Talking about faith and Christianity is a very important part of the Bethany curriculum, which is constantly being refined and changed to better engage the students in faith conversations. Last year, a new project, called the Keystone Project, took effect to make one memorable thing from each year in Bible class in High School. This year, the Middle School curriculum is also changing to reflect that project and to make Bible class one semester instead of two.
The High School Keystone Project is aimed to give students one thing from each Bible class to remember. This takes form of a project to reflect the point of the class. For Freshman Old Testament, the project is writing the story of the Old Testament by memory. For Sophomore New Testament, it is memorizing part of the Sermon on the Mount. For Church History, Juniors are expected to create an “ideal church” that reflects what they believe about the Church. Seniors are to write a senior faith statement in Senior Bible. These projects were chosen by bible teacher Dale Shenk, though the Keystone idea came from a committee.
The Middle School Bible teacher, Matt Miller, has aimed his classes to reflect those of the High School. The sixth graders learned about the Old Testament, seventh about the New Testament, and eighth graders about the Church. This was all good for last year, but now Middle School Bible has been cut in half. There is now only one semester to make room for some state mandated activities. Miller is now presented with the challenge of deciding what to cut and what to leave in. When asked how this will affect his workload he said, “In the short term it will be harder because I have to decide what is most important in each class. In the long term though, it will be easier because I am only teaching it for half a year. It is hoped that students will be more involved with faith based learning in other classes since the structured time has been cut.
The Keystone project and semester cut have been big changes over the last two years, but Mr. Shenk and Mr. Miller are coping well, and will soon be back on track with a regular schedule.
-Corey