Category: Teaching

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Irrationality: How To Think Chapter 1

In the first chapter of his book How to Think, Alan Jacobs makes two main points: 1) thinking alone is impossible and 2) true thinking requires a marriage of reason and emotion. Perhaps his most salient takeaway comes as a result of those two facts: it is possible to have engaged in genuine thought and come up with the wrong answer, and it is possible to come up with the right answer for bad reasons without thinking at all.

Jacobs focuses on the way that we tend to denigrate the thinking process of others. If those we love have changed their mind from our viewpoint to one we oppose, we tend to assume they’ve been ensnared instead of thinking for themselves. If those we love do something we can’t understand, we tend to dismiss them as irrational or crazy.

After the break, I’ll talk about some ways I will attempt to work through these dilemmas with my students..

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How to Think: Introduction

I’m rereading Alan Jacobs’s fabulous How to Think this summer because I’m teaching it again in the fall. Below are my takeaways from the book’s introduction. After the break, you’ll find some prompts to help you personalize the takeaways.

  • Thinking is hard. There are tons of ways to get it wrong. That’s why we don’t work at it (much less do it) even though we know it’s important.
  • Thinking is the process that goes into making the decision, not the decision itself. It’s the work we did to come up with the answer, not the answer itself.
  • Thinking is social. We never do it alone, and when we fail to think, we often do it because it’s socially discouraged.
  • Thinking is emotional. Thinking is rational too. It’s just that it’s easy to make thinking one rather than both of these things.
  • Thinking is oblique. That’s why the best way to approach thinking is not by contemplating thinking in itself but by approaching it indirectly.
  • Thinking is ultimately moral because it’s primarily a matter of our wills.
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Writing With Purpose: Five Takeaways

Yesterday, I had the chance to lead a session for Southern Wesleyan’s first cohort of EdD students. My assigned topic was Writing With Purpose, and you can find my worksheet after the jump.

My five big pieces of advice were…

  1. Begin with gratitude–for people, events, and God. Even the monumental task of writing a dissertation can be an occasion for thanks, and you can put the hard and often stressful work necessary into perspective when you begin by giving thanks.
  2. Find joy in your work–I had the students read out loud the answer to the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s question about the “chief end of man.” Yes, we are to glorify God, but we are also called to enjoy him. Joy can be a real part of the work we do.
  3. Define your purpose–Students wrote out their answer to a pretty simple research prompt: “I am studying X…because I want to find out Y…in order to help my readers better understand Z.” Yes, this kind of statement works for providing a 40,000 foot view of their project, but, when adapted, it could also easily apply to a single work session that would give each student a chance to measure their progress.
  4. Share–one of the cohort’s greatest resources are their other cohort members. I had them conduct a short conversation with a partner about their answers to the research prompt to help them see how helpful it is just to take five minutes and try to say out loud what they’re doing to another human being. Each of these students have people in their lives who care about them succeeding. Not all of those people have the ability to respond to the intellectual demands of their project, however. Finding someone you can talk to about your project is invaluable.
  5. Know what it takes for you to do your best work–this can change depending on the purpose. You might read best at home and write best in the office. But you need to know yourself well enough to know the details that are non-negotiable (e.g. you have to write before noon or it won’t get done) and ones you can experiment with (e.g. location).
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The Purpose for the Composition Course

[T]he essential purpose of this course goes far beyond the mere technicalities of grammar and rhetoric. Ultimately, this course engages your deepest needs and interests, your thinking, your feelings, your relationships with other people.

From Modern Rhetoric by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren

What is freshman composition for?

In the very first paragraph of their multi-editioned textbook, Brooks and Warren give the above answer. The purpose of the composition course, in their minds, is to unite a person’s feelings and thought as well as increase that person’s ability to commune peacefully with other people.

These are spiritual purposes, not pragmatic ones. Though Brooks and Warren are not explicit about the spiritual roots of their view, they do not simply reduce language to a tool that can be used to accrue power, money, or personal happiness. There is something metaphysical here, a kind of harmony with one’s self and others, that language affords. This is not a bad way of answering the question, “Why do I have to take composition?” though I would want to know what the assumptions are that give Brooks and Warren the warrant for making this argument.

Like every God-given facet of human culture, language is a means by which to love God and others more fully. Here are the assumptions that undergird the composition courses I teach.

  1. Language demands our attention because it’s part of God’s identity and thus is a crucial part of what it means to be a human made in God’s image. Jesus is called the word, and God reveals himself to us in words through sacred writings.
  2. Language gives us a concrete way of ordering and organizing the world.
  3. Language has rules and can be used correctly and incorrectly.
  4. Language not only can be used to bless and curse but can, upon being used correctly or incorrectly, precipitate blessings or cursings.
  5. Language that communicates truth will stand the test of time.

Language is at the core of who we are, how we know anything, and how we act in the world. Our relationship with language amounts to nothing less than our relationship with the God whose language brought the world into existence.

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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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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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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.