Ain't Got Nuttin' But Jesus And A Chalkboard

Hey friends, it's been a couple days since I gave you an update. We finally got the schedule worked out and started classes full-blow on Thursday morning. I'm teaching two classes - Greek in the morning, Hebrew in the afternoon. Each one is about an hour and a half long, so I'm putting in a solid 3.5-4 hours in the classroom every day.

I'll be totally honest with you: I am absolutely loving teaching so far. I mean, I expected that I wouldn't hate it, but God has been really good to me in this respect, and it's really a lot of fun so far. It's hot - no AC in the classrooms at all, and there's no technology - just one chalkboard in each room, but it's really been fulfilling so far to get to work with the students. Because English is a 2nd language for most of them, I'm really pushed creatively to try to come up with ways to illustrate grammatical concepts for them.

All right, so let me give you a little info on the make-up of each class. I'll tell you about Greek first.

Because India does not have one common language, and Living Hope draws students from all over India, the school always has to operate in two languages - English for the students from the North/Northeast, and Tamil for the students from the South. For instance, at morning prayer (every day), the whole service has to be translated on phrase at a time, English then Tamil. Living Hope has different classes for each language. Well, as it turns out, my Greek class is composed of both English and Tamil medium students! You're probably wondering how in the world this works...

Well, thankfully, there's another guy here that teaches Greek, named Aruldrage. He's an awesome guy and I've been getting to know him pretty well. Anyway, he's interested in watching me teach, so he basically interprets to the Tamil students for me. I'll go for a few minutes on a concept, and then he'll explain it as quickly as he can to the Tamil students (they understand a little English, so this works pretty well). I'm really thankful for Aruldrage, because without him, those students would either not be able to take Greek, or they'd have to do so at an extreme disadvantage.

The Greek class is mostly composed of undergrade Bible-Theology students, with some Master's students mixed in here and there. and one faculty member who's wanting to learn Greek. We started on Thursday with about 22 students or so, but new people have been getting here every day, so it's probably somewhere between 25 and 30 right now.

My Hebrew class is all Master's students. I'm guessing that every single one of them is at least 3 years older than I am, but they're not asking my age and I'm not telling : ) This class is a little smaller, with probably 23 students. All of the students here have a lot of respect for the teachers. If I walk into class and some are already there, everybody stands up when I enter the room. If I'm already in the classroom and people get there, they wait outside the door until I look at them and invite them in. It makes for some really funny moments sometimes, because I'll be looking over my outline or talking with the students who are already there, and then I'll look over at the door and there will be like 3-4 student just waiting for me to acknowledge them so that they can come in. They even ask my permission to leave and come back, even if class hasn't started yet! It kind of puts me in an awkward position, because I want to respect the normal standards for the school, but I also want to get closer to the students, and it's hard to do that when they treat you like the Pope!

We had class on Thursday and Friday, and then at the morning service on Saturday, Ghuna decided we were going to have an impromptu extra hour for each class (they normally don't meet on Saturdays). So, I just did kind of a review session with each class over the previous day's material to solidify it in their minds. I could especially tell on Saturday that a couple of the Hebrew students had been putting in their time, because some of them were nailing the stuff to the wall, which is a great thing to see if you're the one teaching.

Both classes are through their respective alphabets right now, plus starting verbs in Greek, and the whole Hebrew vowel system in Hebrew. I'm really encouraged thus far, and am looking forward to starting working through some passages with them this coming week slowly so that they can get a taste of the real reason we're doing all of this not-so-fun grammar work - Biblical Interpretation! I think we're going to start in John 1:1 in Greek, and Psalm 23 in Hebrew, so just pray that God would continue to reveal Himself to me through these passages, and that I'd in turn be able to really open them up for the students, as this is really the heartbeat of Biblical language studies.

There's a lot of other great stuff that's been going on...I'll try to post some more tomorrow on my interactions and Sunday church experience this morning. Thanks for reading this, and thanks for your prayers!