I won a free throw contest once. A long time ago. It was set up as a tournament; I won my bracket and a friend of mine won the other bracket. So we met in the finals. The setup was that each of us would shoot twenty-five free throws, five at a time. That meant that there came a time when I had to make the last five, not having missed any yet.

As I stood there at the free throw line, I had the clearest picture of myself standing at the free throw line. I saw this person (me) wipe each hand on his shorts, holding the ball in the other hand each time. It was uncanny. I value it now, having not had such an experience since then, but at the time, my reaction was “Great! How am I supposed to focus on the basket with this picture in my mind.” [1]

After that, I lived the great majority of my life and then I started watching Zoom recordings of myself teaching a Bible study made up of some of the best students I ever had. I was struck immediately by how very different the experience of teaching a class is from the experience of watching the whole class while you are teaching them.

My experience of the members of the class while I am teaching is a little like a spotlight with a larger or smaller penumbra. The spotlight moves as the argument develops, lighting whoever is making the argument and anyone associated with the direction the argument might go. When I watch the recording, I watch with the knowledge of where the argument did go and with the clear recollection of what was lighted at the time. But now I also know what is going to happen next and I can watch it develop.

At about minute forty of a recent session, a student who had not been active in the discussion—and who had not, therefore, been in the lighted part of my observation—introduced a challenge that started at a different place than the argument we had been developing. During the session, I was surprised. Watching the recording, I could watch them prepare to make the point they wanted to make. They knew it was a proposal that we look at this scene not in the way we had been looking at it (as a literary construction), but as if we had experienced it ourselves. They shifted one way and another in the seat, they started to speak but then did not. There were plenty of cues available had I known what was going to happen. And in the recording, I also got to watch the reaction of the others in the discussion—the head nods and the eye rolls and the raised eyebrows. I had missed all of that the first time as I was absorbing the challenge and working out how to oppose the argument and support the student at the same time. On my second time, thanks to the recording, I had a chance to see it myself.

And, needless to say, [2] I was drawn to an evaluation. Did I handle it well. How did that student react? How did the others react? Is this a one off or the first of many such proposals? Should I be the one to respond or should I let the others respond, relying on what our approach to this issue has been in the past?

That second option would be ideal, I think. Our approach in the past has been that the way a biblical story is cast reflects the author’s best judgment about how to describe the event so as to have the right effect on the rest of the narrative and the right effect on the listeners. Every member of the class accepts that as our working method and about half of them could describe it as I just have. So maybe, I think as I watch myself leap to respond on the recorded version, I should have held back a little and see who else would have wanted to say what I eventually said.

I learned a lot by watching the interaction on the recording, but I think I ought not to do it very much. There is a “watching what happens next” cast of mind that I think will distract me from the actual teaching. I think I need to teach in a way that I will be willing to be surprised; willing not to see it coming.

Better for me; better for them; better for the development of the argument.

[1] I did make the last five. I have no idea how.
[2] I have just learned that that rhetorical device is called paralipsis, roughly translated “left behind” or “left unsaid.” I say “needless to say” as a preface to actually saying it, which, since it was needless, I should not have said at all.