Adventures in Gratefulness: Dr. Dan Nelms

DECONSTRUCTING JEFF: Adventures in Gratefulness

As I approach 60 and am finally synthesizing the research of my own life via Deconstructing Jeff, here are a few outtakes from a section titled Adventures in Gratefulness.

Some Context

From time to time throughout our lives, we come across souls who we eventually realise have had a monumental impact on our lives. I am not talking about the idea that ‘we should be thankful for the good, bad and ugly people in our lives’. I mean those few beings who we are profoundly grateful that for a short time our two paths were able to cross. (NOTE: to keep things simple I will not be mentioning family members or relatives, whether natural or via marriage.)

DAN NELMS: early 80’s (US)

Prof Nelmns was a firebrand 4’-11’ monster of a quiet man. He was extremely intelligent, logical and made you question everything — which was quite unusual given this was a fundamentalist Bible college. Being a research guru himself, he unknowingly began to mold a HUGE part of my work and academic life. “Go to the source and prove your point.” Whether this was his actual mantra or my own being reverse personified on him, this idea of going to the source for any and all research was what he taught. This also made his approach to Christian education very pragmatic as opposed to dogmatic.

The first course I took with him was a ‘philosophy of education for youth’ course. It was in my first semester and I just spent a year or so working with teen groups even though I was not much older than them. Two major components of the class were a 20-page pseudo-thesis assignment that required many sources, as well as the final exam which was the classic, ‘What is your philosophy of working with youth and how would you go about it?’ which basically meant you had to write for 2 hours about everything you’ve picked up from the class and have it make sense. Though having been working for a couple of years after high school and being 21 at the time gave me ‘mature student’ status — I was by all accounts an academic novice.

Dr. Nelm’s insistence on using a vast number of credible sources had a huge impact on my academic life as well as most of my life about always going to the source. Even today when I am creating my YouTube videos I will use many sources and will not only reference them, but add links to the articles. I guess this is my own personal approach to combating all the plethora of ‘fake news’.

Who are you grateful for from your college days?