Lent Faith Stories: Kevin Day

A word from Kevin Day:

I strive in my teaching to mold thoughtful, articulate, creative problem-solvers who engage moral dilemmas, open historical questions, pressing global concerns, three-paragraph essays, and their classmates with the patience, generosity, and care they themselves deserve. Each day I call out my students from their weariness, indifference, anxiety, and (sometimes) open disdain of history to stand with me where old stories and current events intersect, awaiting our answers.

Or so I hope.

I like to think I embolden a few of my students to think for themselves - and to want to think for themselves, even when it isn't assigned. But after these four and a half years of teaching, I place myself before my own essential questions and wonder if I possess the wisdom (or the courage) to live out the authentic answers I expect of my students.

Can history teach me to be more...?

What's the story behind my story?

What is school for?

These essential questions invite my ninth grade World History students to think historically with me - the most faithful response to my seminary professors' invitation to think theologically with them. I remember the afternoon in Greek school when I realized that my time at Columbia Theological Seminary would not be the Finishing School for Preachers I had hoped. I would come to discover something far more transformative and dangerous there: A safe place to thrash out my sense of call alongside professors who, each in their own way, preached an implicit gospel in their lesson plans. Along the way, each one emboldened my search for answers beyond churchy jargon and borrowed words. Each one insisted my classmates and I dwell upon primary sources with technical skill and theological integrity. And each one taught in a way that honored good questions, making of their classrooms places of sacred waiting.

Is geography our destiny or our decision?

What in the world are we coming to?

What is school for?

My seventh grade World Geography students calculate their carbon footprint and imagine more sustainable cities, classrooms and schools (and, this year, practice creating one). We perceive and redefine our connectedness with female migrant factory workers in China, Darfur refugees, out-casted dalits in India, and Arab street vendors rallying for a voice in their own government. At each turn, I pray our exploration of the world renders it both larger and smaller than we first imagined, and invites us to participate in a future that remains open to our involvement and invention.

I remain grateful for John Philip Newell's gentle invitation to ask myself these very questions - particularly that third one. I am coming to see that the next mile of my journey as a teacher will force me to put myself out there as a voice for curricular innovation at my school. I find myself, as fearfully and imperfectly as any of Jesus' first disciples, daring to venture along a different road than the one my seminary professors walked with me. I am "back at school", so to speak, but without another adult in the room for whose validation to angle other than... mine.

And, for now, my daily seems to be to submit myself to be remade by my own questions, whether or not anyone ever knows what will become of it. Or, me.