Your classroom. Your world.
When students walk into your classroom, they walk into your world.
We don’t usually think of our classrooms as a microcosm of the universe. We think of it as room 113 or Mrs. Gerth’s Room or the Science Lab. We give it a name based upon where it sits in the building, who teaches there, or what gets taught there. But more accurately, when students enter your classroom, they are walking into your world.
Your classroom models for your students how you think the world works—what you think is true and what to do with that truth.
You model how to spend time. You model how to be just and merciful. You model how to develop good taste. You model when to mourn and when to rejoice.
In his book Something They Will Not Forget, Joshua Gibbs says, “If the teacher wants his classroom to be about the world, he must use class time to show students how to live…the good classroom is an icon of the world, not an oasis from the world” (27). Too many Christian parents choose Christian classical schools because they want an “an oasis from the world.” But little is said or done at home by these same parents to create an icon of the world at home. It’s almost as if these parents want an “unplug and make them play solution” for eight hours a day because they don’t know how to build a microcosm at home of the world they want their children to believe in. Both home and school must reflect what you believe to be true about who God is, who your children are, and how He expects you to live as a family.
But parents aren’t the only ones on the hook here. The way we order our classroom communicates more to our students than we think. What we hang on the walls, how we begin the class period, how we spend the class period, which rules we are willing to enforce and which we let slide, and what we say to them before they leave. All of these things communicate to our students how we think the world works and how we think they should live in the world. In a very real sense, when they step into our classrooms, they are stepping into our world.