For Part Two, Part Three, or Part Four, or even Part Five, Part Six, or Part Seven, click on the appropriate link.
Today we are settling in on Elder Paul H. Dunn's Conference talk from October 1971, called "What Is a Teacher?"
He talks about a bishop that attempted to put some wisdom into his mostly empty teenage brain. The first quote his bishop gave him was:
The Quote
"...Attention is the mother of memory."
A good quote, but the bishop didn't tell him who said it. This sent me scrambling all over the Internet, looking for some good facsimiles of the quote that seem fairly close to this one.
Samuel Johnson?
At first I thought it might be Samuel Johnson. Boswell's Life of Johnson is pretty high up on my reading list, but a perusal of this, and some of Johnson's other works as well, proved fruitless.
What about Cicero?
It could be, but not that I've found yet. I tried the De oratore. Man, I could wade through that Latin all day, but time requirements hinder me.
Does this quote exist at all?
Maybe, but when we can't determine the accuracy of the quote, we are left with the content...and in this case, the context.
The context of an elderly bishop trying to pass on wisdom he's learned in a long life to a young man who's yet to learn those lessons, and who could go even farther than the person trying to boost him up.
That's teaching.
And it's something we all do, not just paid teachers. We teach by telling, and sometimes when we can't speak, we teach by example.
Sometimes I wish it was as easy as downloading all my experiences and all the things I've learned from hard experience into younger people, and then watching them go so much farther than I ever could.
But it doesn't work that way.
I'll bet God feels that way too. Christ was certainly the ultimate Teacher...but for Him to just dump on me everything He knows and everything He's learned would probably explode my little brain. Like trying to teach an infant calculus.
I'm trying to pay attention though, and remember...step by step.
