Six-Word Business Plan

“Where am I in your business plan?”

This is the question I heard from God in prayer yesterday. 

The question came to me in a moment of satisfaction with myself at the completion of the full business plan for Long Island Languages. Tom and I have been working every single day from sunrise to about midnight (I know, that’s not enough sleep for people over fifty) to prepare for our new business to open on October 1st, to make sure we haven’t missed anything. I was feeling accomplished and a little prideful. And I was starting to ask God about keeping me humble, when BLAM! He humbled me. “Where am I in your business plan?”

God makes a good point. He inspires me. He makes my path straight. He opens doors. He energizes me. He is the One who makes me able at all, so when I write out the formal business plan for Long Island Languages, the lengthy document that lists our vision, our assets, our needs, our expectations, our start-up plan, our five-year projections, why is God not in that yet? And how does He fit into it?

To demonstrate need for the school, we have added demographic charts that show the growth of bilingualism in Riverhead over the past five years. To demonstrate our capacity for preparedness, we created graphs of how tuition funding will pay the rent and the professors’ salaries. We outlined our plans for decor, for furniture purchases, for a security guard station, but we never mentioned where God would be. I profess an awareness that I can’t do a thing without Him, so how did I ever create a business plan that left Him out? “Where am I in your business plan?”

How many times have I heard from the pulpit that I need to carry the Sunday messages into the week and into my daily activities. My life as an educator has never been void of God exactly, but apparently I am still keeping my church life separate from my profession after all these years, and God may be straightening that out for good now.

I think it was in 2010 that I had the privilege of attending a late-August faculty meeting that caused me to zero in on my purpose as a teacher, and that’s when I first noticed how God had been weaving His way into my job. In that convocation-style meeting, a colleague, mentor, and dear friend of mine gave a speech to the entire faculty that helped me define myself as a professional, and I love that I’m sitting in 2024 feeling gratitude about it in answer to God’s question. Christine Finn, an administrator in the Patchogue-Medford school district at the time, introduced us to the concept of writing a six-word bio. The six-word bio is a way to first reflect, then to pinpoint your purpose in any walk of life, then to attempt to spell it out in just six words. I highly recommend the practice of introspection that led me to discovering who I really am as an educator. It works for teachers, but I suspect it works for all professions. The directions for developing a six-word bio are simple… but restrictive. You can write a full sentence with six words, like “I love to eat potato chips”. You can write a list of six words like “cats dogs chickens kids work housework”. But you can’t write five or seven words of anything. It’s got to be exactly six. Maybe everyone at that meeting didn’t think it through as I was doing, but the process for me was serious. In our case, we were challenged with a one-week deadline for handing in our six words. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

As with everything I do, I started with a list of questions. What do I want to achieve most every time I stand before a class? What do students say about me? What kind of teacher am I? It became clear right off that one of the six words I must have in my bio is LOVE. My goal with every single student I’ve ever had is for them to feel loved. In my first-ever year teaching, when I was working in a pre-school, I comforted four-year-old babies that were afraid to leave their moms for the first time and venture off into this three-hour trap called school. One at a time, with smiles and hugs and laughter and music, I won them over. Before long, each one of those babies accidentally called me mom, climbed into my cross-legged lap, or held my hand for comfort. They needed to feel loved so that I could teach them. They needed to trust me so I could get their attention. And that early lesson in nurturing my students (taught to me by the babies I professed to be teaching) has shaped my entire career.

Another word I knew belonged among my six is TEACH. Yes, I love my job, and I show love to my students, but for what? My real goal is to be able to help students to progress in knowledge, to teach them something. When I taught high school English, for example, lessons came in the form of vocabulary quizzes, literature comprehension questions, and very boring grammar practice. If I hadn’t loved those teenagers, I wouldn’t have been able to teach them a single thing. Though lots of those kids came from very loving families, my classroom still needed to be a place of love to be able to get them to trust me, to respect me, to listen to me even through my imperfect explanations of sentence diagramming. Students did well, too. They learned how to find their voices in their journal-writing. They took risks to animate the characters in Shakespearean dramas. They openly shared their disdain for grammar and spelling rules and homework, but still passed my class. They didn’t just learn the subject of English; they learned how to think for themselves. This is a crucial distinction for me. When I taught in the Christian school, I was concerned about how easy it would be for me to persuade my students to think how I did, to trust God because I said to, for example, to read their Bibles because I said it was the right thing, to say they had faith when they didn’t really have faith of their own yet. Because of this, I made a specific effort to raise up the students in my class to think for themselves, and not to think like I told them to. As a follower of Christ, I hope that students will see something in me that they want to find out about, but I don’t want to tell them how to think. I want to teach them to think. I recognize that faith and learning are a hand-in-hand classroom journey that requires considering God for ourselves. Learning to think: that’s a true education. 

The last important word that came to mind for my teaching personality was JOY. It’s not a verb, but it’s an active part of my classroom. Take a peek in the window, listen at the door, ask my students what my classroom is like: the result will say something about JOY. I have fun when I teach. I always have. I used to sit on the floor with my kindergarten ESL students and laugh and laugh with them as someone would make a funny mistake and someone else would notice — and don’t think that that someone wasn’t me sometimes. Those five-year-olds sang with me on the carpet in my classroom. They cried with me when they had difficulty with the social issues and pressures that being different, learning a second language and having a separate culture in their home brought them — but we laughed, too. My love for my students, my love for my profession, my awareness of the need for language skills to succeed in life (whether as a pre-schooler, kindergartener, teenager, or as an adult second-language student) make me joyful to be a part of the solution. 

I love how God has called me to be an English professor. My six-word bio is:

LOVE FIRST.

TEACH THINKING.

BRING JOY.

I plan to post this somewhere on the walls of Long Island Languages. I do pray that anyone who sits in my class, even those who never notice the sign, will be able to tell that this is my teaching philosophy. In fact, it’s now the purpose for an entire business where many families will reap the benefits of its professed teaching style.

“Where am I in the business plan?” 

“Well, Lord, You are the business plan. And the lesson plan, too. Without love, I cannot teach. You are love.” 

1 John 4:8 “God is love”

***THANKS FOR READING. PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT …AND MAYBE SHARE YOUR SIX WORDS. I’D LOVE TO HAVE THE FEEDBACK.

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