Midway through my first semester at Colorado School of Mines, I took my next faith step as a Christian professor. I briefly shared in class some personal details about myself to help my ~100 students to get to know me better as a person, not just as their teacher. I also passed out 3×5 cards on which I asked them to tell me some interesting things I should know about them so that I could also know each of them as a person and not just as a student.
I’ve found this simple step is a great way to relationally connect with and care for my students.
This exercise also opened the door to share some personal details about myself. In those early years, I typically shared something like this:
“I have a wonderful wife, Ann, who I met my senior year in college and married the summer after I got my B.S. degree. We have a daughter who was born the spring of my last year in graduate school and a son who will be born this coming spring. I love to play tennis, which I played competitively in high school, and racquetball, which I recently started. I love to snow ski as well and am an avid jogger. Ann is a gypsy who loves to travel, and so do I. Our bucket list includes visiting all seven continents some day and living on at least three before we expire. But the most important thing you should know about me is that I became a follower of Jesus Christ as a college student, after pursuing success as my God and finding that success alone did not really satisfy. I hope that you will see that it makes a great deal of difference in how I treat you in this class. I would be glad to visit outside of class with anyone who would like to know more about my faith journey.”
This journey began with this first simple step; namely, I publicly identified myself as a follower of Jesus.
Whenever I self-identify as a follower of Jesus to students and colleagues, I always indicate that I hope they will see the difference it makes in the way that I treat them.
To help make sure this wasn’t just a statement, but a reality. Ann and I would pray that God will give me the daily grace to honor this commitment. And practically, I’d make sure to learn my students’ names (with the help of pictures that I take of them the first day of class) and to take the time to visit personally with them when they come by for homework help.
I also set ambitious learning objectives and then worked extremely hard to help every student to achieve mastery of these objectives with well-crafted lectures and homework assignments. To serve my students, I’d always offer optional (but very well attended) review sessions the night before my exams. Those review sessions often began at 7:00 P.M. and ran until the students run out of questions.
In addition, when invited by students or colleagues, I’d go snow skiing and play tennis to get time with them outside the academic environment.
In those early years at Colorado School of the Mines, God had confirmed my calling to be a Christian Professor in ways that I could never have imagined (Jeremiah 29:11).
God also blessed me professionally with a university-wide teaching award and a NSF research grant, but more importantly we saw lives change both in the fellow faculty with whom I served the university and in students whom I had the privilege to teach.
Walter Bradley