Teaching Is One of the Greatest Acts of Love
There is a thing I do when kids are dull in class. I call it Jumpology. 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; he took me as his own. Every kid at my secondary school loved him; nobody wanted to make him angry either. I watched him do it during devotions, out on the field, whenever a room went flat. He never told me to carry it forward. I just did.
Last Wednesday, after midweek service, my kids church team lead told me the kids had been asking where uncle Sammy was. My chest tightened; I smiled. My mom had said something similar weeks earlier when I told her I was leaving church. She said: what of those beautiful children?
Teaching can be a lot of things that aren't love. It can be ego. A way of staying important. A performance. Apostle Paul said it plainly: knowledge puffs up; love builds up. The difference is what the teacher actually wants: their own significance, or the student's understanding.
I learned that distinction before I knew to name it. My mom is a licensed teacher. My dad met her as one too, then spent the rest of his life becoming a geologist, a pastor, an elder in church; teaching more in every role than he ever did in a 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.
That was tested. From 2023 to late 2024, I was home. Depressed and suicidal. Unemployed. My mom's school was in our compound; stepping outside meant walking out of my bedroom door into a classroom. Most mornings I came in looking like a mess, still carrying the weight of the night before. I was doing enough judging for everyone in that classroom. The kids just saw uncle Sammy; 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. Just present, no performance, no weight.
I hadn't done anything extraordinary. I just told them to jump!