Category: Teaching

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When I think about how to organize my classes, I start with this premise: 5 segments per class with a (potentially) changeable order.

Those sections are:

  1. Review
  2. Textual Engagement
  3. Lecture about a key idea
  4. Writing/Small Group Discussion
  5. Application

Now I can see swapping #1 and #2 or having #4 follow #2 and having #5 come out of the lecture.The point is that as I develop my plan for the day, I have something substantive in each of these categories.

Day #1, for instance.

  • Textual engagement with the syllabus, including a quiz to help students get into it.
  • Review: the key points of the syllabus’s promises and requirements
  • The Key Idea: the artist/author as a creator in the image of God; literature as part of the redemption of the world
  • Writing/Small Group Discussion: a goal for the class
  • Application: talking as an entire class about how to tie their individual goals to what the course specifically asks of them

It’s not a perfect structure, but it gives me a good start to evaluate whether I’m ready with a given lesson or not.

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A Question about Reading

This week, I finished Alan Jacobs’s provocative A Theology of Reading.

This is a book I’ve needed to read. Last week, I wrote a statement about faith integration for a promotion application, and the book’s refrains of love and generosity were ringing in my ears. Jacobs explores the way our readings can change over time, exemplified by a detailed examination of WH Auden’s relationship to Soren Kierkegaard (probably my favorite part of the book). And most of all the book gave me some follow-up reading; the book convinced me to return to John Milbank and (especially) Mikhail Bakhtin.

The book also left me with a question. At the book’s close, Jacobs examines Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and its satirical take on the “institutionalization of charity,” a dangerous pitfall if one substitutes a bureaucratized love for one a personally vulnerable one. Jacobs turns his eye to the academy at the book’s conclusion, but I was left wondering about another extension of Jacobs’s insight.

As an English professor, I feel conflicted about the fact that I am part of the institutionalization of literature and of a certain kind of reading.

My question then: is this kind of “institutionalization” a potential problem?

Does it contribute to the analogous problems as charity’s institutionalization?

If so, what are some ways we can combat those potential problems?

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Faith and Rationality in Macbeth

This has been bugging me since my ENGL 112 class ended.

We talked about RATIONALITY and IRRATIONALITY in Macbeth and in our lives as a way to start thinking about why the play still matters.

As my students completed their daily writing, I listed a bunch of topics where you could experience the pull between the rational and irrational in your life. They included:

  1. Love
  2. Family
  3. Career
  4. Friends
  5. Money
  6. Health

Here’s what’s been bugging me. The most obvious category of my life where I experience the tugs of Rationality and Irrationality is my FAITH, and I left that category out! Continue reading “Faith and Rationality in Macbeth”

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Politics and Performance in Henry IV Part 1

I took my own undergrad survey of Shakespeare in the spring of 2001. George Bush Jr. had just won a highly contested presidential election, and even pre-9/11, my professors were skeptical. During the campaign, Bush had adopted the narrative of a redeemed man. His past was pretty sordid: alcoholism, shirked duties, the stereotypical foibles of a rich kid with tons of privilege and little common sense. But now? He was a highly successful Texas governor, a born again Christian, a compassionate conservative who was tough on crime but merciful to his political opponents.

George Bush, my professor Ted Brown told us, was Prince Hal: not the historical Prince Hal, but Shakespeare’s representation of him. Someone near the Shrub, as Dr. Brown was wont to call the president, had been reading his Shakespeare (Doc Brown couldn’t imagine that Bush himself had read the play). They knew that the redemptive, comedic narrative succeeded in the 1590s just as well as the 1990s. Continue reading “Politics and Performance in Henry IV Part 1”

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Wrestling with Othello

We happened to read and talk about Othello the same week we celebrated the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. While the play’s early (white) audiences may not have reacted to the play’s racial dynamics, I cannot, in 21st Century America, read Roderigo, Iago, and Brabanzio’s descriptions of Othello and not think of our nation’s own conflicted relationship to black men and women (#blacklivesmatter). This is a play that asks us to balance the duties of individual and social responsibility. We can lay blame for what happens to Desdemona on Othello alone or even extend the blame to Iago (whatever his real motivation is). But what responsibility does the larger society have for enabling a world where Othello associates the color of his skin with sin? Continue reading “Wrestling with Othello”

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What Does Theology Have to Say About Grammar?

Reading a book on Christian Curriculum yesterday, I ran across this sentence:

Grammar and language are indeed relative to a culture, but the fact of a degree of relativity does not make it necessary (nor sensible) to affirm a radical relativism.

I then ran across this meditation on covenantal ethics.

The covenant teaches that man is a conditioned creature. Only God is unconditioned, meaning unbounded by time or place. Man’s response to God must always be conditional. Man is bounded by God’s law, but he is also bounded by history. He must faithfully apply the law to historical circumstances. The covenant (the law as a whole, as well as the historical books of the Bible) provides us with the details of these historical circumstances. These details must be respected.

So here is the false dichotomy that I find both statements attempting to answer:

  1. Human knowledge is absolute and unchanging.
  2. Human knowledge is radically relative.

Continue reading “What Does Theology Have to Say About Grammar?”

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The Most Important Work I Did Yesterday

Yesterday, I taught Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in my British lit survey and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in my Shakespeare survey. I worked out a two-sided page outline for each class that included performances, class discussions, writing exercises, and engagement with secondary sources. This was not even close to the most important work I did yesterday. Continue reading “The Most Important Work I Did Yesterday”