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.