Teacher-Student Conundrums

I love being a teacher. I really do. I've done it for a living since 1995 and have found it a very fulfilling life. And before that time I really enjoyed being a student. Now as I am employed as a pastor and as a teacher and am spending time, money, and no small amount of effort trying to learn to be a student again, it's serving to open my eyes.

Case in point. If you've been following this blog you will have noticed that I'm posting summaries of chapters in books I read for seminary and for other purposes. One of my assignments for a seminary course is to write a critical review of one of those books that I've been summarizing. It seems like it should be a pretty easy task. But I'm now running into trouble with length requirements. After I pulled the material for Redating Matthew, Mark & Luke and dropped it into a word processing document with double-spacing I found I had thirty-odd pages of material. Some pages, of course, were odder than others. Now to reduce that to five pages of summary and five pages of commentary, consistent with what the professor has requested - that's more of a challenge to me than reading the book and writing the posts.

It's a good challenge, learning to present material in the way that the teacher requests it. Not that the teacher is necessarily requiring the best possible manner of presentation or that there are particular advantages of that over anything else you could do. It's just good to learn to comply with the requirements placed upon us. Who knows when we might need to do other tasks in accordance with the expectations others give us? It isn't that uncommon.

So as I take a couple of days off from writing chapter reviews, I'm busy learning to trim material, hopefully the best material to be trimmed, in order to present a nice concise package to a professor.