How do you Rate?

Last week I had the honor of interviewing candidates for two open teaching positions at the local Christian School’s elementary school. Like all interviews we asked a lot of question in our effort to get to know the candidates better.

One question that we asked was “on a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate yourself in Bible knowledge?” It is a tricky question. Answer too high and you seem like an overconfident show off but answer too low and you likely won’t be hired. It was really a trap. After asking it once we decided it wasn’t a fair question so we stopped using it as part of the decision making process. But we continued to ask the question as part of a social experiment.

During a break I asked the principal that was conducting the interview how he would rate himself. He said about a 4. I said I was thinking I was thinking I was a 3-4. I asked the principal if his self-answer was higher or lower than it would have been for himself 10 years ago. He said he would rate himself lower than 10 years ago. I said

I would definitely give myself a lower score today than 10 years ago.

Clearly neither of us was going backwards or unlearning things from the Bible.

The more I dig into the subject of the Bible I find that I have so much more to learn.

Over the weekend I had the chance to ask my children and some of their friends the same question. Everybody was in the 3-4 range as well. All of these children are high school students at a Christian school. They go to bible class every day and church every Sunday. One of them said “so the lower the score the better you understand the Bible.” He might be right.

I am sure that the same is true of every subject. It seems the more you study a subject, the more you realize how much you don’t know about that subject. Hopefully that realization drive you to keep studying.

Pretty humbling isn’t it.