Teaching Is One of the Greatest Acts of Love
Teaching is one of the greatest acts of love.
There is a thing I do when a class goes dull. You can feel and see it happen: when the kids stop responding to prompts, when their hands start wandering across the table, or when their faces are looking at you, but they are no longer present in the moment.
I call it Jumpology. The goal is to loosen them up and bring them back to the room.
I tell them to leave their seats and jump. I say, Jump, jump. They say, Jumpology.
It always works.
I learned it from my uncle Columbus in secondary school. He lived in our compound and took me as his own. Every kid in my secondary school loved him, and nobody wanted to make him angry, either.
I watched him do it during devotions, out on the field, and in those classroom moments where the children were physically there but already gone from the lesson.
He never told me to carry it forward. I just did.
Last Wednesday, after midweek service, my children's church team lead told me the children had been asking where Uncle Sammy was. My chest tightened, then I smiled.
My mom had said something similar weeks earlier when I told her I was leaving church.
What of those beautiful children?
Teaching can be ego. A way of staying important. A performance.
Apostle Paul said it plainly: knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.
The difference shows in what the teacher wants: their own significance, or the student's understanding.
For me, love is attention.
It is noticed when children are still trying to follow you, when their eyes have started moving around the room, and when another explanation will only make the class heavier.
At home, teaching was everywhere.
My mom is a licensed teacher. My dad met her as one, then spent the rest of his life becoming a geologist, a pastor, and an elder in church. He kept teaching in every role, even outside the classroom.
My brother helped my mom build her school. I started somewhere around 13.
Nobody assigned this to any of us. We just kept ending up here.
From 2023 to late 2024, I was home. Depressed and suicidal. Unemployed.
My mom's school was in our compound, so there was no real distance between my bedroom and the classroom.
Some mornings, I stepped out looking like a mess, still carrying the weight of the night before.
I had already judged myself before anyone else had the chance: unemployed, ashamed, tired of being seen.
But the kids still expected Uncle Sammy. They turned when I entered the class, pulled me by my hand, and called my name like nothing had happened.
They always did.
The age group I keep returning to is pre-teens. Those were my most formative years: when I decided I wanted to be a software engineer, when I was most fully myself, and when I first felt the pressure of other people's expectations settling on me.
I was twelve.
When I show up for that age group now, I want them to feel the opposite of what I felt: present, unburdened, free to be children without performing for anyone.
Most days, that does not look extraordinary.
I just notice when they are no longer in the room with me, and I tell them to jump.
And somehow, in a season when I was tired of being seen, the children still knew I had seen them.
What of those beautiful children?
Teaching is one of the greatest acts of love.