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Commencement Address
The 55th Graduating Class of Bellevue Christian High School
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Bill Safstrom. Parents and friends of BCS, faculty members, and seniors, thank you for asking me to speak at your
graduation. I count it a great privilege and an honor. Tonight I’ll only remind you of what you’ve already learned, and
encourage you to continue doing what you’ve already begun.
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| Tuition and Mission, or Do Policies Teach? |
Bill Safstrom. In a meeting with Christian school administrators about long range tuition planning, I heard the following
tuition policy rationale that requires a response. Since some parents paying their own children’s tuition are reluctant to
donate to cover another family’s tuition (financial aid), it makes practical sense to cover financial aid within the budget
and ask parents to donate to cover more acceptable or exciting needs such as teacher bonuses or pay increases.
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| GUIDELINES FOR SCHOOL SPONSORED STUDENT TRAVEL
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Bill Safstrom. School sponsored student travel, including international travel, for mission work or educational
purposes can be an important part of a Christian school education. While the need for students to see themselves
as global Christians who understand their world is great, the questions about health and travel safety are many
and changing.
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| Yabus, Sudan |
Tim Krell. Four days after leaving home and seven flight later, the small prop-plane bounced down on the dirt airstrip cut into the
landscape of Yabus, Sudan. -- This article first appeared in the Christian Courier.
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| Christian Education in Haiti: Hope in the Midst of Despair |
John Van Dyk. Haiti has been much in the news this year. And the news was not good. Surrounded by warm, blue Caribbean waters,
this once beautiful country was hammered again and again by an unrelenting series of destructive hurricanes, exacerbating the misery
of people already suffering in the throes of unbelievable poverty.
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| Christian education is alive and well in Central America and the Caribbean |
John Van Dyk. Christian education is alive and well in Central America and the Caribbean. In fact, the good news is
that the Christian school movement is steadily expanding.
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| Assessment that Supports and Encourages Learning |
Elaine Brouwer. Blessing is likely not the descriptor that most of us have attached to assessment. More often,
the word conjures up images of endless hours of marking student work, the dreaded report card season, the sometimes-painful process
of justifying the mark to students and parents, and accusations of grade inflation. Burden is a more likely descriptor.
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| What is Quality Christian Education? |
John Van Dyk. What do you think of when you hear the word "quality"? Probably a well-made product, such as
an automobile without built-in obsolescence, or a skillfully crafted violin capable of producing a most exquisite sound. Quality
, in general, suggests a set of characteristics that make something rise above the mediocre. If something is "of quality" it either
meets or exceeds a very high standard. In a sense, all the children in Lake Wobegon are "quality children."
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| Curiosity and Wonder Lost in School |
Tim Krell. Young children are innately curious. They poke sticks in puddles, chase grasshoppers, and
wonder how things work. When these little explorers go to school a different set of discoveries is set before them by
their teachers. Slowly but surely, they lose the intrinsic wonder for life and learning, and it is replaced with the extrinsic
need to please the teacher by producing a good assignment and to impress their parents with an A on a report card.
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| "Justice, fidelity, humility": a charter for Christian education |
Doug Blomberg. What does it mean to be human? On October 4, 1957, amateur astronomers witnessed
a confounding sight: a star that not only failed to twinkle,
but moved! How they wondered what they spied, up above the world so high, like--well, like a missile in the sky.
NASA's commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the "space age" claims that on this day, "history changed", when
"the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I." So shocking was this event to the American psyche, so confident
of technological and military superiority, it inaugurated the "Space Race". NASA was hastily established, and
John F. Kennedy soon promised to build a thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles--an ominous allusion to
Helen of Troy--as well as to put a man on the moon by the end of the sixties.
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Justice, Fidelity, Humility: a charter for Christian education - key note address for the NWCSI/CTABC teachers
convention, October 2008
Doug Blomberg Home Page
Institute for Christian Studies
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| How Then Shall We Teach? |
Doug Blomberg. Two weeks ago, we witnessed an extraordinary event. An arch-opponent of government
regulation of the business sector announced the largest bailout of corporations in history, transferring their debt
to the American taxpayer. Action needed to be taken, but not the knee-jerk, ad hoc moves that George W. Bush announced.
Why reward those companies that had precipitated the crisis by their own greed and mismanagement, some of
whose CEO's earned more than $50,000,000 per year?
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How Then Shall We Teach - key note address for the NWCSI/CTABC teachers
convention, October 2008
Doug Blomberg Home Page
Institute for Christian Studies
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