Teacher: Buenos días, clase. (Good morning, class.)

Students: Buenos días, Profe Taylor. (Good morning, Professor Taylor.)

(Ten minutes, and many words, pass.)

Student: So, we just had a ten-minute discussion about saying “Good morning”?

Teacher: Yes, we certainly did.

Yes, we have a pet rubber chicken!

His name? JumbleRumbleKins!

Reader of this article, my hope is that someday you may share in one of life’s most meaningful relationships.

A birthday party photo graced the screen at the front of my classroom. There crouched my middle-school-aged daughter next to two younger children, their smiling faces painted with feline fur, whiskers, and noses.

Less than a year before, these two children and their parents had left their native Venezuela and traversed thousands of arduous miles to the United States, enduring the particularly harrowing experiences of the Darien Gap between Columbia and Panama and an immigration checkpoint between Guatemala and Mexico.

Dear Kailyn,

It is no accident that you are alive in this world.

You have been called into it by the love of our Creator.

It is probably also no accident that you are in this class.

So begins the syllabus that I handed out to Kailyn and her classmates (not all of them named Kailyn, of course). My intent was to issue a friendly summons of sorts, calling them into the class and inviting them to see it in a certain way.

It was a Monday.

In particular, it was the Monday following the funeral of Anthony Mendoza, a longtime member of my church who had crossed over into the next life, leaving behind Evelyn, his wife of many years.

I stood in front of my classroom, introducing my second-year Spanish students to the lyrics of the song “He Tells Me that He Loves Me” by Mexican singer and songwriter Jesús Adrián Romero. In English translation, they read:

He stood in front of my desk, red hair blazing, with eyes deep-set and jaw muscles taut, steeling himself for the rebuke to come. I can no longer remember the infraction this young man had committed, but I can acutely remember the sense I had, both during and after I spoke to him, that my words about the inappropriateness of his behavior and the need for change were not at all penetrating his mind or heart. He listened (or, more accurately, stood facing in my general direction), mumbled an apology along with a promise to do better, and then proceeded to demonstrate little to no improvement over the course of future days and weeks.

"What is the hardest thing about being a young person in our world today?”

I recently asked students in my junior and senior high Spanish classes to respond in writing to this prompt, and their responses were revealing and, in many cases, heartbreaking.

“Why should I send my child to a Christian school?”

As Lynn Swaner and Charlotte Marshall Powell state in the recent report “Christian Schools and COVID-19: Responding Nimbly, Facing the Future,” Christian schools must think well about how they articulate to families the value of the education they provide.[1]

No doubt, many of us in Christian schools have spent years articulating our value proposition via our websites, print materials, and campus tours. We can readily describe many good things that our schools bring to our students and their families.

Yet I think we can do better. In fact, I believe we must do better.