The Case for Christ: Student Response #1

In the first term of this school year my grade 7/8 class has read The Case for Christ: Student Edition by Lee Strobel. At the end of the study of the book each student was asked to answer one of the questions posed in the chapters of the book. I told that I would be sharing their responses online. So, throughout the rest of the year I will be posting their work. Please note, I have not edited these responses, they are exactly what the student handed me.

#1

Was Jesus really the Christ? Did he fulfill these predictions that were written centuries before he was born? In the Old Testament, there are tons of major prophecies about the coming of Christ.

These predictions allow the Israelites rule out any imposters and check the credentials of the real Messiah.

In Isaiah 53:3-9,12 There’s a picture and description of the Messiah who would suffer and die for the sins of the whole world. This portrait was of Jesus of Nazareth. This passage was a description of Jesus being born of a virgin in Bethlehem to getting crucified and resurrected. All of which was written 700 years before Jesus was born.

Not only did all these old testament prophecies come true but from the time Jesus was born to the time he died he performed countless predicted miracles that were witnessed by thousands. These miracles included things like turning water to wine, walking on water, feeding thousands of people with a couple loafs of bread and a few fish, healing the unhealable, and raising from the dead after he was crucified. All the while doing this he never committed a sin or did anything wrong, not even the worst adversary Satan was able to convince Jesus to commit a sin.

Although there have been other people in history that have done selfless acts and were even martyrs, none of them were able to do the miracles Jesus did nor have their whole lives predicted hundreds of years before they were born. For these reasons Jesus does match the identity of the Messiah.

Strobel, Lee, and Jane Vogel. The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 2001. Print.

Where have all the Binders gone?

15 years ago I walked into my first classroom fresh out of teachers college. I hardly knew where to start. So the school handed me some binders and said, "Teach this."

Those binders were my salvation. Without them I never would have survived as a teacher.

They contained detailed lesson plans for everything. When I started teaching I did exactly what they told me word for word. I won't pretend it was great teaching, but at least it was teaching.

Those binders gave me examples of what a wide variety of lessons could look like. They had different learning styles, activities, and ideas. I followed them all. As time went on I branched out and began exploring my own options and eventually began developing my own lessons. Even today I still use elements of those binders.

Perhaps most importantly, those binders had examples of rich Christian perspective embedded in the teaching. I saw how we, as Christians, could unfold God's story in every subject. From those examples my own understanding of what it meant to be a Christian teacher grew.

Those binders were created by the Ontario Alliance of Christian Schools. They assembled teams of teachers to write them, they raised funds, they edited, they published, and they distributed the binders at the end.

A few years back they stopped.

I miss the binders.

And I wonder, how many of our new teachers will never experience their gift that saved me as a teacher and helped me see what it meant to teach Christianly.

My PBL failure

I've been thinking about PBL a lot lately. I've had a few months since the end of my last PBL experience and I thought I'd share a little more about it now that I've had time to reflect.

I ran a project based on this driving question, "How can we, as Christian programmers, develop a video game that honours God?"

The students completed plans, wrote blogs, and learned to use two different platforms to develop their games. (We used Twine and Tynker.) We did gallery walks which I called Alpha testing and Beta Testing. In the end each student was involved in creating a video game. While doing it we had lessons, discussions, and presentations by experts (Thanks Kevin Schut author Of Games and God) on the topic of how Christians should interact with video games.

Near the end as we prepared for our Celebration of Learning at school where we would showcase our work the students asked if we could turn our classroom into an arcade. A few days later the whole room was sectioned off to be black, with glow-in-the-dark lettering, a disco ball, laser lights, music in the background and so much more.

The night of the Celebration of Learning that room was hopping. Of course tons of students wanted to come in and check out our games, which brought all kinds of parents in.

In the end it looked like a smashing success.

But that's not the whole story.

There were three students for whom the project was essentially a failure.

1) A young lady who had little or no interest in video games herself, nor much interest in coding. She was with a partner who struggled to communicate effectively. The work involved was quite difficult for her and in the end the game they produced was buggy and actually had little of her work in it.

2) A young man who loves outdoors and sports of all kinds. He did not care for video games in the slightest. School was always a struggle for him which was just as evident here. Eventually he did create a game of his own, which worked and he definitely learned a few things along the way, but it was not an easy journey.

3) A young lady who was highly competent, skilled, and hard-working. But she certainly did not like video games. But, because the teacher asked her to, she dug in a did the work. In the end she created a highly detailed story based game.

For these three students this was not a great learning experience. Oh, they learned some things, so it wasn't a complete waste of time, but it didn't go all that well.

And that bothers me.