracy Smith is a professor in the College of Education and faculty development consultant at Appalachian State University. She and her family attend the 8:45 am Sunday services at BUMC.
by Jason Byassee, May 7, 2014
Jason Byassee
May is Teacher Appreciation month. It is a good time to reach back out to teachers who influenced and blessed and loved us well. It is also a good time for our church to think about the God-given goodness of the vocation of teaching. Each week in May we’ll interview one of our teachers about their work and the ways they find God in it. I hope we’ll all learn more about the richness of the body of Christ of which we are all a part.
Tracy Smith
New York Times best-selling author Pat Conroy writes
I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom. Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well.
What got you into teaching?
I always loved school. It was a safe place for me. I had excellent teachers who challenged me, loved me, nurtured me, read to me, and prepared me to think about a future that included college.
I found a sanctuary when I started school. I had access to colorful books, a clean classroom with shiny, waxed linoleum floors, and a warm meal at lunchtime. I was poor, but public education was free, and at a very early age, I somehow decided not to waste a priceless opportunity.
Rather than looking at my unfashionable clothes and hairstyle and imposing on me labels like “unfortunate” or “under-resourced,” most of my teachers saw the potential hidden inside me. My teachers challenged me to learn all that I could. Because of their encouragement and support, I received scholarships to fund my bachelor’s degree. I graduated with a B.A. degree in Secondary English Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And I became a teacher, too.
Tell me about a teacher you admired.
Sorry, I have two…
In third grade, every day before lunch, Mr. Ferguson would ask us to sit in a circle around his rocking chair, and he would read aloud to us. I have such vivid and fond memories of
Mr. Ferguson reading aloud to the class and bringing to life E.B. White’s barnyard tale of an unlikely friendship between a pig and a spider. Mr. Ferguson gave me a wonderful gift that year: love of reading. Antoine de Saint Exupery, author of The Little Prince once wrote, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” I longed for those 30 minutes, sitting at the feet of my teacher while he made stories come to life.
I was fortunate enough to have a high school English teacher who was an academic–she held a Ph.D. in English from Duke. She was a scholar who focused her work on her students’ learning. She studied our needs in order to challenge us. She was well-read and intelligent. She was the smartest person I had ever met. But somehow she made me believe I was smart, too.
I remember sitting in Dr. Eggers’s English class during my senior year of high school. I was a bit uneasy because she expected so much from me and from all my peers. She challenged us in a way that no other teacher had. I was not sure I could deliver. But she was. At that time, I didn’t even know what a Ph.D. was. No one in my family had ever even attended a university. Still, I remember thinking, “I don’t know what a Ph.D. is, but I’m going to get one someday.” In 1999, I was awarded a Ph.D. (with distinction) in Curriculum and Teaching. I returned to my high school and taught high school English with Dr. Eggers. She was my department chair, and still an inspiration, still my teacher.
In one class period per day, in one school year, her influence changed my life forever.
To be continued….
by Jason Byassee, May 2, 2014
Jason Byassee
May is Teacher Appreciation month. It is a good time to reach back out to teachers who influenced and blessed and loved us well. It is also a good time for our church to think about the God-given goodness of the vocation of teaching. Each week in May we’ll interview one of our teachers about their work and the ways they find God in it. I hope we’ll all learn more about the richness of the body of Christ of which we are all a part.
Katie Mauldin Matthews
What got you into teaching?
My parents were in education for over 40 years. My earliest memory is sitting at the dinner table listening to my parents share stories about their classrooms. I knew that I would be sharing those same stories with my own family one day. My parents never led me to believe that it was an easy career. It would not be rewarded with money, but in my students’ successes.
As a student, I was surrounded by good teachers. Mrs. Kluttz, my sixth grade teacher, changed my outlook on what makes a teacher outstanding. I was suddenly held accountable for my own learning and was, for the first time, truly excited about school. She cared about our thinking process, answered questions with questions, and knew her students as individuals and formed meaningful relationships with them. In a very short time, teachers can have a lifelong effect.
Creating relationships with my students and their families has become the foundation of each school year. I know them and they know me. We are accountable to each other. I encourage my students to challenge each other to be better people. I see such growth throughout the year as my students become wise decision makers and understand the effect their actions have on others. It is not an easy task to teach students to question, respect others’ thoughts, construct creative solutions, and realize that what they learn is their responsibility. Creating a classroom that focuses daily on citizenship and academics benefits each student and our society.
Tell me about a teacher you admired.
I admired the teachers who made me work hard. It helped me develop my self-confidence doing something I doubted I could do, but with the encouragement of a teacher, I did my best and worked hard–even if I failed the first time.
I am amazed every day by my colleagues. They are selfless. Teaching is a tireless job and at times, thankless. My fellow teachers give of themselves daily. They offer endless
support to other teachers and creative ideas to enhance instruction.
How does your faith weigh into your work as a teacher, since obviously it shouldn’t explicitly do so in a public school setting?
The blessing and the curse of being a teacher is that everything is temporary. The group of students that you wish you could teach forever, you only get for 10 months. Parents who are supportive of you and their own children–10 months. Colleagues and administrators who make going to work fun and rewarding, similarly short-lived. These blessings make the challenges bearable. Policy makers who are on a two-year cycle, students who challenge you at every turn, parents who want you to be their child’s other parent instead of their teacher or who want it all to be easy–I’ve lost sleep over those. But God grants me so many blessings that the challenges that come my way are easier to handle. Trust me, there is a lot of prayer in school. Ask any teacher the week before spring break, the day after Halloween, the night before a new school year, or EOG testing, or parent teacher conferences, or on mornings when you run out of coffee or afternoons when chocolate is scarce. There are also prayers of thanks when a child has donated food to take home, when a local business gives warm coats, when a child finally gets it, when a parent surprises by showing up for a school event, when you get that needed hug from any of your students, when the school year ends and you see how you helped mold and shape students into who they are supposed to be.
Katie Mauldin Matthews teaches at Valle Crucis Elementary School and was Watauga County’s Teacher of the Year in 2012-2013.
by Jason Byassee, April 15, 2014
Jason Byassee
Failure is an odd topic for Easter. But it is not unfamiliar to any of us. Most of us could probably imagine a scenario by which we would fail–in family, at work, in play, with friendships, in life. Many of us are motivated partly by fear of failure. I know I am.
Yet there is something freeing about failure. Think of the sports team that knows it is out of the playoffs that suddenly plays loose, together, like they have nothing to lose. Is it any surprise they’re suddenly good? Something happens when we loosen our white-knuckle grip on the thing we care about too much, with which we’re trying to prove ourselves. Lose it, and suddenly you can be yourself, exhale, relax, live. Personally I’ve noticed some of my best moments have come after failure. Then you can be magnanimous in defeat, congratulate the victor, learn from missteps, and step into a broader life.
There are worse things than failure. Much, much worse.
The bible has a lot to say about failure. In holy week we see portraits of two cataclysmic failures. Peter betrays his Lord. This after Jesus had predicted it in remarkable detail. Peter swore it would never happen and then it did, precisely as Jesus had said (with a bit of confusion over whether the cock would crow once or twice, but never mind). Judas, so trusted once the disciples asked him to guard the group’s (paltry) money supply, sought to add to his personal wealth by turning the Lord over to the authorities. Theories abound as to why he did this–was he trying to force Jesus into a confrontation with Rome that would end with Jesus as victorious king? Was he just greedy, an agent of evil? The bible doesn’t say. It just says he committed a monstrous misdeed for which he could not forgive himself. He committed suicide.
Here is what scripture is saying with these two portraits of failure: the difference between Peter and Judas is simply whether they were willing to receive forgiveness. Peter is restored to Jesus’ trust by being asked three times, “Do you love me?” Peter says he does. “Feed my lambs,” Jesus instructs. And Peter does, becoming the most important leader among the Twelve after Jesus’ resurrection. Judas did not linger for any such restoration. His turning in of the Lord was crucial–Jesus going to his death means life for the world. Surely there would have been restoration for him too, as with Peter. But he could not stand his failure, did not seek the chance for restoration. In the 10-part miniseries called The Bible from last year (the Jesus portion of which became the movie Son of God this spring), Judas receives the Last Supper from Jesus’ hand. When he goes out to betray Jesus, he chokes on the wafer. He couldn’t get that broken body of forgiveness into his system.
Peter and Judas are not the only failures in Holy Week. Jesus dies for all our sins. All institutions–religious, civil, military, social–team up and crucify Jesus. We all shout our demand for his death. We roll a stone in front of his tomb so he won’t come back and bother us again.
Then he’s back. Stone rolled away. His body restored, made new, as fresh as Adam in Eden, as fresh as your newborn, as scarred as anyone, but made new. Our failure led to his resurrection. And now he is offering us forgiveness, restoration, the charge to feed his lambs.
The worst failure ever has already happened in our successful execution of Jesus. Now no failure can come close to that one. And that failure meant life for the world.
What fruit can this resurrection, new-making God bear through our failures? Come worship with us all Holy Week and then on Easter morn and let’s find out together.
