You want your students to understand what they’ve read. Typically, they demonstrate that understanding by listing the chapter’s five or ten critical points. The only problem is that summarizing what they’ve read is a predominantly intellectual exercise.
Continue reading “Reading Is Emotional”Free-Writing
What is free-writing?
Free-writing is straightforward.
- Choose a topic.
- Set a timer for five or ten minutes.
- Write without stopping until the timer goes off.
While easy to describe, free-writing is built on two profound premises:
We self-censor too many of our ideas when we write.
Writing can be a way of thinking, not just transcribing our thoughts.
Self-censoring
Ask your students how often they say this to themselves while writing: “I have an idea, but I can’t write it down. It sounds stupid.”
Evaluation is a crucial element of good writing. We’ll talk about it more when we get to revision. The problem is that this kind of self-talk is hard to calibrate. Sometimes you will write a sentence that sounds stupid. But this evaluation is based on the faulty assumption that you must produce a perfect draft on the first try.
Encourage your students to evaluate their writing only after they’ve done some writing. They’ll have plenty of time to evaluate their thoughts once they’re on the page.
While self-censoring a single sentence isn’t a big deal, it can lead to something worse: self-censoring an entire paper.
See if your students tell themselves, “I’m not ready to write this paper.” While this sentence is probably true, it’s also true that if “ready” means “Every single word is already mapped out in my mind so that all I have to do is photocopy my thoughts into Microsoft Word,” your students will never be ready to write their paper.
If you’re habitually writing down your thoughts before you judge them, you’ll have successfully started the writing process.
Writing as Thinking
Free-writing helps your students in two ways.
It neutralizes the students’ negative habit of deleting an idea before they’ve even written it.
It also reinforces writing’s great power: it helps us think.
Once your students have gotten over the idea that you write an essay in your mind first then sit down and transcribe it, they’ll discover that sitting down to write is the best way to figure out what they want to say.
Students will have a crucial experience when they free-write. They will come up with an idea at minute 7 of a 10-minute exercise that they could not have predicted. By refusing to censor their thoughts and continuing to write, students will be able to figure out things they did not know before their writing began.
When you hear your students say, “I’m not ready to write because I don’t know what I want to say,” your response should be, “That’s the perfect time to start writing.”
And free-writing is a great exercise to help them begin.
Tantrums
“You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Psalm 16:11
Our daughter had some tantrums worth recording today. They were utterly typical in cause and extraordinary in their intensity.
- She was upset because the “lake” we made with the hose was too quickly absorbed by the ground.
- She was upset because a tiny flag she had made from yellow memo paper and a plant stake had gotten crumpled.
- She was upset because she broke the cheap bead necklace from Halloween she was using.
My own natural response to these outbursts is anger, not understanding. It infuriates me that our daughter can talk harshly to my wife or me and not feel sorry for it, and yet she sheds tear after tear over a piece of yellow paper she hasn’t used in three months.
Part of the reason I’m angry is that I know I often placate our daughter. I do whatever I can to set up circumstances so that she won’t have a fit. I compromise, I bend over backwards, and I build paths that are designed to get her to pleasure as quickly and for as long as possible.
Lately, God has been convicting me about the superficiality of the things I enjoy. There’s nothing wrong with donuts or dance jams or novel or tennis or hot showers or many of the things I love. If that’s all I love I love, however, my desire is pretty superficial.
I too can get up set when I don’t have Krispy Kreme chocolate fix or don’t get to hear the 1968 playlist I made or don’t have time to read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I don’t throw tantrums, but I can pout a little.
I’ll give our daughter this: she doesn’t hide anything.
I pray that my spirit is more mature than my daughter’s, not just my outward demeanor.
I want to have a greater view of what matters — God and His kingdom — that sustains me through mishaps great and small.
I want more than to not have a tantrum. I want to be joyful, and I want the same for my daughter.
“Dad, can you get…?”
“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” Matthew 7:9–11
Typically, we eat dinner right after an episode of Wild Kratts begins. The first few times this happened, our daughter reacted to our meal time as though she had been shot through the heart.
My response was to subscribe to Amazon Prime’s PBS KIDS database, a resource that pretty much grants me access any PBS KIDS show out there. Now when it’s dinner time, I know that I can get the episode our daughter’s about to miss.
This has led to a pretty standard refrain: “Dad, can you get…?”
Fill in the blank with “Odd Squad” or “The Cat in the Hat Knows All About That” or “Peg + Cat” or “Daniel Tiger” or, of course, “Wild Kratts.”
It’s always a treat when I pick our daughter up from daycare with a previously requested episode on my IPAD.
She seems me. We got through our “How was your day?” ritual.
Then I say it: “Guess what I’ve got.”
Today it was the Cat in the Hat space movie.
A week ago it was episodes of the Nickelodeon show Team Umizoomi.
It gives me delight to answer her request.
I thought today about how much more it must please God to do good things for His children and what inexpressibly good gifts He can and does grant us.
I want to be the kind of father who gives my daughter good gifts, and so I aspire to do more for my daughter than offer PBS cartoons (and to teach her there are much better gifts in the world than Team Umizoomi!).
I also want to be the kind of child who believes his Heavenly Father gives good gifts, and I aspire to be the kind of child who trusts his Father implicitly.
My prayers will not be start with “Dad, can I get…” though. They start “Dad, would you…”
“Would you let my wife and I better know your love in this difficult season?”
“Would you let us be your hands and feet to those in need in our community?”
“Would you save our daughter?”
These are requests worth making. We have a Father who can answer them.
Rebound
“Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” Psalm 43:5
This Psalm captures some glorious self-talk.
I listened to a sermon this morning describe this Psalm as preaching the gospel to yourself. I’ve been asking God to give me opportunities to share His truth with others. This verse reminded me to share God’s truth with me!
I saw our daughter play an analogue of this process out this afternoon.
She and I were in the garage. She wanted to play basketball, which basically consisted of her dribbling around with absolutely no pattern and finally flinging a shot at our tiny hoop.
She made her first few, but as she began attempting shots from further than five feet, she missed several in a row.
Our daughter does not handle failure well. She got frustrated.
First came the grunts. Then came the slumped shoulders. Then came the sit-on-the-ground pouts.
I wanted to say something.
“Get up!”
“Get closer!”
“You can do it!”
I kept my mouth shut. I decided to see how she would work it out.
The garage floor is not clean. Our daughter was not on it long. She stood up within 30 seconds and began dribbling again. Her first shot post-tirade went in. She was elated.
She sank the next four shots.
I don’t know what she told herself. I could imagine a Christ-fearing version of my daughter saying, “Why are you so downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed?”
I am not making lighting of the Psalm. Its writer was in far greater distress than our daughter.
But, like the Psalmist, our daughter kept going.
I pray for the Holy Spirit to work like that in my life and for my daughter to find reasons for hope and praise when the stakes are higher than a missed shot.
Merciful Hairdo
“The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” Lamentations 3:22–23
Our daughter likes variety. She wants something new every ten minutes.
My wife is extremely patient with our daughter’s impatience.
Tonight, my wife — who was suffering from a day-long headache — offered to braid our daughter’s hair.
She refused. “No!”
“Mama does so many things you ask her to do,” I told her. “You won’t let her do this one thing?”
She relented.
To the surprise of neither me nor my wife, our daughter loved the results. She demanded a photoshoot.
Her refusal to accept this gift — and then being so pleased with it she wanted to celebrate it — reminded me of the way we treat God’s mercy and grace.
Mercy is the opposite of grace. Mercy is when we don’t get what we deserve. Grace is when we get what we don’t deserve.
Given her attitude, our daughter deserved a quick trip to the bathtub and her bed.
In her mercy, my wife withheld punishment. With grace, my wife gave her a beautiful hairdo.
I am in awe of my wife’s patience with our daughter. I am even more in awe of God’s mercy towards and faithfulness to me.
Camellia Petals Only Last A Day
“The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.” Isaiah 40:8
My wife brought some of her parents’ camellias to our house, and this morning there were fresh petals on the floor.
In the ten minutes between getting up and getting in the car to go to school, my daughter found them and adopted them.
We put them in a plastic container, and she held them all the way to school. She typically brings in a stuffed animal for the school day. Today, she chose the container of camellia petals over the stuffed jaguar.
When I picked her up from school, she was looking at the petals with her beset friend.
It was on the way home that the hammer dropped. She noticed the petals were getting black.
“My petals are dying!” she cried.
We explained the biology of plants. The petals had been dead this morning. It was a blessing that they had managed to last for the day.
She wasn’t having any of it.
We handed her kleenux, and it ended there.
Her brief but torrid relationship with these petals is a preview of coming attractions. Truly does the grass wither and the flower fall.
I will hold onto this day as an illustration for her when I want contrast created reality with the Creator. God — and God’s word — will never pass away. That certainly gives me comfort.
“When COVID’s over…”
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” James 4:13–15
Today, my daughter asked me if she could go over to a friend’s house “when COVID’s over.” I said, “Of course!”
Thankfully, she didn’t ask when that would be. If she had, she wouldn’t have gotten the response, “I don’t know.”
This is what the pandemic has given us: less certainty than ever before in a culture that takes certainty as a given.
My heart went out to my daughter. Going over to a friend’s house is such a small thing. I’m not sure it will happen with this particular friend given her distance from us and the rapidly approaching date of our daughter’s preschool graduation.
Life is precious. I don’t want to take any of the small graces God has given me for granted.
My daughter’s request is one such grace. I’m glad she has a friend she’d like to hang out with outside school. That’s a good thing. I thank God for every good thing He gives, and I pray for a spirit that is more attuned to His will, one that not only takes Him into consideration but begins with Him.
So, the next time my daughter asks if she can to her friend’s house “when COVID’s over,” she’ll get the response, “Lord willing, sweetheart. Lord willing.”
Family
“Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” John 1:12–13
For my fortieth birthday, my wife asked a bunch of people in my life to write me letters. I will treasure them for the rest of my life. They are a humbling collection indeed.
One that particularly moved me came from my sister-in-law. In its final paragraph she talked about how thankful she was that my wife and I had brought our daughter into the world (a sentiment with which I agree wholeheartedly).
The daughter of my brother and sister-in-law is nine months older than our daughter, but the two of them are thick as thieves and enjoy getting to see each other any time they can.
My sister-in-law wrote that if our daughter ever felt blue, she need only be reminded that she’s her cousin’s favorite person. I read the sentence to my wife and started crying.
This kind of grace — my daughter’s a decent kid, but it’s not like she’s earned her cousin’s undying affection — is a picture of what we receive in God’s family. My niece doesn’t need any more reason to love our daughter than that their cousins.
It is sometimes miraculous to me that I’m related to the people I’m related to. I have two remarkable brothers, a remarkable mom and dad, who were themselves the children of remarkable parents. I’ve never met anyone in the world like some of my aunts and uncles. The only reason I know people like them is because I’m related to them!
Family is a gift from God, and being a part of God’s family is an even greater gift. I am appreciative of my sister-in-law — and many others — giving me the chance to reflect on that gift.
Birthday Celebration
“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12
I turn 40 years old today. Several things have changed in the last decade.
- I got my doctorate.
- I got hired to be a professor at two universities, first at Charleston Southern University and then at Southern Wesleyan University.
- My wife and I bought — and had built — two new homes, first in Summerville and then on the same piece of land that’s been in my wife’s family for over 200 years.
- I became a father.
- My relationship to God got significantly better.
These five things are not unrelated.
My providential hiring at two Christian schools put me in a place to better cultivate my faith and learn how best to connect my private and professional lives.
The birth of our daughter occasioned a lot of reflection and some searching that might not have happened otherwise. When my wife got a new job in the upstate near family, it was a blessing. Our daughter hadn’t yet turned two, and the possibility of being somewhere minutes instead of hours from family was a way to live intentionally as part of a family and church community rather than a nameless couple in the suburbs in a gigantic church.
Finally, the birth of my daughter occasioned a lot of soul searching and praying. God had taught me lessons about prayer and fellowship in my early 30s. As I became a father and had to balance my commitment to my wife and the students, I discovered that my priorities needed calibrating. When I made God the focal point of my life, my relationships with people — my family, my friends, my students — fell into place. I have enjoyed the richest season of community in my life during the past five years at a time where I was told my
Even this past year — complete with the pandemic which struck America just after my birthday — has given me clarity about the work God still needs to do in my life. I need humility, and I need to listen. Those are not unrelated qualities, and boy, does being a father give you ample opportunities to improve in them.
The summer before our daughter was born, I asked the ministers I was under to tell me how their own fatherhood had affected their relationship with God. They said it had done so profoundly, but in different ways. One spoke about understanding how love worked: that you thought you couldn’t love anyone as much as you love your wife but just look how you now loved your child as much. Another talked of discovering the dimensions of God as a Father through his own experience of fatherhood.
As I enter my forties, I want to be a better conduit through which my daughter and wife can experience God’s love. I am thankful for the opportunity to have a daughter and wife to love, and I am thankful for the opportunity to have a daughter and wife to love, and I am thankful for another year in which to see God’s hand at work not just in my life but in the lives of everyone around me.