Seminary Teaching Evaluation

(Sorry for being merely descriptive--and not creative--with my title.)

So, Monday at noon I had the first 10-minute teaching evaluation for my Intro to Seminary Teaching class. I felt, in preparing, that I really didn't feel as prepared as I'd like to feel (which, well, is pretty much the case with everyone with everything, I'm finding . . .), and yet, I realized that I didn't think I'd previously spent that much time preparing a lesson of any kind.

I should explain what it is I'm talking about. So, there's this class I'm taking, which is basically to prepare people (like me, for example--though I'm not the best example) for the CES (Church Education System) hiring process. Some percentage (75% or something) of the students in this class are invited to move on to the next class, Seminary Teaching Methods, almost exclusively based on their grades in these 10-minute teaching experiences. The next class has a similar evaluation process, but I think you teach an actual class for a whole week or something, and then a few of those people are invited to become student teachers; and then, a very few are actually hired as seminary and institute teachers.

So anyways, that's the basic idea. As for what I actually taught, I chose Alma 32:12-16 as my "scripture block," and basically, we (a class of five, two of whom were other students in my same class) went through the verses and talked about the process Alma was teaching: the two ways we can arrive at being humble, what humility leads us to do, and what importance baptism should have for us as baptized members of the Church every day of our lives.

In planning it out, it was easy for me to identify the principles that I wanted to focus on, but it was more of a challenge to decide how I could teach in a worthwhile, interesting, memorable (etc., etc., etc.) way. I ended up with a little object lesson about how humility works, and I think it worked well--in that it wasn't incredibly time-consuming, and it was simple enough to work back into the principles of the lesson with just a few words referring back to it.

Anywho, I don't mean to be long-winded. (Though, I suppose if you really didn't want to read what I say, you would certainly be welcome not to. Anyways.) Mostly, it was just interesting to me to see how fulfilling it was for me to feel I had done a good job, and to have that confirmed by my teacher (who happens to be quite the energetic, stereotypical seminary teacher-type guy). And yet it was challenging enough for me to feel like planning and teaching lessons was something I could be happy doing on a regular basis . . .

That's all.