Category: Discipleship

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Assessment

To make learning-based assessment work, the best teachers try to
find out as much as possible about their students…

From What the Best College Teachers Do

Early this semester, I’ve done two things to help me gain crucial information about my students. The first is that I’ve offered extra credit for filling out an information sheet. The sheet contained the following questions:

  • What are three things you believe are true?
  • If you were given an unplanned Saturday to do with as you please, how would you spend your time?
  • What is the high school or college course you’ve benefited the most from? Explain.
  • Who are three people in your life whose advice you listen to? What advice have they given you that you cherish?
  • What are the two most important ways you’ve grown as a person in the last year?
  • What’s your favorite story? Why?
  • How are you currently contributing to the lives of your family members, friends, or neighbors?
  • What do you hope to learn in this class?

In the future, this will simply be a quiz grade, rather than extra credit. These are the kinds of questions that I want from every student, not just the overachievers.

The next thing I’ve done is give every student I’m teaching this first-week writing assignment:

Write yourself a letter dated May 10, 2019 and address it to me. Begin “Dear Dr. Sircy, I got my ‘A’ because…’” then tell me what you will have done to earn your ‘A.’

I’ve only read a few of them, but it may be one of my favorite reading experiences ever. Students are telling me (with more or less detail) what they think they’ll need to do to succeed. With only two classes under our belts, they don’t really have a sense of me as a grader or the exact nature of the work they’ll be asked to perform. It’s cool to see what they’re thinking about their own emotional and intellectual abilities and how they can put them to work this semester.

I pray this will contribute to better assessment on my part. I certainly feel like I know these students better after just one week. Of course, assessment is just one part of the Christian teacher’s gig. I’m praying their souls as well and their growth as disciples. Through the information questions I ask as well as the “I got an ‘A'” assignment, I’m trying to suss out where they’re at in terms of their faith and how that faith interacts with their educational goals. I pray that I don’t forget this part of my task.

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Critical Thinking Applied: Part 3

Discriminating between observation and inference, between
established fact and subsequent conjecture.

From What the Best College Teachers Do

As I work through this checklist of critical thinking skills from Ken Bain’s book, I’m struck by how literature courses, through their focus on interpretation, can get at the thorny distinction between observation and inference.

For my quizzes this semester, I’ve been giving metaphors to identify and unpack. Yesterday, my metaphor came from the Sherlock Holmes short story: “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

“He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen…”

This is Watson describing his detective friend. Students wanted to make “machine” into “computer” or some kind of processing device, an interpretation of the metaphor that would clash with its 1891 publication date.

So we have two facts: the story came out in 1891 and Watson has called Holmes a machine.

The next part is inference: what does the word “machine” refer to?

Continue reading “Critical Thinking Applied: Part 3”
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Imagination

“I’m not imaginative,” says the diehard sports fan who just watched the Tigers of Clemson battle the Tide of Alabama (who have an elephant mascot) in a football game.

The rules of football are arbitrary. You can’t use empirical reasoning to explain why a field is 100 yards, each team can only have eleven men on the field on any play, or a touchdown is worth six points. It’s a game. Those are just the game’s rules.

This does not mean that the effects of the game aren’t real. People tear ligaments in their knee in the game’s middle, show themselves able to throw the ball measurable distances during regulation p;lay, and trade their success at this particular game for lots of money. The imaginative space of the football field reveals real things about the world: most importantly, mental and physical strength. Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco was a laboratory on Monday night where players from Clemson and Alabama worked out a debate about who was national champion, not “in nature” but through a controlled experiment. On this day and at this time, these two teams played and the result was final. In this particular experiment, Clemson was superior.

And oh the joy! There’s a lot of emotional and economic resources tied up in the success of both of these teams. I live about 20 minutes away from Clemson, and it’s a huge deal that they’ve just won their second national championship on Monday night. What strikes me is that the same person who is fanatically devoted to this team and will show up for the parade and wear the t-shirt and generally crow over any other college football team is the same one who will tell me, “I don’t like fiction because it’s made up.”

So is sports. Yet sports isn’t a lie. It’s an experiment in imagination. Literature isn’t a lie either. It’s a laboratory for the heart where we go to find experiments in ways of interpreting the world and how we feel about it. We can use our reason inside this lab, but the experiment begins with us exercising our imagination. Everyone can do that much.

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Unpacking The Student’s Prayer

Every semester, I start each class by having my students say aloud the following prayer:

O Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of our understanding. Take from us the double darkness in which we have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance. Give us a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally. Grant us the talent of being exact in our explanations and the ability to express ourselves with thoroughness and charm. Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Every semester I find new truth in it. This is what I’ve been telling students about the prayer yesterday and today as the spring semester begins…

Continue reading “Unpacking The Student’s Prayer”
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Critical Thinking Applied: Part 2

Being clearly and explicitly aware of gaps in available information. Recognizing when a conclusion is reached or a decision made in absence of complete information and being able to tolerate the ambiguity and uncertainty. Recognizing when one is taking something on faith without having examined the “How do we know . . . ? Why do we believe . . . ?” questions.

From What the Best College Teachers Do

Students tend to assume that the interpretation of literature is subjective: this is what it means to me and you either can’t explain that or there’s no way of disproving it.

Encouraging my students to see what we can and cannot defend in the service of our argument will be an important part of the class.

It’s one of the reasons that I will be focusing on figurative language in daily quiz questions. Metaphors and similes ask to be unpacked, and if students can begin to discern the meanings of this non-literal use of language, they’ll be on their way to saying substantive (and not merely subjective) about what they’ve read.

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Critical Thinking Applied: Part 1

Consciously raising the questions “What do we know . . . ? How do we know…? Why do we accept or believe . . . ? What is the evidence for . . . ?” when studying some body of material or approaching a problem.

From What the Best College Teachers Do

In his chapter on what the best college teachers expect from their students, Ken Bain gives a list of ten things the best professors use to assess critical thinking.

In my introduction to literature courses this week, I will be asking them why we turn to fiction to help us understand the truth. Part of my case to them will be the fact that Christ’s parables were certainly not standard features of Judaic rabbi training. Christ made a point of telling stories that were not literally true in order to convey deeper truths about the coming kingdom of God. If we figure out why, then we will be on our way to establishing why the work we do in the literature course is important.

I might fill in the ellipses in Bain’s questions this way:

What do we know about fiction?

How do we know that fiction isn’t simply lying?

Why do we accept or believe fictional stories as a valid means of communicating truth?

What is the evidence for using fictional stories this way from scripture?

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Giving an A

This ‘A’ is not an expectation to live up to but a possibility to live into.

From The Art of Possibility

In their book The Art of Possibility, Rosamund and Benjamin Zander discuss the freeing practice of giving yourself and others an ‘A’ inside and outside the classroom.

Ben Zander gives students enrolled in his year-long musical performance course the promise that they will get an ‘A’ if they complete the following assignment: within the first two weeks of the class, they must write a letter dated at the end of the academic year that begins, “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my ‘A’ because…”

I will be giving this prompt to my students for their first weekly letter because I’m interested to see what kind of work they think writing-intensive literature courses demand. More than that, I want them to exercise their imagination. What will they have done to live into the possibility of getting a superior mark in the class?

I will share them with my own letter. This is its first sentence: “Dear students of ENGL 101, I got my ‘A’ because I coached you through the process of reading and writing about literature in a way that made you more confident as a reader of and writer about literature while convincing you that both practices are of practical and spiritual importance.”

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Of Houses and Cars

Learning requires us to use powerful metaphors.

With that in mind, check out the following paragraph which I’ve had in my syllabus for the past five years:

This course’s promises don’t mention specific grades. That’s important. The specific grades you receive at midterm and after finals are neither a reflection of your worth as a human being nor the ultimate purpose for the class. Think of your education like a house. Grades are like a house inspection. They simply tell you that the house meets basic building codes. You live in the house. You put the inspection in a drawer and eventually forget about it. As you assess your progress towards realizing the course’s promises, remember what matters.

There’s nothing wrong with the metaphor. It’s apt. When I’ve shared it with a colleague, they always nod their head in agreement.

But my students don’t really feel its truth. Few of them have built a house, much less been involved in a house inspection.

So here’s how that paragraph will read from now on.

This course’s promises don’t mention specific grades. That’s important. The specific grades you receive at midterm and after finals are neither a reflection of your worth as a human being nor the ultimate purpose for the class. Think of your education like your ability to drive a car. Grades are like your driver’s license. They simply tell you that you can legally get behind the wheel of a car. You probably know people that you would never want to drive you anywhere even though they have their license. This is the person who gets all As and Bs and manages to not have learned anything. The grade is a necessary step in learning, but it’s not the same as being educated. As you assess your progress towards realizing the course’s promises, remember what matters.

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The Best Teachers Are Disciples

Fundamentally, they were learners, constantly trying to improve their own efforts to foster students’ development, and never completely satisfied with what they had already achieved.

From What the Best College Teachers Do

This quotation from Ken Bain identifies a common trait in the best college teachers: they never stop learning. I was particularly struck by how the great teachers Bain examines pursue a goal that is more communal and larger in scope than any one class or skill. Great teachers are community builders who realize how what they do requires collaboration with their colleagues who can share a larger goal for education. For the best Christian teachers, that shared goal is discipleship, and thus a common trait for a great Christian professor is that they never stop being disciples.

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Mother Night as Meta-fiction

Scrutinizing meaning systems more closely will help us to distinguish the good from the bad in the systems we develop as we seek to live in God’s world in a manner pleasing to him.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin make a case for the benefits of reading meta-fiction, a newer genre that seems in its very philosophical premises to oppose Christianity.

The work work I teach that most explores the epistemological skepticism undergirding meta-fiction is Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The novel purports to be the diary of an American Nazi name Howard Campbell who is writing from an Israeli jail cell pending a trial for war crimes. Vonnegut, the novel’s author, claims only to be the book’s editor. Campbell is himself a writer, a playwright more specifically, and Vonnegut-as-editor meditates on what that means for the diary’s veracity.

Continue reading “Mother Night as Meta-fiction”