Category: Discipleship

Posted on

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”

Posted on

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”

Posted on

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”

Posted on

Playing Injured

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. – II Cor. 12:9

When I watch sporting events and the announcers tell me that so-and-so is questionable because of a sore hamstring or right bicep, I expect the person to perform well regardless. It’s not a fair expectation, but I have it anyway. I think it’s because I have never had never had those particular injuries, I can’t immediately put myself into the position of imagining what playing the sport while nursing those injuries feels like.

Here’s what I do know about: sore throats. Over the past two weeks, I’ve had what amounts to a canker sore on my epiglottis. My entire mouth hurts any time that I swallow. This consequently makes simple and important tasks like eating and sleeping and talking painful.

This is a comparatively small thing. I wonder if I had this ailment for a month, I would adjust and the pain would start to become cognitively dull for me. It doesn’t feel that way today.

What I do know is that it makes teaching hard. I feel like I’m playing injured. I have not told my students about my ailment, but I wonder if my demeanor is different or if they have same faulty expectations of me that I do of athletes: “Hey, if he’s up there teaching, he must be at full strength.”

I realize how often I’m guilty of assuming things just by examining students’ demeanors. They’re in class so they must be at full strength. Their waning attention is a moral or intellectual lapse, not a result of the physical or emotional toll outside circumstances have taken on them.

My sore throat has made me thankful. I take smaller bites of food and end up savoring it more. I choose my words sparingly and end up listening more.

It also makes me think about all the things I consider my strengths. If God’s strength is made perfect in weakness and I’m waiting for my own perfection to perform well, I’m elevating my own strengths above God’s. I don’t want to play hurt and because of that, I can’t see the ways I play hurt even when I think I’m fine. A sore throat is better than the millstone of pride, and I pray that emerge from this ailment healthier and humbler.

 

Posted on

Sustainability

On a moment to moment basis, a large portion of my mental bandwidth is spent worrying about the present moment being repeated into the future ad infinitum or figuring out how to replicate the present moment forever.

Examples range from my daughter’s coughing (will she ever stop?), to some new reading method (how do I apply this to every book I own?), or some classroom exercise that works (how do I do this all the time?) to a good day with my wife (can’t we do this all the time?).

These feelings are often distortions of a very real prayer: “Let your kingdom come, let your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

My desire for positive sustainability is a yearning for eternity here on earth. I must say, a lot of times I’m glad God doesn’t give me what I want.

God has dealt with me a lot this year about my tendency for longing for the past, either in regret over what I failed to do or in longing to do again what I used to do. When I carry that tendency into the present, it’s like I’m in perpetual state of melancholy.

The reality is that this is always happening:  “Therefore [Christ] is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.” (Hebrews 7:25)

I pray for a child’s faith to rejoice in that reality to know that because of Christ my Father gives bread and not stones. Because of Christ, I can live in true thankfulness: for when my daughter does stop coughing, for when I have a reading experience that proves fruitful, for when something I do in the classroom helps my students, and when I have a great day with my wife.

Posted on

The Long Game and Reading

In the summer of 2017, I finished reading Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, a book I had started back in March of that same year because a friend was writing about it.

I stalled out about 300 pages in once April hit, but in a rarity for me, I picked it back up at the beginning of July and sped through the last 200 pages.

I had been holding onto the novel for nearly twenty years.

Dr. Thayle Anderson assigned the novel to our American Novels class when I was sophomore, but I blew it off. However, I kept the novel despite having never read it, because my first serious girlfriend was in Dr. Anderson’s class with me and introduced herself to me under the auspices of talking about the novel, which she loved. Side note: I probably should have known the relationship was doomed when I didn’t even read the book.

As I finally began reading it nearly two decades after first receiving it, I thought it well-written, but underwhelming. All it took was an April crush, and I put it down.

But when I returned to it in July, I felt as if my eyes had been opened. I realized that it was about marriage and the tension of individual flourishing in the context of said marriage. The heroine, a 19th Century American woman, is constantly having to move for her husband’s career though she was every bit the artist/professional he was. The novel poignantly explores the shame and guilt that comes with trying to love your spouse when you don’t have any spiritual foundation for things like grace or forgiveness.

To have read this in the summer of 2017, the summer where my wife took a new gig and moved 3.5 hours away with our daughter, absolutely devastated me.

It made me realize that:

1) I was no more ready to read that book at 19 than I was when I was 10. It would have been lost on me.

2) I wasn’t even ready to read the book two months before.

3) Only through the peculiar circumstances I found myself in now with Britt was the book able to speak to me.

This is the kind of experience that I hold onto as a teacher: the possibility that something I assign may not matter for a student in the moment but may come back to them fifteen years later.

My friend and I call it the long game, and I want God-given patience to continue playing it as an educator and disciple.

 

Posted on

Grateful for Voices

As the semester progressed, I started modeling more and more of the work I asked my students to do. It was fine to write rough drafts because then I could model revision. The tough part was writing a purposefully rough opening draft, and even more specifically, failing in that draft in a way that would help highlight typical student errors. My voice was always off. I seemingly cannot write like anyone but myself.

Today, I had the opportunity to revisit the essays of some students I taught in the spring. I was struck by how good one of them was, so struck in fact that I reached out to the student to say thank you. Not only were the insights unique, but they were expressed in a way that was totally unlike mine. I was encountering a student who had already developed her voice. Her critical acumen was still growing, but she had figured out how to write things effectively. The fact that she had something to say made the essay all the more a delight.

I’m so thankful for moments like this where I confront in my own students’ work the kind of reading and writing that I certainly could not imitate. I can only sound like me, which is a good thing and bad thing. It’s most often a bad thing when it becomes clear that I’m writing for an audience other than my students, the ostensible beneficiaries of the model. I don’t want students to produce essays I could write. I want them to write better, more diverse essays. This particular student nailed it.

I pray for the wisdom to hear student voices and the willingness to highlight and share them. When I am listening, they are indeed a beauty to hear.

Posted on

Going Back

But Jesus said to him, “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” – Luke 9:62

I read this verse today in an article on education, and it cut me to the quick. This blog is one place where I have put my hand to the plow. I need God’s grace to not look back.

Posted on

38 Now as they were traveling along, He entered a village; and a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her home. 39 She had a sister called Mary, who was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. 40 But Martha was distracted with [a]all her preparations; and she came up to Him and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to do all the serving alone? Then tell her to help me.”41 But the Lord answered and said to her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; 42 but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”  (Luke 10:38-42 NASB)

I am a Martha.

Let me put a finer point on it.

I am a Steven Covey reading, Zig Ziglar listening, Tony Robbins Personal Power II owning Martha.

Goals? Responsibilities? Affirmations? Identified. Discerned. Verbalized.

In the words of the lay philosopher Larry the Cable Guy, git-r-dun.

So this passage from Luke is a convicting one. Continue reading “”

Posted on

Teaching and Power

Job 36:22 “God is exalted in his power. Who is a teacher like him?”

This passage makes me uncomfortable, mainly because it connects power and teaching. The two sentences form a causal relationship. Because God is exalted, Elihu appears to say, who is a teacher like him?

The answer is no one. In his absolute power, God confronts us with our powerlessness and offers to teach us contingent on our fear and awe.

It jars against the image we have of Christ in John 13 washing the disciples feet, telling them they are right to call him rabbi and to do as he has done: serve their students.

The Job verse makes me uncomfortable because I don’t want to think through the kind of power that I have at my disposal: be responsible for the factor I play in a student’s educational future or the duty I have to God to make sure that what I’m teaching glorifies him.

The power God has is not an end in itself. He does not teach in order to exert power. He uses that power in order to teach, love, and serve. In the same way, Christ lowers himself not as a way of making himself less the Son of God but as a way to show us that his power is a means to an end: communion with us through service.

I pray that I will use the power God has given me to better serve my students: neither denying or remaining unconscious of that power nor using it as an end. It is by following Christ’s example that I can best merge education and discipleship.