Ken Alford This information was originally published at http://kenalford.com/semlist/2002/02jan13.htm and sent out as part of Ken Alford’s email list to Seminary teachers.   It’s helpful for teachers who may be struggling with tardiness in the classroom: Punctuality always seems to be a challenge in the church, but it is especially so when you add teenagers and early […]

Despite years of fighting with Drupal to try to speed it up, I've just never been able to get things going fast enough.  We tried everything -- even paid for a second file server for downloads -- to try to handle the load.  Never could do it.  A few months back I decided to switch […]

Well, that went well.  I felt the spirit more strongly during this Relief Society gospel study lesson than in our previous lessons.  I started out by debunking that Mormon myth about the devil having control of the waters in D&C 61.  Easy.  Hopefully it's clear to everyone that the destroyer is not the devil, but […]

I had a fun time with this lesson.  I felt like I had a clear focus, which gave me a chance to really push my lesson home.  I do wish I had more time to polish it, but I spent the day Monday Christmas-ing up the house for my daughter, and didn't realize I hadn't […]

I followed up on our challenge to introduce ourselves to new move-ins and seek to welcome them to our ward at the beginning of class.  No stories to share, but I'll follow up again later. Last week we did not get to the gifts of the spirit in D&C 46, and since a student mentioned […]

Ha! I found my lesson notes for this lesson!  I am going to back date it so that it shows in order on the website, but really I'm writing this three weeks after I gave the lesson, so hopefully I can remember how it went. This was the At The Ohio lesson for me, so […]

When I first began teaching, I kept hearing people say that teachers should "teach with the Spirit".  What did that even mean?  It's not like I can control when the Holy Ghost testifies or if another person can hear or listen to him, right?  Does teaching with the spirit mean I should scrap the manual […]

I've completed the move to WordPress, or at least, I've completed it far enough to take the website live, anyway.  I'll blog another day about why I moved to WordPress from Drupal, but for now, I'm just going to make a quick run-down of the new features of the site. Streamlined Menus I hate to […]

After last week, I thought that the class might be dwindling to an unsustainable level. Even though people keep expressing "interest" many were not showing up or were scheduling other appointments during class time. I was thinking that we might be approaching a time that we would have reassess the need for the class. But […]

AC expressed a common concern on the LDS Seminary Teacher Facebook Group: "I'm a new teacher this year, not creative at all and need desperate help. I have my two boys in my class and they both tell me I'm boring." Here's what I said: Please know that everything I'm about to say is intended […]