For the first time in my teaching career, I’m typing up something like final remarks for my courses. I’ll be sharing them over the next few days. I gave a slightly modified version of the following remarks today in my one upper division course, Non-Fiction and Its Process.
I’d never taught this kind of course before. In fact, no one had taught this kind of course at SWU before. It had been on the books for multiple years before I showed up and hadn’t been taught once.
If you didn’t know that I’m not an expert in this field, then listening to our guest speaker Jeremy Jones on Tuesday surely clued you in to what a dude who’s an expert sounds like. I think he dropped more quotations and article references in an hour than I have all semester.
You probably didn’t know what you were getting yourselves into when you signed up for the course. I really didn’t either. And here we are.
So here’s some of what I’ve learned:
- A narrow focus isn’t an entirely bad thing. Getting a hydrant-strength stream of David Foster Wallace may not have been the best way to convince you that non-fiction is a many splendored thing, but it was certainly truer than pretending that I had this smorgasbord of writers to choose from and then have you get into the reading assignments and have the readings STILL end up being myopic and narrow. Because Wallace is a maximalist and tends to do everything to the Nth degree it can be a temptation to think his style is the ONLY style, but since he’s kind of inimitable, reading him gave us insight smaller things we could take away from his work—giving us a metaphor for someone by giving a close description of their face, working in time log form—and all of the stuff it’d be better off if we just left on the cutting room floor. Yes, we were narrow, but we went really deep, and that, at least for me, was helpful.
- If I don’t know as much, then I have to do more. A key moment for me this semester happened when I stopped simply giving assignments and started actually writing them along with you. I was making up assignments I’d never given before. Typically I would have past student work to revise or use as examples, but once I committed myself to writing the kinds of things I was asking you to write, I felt the limitations and possibilities of each assignment. I also felt my own vulnerability. I didn’t have a backlog of essays to draw on. I had to write them in real time and not lose my ethos in the process. That was scary. It’s good to feel that. I think my students often feel something similar about their writing, so it’s good for me to feel what that’s like.
- Revision is a wonderful thing. I’ve never had so many students revise graded work and make the work that much better as I have in this class. It’s been humbling to see you keep going after a better versions of your work and find it. I hope you never lose this desire or skill. The semester is an artificial ending. If there’s a piece in here that you want to see complete but that the semester ends without you having finished it, keep writing it. I will help you with it however I can.
Real learning never stops. Good writing and reading never ends. Discipleship, the things to which all those practices point, is similarly never over. We don’t need to improve to somehow meet some artificial goal. We are accepted and loved by God no matter what. The experience of glorifying God and enjoying him forever? That is what progresses and builds, and that is a difficult but deep pleasure.
I left this semester with a greater desire to create and enter portkeys, a greater certainty that all truth is God’s truth, and a lot of affection for each of you. God’s blessings on you.
Be well. Do good work.