structured learning

This past week I joined a few people in my church in starting a schedule of chronologically reading through the Bible in 112 days. This is something that I resisted at first, but that I decided I would start with the caveat that I would drop it if it became too much of a burden. So far the reading has been less involved than I expected, and it has required less time overall than the reading and homework I had to do most semesters when I was taking MBA classes. Life is busy, though, so I am not entirely convinced I will complete this.

The last time I tried a structured Bible reading program I was in junior high. I don't believe I finished, but my memory of the process is spotty. I have never been an extremely fast reader, and it was very hard to catch up when I got behind (which will happen at some point during every reading program if you don't read ahead). It was hard enough to focus on the content of what I was reading when I did a day's reading, but if I tried to read multiple days' worth of reading speed was a higher priority than understanding what I was reading. Even then I knew this defeated the purpose of reading through the Bible. This is a big reason why I am wary of structured reading plans.

The first time I actually read all of the way through the Bible and understood most of what I read was around my sophomore year in high school. I took more than a year going through it at that time and I used a study Bible so that I would have a better context for what I was reading. Furthermore, when I did spend a large block of time reading the Bible it was because I was interested in what I was reading rather than because I had to complete the scheduled reading for last month, so I retained what I read better. The success I saw with the more unstructured reading further influenced my opinions regarding the best way for me to read the Bible.

Because of this experience, I am actually a bit wary of the other ways that I have heard pushed to read the Bible as well. Reading the Bible a little each day is a great way to stay on top of reading if your life can be structured in that way. I think that saying that that is the standard for Bible reading is ridiculous, though. Bible reading is important if it is effective, and if a specific structure or plan for reading the Bible does not work for someone then pushing it on them is not helpful. It will only discourage them from reading Scripture in the future.

Ultimately, the reason I decided on this Bible reading plan was that I found I was coming up with excuses not to read a lot of the passages in the Old Testament, so I figured if I had the motivation of discussing what I was reading with others who were reading it the reading might not be so much of a burden. I do not want to diminish the value of the Old Testament, but much of it can be dry and difficult to trudge through, such as Exodus, Leviticus, and stretches of the two books of Chronicles (which open with nine solid chapters of genealogies).

I found a story in the New York Times today that I felt paralleled this a bit. The College Board is in the process of revising the coursework associated with advanced placement classes because some of the classes had so much material the classes were more focused on memorization than discovery. If you know my philosophy on education, which was formed based on experiences like what I just described, you know that I like these changes. Allowing the student to learn through self-directed means rather than forcing him or her through a rigid set of steps will ultimately cause that student to retain more knowledge and discover how to learn new things. For people like myself, if you take the discovery process from Scripture reading, then they will not want to read it and they will only learn what they have to. That is true for all other learning as well.