A Week of Seminary

A week ago, I got a call from a brother in our ward who teaches seminary, a religious class taught each weekday morning during the school year for high school students in our church. His wife's schedule had changed, he said, and he couldn't teach this coming week. Could I do it? I said yes.

Seminary, in our ward, is early mornings, starting at 6:00 a.m. at our church building (which is about 15 minutes from where we live) and ending at 6:50. We have a car pool arrangement with another family that lives nearby so that either he or I do the driving each morning, taking our kids up to seminary. Usually we don't have to stay, because our kids can get a ride with one of the students who drives a car from seminary to the local high school. So at worst, it's a matter of getting up, helping my daughter get her breakfast, and then driving for 30 minutes, up to the church and back.

Actually teaching the lessons is a very different thing. The focus this year is on the Doctrine and Covenants — a work of modern scripture, including revelations mostly receiving during the first half of the nineteenth century — with a generous side helping of early LDS Church history. It's a topic I've always enjoyed. Packaging it for teenagers, though, especially early in the morning, is a different matter.

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Teaching and I have always had an uneasy relationship. I do fine as a student (well, mostly). And teaching classes for adults at church seems purely easy to me: you read a few scriptures, ask a few questions, and let the discussion flow. Teenagers, though, are a different matter.

Maybe part of the problem is that my teaching experience has mostly been freshman English composition at the college level and/or remedial writing, which are no one's favorite classes. There's no energy from the students to tie into. If you want to get enthusiasm from your students, the only way you're likely to achieve it is through injection — that is, by pumping your own energy into the class experience and then hoping some of it circuits back to you. Either that or going completely off-topic, allowing students to talk about the things that interest them, which generally don't have much to do with what you're supposed to be covering in an English class.

There's an element of performance in teaching, which is probably part of why I'm so bad at it. That element becomes more important when the students are reluctant or unwilling, which is pretty much always the case with college composition classes and is likely to be the case with early-morning seminary. First, there's the early-morning part, which is never a plus when you're dealing with teenagers. Second, this is about church stuff, which most of them have been getting in classes since they were toddlers. Seminary is typically more intensive than those previous experiences have been, and includes (or can include) a lot of new stuff, but it can often feel like more of the same old thing. So that's another negative. And I don't always identify terribly well with teenagers, except the geeky and eccentric ones. I'm sure that's part of the reason for the less-than-stellar chemistry there's been in English classes I've taught over the years.

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Despite all this, the week turned out pretty well. Even my daughter said so! Part of this is because it's a good group of kids (and those who might be more inclined to cause trouble are usually mostly or entirely asleep). Maybe I've also grown more comfortable in my skin over the years.

I don't anticipate that this is likely to be repeated. Certainly no one's talked to me about becoming one of their permanent teachers, and I'm not planning to seek out anyone to volunteer. I'm glad it happened, though. Just knowing that I could do something like that and have it turn out okay was worthwhile, from my perspective.