First Day of School

This is a shot from my first day teaching at BYU this semester (you can tell it's BYU 'cause of the BLUE shirt, on my first day at UVU I wore green!) Also, you can tell that this isn't actually during class, because my tie's off)

Anyway... I'm teaching personality again, which I'm thrilled about, because, as I mentioned in my last post, my "living question" is all about human identity/personality. Furthermore, I have a couple of students in class this semester who have previously taken a class from me, which I always take as a really good sign that I'm doing something well when I teach. (Especially when it's an elective class like personality!) This week, however, I received an even more impressive (and humbling) sign.

After class, one of the students I taught last year in an Intro to Psychology class came up to me and said "I just wanted to thank you for last year's class. I loved the perspective you brought to the subject and because of that experience I've become a psychology major." She said some other really nice things along those lines, but I was a bit too surprised to comprehend it all. I certainly don't set out to "convert" anyone to psychology as a field (if anything, I'm a bit of a critic of the discipline), and my main goal in class is to help students think about some of the critical issues effecting their lives (i.e. "what are humans, how should they be treated, how should they be talked about, and how should we stay away from really bad ideas that will be detrimental to our self understanding and progression" etc.) Still, it was nice to hear that God could use me to make even more profound differences in the course of some of my students' lives (enough so for them to had the courage to seek me out a year later and let me know it!) Nice and humbling. I've just barely begun my 3rd year teaching and have only been doing adjunct teaching and grad student instruction; I didn't expect to see such rich dividends so soon, but I rejoice in it and thank God.