Testimony tips

Man, do I love the Book of Mormon.

I have for some time. It is a key element of my testimony of the restored gospel and my understanding of my relationship to my Father in Heaven and to my Redeemer.

As I contemplate teaching seminary this year, I’ve been preparing lessons in advance of our actual start of classes next week. (My goal is to have four weeks of lessons “in the can” – if I can get two and a half more lessons done this weekend, I’ll meet that goal; then I can figure out how to continue to prepare lessons in advance while reviewing lessons just prior to giving them. I feel like I’m on a bit of a tightrope at this point.)

As I’ve reviewed the vision of the Tree of Life, I realize that in a few chapters, we get the basics three times. On my mission, I heard Elder Theodore M. Burton teach us that we should pay attention when the Lord repeats himself in the scriptures, and here I find in the first 15 chapters of the Book of Mormon, three recitations of the Tree of Life vision. (Oh, and repetitions of the vision of the Savior’s role as Redeemer, too!)

It occurs to me that there are plenty of repeat messages in 1 Nephi. Not only do we learn of those visions and of the Savior’s role in God’s plan (and our eternal happiness), but we also have repeated models of how to gain a testimony, or at least of how Nephi gained his. We’re reminded more than once of the value of approaching gospel learning with an open mind and an open heart – a desire to believe. We’re reminded of the Lord’s willingness to answer our prayers (and His disappointment when we believe He won’t answer us). And we’re reminded of the consistency of His message to prophets. Some details might shift slightly (like Nephi’s noticing the filthiness of water that Lehi didn’t pick up), but major story arcs (like the importance of the fruit of the tree) do not change.

As I think about my role as a seminary teacher, I understand that I’m there to open the scriptures to my students and to invite them to feel the spirit as they discover what the scriptures teach about the Savior. I need to get out of the way and allow the scriptures and the spirit to do the teaching and converting. I need to invite, encourage, entice.

The stakes are high for seminary teachers. Lots of studies show that seminary teachers have the opportunity to have significant influence on our youth, and it’s no surprise. Seminary teachers get 50 minutes a day, five days a week, with regular attenders. It would be easy to use that time as a platform to promote my views, or even to set myself up as some great guy. But the last thing I need is to generate a group of Paul-ites. Hopefully what I can do is to offer my students a place where they can safely explore spiritual questions and seek spiritual answers. Hopefully I can help them to feel safe enough to trust what the spirit whispers to their minds and hearts.

In our recent seminary fireside, I mentioned to the students and their parents that as seminary teachers we can offer activities. We can entertain them. We can review scripture mastery verses and play games. But they need to actually read the book. They need to seek the testimony. And if they’re willing to do that, the rewards can be great.

I don’t think I’ll spend my whole year blogging about seminary. But I might share a little from time to time. In the meantime, I extend the same invitation to you: if you read the book, if you open your heart and your mind, if you ask, the Lord can provide you the same great blessings He promises my seminary students.

Teaching in FHE

We have a long-standing rule in our home. Lessons in Family Home Evening may not last longer than 10 minutes.

Actually it’s not so much a rule as just the way things are. But we articulated it several years ago when Elder Perry mentioned in a stake conference that his children’s FHE lessons were a minute or two long because that’s all their kids would sit still for. (Elder Bednar promulgated a similar notion in his famous “He’s breathing my air!” talk. And Elder Holland enshrined the flexibility of FHE forever in his reference to Belamites.)

We have seven children who range in age from 11-31. As a result of that wide spread of ages we’ve had to be pretty flexible in our approach to Home Evening lessons. Interestingly, it’s not the littlest kids we’ve had a hard time keeping engaged, it’s the surly teenagers. Some have just been bored at anything that doesn’t come out of an electronic device. Others have resisted FHE because of various stages of testimony doubt. But we’ve been fortunate. Most of our kids, most of the time, have been willing to be at least civil for a ten minute lesson.

That’s not to say our Family Home Evenings are limited to ten minutes. We try to keep the family in “home evening” mode from dinner through family prayer. In addition to the lesson, we sing, we play a game, we have a treat (still the all-time favorite part of FHE, especially for the person who gets to pick the treat!), and we have our weekly calendaring session.

When we teach, of course we mix up who teaches (we have one of those FHE charts with moveable pieces for each of us; with fewer kids at home now than then, we simply skip some of the assignments on the chart – now the person on lesson also conducts, and we don’t do a spotlight anymore (though during his senior year, one of our sons loved that assignment – he would always spotlight some organism he was learning about in his environmental biology class)).

When my 11-year old daughter teaches, she likes to use PowerPoint or a favorite Mormon Messages video. (I will often still help her prepare her lessons.) I like to use videos, too, including excerpts of conference talks. My son favors basing his lessons on an article from one of the church magazines (often the same article he’s used for our home teaching lessons…go figure). My wife and I both like to have the kids digging in their scriptures. That said, most lessons are short and to the point. There’s discussion involving everyone. And we try to reinforce whatever the teacher of the evening is trying to teach.

After April conference, my wife and I reviewed together which talks had messages we thought our family ought to hear again, and we often refer back to that list of talks when we teach. And recently in my personal prayers I’ve felt a strong pull to teach doctrine to my kids rather than behavior.

My own experience has taught me that regular family home evening is not a guarantee that our children will choose the way we would like them to all the time. But I do believe that it has helped our family stay close together. I treasure that time together with my wife and children.

In fact, I treasure that family time so much that we actually have three family nights a week most weeks. Of course we have traditional Family Home Evening on Mondays. But Sunday night (when there is not a youth fireside) is also family time – we play board games between dinner and bedtime. And so is Friday night, when we always have pizza (almost always homemade) and a movie. (Nope: Friday is NOT date night for my lovely wife and me; that’s Saturday.) Even when I was bishop, or when I have been my busiest at work, I did my very best to keep those times available for my family and me to be together.

What works in your FHE?

More things I avoid when I teach

I’ve posted a few times about gospel teaching, and a recent post (here) listed a few things I avoid when I teach. Here are a few more:

1. Lectures – I will not lecture a class. Or at least almost never will I mean to lecture a class. To me, a gospel class is all about the discussion, because I think participants learn by participating. The Doctrine and Covenants cites the value in class discussion, too:

Appoint among yourselves a teacher, and let not all be spokesmen at once; but let one speak at a time and let all listen unto his sayings, that when all have spoken that all may be edified of all, and that every man may have an equal privilege (D&C 88:122).

If I form a comment in my mind and make that comment, I will have thought more actively about that particular item than if I weren’t commenting. (There’s a corollary in youth classes, namely that the youth will simply not pay attention in a small group setting to a lecture; they will comment, if only to their neighbor, and a wise teach needs to figure out how to accept those comments and weave them into the lesson.) Having said this, I acknowledge that once in a while someone may have a lecture approach that works for a particular lesson, but I would view that as the exception and not the rule.

2. Too many outside sources / stuff – I am not a fan of manual-reading in the classroom. I don’t like sitting in lessons where all the questions come out of the manual and the teacher’s goal seems to be to get from question to question rather than actually leading a discussion or teaching. That said, I’m also not really interested in someone else’s research project as a part of my Sunday School class. I do like hearing teachers bring their own experience and research into a discussion, but I don’t want that extra-curricular material to be the whole basis of the lesson. I’ve been in wards that are more conservative than I am on this topic. One gospel doctrine teacher we had a number of years ago quoted every week from some supplementary text. I never knew what it was, but she quoted it like it was scripture, and several members of the class were pretty nervous about it, wondering about the use of unauthorized material in the class. It didn’t bother me much, because it was not her whole lesson, and she did most of teaching in the scriptures. For me, outside material needs to be linked clearly to the scriptures being taught that day.

3. Gospel hobbies – Similar to #2, I’m not a fan of gospel hobby lessons. Years ago when my wife was called as a Teachings of the Prophets teacher in Relief Society, the RS president specifically invited her to use more of the quotations from the prophet we were studying that year (I can’t remember which it was). Her reason: teachers had been reading lesson material and then going off and planning elaborate lessons around a theme or two they liked without ever returning to the actual words of the prophets (but they had nice centerpieces, I’m sure). They ended up teaching the subjects they liked instead of the words of the prophet, and the RS president wasn’t wild about it. (My wife, BTW, was a reluctant teacher; she didn’t like being in front of the class, but she was faithful to the request from her RS president and generated a lot of discussion around the words of the prophet.) So on the one hand, we ought to teach the lesson of the day, not just what we like. On the other hand, we shouldn’t teach the same lesson every week. We had colorful characters in some of the units I served in on my mission who taught essentially the same lesson (with the same moralizing admonitions) every time they taught. Our correlated materials should help protect us from that sort of teaching.

4. Only scratching the surface – This is a toughie because our survey gospel doctrine courses rarely allow us the opportunity to dig deeply into a particular subject without giving over to outside sources and/or gospel hobbies. But I struggle in Sunday School classes in which a teacher glosses over material in order to get through it. I am encouraged, however, by regular counsel to teachers which reminds us to pray about the lesson material and our classes and to select the concepts and parts of the lesson that are most relevant to our class. When I teach a youth class, I try to teach one or two key ideas, and when I end the lesson, I typically have a “if you leave here with only one thought” moment at the end of the lesson in which I try one last time to push home my key thought. And even in an adult class, I find it’s better (and more interesting) to focus on a few things rather than to do everything the manual gives me. If I’m really listening to my class and to the spirit, sometimes the thing I think we’ll dig deep on is not what we actually focus on in the class. Sometimes a comment or a question leads us down a path I had not anticipated, but one that meets the needs of class members nonetheless.

Well, that’s my list (for now). Feel free to share your list of things you avoid when teaching.

Sustaining my teachers

I wrote recently about sitting on my hands (here and here). One of my reasons for that post was to renew my support of my gospel teachers at church. I raised my hand to sustain them, and I want to continue to sustain them.

But what can we do when we have a teacher who is sub-par (or who just bores us)? We don’t all respond to the same kind of teacher, I’m sure, so there are likely times when the person in front of the room isn’t our favorite.

Here are things I hope class members will do for me when I teach:

1. Prepare to come to class – read the lesson and come ready to learn something. It may not be from the teacher, but from another class member, or even just from quiet reflection on what has been said. But I hope students come to my class prepared to learn. (And yes, that also means bringing a set of scriptures (I don’t care what form!) and a copy of the lesson manual. Extra points if I’m teaching one of those Teaching for Our Times lessons and someone brings a copy of the conference talk! (Personally, I never know what talk we’re discussing until I show up; somehow it doesn’t get communicated very well in our ward. But at least now that I use my Kindle Fire at church, I can find whatever conference talk is under discussion.)

2. Volunteer to read and comment – there’s nothing worse for a teacher than inviting volunteers to participate and hearing crickets in response. Ok, it may be a lame question, but maybe your insight will drive the discussion in a positive direction. There’s one fellow in my ward who is particularly good at this – I love having him in class when I teach because I know he’ll say something cool.

3. Ask thoughtful questions – if the lesson is lagging or if there’s a question you brought to class hoping for an answer and it doesn’t look like you’re going to get it, ask the question. The worst that will happen is that you’ll get a blank stare. But the question might lead to an interesting and fruitful discussion. I’ve done this sometimes and had a fellow class member button-hole me after class for an extended discussion about my question.

4. Teach yourself the lesson you’d like to hear – if all else fails, you can always teach yourself the lesson while you sit in the classroom. Elder Eyring told a story a few years back about his dad’s doing this in sacrament meeting if a talk got a little on the dull side. I prefer to wait a while before leaping to this conclusion because if I’m teaching myself in my head, I probably won’t hear what others are saying in the discussion, and so I won’t learn anything from them.

I believe there’s value in showing up prepared for a class. It benefits me as a student and it also benefits the teacher. But sometimes there is a teacher we just don’t get much from. Hopefully that teacher isn’t instructing every week, and hopefully that teacher can get some in-service training. But even if he or she can’t, we can still sustain him or her by being present and ready to learn.

Some teachers do get better over time. I have a friend who taught a class I used to attend regularly. Initially I wasn’t all that thrilled going when he taught. But over time he introduced innovations to his lesson – he sought out information in other church publications to supplement what he was getting out of the shared manual; he did a better job of leading class discussions instead of reading from the manual; he became more confident in his own ability to teach. It was fun to watch the change in him, and it became fun to attend his class.

King Benjamin’s remedy for our earthly state seems to apply in this case, as well. If we are “submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love” (Mosiah 3:19), we are more likely to be accepting of our teachers who might not be our favorites, and we might learn something along the way.

Things I avoid when I teach

I’ve written couple of posts on gospel teaching (for instance, here, here and here). It’s a subject I care a lot about and have for many years. Just before my mission (I think the telephone had been invented by then – and by telephone I mean the one that was connected to a wall…) I took the teacher improvement course and I really enjoyed it.

Early in my marriage, I served as a Sunday School president. I approached my calling very seriously (even though by then SS presidents were about as useful as the human appendix) and my counselors and I worked hard to try to improve teaching in our ward. I’ve really enjoyed teaching over the years, and have taught in Sunday School, Primary, Young Men’s and in my Melchizedek PH quorums. I even taught one Relief Society lesson when I was a bishop. (Ok, it wasn’t a whole lesson, but I was in the room and I got to teach!) I’ve never taught in Young Women’s, but I have taught Young Women in seminary and in youth firesides. And I’ve taught institute, as well.

I don’t know that I’m a great teacher, but I guess I’m entertaining enough. People seem to respond to my lessons enough that I keep getting asked to teach.

Here are a couple of things I try to avoid when teaching. When I’ve seen these things in other classes (or when I’ve realized I’ve been doing it in my teaching), I’m kind of turned off, and I figure other students are, too. This is my short list. Maybe you have others, and you’d like to share them in the comments:

1. Play “Guess what the teacher’s thinking.” Remember in Junior High (ok, I’m so old that we didn’t have the trendy “Middle School”) when a teacher would ask a question, you’d summon the courage to answer in front of your peers with a completely logical and reasonable answer and she’d say, “Well, that’s not what I’m looking for; anyone else?” It made you feel silly, didn’t it? (Well it made me feel silly, anyway.) The point of questions in a church class is not to test knowledge, but to foster discussion. Even if an answer is a bit off the beam of a teacher’s message, the teacher can walk back to his central theme and still acknowledge and accept the discussion as it comes.

2. Ask yes-and-no questions. See #1. If the point of questions is to foster discussion, how does a yes / no question do that? Furthermore, do we really expect anyone to say “No, we don’t believe in the Godhead?” I agree that a careful series of yes or no questions may work as a rhetorical device from time to time, but as a general rule, these are the wrong kinds of questions to ask.

3. Be Nephi (or any other scripture character). Avoiding this is a newer innovation for me in my teaching. In fact, I used to assume roles all the time. I used to say things like, “I can imagine what Nephi was thinking – here he was tied up on a ship which is about to go under the sea and his brothers are dancing and having a great time…” The thing is, I don’t know what Nephi was thinking. There are surely some who might have said of me, “I know Nephi. Nephi is a friend of mine. You’re no Nephi.” This issue came home to me a few years ago as I sat in a class taught by another entertaining gospel doctrine teacher who did the same thing. Except I thought to myself, “Nephi didn’t think that. He never said that.” And I realized that although I can liken the scriptures unto myself, I ought not liken myself unto the characters of the scriptures. I ought to let them speak for themselves.

4. Run overtime. There is nothing I have that will be more important to all the members of my class than getting out on time. If they can hear the bell or see a clock, they will worry about whatever they have to do next more than whatever fabulous ending I have planned for my lesson. Therefore, I need to plan to start my “big finish” (if I have one) early enough to be done at the end of class. (That said, it was entertainingly ironic a few weeks ago as our substitute gospel doctrine teacher ran five minutes over while discussing looking past the mark. As it happens, he had misunderstood what time class was supposed to end.)

Well, that’s my short list. I’m happy to have you add your thoughts to the list.

Hand sitting progress...

A while ago I posted about sitting on my hands -- in church classes, that it. I thought I'd let you know know that's going.

I'm relieved that not every idea I have is bad. (One bad one here...)

I have tried to be more measured in my participation in class. I am happy to read, and volunteer to do so. And I'm trying (for now) to limit myself to just one comment. My reasons:

1. To avoid "teaching from the fourth row" -- I want to respect that the instructor has a point of view, a message he or she has prepared, and I want to hear what that is. If I keep interrupting with my great ideas, neither the rest of the class nor I get to hear what the instructor has planned.

2. To avoid monopolizing the conversaton -- more than once I've been in a class where someone comments so much that others kind of shut down and let the instructor and the verbose commenter carry on their dialog. Recently I've realized that sometimes I'm that guy, and I didn't want to be.

3. As much as I like to hear myself talk, I'm trying to limit my pontification to my blog and to my home, where I'm king. (Oh, strike that second part...)

So over the last few weeks, I've been pretty good about it. I substituted for two weeks in my son's Sunday School class, so I got to talk all I wanted there (guided by the lesson manual and the Real Manual (aka, the scriptures), of course).

In priesthood the first week of hand sitting, I responded to a question early on, and the stake president, who was visiting our ward that day, commented on my comment. I was anxious to answer his thoughts, but even as I was putting up my hand, I remembered to sit on it, instead. As it happens, someone else commented on what he said. The conversation did not go in the direction I would have taken it, but the instructor was happy to have several people participating, and that was good.

In Sunday School yesterday, I was a little late to the discussion because I had to follow up with the bishop on another matter. When I joined the class, they were discussing one of my very favorite chapters of all scripture, Mosiah 4. There we learn about our need to serve others, about how our attitude in service is at least as important as our actions, and about how caring for the poor and needy is the way we ensure that we retain our sins' remission that we receive in baptism and in taking the sacrament.

Our teacher had me read verses 21-26. For me, the key is verse 26:

And now, for the sake of these things which I have spoken unto you—that is, for the sake of retaining a remission of your sins from day to day, that ye may walk guiltless before God—I would that ye should impart of your substance to the poor, every man according to that which he hath, such as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and administering to their relief, both spiritually and temporally, according to their wants. (Emphasis mine.)

As our teacher reviewed key verses, he had me read through verse 26, but he did not discuss it. My hand was itching to go up, but I sat on it again. He clearly had somewhere he was heading. After class, he told me that he was going to spend some time on that subject, but because I'd read the verse with the emphasis I marked above, he felt like his point had been made and he moved on.

All in all, so far so good. I am noticing, particularly in my HP group, more participation when I curb my dialog with the instructor. And I'm getting to hear some other points of view besides my own. That can't be a bad thing.

Open Your Heart -- or Surviving the Youth Sunday School Class

I taught my son’s Sunday School class this week. It was The Dreaded Fourteen And Fifteen Year-Old Class. And I survived. In fact, it was pretty cool. I was bishop to many of these kids when they were baptized; maybe that’s why they went easy on me.

Of course we use the same manual and same scripture blocks in the youth classes as in Gospel Doctrine. I prepared but didn’t quite know what to expect. I probably over-prepared. (Ok, I certainly over prepared, but I was glad I did.) When I teach a youth class, I like to have lots of arrows in the quiver just in case I need them.

The lesson this week was on Paul’s second missionary journey. We looked at the maps of his journeys, and we had the kids draw a world map on the board so we could talk about to what “world” the apostles were carrying the gospel. We reminded them of the story of Saul / Paul (and they loved playing dumb about it…). We then talked specifically about how Paul had to listen to the spirit to know where to go on his journey, and that the spirit constrained him from going some places, and led him to others.

Then we read in Acts 16:14 about Lydia: “And a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us: whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul” (emphasis mine).

We stuck on this idea of opening one’s heart for most of the lesson. We probably used that phrase “open heart” about three dozen times. We talked about what it meant to have a closed heart and an open heart. We compared the closed heart feeling to how the class members felt about their little siblings who had messed with their stuff or their rooms or told on them. We suggested the closed heart was in a box under the bed, in a safe, or in a Swiss bank account (all their ideas). We talked about how an open heart might feel different from that and how. And we talked about how they might open their hearts to spiritual things.

I remember being 15. It was like I was on the dark side of the moon, out of radio contact with spiritual things. Even though as a younger kid I was really tuned into what I thought was the spirit, at 15, I was aloof, and trying my best to be a little rebellious. I see the same thing in my own son, and I’ve seen it before. Part of my goal as a dad, as a bishop and as a friend to some of these kids, has been to do what I can to keep the gravitational pull of the spirit strong enough so that when they return from the dark side of the moon, they’ll be swept up in it and feel it again.

So we didn’t talk about Thessalonians. And we didn’t talk about Paul’s different missionary companions. And we didn’t talk about signs of the second coming. Frankly, most of the lesson was left on the cutting room floor, except for this idea of opening our hearts to the spirit.

By the time it was done, I felt pretty good about myself. Until I got home later and my son reported that I hadn’t done too bad. “Thanks,” I said. “What was the point of the lesson?”

He thought for a while. “Well, I drew a map of the world.”

Me: “Yeah…”

Son: “And we talked about Paul.”

Me: “Yeah…”

Son: “What?”

Me: “What about the point? That I said about three dozen times?”

Son: “What?”

Me: (moving my hands in an opening gesture)

Son: “What?”

Me: (still gesturing) “Open….”

Son: “Oh, open, uh, open…”

Me: “Open…your…”

Son: “Oh, yeah. Open your heart.”

Radio silence? You bet. (Sigh.)

Teaching the Gospel

There has been considerable chatter on LDS blogs these days about teaching at church. The commentaries seem to talk about two key issues:

1. The "simple" lessons in the Gospel Principles manual used in Relief Society and Priesthood
2. The recommendation not to supplement provided lesson material with other outside resources

Personally, I'm a little surprised at the backlash against the Gospel Principles manual. I suppose there are those who think they've progressed beyond the basics of the gospel, but I'm reminded it was while pondering the atonement that Joseph F. Smith had the revelation which now is Section 138 of the Doctrine and Covenants.

While the manual is rather simple, and in fact downright slim in some instances, the subjects are rich for discussion on many levels.

As for not supplementing our lessons with many outside materials, I agree we should teach from the church manuals. But as a rule, good teachers should be guided by the spirit to include applicable scriptures, personal experiences and other suitable materials in their lessons. In his oft-quoted conference talk, Elder Oaks said, "A gospel teacher is called to teach the subject specified from the inspired materials provided." Continuing, with specific reference to the Teachings of the Prophet manuals used in previous years, he said, "The best thing a teacher can do with Teachings: Joseph Smith is to select and quote from the words of the Prophet on principles specially suited to the needs of class members and then direct a class discussion on how to apply those principles in the circumstances of their lives" ("Good, Better, Best," General Conference, October 2007).

Russell Osguthorpe, general president of the Sunday School addressed the matter of gospel teaching in an interview with the Church News in January of this year. He described a gospel doctrine class he attended in which the teacher had the manual open before her, but rarely referred to it. Instead, she led a discussion of the major points of the lesson with the class.

I am not a fan of the "ready, aim, read" method of teaching that seems to seep into my high priest's group. Whatever the manual, we seem to start at the beginning, read a segment, and then chat about it, and then read the next one, and so on. While that's an ok way of covering the material, it's not an ideal to lead discussion or to teach in my view.

In a talk in General Conference in October 2009, Brother Osguthorpe listed some key questions gospel teachers ought to ask themselves:

1. As a teacher, do I view myself as a messenger from God?
2. Do I prepare and then teach in ways that can help save lives?
3. Do I focus on a key doctrine of the Restoration?
4. Can those I teach feel the love I have for them and for my Heavenly Father and the Savior?
5. When inspiration comes, do I close the manual and open their eyes and their ears and their hearts to the glory of God?
6. Do I invite them to do the work that God has for them to do?
7. Do I express so much confidence in them that they find the invitation hard to refuse?
8. Do I help them recognize promised blessings that come from living the doctrine I am teaching?

I believe the counsel to "stick to the manual" is less about directing the flow of the lesson than the general subject matter. Of course we ought to teach the course of study we've been assigned. But we must do so with the spirit so that we can inspire others (or invite the spirit to inspire others) as Brother Osguthorpe suggests.

Indeed, even our personal study can (and arguably should) exceed what the manual covers. Consider Elder Perry's memory of his mother's preparation to teach:

"Mother was a great teacher who was diligent and thorough in her preparation. I have distinct memories of the days preceding her lessons. The dining room table would be covered with reference materials and the notes she was preparing for her lesson. There was so much material prepared that I’m sure only a small portion of it was ever used during the class, but I’m just as sure that none of her preparation was ever wasted. How can I be sure about this? As I flipped through the pages of her notebooks, it was as if I were hearing my mother teach me one more time. Again, there was too much in her notebooks on any single topic to ever share in a single class session, but what she didn’t use in her class she used to teach her children" ("Mothers Teaching Children in the Home," April 2010 General Conference).

It seems to me a great teacher will have plenty in his mind and heart to share, and then be sensitive to the spirit's guidance as he teaches, recognizing the needs of his students, the subject of the lesson, the experience of his class, and his time constraints.

While some may be disappointed that Sunday School, Relief Society and Priesthood are not places for treatises on the history of ancient Judaism or endless debate on gospel hobbies, hopefully they can be compensated by well prepared and well presented lessons that draw upon the scriptures, invite the spirit, and teach the gospel.