Jan Anderson

There can be no denying that being a teacher is directly related to my being a Christian.  We all have a driving force in our life, and for one who has been redeemed, all of life takes on a redemptive hue – this is no less true for our occupations as for our avocations.  However, no one is more surprised than I to find that one of my greatest joys in life is working with students teaching, of all things, a “dead” language!  When a high school teacher of mine once remarked that he thought I ought to become a teacher, I thought it humorous and a remarkably failed analysis of my passions and abilities.  I wanted to serve Christ in some exotic capacity – a mission field, the inner city – something that would benefit the kingdom of God, and that did not include something as mundane as a schoolroom.

Music was a driving force in my life, and upon receiving my performance and music education degree from Seattle Pacific, I taught music for two years at Bellevue Christian School , all the while yearning for “real ministry.”  I joined the music ministry staff of Campus Crusade for Christ and soon found myself neck-high in “ministry” and living in Germany .  

I then married, and when my husband and I were expecting our first child, my mother sent me one of the earliest books ever written about homeschooling, a then unknown phenomenon, and said she thought I ought to homeschool this yet unnamed life growing in me.

God is thrifty and does not capriciously guide our footsteps, and while at Bellevue Christian, the superintendent of the school was Dr. Al Greene, who was the first person to ever encourage me to teach everything from a Biblical foundation.  He awakened in me something that has grown for 30 plus years: the understanding that all disciplines are God’s and I must consider His purposes and attributes when teaching, and doing otherwise robs Him of His glory and teaches the child to consider God as irrelevant to that discipline. 

When my husband and I began schooling our children at home, it was the knowledge that we must teach as Christians ought to teach that motivated us.  However, we were not well-instructed as to what that meant in every instance, and we soon fell into a temptation that can afflict some homeschoolers – we bought every new and improved curriculum out on the market, fearing we would not be giving our children what they needed in order to be good students.  This was not only expensive, but it was exhausting and very counter-productive. 

Realizing that we had to have an educational philosophy to guide us, we began reading all we could on approaches to education.  Convinced that a classical approach was born out of a Biblical worldview and was, by the observation of our own children, accurate in its assessment of how children learn, we began to read all we could about classically training our children. We joined with a couple of other families to begin a classical Christian school.  The others all had pronounced specialties, and when the teaching assignments were handed out, because I had had the most instruction in linguistics, Latin sat on my plate.  What happened there with so little fanfare has actually become one of the greatest moments of my life.  Little did I know what a love affair was beginning!  Little did I know what an amazing tool in my life God had just handed me! 

What I did know was that I had a lot of work ahead of me, and, procuring a tutor, I ran very fast to keep one step ahead of my first class of students.  But my tutor was divinely appointed.  Her name was Lynn Napiorski.  She was a woman whose aptitudes and temperament were classical down to her toes.  This alone made her a valuable asset, but her primary gift was that of being a teacher.  She understood students at all levels.  She had taught Latin from the very young through the college graduate level. 

For two years she taught me both Latin and teaching.  She made the difficult much easier than it otherwise would have been, and gave me the ability to see what a student sees, to question what a student would question.  She was articulate, humorous, humble, dedicated, and a great cheerleader – always interested in my progress, always wanting me to offer my students the finest possible lesson.  I owe her so much, and she asked so little! 

The more I learned, the more I grew as a student, a teacher, and a Christian.  A genuine transformation was taking place in me, but very subtlety.  The more I learned of Latin and language, the more I saw the classroom as my service to God and a powerful means of proclaiming Him – and that not artificially – not as side trails and propoganda – but as integral to the study of language itself. 

God’s fingerprints are all over His creation – on both things visible and invisible.  God’s very character is imprinted on language, and some of the most powerful moments in life are when God reveals to the language student how that is true.  When God is the center of the classroom, teacher and student alike glorify Him as they fulfill their duties with real joy – for joy is an authentic product of working as unto the Lord. 

Since those days I have continued my studies through the University of Georgia , and I have spent hundreds of hours in the classrooms of the completely inexperienced language student to the rather sophisticated ones.  From the young girl who romanticized ministry to the woman who receives the ministry of the Holy Spirit on a daily basis within the four walls of her classroom, there has been a great journey.  It is with the anticipation of growing in Christ along with my students as I look joyfully on beginning each day with, “Salvete, Omnes!  Quid agitis?!” believing that, in reality, the journey has only just begun.