Books on Christian Schools

If you were to ask me to give you a crash course on my favorite sport of baseball, it is a bit difficult to come up with where to start. Do you explain the rules of the game? Do you talk about the great players throughout the years? Or do you talk about the moments in the game that made you fall in love? Some of this is just going to be too personal to connect, but one of the things that I have learned is that if you are talking about something that you are passionate about, the audience feels your passion and absorbs some of it from you.

I will start with what baseball means to me and I would say the chief thing that it does for me is give me community. My personal history with the sport is that it has been passed down from generation to generation. My dad told stories about going to games with his dad when he was younger and he followed that by buying season tickets and sharing that same experience with me and my siblings. Our shared love of our favorite team is something that we always have in common and we are always staying in touch with updates on the team that has no bearing on our lives other than our undying love. This is a sport that I hope to pass down to my children in the future, even if that means rooting for our team that has experienced very little success in my life. Baseball brings people together in a way that many other sports are not able to copy. It is a place that you can go to sit out on a nice day, enjoy a hot dog, and enjoy the company of your friends and family.

Baseball is not just a sport that is stuck in America. It is international and the leaders in the league are working to make it more global. Other than in America, the biggest baseball league in the world is in Japan, where they have adopted baseball for themselves. There are top players in Japan constantly making the leap to America to compete with the best of the best. The other places that many players come from are places like the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Cuba. These countries have produced some of the top players today and in the last 30 or so years. In recent years, MLB has expanded their reach by hosting games in other countries, including a recent game in London. They would love it to be a global game, which is part of the reason they sponsored the World Baseball Classic, an international competition that took the place of Olympic baseball after it was dropped from the list of sports. The Classic is a tournament that has taken place every 3 years and has shown just how massive the sport is. In the last tournament, Israel even had a team qualify and make a run into the tournament. The rules allowed for those qualifying for Israeli citizenship to play, so a team of American Jews took the tournament by storm. They showed that baseball has power around the world.

For some parents, there are no limitations to what they will do for their child. They appear overbearing and in some cases, the child resents their parents for their ruthless behavior. In fear of being this child, some parents fall back way too much and give their child too much freedom which also hurts the child. Good parenting is not something that can be forced and there is no right or wrong answer. But when it comes to good daycare there are certain questions that some parents just are not comfortable asking but they need to be asked. You do not want to enroll your child into daycare and simply assume that some things are going to work out. Ask right away to avoid any confusion, communication is crucial to the experience that your child will have in daycare. 

Do Children Go to Good Schools from this Daycare?

When it comes to asking about daycare, many of the questions have to do with the future of the child. No one wants to sound like an education snob, but in the same breath, you want to make sure that your child is set up for a bright future. If a daycare center is hesitant to discuss the success of their alumnus then it might be time to look into a new daycare. 

What are the credentials of the staff?

When you ask questions about daycare, the harder ones are going to be about the staff. This is because they are usually the ones fielding the questions and might feel personally attacked. However, the great daycare centers are used to answering questions such as these. They know that parents are going to want to know what type of education the people have who will be working with their children. The best daycares only hire the best educators. 

Do you perform background checks on the staff?

Another question you might be afraid to ask about daycare because you do not want to offend anyone. But we have all seen the news reports of children being abused by educators at daycares and it typically comes down to parents not asking the right questions. With a simple background check, you can see all that you need about the educators to avoid an all-out disaster. Do not be afraid of offending anyone, this is your child’s safety and there are no questions that are off-limits.

Are the facilities state of the art? 

Comparing one daycare to the next might seem unfair, but it absolutely is not. This is a competition and you are paying for the service. There is a clear winner and loser, so make sure you are on the winning side. A daycare that invests in the latest education and technology is going to be a center that you want your child to attend. This will give them a leg up on their peers when it is finally time to enroll in school. Stop being timid because this will only hurt your child and it will rub off on them in the wrong way. Set the precedent and ask the tough questions about daycare so that you know you are working with the best. 

Being a solid student in a Christian school is absolutely a skill. Some of us have it innate in us and it is something that does not require too much effort. But for others, it is something that requires hard work and dedication to find any sort of success. No matter what category you fall under, or even if you are a hybrid of the two there are a few universal skills in Christian education that you need to possess in order to have success. Most of these skills need to be taught in order for students to rise to the stop and stay there. For some reason, most Christian schools do not teach these skills directly. They subtly put them in their lesson plans and leave it up to the student to pick it up themselves. Some students pick up these skills in Christian education while others are left in the dust. If you or your child want to make sure that you have these skills, then you should keep reading on. 

Study Skills

Studying takes discipline. After spending ninety minutes in a class struggling to understand the subject matter, the last thing you want to do is go home and review this subject matter. But you absolutely have to if you want to prevail in this class. However, showing up is only half of the battle and that might even be a generous percentage. You need to possess strong study skills to make sure that you are actually picking up good habits with the course material. The moment you spend hours with the content but are misunderstanding you are hurting yourself. You have wasted your time and you are going to ultimately fail which is an absolutely lose-lose. So you need to make sure that your study skills are sharp so that the time you spend in the library is merited and will benefit you in the classroom. 

Note Taking Ability

Taking notes, for whatever reason, is not something that is taught in class? One day, you are just responsible for taking down all of the important notes that your teacher is giving to you. In some classes, they even have certain notes that are giving in class but not covered in the book. These are to see which students were paying close attention during class and which ones tried to cover their butts by speed-reading the text. Diligent note-taking is a skill that will make your life much easier at any school and later on in life when you start your job. This is one of the most coveted skills in Christian education as it is in direct correlation with your ability to study. If you are incapable of taking strong notes then you are going to have a difficult time actually studying the materials when class is over. Take the time to actually learn this skill to that you can surpass and exceed any expectations in the classroom. When you have the ability to take strong notes and you know how to study them, you will see your grades and confidence take a major boost.