To ‘compete’ or not to ‘compete’…..that is the question!

Hi MommyBird23 –

I’m not Sonya, but I understand where you are coming from. In fact, I am the host of the Bible Bee here in Jacksonville, FL. I am not opposed in general to competition and love anything to encourage children (and adults) to return to scripture memorization and wanted to be a part of doing that on a city-wide scale.

I read about the competition aspect from CM after I signed up to host and registered my dd to compete. I understand where CM is coming from, too. I don’t want my kids to cram their heads full of scripture just to win a prize, but I am not opposed to rewarding hard work along the way. I’ve done this for years in my Sunday School classes for memorization – so much work = a prize. The kids are often motivated by the prize in the beginning and always enjoy the prizes, but by the end, they want to learn for the sake of learning and those kids still remember years later. I just taught a group of 3,4 & 5 year olds all the Books of the Bible in 24 weeks of classes and rewarded them with gum or balloons every 5 or 6 books. They all succeeded!

Well, when the BB study materials were released, we withdrew dd from the competition. It was just too much! I knew she would be discouraged by the amt. of material and I don’t want discouragement and scripture linked in her mind. As a competition, we’ve decided to add the Primary Mini-Bee for the 7-10 year olds that focuses only on category one. My daughter has decided to participate in it as it is much more doable. She would, of course, love a prize, but she’s encouraged to have a goal that is achievable and beneficial to her life before her. I let her make this choice.

Now, I’m not sure exactly what Miss Mason or Sonya would say, but this is a reasonable compromise for our family. We are learning together, encouraging one another and if there’s a physical reward at the end of it, well that’s just a bonus to hiding God’s word in our hearts as a family.

Many blessings,

Christie

I’d love to chime in on this, because ever since my dd learned to speak she’s been memorizing scripture. When I first realized she had such a knack for it, I began to consider what translation of the Bible she should memorize scripture in so she could memorize it correctly for wherever she would one day be competing. Then when I heard about the Bible Bee, I thought – this is PERFECT for her, perhaps I should get the rules now, even though she’s not old enough to compete yet, we could start prepping… Do you see where this is going? My children will likely NEVER compete in any scripture memorization contest because it is a source of pride for ME. I am blessed in that they memorize easily and don’t need any motivation to do it. We simply read each verse a few times a day and after about a week they know it. We occasionally try to recall all the verses we can without any prompts as a bit of a competition amongst ourselves, but that is the extent of it.

I’m certainly not opposed to activities such as the Bible Bee because while the motivation may not always be well placed, I do believe that the word of God will not come back void, so even prideful parents such as me will have children that ultimately have hidden God’s Word in their heart.

That’s just my personal testimony on the issue, doesn’t sound like it has any correlation with the three dear ladies that have posted above, but I share in hope that it will encourage others like myself and also in case you ever see a crazed “Bible Bee mom” named Rebekah yelling at her kid from the benches of the National Bible Bee competition you’ll hold me accountable and have me locked up for my own good. 🙂

This is very thought-provoking! 🙂 Our kids do AWANAs too, it’s been a great motivator for me to prioritize scripture memory with them. But we’ve had three incidents this year when a teacher was signing off on verses my ds never learned. (This is one of my adopted dc’s who apparently got a lot of misdirected sympathy from this particular teacher.) Each time, we told the teacher not to sign off on verses ds had not learned. And after the 1st time, we also told our ds that it was cheating, regardless of whose idea it was. It was a difficult spot to put our 7 yo ds in, to ask him to stand up to an adult who’s telling him he doesn’t really have to do the right thing.

It was a very frustrating experience to have an adult showing our ds that scripture memory isn’t as important as winning the prizes. Finally, my dh had to confront the teacher and tell him this; that he was modeling cheating and lying for our ds and cheapening scripture memory. It was a real lesson for our ds.

I’ve wondered about this also.  “Bible Bee’s” were very popular when I was growing up, and I was never really comfortable with it.  Maybe I’m not so good at the competition thing myself.  Also, I never really wanted to “fail” God.  I kind of felt that way if I didn’t know a scripture, so I never wanted to join in.  I’ll pull up a chair to see what others say….

I would tend to agree wholehartedly with Sonya on her principles of teaching Scripture memory. We teach our children to memorize Scripture as well as catechisms. It is hard to emphasize that we are not doing it to see “how many we can do” or to show off to daddy when he comes in or Grammy when she comes over – those are such natural tendencies I guess since memorizing is a task that you do and it feels good to have accomplished it and you want to share. The one thing I try to encourage the kids to do with Scripture they have memorized is to learn how to apply it to our daily life themselves – e.g. if I can think to refrain myself from just spouting out scripture when a situation arises (like conflict with siblings) I will ask them “what does God’s word say about this?” and hopefully they can come up with an appropriate verse, then I may add by saying “that is true, what about ….” I’ll give them the chapter/verse and see if they can remember the words. In this way they are seeing that by hiding God’s word in their heart, it is a useful tool to them in how to deal with everyday life. The way we handle the catechisms is whenever we are reading the Bible and we are discussing it, we might ask them the appropriate catechism question to help them understand the meaning of that passage. Without any type of prize given, their reward is seeing that particular verse help them out – and God’s word is powerful and I have seen even my small children be comforted and encouraged by it.