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Reader Types: The Professional and The Status Seeker

As I continue to think about kinds of reading and readers, I turned to C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism today. The book’s entire premise is that it’s easier to talk about differences among kinds of readers instead of kinds of books.

In the book’s second chapter, Lewis makes clear that people who love reading (“the few”) are not morally superior to those who do not love reading (“the many”). He also makes clear that not everyone who seems to be part of “the few” is really in that number. We have the professional and the status seeker to deal with.

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Signs

Matthew 16:3 “You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.”

The Pharisees indicted in the passage above have two interpretive problems: scope and application.

First, their scope is limited. They can interpret things well as far as weather goes, but they get caught up in the clouds and can’t think of anything more than if they will get caught in the rain this afternoon. Ultimately, the weather is less important than their soul.

Second, they fail to apply their interpretations. They think of themselves as pragmatic but in hurrying to apply a small reading they miss the broader application of the interpretive principles they’ve used. If you’ve got a high-powered laser, it seems a shame to use it to engrave your name on a penny.

In this way, their problems of scope and application are connected.

This is convicting. I already spend an inordinate time reading and writing, and it feels like a lot of the time when I’m not reading and writing, I’m thinking about how to get more time to read and write.

So, in this verse I hear Christ tell me:

“You know how to interpret Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, but you cannot interpret the needs of your own wife and child.

“You know how to interpret what the literary analysis paper from your student in a 9am literature class needs, but you cannot interpret the clear command to pray without ceasing.

“You know how to interpret the theme of addiction as worship in post-modern literature, but you cannot interpret your own restless heart.” 

God, have mercy on me a sinner.

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Games

This week, I’ve been thinking about education as a long game enterprises, but I realized this morning I’ve thought very little about literal games inside my classroom. This is primarily because I hate games. I despise them. I would never want to sit through them as a student, and I certainly wasn’t going to inflict them on my students.

But this is selfish.

My students aren’t me. My students don’t relate to the books they read like I did. This is not a bad thing. It’s a basic awareness that what works or doesn’t work for me should not exhaust my teaching repertoire. 

Games might in fact be a long-game strategy. 

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The Long Game, Continued

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.” – Matthew 13:44

“The excellence of the heavenly life is not perceived, indeed, by the sense of the flesh; and yet we do not esteem it according to its real worth, unless we are prepared to deny, on account of it, all that glitters in our eyes.” – John Calvin’s Commentary on Matthew 13:44

I worry about not being able to help the students I teach who most need my help, that I’m a physician who helps wealthy people get into better shape but can’t really aid the direfully ill in their need.

This anxiety reveals that playing the short game, one that’s built on the idea that every subsequent semester will always be like this one; that if I can’t see results now, nothing substantive has happened; and that I know what I’m looking for in the first place.

The parable Christ tells typifies the long game approach, a total commitment to what eternally matters most.

I pray for kingdom eyes to see and the spirit-filled stamina required to play this long game.

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Plagiarism and Self-Deception

As I finish up my grading this semester, I’ve spotted more than my fair share of plagiarism. It’s disheartening, not just because it involves deceit but because it makes a mockery of the golden rule. This is true not just because plagiarism represents a failure to love one’s neighbor but because it shows a person unwilling to love yourself. Namely, plagiarists lie to themselves as much as they do others. It is bad enough to be deceived by someone else. The road to self-deception is a dark one indeed.

I pray for the ability to see myself truly: through the eyes of God and my neighbors. One way to do this is to cultivate humility by acknowledging my own indebtedness to the thoughts and feelings and others and consistently thanking God for what I’ve learned.

 

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Prayed Over

This afternoon, a colleague took me to The Potter’s Place, a kind of prayer resort near our campus that gives disciples an “environment of quiet solitude where those who come can seek God.”

My colleague described the place as “prayed over” and just from my 45 minutes there with him today, I felt clarity and the ability to articulate some deep concerns in my own family and personal life.

Right now, my colleague is separated from his wife and children who are in Canada as they try to get proper visas for the US. This weekend, he said, he had finally put together and prayed over the beds his daughters will sleep in when they arrive.

The story cut me to the quick. This weekend, I was inside our new, still-under-construction home, and it never occurred to me to pray. As I continued to reflect on the semester, I had to admit that while my classroom was prayed in I couldn’t honestly call it prayed over. I’ve prayed for a place as a kind of metonymy for the people in it, but only as an abstraction.

So this evening, I prayed: “God, thank you for the spaces you’ve provided me to pray and share and serve. I commend to your continual care the home we are renting, the home plan to live in, as well as the office and classrooms I teach in. Remove any impediment in these places that would hinder your spirit’s work. Grant the family and students and neighbors and strangers who come into these spaces to know your love. Fill each of these spaces with your presence, and grant me a servant’s heart so that I may love you and others there.”

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Final Comments – ENGL 1013

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 yesterday in my Intro to Lit course.

It has been difficult for me to see many of you struggle with this course. When I taught a version of this course at Charleston Southern University in the spring, I had 24 students, and while I had students who struggled, I also didn’t have the luxury to look at multiple drafts or give wholesale revision opportunities. It was tough to tell whether or not it was the students, the material, my teaching or some combination of all them. The answer is all three, and I’ve had the chance to see that play itself out this semester.

I care deeply about you and about this class because I do believe that all truth is God’s truth and that we are able to access truths about how to feel and interpret the world through our imaginations in a way that we can’t through logic. Of course, that means there’s a balance, and your assignments in this course asked you to be more logical and analytical about the imaginative truths you found in poetry, short stories, drama, and novels.

The insight Joya gave during her presentation on Tuesday—the fact that you should not love someone just for themselves but as a way of honoring God—can be preached in a sermon, encapsulated in a motivational quotation you encounter on Facebook or Twitter, or discovered through the trial and error of your real life experience. But Joya got there through a story: a novel. Not because someone had laid out a logical case for it and she, after twenty hours of deliberation and hearing both sides, finally assented, but because in some key way the novel helped her feel it. Continue reading “Final Comments – ENGL 1013”

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Final Comments – ENGL 2703

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: Continue reading “Final Comments – ENGL 2703”

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Guest Speakers

But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.” – James 4:6

Yesterday, Jeremy B. Jones came and talked to my Non-Fiction and Its Process class. He teaches non-fiction at Western Carolina University, and he  read some of his super fascinating current book project and liberally dropped quotations from cool people like Anne Lamott and Richard Hugo and Marianne Moore and used Harry Potter references to explain how essays should work (e.g. memoirs should be filled with “portkeys”) and was just a consummate professional.

Now, Jeremy’s got pedigree and the ethos to spare. Boasting an MFA from the University of Iowa and a first-book memoir that’s won awards will do that.

Add to that that I’ve felt like an imposter all semester teaching this class and that the topic was the real deal for him? You have the ingredients for seeing a master display that left invigorated and more than a little humbled. Continue reading “Guest Speakers”