Oral Report

     Do you remember giving an oral report growing up?  Maybe you were nervous.  Maybe you worried your mind would go blank in front of the class.  Maybe you were worried about making silly mistakes.  Well, you needn't have feared!  Yesterday, one of my students gave one of the craziest oral reports ever, one to put all other possible erroneous reports out of mind!

     As I've shared, I teach 5th grade at a Christian school here in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  It's a small, close-knit school.  I only have twelve students in my fifth grade class.  Yet even in a class of twelve, they certainly have their very different personalities!  Take Ian* (not his real name).

     Before the oral report, we had a music practice.  Our class is rehearsing a song to perform for the rest of the school the last day.  It is a worship song.  Yesterday, a woman came in to teach them the sign language for the song as well.  All the kids were doing really well, learning the signs...all but Ian.  He was standing there with a bored look on his face, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.  It really ruined the effect of the others all doing their best.

Our School chapel/auditorium, where we will  perform our song. FYI, this picture was taken at a school music recital.

     "Ian, give it a try," I encouraged.  Ian looked at me as if I had asked him to shoot his mother, and then burst out crying.  The music stopped.  The signing stopped.  All eyes were on Ian.  His classmates and I are used to these little outbursts, but the music teacher and signing visitor were perplexed.

     Ian held up our practice time for a good ten minutes with the scene he caused.  The music teacher was trying to calm him down.  Ian was eating up the attention, yet stubbornly refusing to speak or explain.  Ian is a great kid, but our class has been a victim of these scenes a few times.

     "Ian," the sign language lady smiled.  "If you don't want to sign, you can go stand over by Mr. Moss (music teacher) and sing the song with him while he plays it on the guitar."

     Ian ignored this suggestion and kept crying.  I had had enough.

     "Ian, two choices," I said kindly but firmly.  "You can try the sign language with the others, or you can go stand over by Mr. Moss.  Which do you prefer?"

     Pouting, Ian shrugged.  He was hamming it up and enjoying every minute of it.  He liked that everything had stopped for him.

     "Then I choose for you.  Go stand by Mr. Moss."  He slowly complied, sniffling dramatically.

     The rest of practice went well.  We all had fun.  The others all learned the sign language quickly.

     As we walked back down the hall to our classroom, I told Ian that it was okay for him to share that he didn't feel comfortable signing, but he was never allowed to just not answer like that.

     "Can't help it," he said, now happy as a clam.  "I'm just a private person."

     He sure cried and made a scene privately, didn't he?

     It was time for the class' oral reports.  We have been reading biographies of missionaries or other heroes of the faith this year, and I had put the kids in teams to do more in-depth reports on these great Christian people whom we had already read about.

Corrie ten Boom

Jim Elliot

Amy Carmichael

David Wilkerson (founder of Teen Challenge, and author of The Cross and the Switchblade)

Fanny Crosby, blind hymn writer

     One other missionary included in our reports (as well as our book list this past year) was Brother Andrew, who smuggled Bibles into Soviet bloc countries during the Cold War.  His book, God's Smuggler is one of my favorite books.  It reads like an exciting spy novel, but is a true story of God at work.  Click here to check it out.  It was a delight to share it with the students.  I had assigned two boys to do the oral report on Brother Andrew.  

Brother Andrew, the Bible Smuggler

     As you may have guessed, Ian was on the team doing the report on Brother Andrew.  The students had weeks to work on it.  I gave them time in class every day to work with their partner.  I told them to come to me if they needed help.  I let them use the books we had read about these people, and also looked up information on the Internet for them.  Several students asked me questions and requested help.  I was glad to help them.  Ian only asked me to print a few pictures of Brother Andrew for his display board, but never seemed to need information.  It was his job to ask.

The team doing their report on David Wilkerson.  They received an A+

     It wasn't planned this way, but Ian and his partner went last.  Up until this point, the teams had all gotten somewhere in the A range for grades on the reports.  I expected similar success for Ian's team, especially because his partner strives for good grades.  

     In order for what happened next to make sense, I'll give a really short explanation about Brother Andrew.  If you're unfamiliar, Brother Andrew used that name as a protection of his privacy and the privacy of believers in the Soviet Union when he was smuggling Bibles into that region.  He was from Holland, and impacted much of Europe with his ministry.  As a younger man, he had fought the Dutch war in Indonesia.  An injury during the war was what ultimately brought him to Christ, and into the ministry.  I highly recommend the book.  Anyway...

     The two boys walked up to the front of the classroom.  Ian (the private person, you'll remember) began by exclaiming loudly, gesturing dramatically with his arms, "Brother Andrew fought in anesthesia, and I have no idea what the heck that is, because no one bothers to tell me anything!"  

     I cringed!  He meant Indonesia, not anesthesia.  It was his business to know what it meant!  He'd had weeks to work on this report, not to mention that we had all read the book.  

     "Yeah," his partner picked up.  "That part was in chapter two of the book."

     "No!"  Ian corrected him.  "It was chapter three!  I remember now!"  

     "I'm sure it was two!"

     They had a mild argument before deciding that this part of the story had covered chapters two and three.  

     After explaining virtually nothing about Brother Andrew's short-lived military career, Ian backed up.  "When Brother Andrew was a kid, he played a mean trick on some neighbors and put glass on their chimney and ruined the cookies!  Anything but cookies!  Come on!"

     The back story to this was that a young Brother Andrew had put a glass pane over a neighbor's chimney, backing it up, and thereby filling the house with smoke.  The neighbors caught on to what he had done, but instead of being angry, they offered him a cookie that they had been cooking (which were not ruined, by the way).  These people ended up supporting his ministry later on.  Ian's version explained nothing!  

     He carried on another two or three minutes about how horrible it was to ruin cookies.  His arm went dramatically across his forehead.  Alas, poor Ian, I knew him well!  Pretty impressive for a self-proclaimed private person.

     His partner went on to explain a few things about the Bible smuggling.  His facts were a bit off as well, and mostly preceded by the words, "I believe," indicating he was not sure of his facts.  

     Then Ian took back over.  "This report was really hard, because the book was no help at all!  Thanks a lot book!  And the Internet was even worse.  Thanks a lot, Internet!"  

     And now you know all about Brother Andrew!  You also know that if you ever felt you bombed an oral report, you were still better than Ian's report!  To quote Mark Twain, Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene.