Teaching in the Home and Church

What does it take to teach?

Teaching techniques? A classroom of students? A lesson manual?

It’s much simpler. The minimum requirements for teaching are two people and an effort to communicate something important.

These articles focus on those two people: parent and child, husband and wife, leader and follower, instructor and pupil, missionary and contact, friends. … They focus not on what is taught, but on what is communicated: loving concern.

These are the people who care: a father who takes his son along with him; a mother who thriftily uses transportation time to teach her children; a father who asks for help with his family home evening responsibilities; adults who learn how to be invited into another’s “inner space,” a tenderhearted sensitivity to everyone’s need for honest appreciation, a way to listen totally; the teacher who discovers that ejecting a discipline problem may mean rejecting a human being; the music director who saved a family when she thought she was finding a soloist; the home teacher who loved his family through to a temple sealing.

All of these people try to communicate. One of the things they communicate is that they care. And, in case after case, the loving, honest attempt to communicate is a link between two people and a bridge for the spirit as well.

Illustrations by R. Hull