Happy New Year! Welcome to the 2010-2011 school year – it’s bound to be an adventure! This is my first year teaching at Heritage, as you probably already know, and I’m looking forward to figuring it all out with you!
My vision for us as a class is that we would grow to be more like Jesus through the literature we encounter, work toward reaching the incredible intellectual potential we all have as beings created in the image of God, and appreciate how God reveals His truth through the world around us. My job isn’t just to teach you how to write papers, use semicolons correctly, or identify the rhyme scheme of a poem; I’m here to challenge you to question, think, and discern. I invite you to make Walt Whitman’s challenge your own for yourself over the next seasons:
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or at church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem . . .
This class will not be about me or what I think. It will be about you being on a journey of finding out for yourself truth about the world and the infinitely true God who made it. Sometimes this is scary, and always it will remind us that nothing in the world revolves around us; it will require reliance on the Holy Spirit and the Bible to discern truth from deception, but always the truth will point back to Jesus and the new life He gives.
We’re going to have an unforgettable year – I know it already! Here we go . . .
Sincerely yours,
Mrs. Emily Berg
