The Whole Child

Edith Smith, M.A.

"One thing I don't like about the courses I'm taking is that I never see the connection between any of them." This comment made by one of my students set me to thinking, and it's food for thought worth sharing. Today's increasing specialization in nearly every profession and occupation has affected teaching. Not all the consequences and specializing are advantageous.

Teaching that gives the impression a particular course is the most important one is the students' curricula can evoke great enthusiasm for the course and commendable accomplishment by the students. Such teaching may, however, fail to help the students coordinate that particular course with other phases of their total education. A medical specialist usually works in cooperation with a general practitioner, who sees the "whole picture." Likewise each teacher needs to keep the whole picture in view while teaching in his or her special field.

Elementary-level teachers have a setting conducive to relating the various subject areas to each other. But even these teachers may tend to focus solely on science in science class, math in math class, and so on, without relating one to the other. Nearly every lesson plan can include a connection with some other lesson being taught that day or week. This need not be detailed or time consuming, but it should be highlighted and clear.

Secondary-level teachers can discover without great effort what their students are learning in other courses by asking, for example, a few incidental questions and by observing the bulletin boards in other classrooms. With a little thought, nearly any day's lesson can be related to the content of some other course. Students like it when they discover that your knowledge and interest extend beyond the limits of your course. And your interest in the whole spectrum of their education can cause them to notice how their various courses are interrelated.

If you are teaching English writing and grammar, you can motivate your students to select a theme or topic that will enable them to explore a phase of some other subject. You can encourage, or require, them to make a list of vocabulary words that they are learning in your class as they notice these words in other textbooks or hear them used in other classes. Writing brief contexts in which they find the words will make this a more useful coordination of learning. As time permits, you could have the students share these uses of new words.

All teachers other than English teachers can reinforce the importance of spelling, punctuation, and grammar by pointing our errors and by complimenting excellence in these areas. You may wish to subtract a point or two for such mechanical errors.

If you teach literature, art, or music, you could help the students place the writers, artists, or musicians chronologically with people and events they have studied in history and mention how the political and social conditions of that period may have affected their work, and vice versa. Likewise, history teachers can reinforce these other courses, and students can be encouraged to mention related information learned in other courses.

If you have art students in your class, you could have them, individually or as a group, make an occasional bulletin board. You may wish to have their teacher evaluate the bulletin board and give credit for it if he wishes.

Foreign language teachers can have their students be alert for words and phrases that they hear or read in their other courses. Conversely, other teachers can encourage language students to explain foreign words to the rest of the class.

Of course, the subject essential to and most easily applied to every other subject is Bible. When teaching history, science, or any other course, you have opportunities to point out Biblical truth and Biblical principles.

The suggestions made here can be multiplied endlessly. They are given with the purpose of triggering your own ideas and encouraging you to plan ways of helping students see that education is a "whole" process, not a daily sequence of unrelated fragments. Wisdom can be defined as "the ability to use information in accordance with the principles taught in Scripture," and this ability is far more important than any information that we may impart to our students. Students should learn that "wisdom is the principal thing" (Prov. 4:7).

Reprinted from Balance, a publication of the School of Education, Bob Jones University. Used with permission of Bob Jones University. Please write BJU Press, for permission to reproduce this article.