The Record of a Lifelong Learner and Disciple
If someone were to ask me if I love reading, the short answer would be yes.
The longer answer would be yes, if…
The books I love most come with stories about how I read them, not just what they were about.
Continue reading “Do You Love Reading?”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.
Read moreI will be pondering the two models Zadie Smith outlines here.
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.
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.
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.
Today, we had our first peer review day in my English Composition class. Typically, I try to have the students grade a sample paper using my rubric to get their hands dirty and then use the insights they make from that exercise to look at their own drafts and the drafts of their classmates with fresh eyes.
But before the game is the game. They need to know what good feedback looks like before they can provide it.
For the past couple of years, I’ve given my students Seth Godin’s post on giving feedback as a conversation starter. While his piece is more about giving feedback in the context of a business or corporate environment, it’s all the more powerful for that reason. It lets my students know that the ability to offer quality feedback is not just something they need to be able to do in a classroom. It’s something that will serve them well in their careers and lives.
Godin gives three pieces of advice… Continue reading “Feedback and Discipleship”
https://youtu.be/LkX2IB-JQjY
https://youtu.be/voxKPJNIkhQ
https://youtu.be/g8o-J1h-zFA