Category: Discipleship

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Compelling

When’s the last time you picked up a book and finished it the same day?

It had been awhile for me, but Saturday I started and stayed up late to complete Ron Rash’s Saints at the River.

Even better? I plan on teaching the book, so I’m thrilled that it’s such a page-turner.

The hook for me was its setting: Tamassee, SC, which is only a 45-minute drive from campus.

In the same way that I want books to occasionally confuse me so I can remember what it’s like when you don’t know what to do with a book, it’s great to have a book suck me in so that I don’t really care about the paper you would write because the story is so compelling. Too often, my head outweighs my heart. This novel won over my heart, and my head followed.

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Sentence By Sentence

I’m helping a student revise a paper for another course. Yesterday, we hashed out the paper’s main argument. Today, it was time to start revising.

I separated each of the paper’s paragraphs into a separate page, made the individual sentences in those paragraphs into bulleted lists, and worked through as many paragraphs as we could get through in two hours.

I had five takeaways.

  1. I was really impressed with the student’s willingness to engage in that intense kind of revision work for two hours.
  2. I need to do this kind of work (on a smaller scale) with as many of my students as possible. I may institute this as mandatory work for anyone who scores below a certain number on the first essay. It would get them in my office and give me a chance to show them what intense revision looks like.
  3. The revision happened as part of an actual conversation between the reader and writer. I asked for clarification, and the student asked me questions too. This is ideal.
  4. It can’t all be like this. The student came in with 3000+ words and something to say as well as the motivation to get the best possible score on the assignment.
  5. I think it is a way of helping the students learn because it shows that good writing is often collaborative.

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Close Reading the Beatles

As I wade through a pile of papers during finals week, I’m constantly in search of good body paragraphs built around close, insightful readings of the novel or play or poem under consideration.

When the pickings are slim, I gain sustenance from what I imagine is a typical source of comfort for literature professors, this paragraph from Rob Sheffield’s wonderful book Dreaming the Beatles where he details what Paul McCartney gets wrong in the song, “My Love.”

“My Love” is a fascinating disaster, if you happen to love Paul, because it’s a string of very un-Paul-like mistakes. He forgets all the Paul tricks he knows better than anyone else ever has. In fact, he goes so wrong here breaking his own rules, it’s an index of everything he usually gets right. His lifelong attention to pronouns fails him—this is a love ballad where the word “you” does not appear, nor do “she” or “her,” not even “we.” It’s all “I,” “me,” “my.” You can’t call this a rookie mistake since rookies know better, mostly because rookies are imitating Paul. So he wrote a love song and left out the woman; he also invited an orchestra, without giving them anything to play. He adds a colossally terrible guitar solo, when the track’s already way too long (four minutes, practically a minute per word). Not his own guitar solo: he lets a sideman barge in to make this butt-ugly (and no doubt sincerely self-expressive) noise. A ghastly sax solo would have made a certain sense, but this is a bluesy guitar solo, with no place in a lounge ballad like this.”

It begins with a nice debatable claim (i.e. “This song is a clunker, albeit one that clunks for intriguing reasons”), and follows it up with a brilliant analysis of the song’s pronouns. Of all the evidence Sheffield could give, I think his observation that “you” or “she” never appears in the song is so smart. He then develops this observation in a witty sentence: “he wrote a love song and left out the woman.” Sheffield never leaves a song half-analyzed, and in the remaining half of the song, he articulates what’s wrong with the song’s orchestration and guitar solo. It’s a new kind of evidence, and it receives its own development.

If Sheffield can muster up this kind of insight about a song just to show how poor it is, how much more should we be able to articulate the beauty of God’s truth both in our explication of scripture and in the books we’ve read that demand further unpacking.

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All Truth

On the final day of class last week, I had students read Arthur Holmes’s classic statement on Christian education: “All truth is God’s truth.”

It forced me to try and articulate for my students the truth I felt we had discovered together in our literature and writing courses. I realized that if I began and ended the course with Holmes’s statement, I probably would have had a good litmus test for what to emphasize and omit over the course of the semester. I tend to be so fixated on tactics that I forget to reiterate the deeper reason for the tactics. In other words, I err on the side of teaching students efficiency rather than effectiveness.

If the goal is to discover and learn the truth about the world, we’ll have a different orientation to reading and writing.

The basic premises of a Christian orientation to literature and writing are that:

  1. When we reading and interpret books, we exercise an aspect of God’s image in our lives and find a concrete place to see the gap between ourselves and our maker (i.e. our interpretations are limited and prone to error).
  2. Thus, reading provides us a place to discover truth (facts) and meaning (interpretation) about God’s world. Literature allows us to access those facts and interpretations in a different, and potentially more powerful, way then descriptive prose.
  3. When we write, we engage in a special form of communication that God used to reveal Himself to humanity.
  4. Thus, writing provides a means to more truthfully and faithfully think God’s thoughts after Him.

If I kept coming back to these points and used literature to illustrate them, I would give students a more affective relationship to the idea that all truth is God’s truth. It’s not enough to know or repeat this. This idea should be formative. As I consider that statement’s effect on my life, I will be more able to convey its important to my students so that their own wisdom begins with a proper relationship to God and truth.

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100%

Our university’s ENGL 101 course focuses on writing about literature. After writing about assigned poems, short stories, plays, and a novel, students get to pick the novel they’ll write their final paper about.

In order to let each student share what they learned, I let them present their project to their peers and me on the final day of class. I did make a subtle change this semester. Rather than having the presentation include complex analysis, I insisted it only feature three things: the novel’s title, the project’s thesis, and whether or not the presenter would recommend the novel and why. The recommendation section was my new wrinkle. I wanted to see if students would ride hard for the books they wrote or insist that their classmates stay away.

One of my ENGL 101 sections reveling in their post-presentation freedom…

Do you know how many of my students recommended the novel they read? Every. Single. One. 100%.

From adult classics (Pride and Prejudice) to YA staples (The Fault in our Stars), from romances (Even Now) to dystopian morality tales (1984), from the allegorical (The Shack) to the horrifying (It), the students told their classmates to read whatever book they had. In some cases, students were already reading the book over again. This was their fourth or fifth time through the book.

This wasn’t my doing. I didn’t tell them they had to like the book the picked. I fully expected the ones who picked high school English staples like The Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird to find the books boring or ineffective. On the contrary, they found the books more compelling and more insightful.

We’ll see if this necessarily translates into stronger papers, but for today, it didn’t matter. The biggest delight was seeing and hearing their delight.

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Rhetorical vs. Dialectical Books

In the opening chapter of his Self-Consuming Artifacts, Stanley Fish distinguishes between rhetoric and dialectic.

While rhetoric “satisfies” readers that “mirror[s] and present[s] for approval the opinions its readers already hold”, dialectic is unsettling for it “requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by.” Fish adds that a dialectical work does not simply proclaim the truth “but asks that its readers discover the truth for themselves.”

This made me wonder what the dialectical books in my own reading history had been, works that had challenged the assumptions of my worldview and had motivated me to seek truth in a new way. I came up with short list that follows (note: I’m omitting the Bible, the book of books that stands as the primary lens through which I view the world).

They include:

  1. Cornelius Van Til’s apologetical work, particularly as excerpted and commented on in Greg Bahnsen’s Van Til’s Apologetic
  2. James K. A. Smith’s view of educational formation in Desiring the Kingdom
  3. Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of traditional morality in The Genealogy of Morals
  4. Northrop Frye’s approach to literary criticism (it can be pursued with science rigor) and literary evaluation (it’s worthless) in Anatomy of Criticism
  5. James Baldwin’s scathing look at the complicity of the Christian church in America’s troubled history with race in The Fire Next Time
  6. C.S. Lewis’s representation of academic moral cowardice in That Hideous Strength
  7. David Foster Wallace’s examination of addiction and depression in Infinite Jest

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Asking Questions

Last week, I had lunch with a colleague. As we parted, he said, “I enjoyed this, but next I have to ask you questions. It felt like you were interviewing me.”

This morning, I arrived to class 15 minutes early, and I had a ten minute conversation with a student about her two brothers, her dad’s motorcycle fascination, her summer job as a lifeguard, and her athletic injury. In the other five minutes, I discovered a a student had been playing Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” on repeat.

At lunch, I asked questions of two other friends between bites of food, discovering that one had taught Spanish in public high schools for 16 years and another had been a youth minister at a church plant in New Zealand.

During office hours, I recorded an interview with a senior English major about her honors project.

This, apparently, is one of my daily practices.

After lunch today, my friend asked me why I ask so many questions. I replied that so often, people never ask someone else how they’re doing because they just want to talk about themselves. I decided I would be the outlier and try to address that imbalance. I like hearing about how others are doing.

During the interview today, I was particularly engaged. I wanted to know what my student would say, and while I had questions to get to, I was never preoccupied with the next question while the student was providing a current answer. It was a real conversation. I left having learned something and, hopefully, I gave the student a chance to articulate some things that would otherwise have gone unsaid.

The only problem is that question asking can be a way of hiding. I can ask questions for selfish reasons: because I don’t feel like talking or feel like I don’t have anything smart to say or because I want to be seen as a good question asker.

The way I know my question asking is doing some good is if I’m not thinking about the person I’m having a conversation with more than myself. I pray have more opportunities like today to exercise this habit: informal conversations with students, longer conversations with colleagues from different disciplines, and celebratory interviews with budding scholars. I also pray that I help my interlocutors feel heard, and that when it’s time for me to open my mouth, I add something to the conversation.

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Cognitive Overload

I have to imagine that some comic book writer has already done this: put Superman in a situation where the problem is not any specific challenge but the fact that he has to be three or four places at the same time dealing with equally difficult challenges. For all of his strength and speed and nigh invulnerability, he’s not omniscient or omnipresent. How would his ability to fly get him out of a situation where he has to stop three bombs from going off when they’re in opposite parts of the world? He can’t do it all himself, and how does he decide what job gets his personal attention?

I bring this up to confess that my greatest weakness is cognitive overload. When I have too much to think about and prioritize, I get paralyzed in inaction or take a whole lot of time to do stuff that keeps me busy but doesn’t help me in getting done what I want to really accomplish.

I do this by starting twenty books at the same time or seizing up when picking a new one or not working on substantive writing projects because it’s so much easier to start a new one or revise old ones.

This isn’t just about work either. If I could just be a dad or husband, things would be so much easier. The fact that I have to be both and then balance those responsibilities with my professional life fills me with stress.

When I feel like this, I come back to a couple of verses:

The first is Matthew 6:33: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”

The second is Luke 10:42: “…but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”

I pray that in any given moment, I will have the courage to seek God’s kingdom first, to do the one thing that is necessary, and to seek others’ good before my own.

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Description and Practice

I’ve been playing pickup hoops this academic year, and it’s been a blast. A colleague in the English Department was the one who talked me into playing, and one of the most enjoyable parts of the Tues/Thurs games is our inevitable text exchange about our respective performances that day and the games’ other points of interest.

Confession: I haven’t picked up a ball outside of these Tues/Thurs games. I run during the week, so I show up ready to burn some calories and play as well as I can. Over the course of the year, I’ve gotten better but I still play more unevenly than I would have hoped.

This wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but I find that I’m still replaying games in my head from the previous day, and as I ramp up to the noontime games the following day, I’m constantly thinking about how I can improve that day.

Today, I tell myself, I’m going to work on passing (no turnovers) or on help defense (rather than over-helping) or driving to the rim (instead of settling for jump shots).

I can describe those things to myself in my head all I want and even get feedback on them from my colleague, but the only way to improve is to actually play.

I’m encountering something similar in my writing courses this semester. I’ve given students the better part of a month to work on their final papers, projects that demand they choose their own novel and generate a research paper about them. I’ve given them lots of class time to work, and I’ve given them open-ended quizzes to keep them accountable.

At first, I asked for 150 words describing what they had done on their project since the last class. The point here was to have them summarize what they were reading, survey the criticism they had found in their initial research, and give them a space to ask questions about the direction their project was taking.

Now that we’re getting close to the end, however, I had them switch from description to writing that could actually end up in the paper. No more telling me about what they worked on. Instead, I want them to show me what that work has led to by writing a body paragraph as the day’s assignment. All of them struggle with this, but the practice is worth it because it forces them to apply the things they’re supposed to be working on outside of class. At some point, commentary and description are just ways of hiding. Just as my commitment to getting better at basketball will come down to whether or not I want to ever shoot outside of the two hours I play a week, so too will their commitment to improving their writing come down to their practicing output (i.e. actual body paragraphs) than recording input (i.e. a description of what they’ve done).

As I enter the summer, I will be thinking more about how to balance description and practice for my students so that they can apply what they’ve learned and then get some post-game commentary that helps them know how they can improve their performance. The answer is more practice, punctuated with helpful description.