Category: Teaching

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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.

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Writing to Remember

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

From Billy Collins’s “Forgetfulness”

At the beginning of the semester, my ENGL comp students had to memorize a poem. While some struggled, all of them tried, and many of them recited their selected poems perfectly, everything from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 to Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.”

Yesterday, we read the above lines from Billy Collins’s poem out loud, and I asked them to take 30 seconds and write down one line from the poem they had memorized in January. Only half of them could do it.

We did this exercise as a way to explain why I had given them a reflective essay for their final exam. For this exam, students have to reread something from one day of class earlier in the semester. Depending on the day, they could reread a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri, an act from Macbeth, or some chapters from Mother Night. Their task is to then reflect on how the second time through compared with the first: whether or not what they got out of the reading changed (or didn’t) and how they altered their reading methods and to what effect.

I told them that given the fact that their memory could be spotty (as demonstrated by the fact that some of them had already forgotten a poem they had tried to memorize just ten weeks earlier), they should plan on writing about something they had already written a paper on. If they wrote their first paper on Lahiri’s story “The Third and Final Continent” they should think about rereading it. Why? They already have the paper as a testament to what they had gotten out of it the first time. It makes it a whole lot easier to tell how the second time through it had changed (or not changed) things.

The students are telling the story of their semester in this assignment, and it’s powerful to see them exercise their memories through their writing even as they use writing to jog their memories.

Yes, I hope they’ll see how they’ve grown as a reader and writer over the semester, but the other takeaway I hope they’ll get is that writing is a powerful way to remember. To use Billy Collins’s simile, writing is the phone service that allows you to get ahold of your memories when they’re in a Brazilian fishing village.

I’ve got a file in Dropbox with my daily prayers from every day since the end of 2016. It’s an amazing time machine, better even than a diary, because it reminds me of conversations with God: a whole heap of gratitudes, requests that have been answered for others as well as myself, and the scriptures that helped me hear God’s voice in response to my petitions. I never wrote the prayers down to have something to remind myself of that particular day’s events. I always did it to focus myself in the moment. But now that the past two years have gone by in a blur with significant changes in my personal and professional life, it’s amazing to have that repository available. I hope my students start building one like that too.

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Conversation Piece

At this time a year ago, I was finishing up my final year at Charleston Southern University. Because I had accepted my new gig at Southern Wesleyan in March, I had a month to say goodbye to everyone who had made my time at CSU so special. This included not only colleagues but students too. Before I left, I sent the students who had meant something to me an email asking for a conversation piece. It said this:

Before I hoof it up I-26 to the upstate (it’s happening this week!), I wanted to ask you for something to remember you by: a particular poem, song, novel, video game, graphic novel, tv show, movie, food type product—you get the idea—that you think I should check out but that I either don’t know exists or haven’t made time for. Some of you have already given me elaborate playlists, and now particular songs from Hamilton and Fall Out Boy’s Mania are inextricably connected with you forever and ever Amen. This is a good thing! I wouldn’t have listened to either of them without the two of you, tbh, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!

You each will be in my prayers, and I will do my dead-level best to keep up with you. Commiserating over the too-good-to-pass-up deliciousness of Market Pantry Fiddle Faddle will be an excuse to say hey. (Note: I don’t know if Target makes good fiddle faddle. That’s just a made-up example, but you get the kind-of point, right?)

This week, I made my way back through some of the emails and listened to the song below that had been recommended from one of my fave non-English major students. It gave me an excuse to pray for the student, reach out and say hello, and give thanks that I get to do what I do for a living, where an ongoing personal connection can be made over books and writing and education and discipleship. I’m blessed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0345Ls4IJf4
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Asking the Question

How can I help?

What can I pray for?

These are just two questions I’ve asked my students repeatedly over the past two weeks, and I’ve been bowled over by the answers I’ve received.

Yes, they want help with writing. Great. That’s what I’m here for.

But they also have real prayer concerns that come from places of pain and guilt and shame.

The two are not unrelated. I am asking them questions because I’m teaching them how to read and write more effectively. My ethos as a Christian comes from my ability to show Christ to them through our shared coursework.

My students’ concerns are bigger than the course, however, and when I ask a spirit-led question and have the God-given patience to listen, I am right where God wants me to be.

I can’t address every need I here, even if it is more about writing than it is someone’s life. I know who can though. I know that He hears my questions too.

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Emotional Solidarity

Today, I spoke with a student who had just run four miles…as a warm-up. He’s a long-distance runner on the track team, and he had miles to go before he slept.

I like to run, but if I had just run four miles, that would be my workout for the day. His warm-up is my workout.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember what it’s feels like to do the work I ask students to do with the same kind of anxiety they feel about it. That’s because my warm-up is their workout.

I can write the 1000-1500 word papers I ask them to write without breaking a sweat. If they get a good 750 word paper, they feel gassed.

Today, I felt their pain.

I’m writing a book review, and it’s hard. I don’t want to do it because it feels like I might fail at it, like I can’t offer any sort of criticism, just a summary. So today has been a day where I’ve seen all my old strategies for procrastination creep in. It turns out, I’m really good at working hard at not working.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell my students this story. I’ll see if it resonates with them. They’ll want an answer about what I do. I’ll answer that:

  1. I pray and ask God for help. I admit I can’t do it on my own and ask for grace.
  2. I read book reviews of similar books and book reviews that I myself have written. I know I can do this. I’ve done it in the past.
  3. I listen to motivational speakers who can be the voice inside my head when I’m tired and am engaged in negative self-talk.
  4. I sit in a chair with the book and read and write for a specified set of time.

It used to be so much worse. God has given me ways of answering this anxiety. I can name it and respond accordingly.

Here’s the biggest difference. I’m not looking for the difficulty to go away. I’m figuring out what to do with it. I pray my students do too.

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Temples and Hearts

And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know’st…

Paradise Lost, Book I, 17-1

Because I begin my Brit Lit I survey with Beowulf and end it with Paradise Lost, I like to have students think about two different kinds of epic: grand stories of external and internal action. While Beowulf features climactic battles with hellbeasts and dragons, Paradise Lost offers us two human beings deciding whether or not to eat a piece of fruit.

Continue reading “Temples and Hearts”
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Hopeful Education and Easter Sunday Christians

The Scripture: I Thessalonians 4:13-18

Hopeless Education

It’s the Monday after spring break, and students are asking about grades and dropping or staying accordingly. What they’re really asking me is if there’s hope for them to pass the class they’re taking.

I’ve heard more negative self-talk this semester than any other in my full-time teaching career. It’s normal for students to complain about hard an English course is or to articulate their inability to understand a particular reading assignment. What’s odd is how vehemently my students have insisted that they cannot write well and this will never change. They have no faith the class will help them. They were betrayed by poor high school teachers and sabotaged by instructors, and now their case is hopeless.

“I can’t learn.” “I’ll never get this.” “Why do I even bother?”

This is simply untrue.

Every student can improve, at least a little, over the course of a semester. I’ve seen it happen too many times.

Hopeful Believers

During this Lenten season as we prepare to celebrate Christ’s resurrection, we find ourselves in between a desire for the resurrection and the pain that comes with knowing Christ must die for our sins before that can happen. When the disciples miss out on Christ’s predictions of his resurrection, they are guaranteeing heartbreak on Good Friday.

Continue reading “Hopeful Education and Easter Sunday Christians”
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Hammering Nails With a Violin

This week, I graded my freshmen’s analyses of short stories from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.

Making my way through them, I felt two things: disappointment in the students’ readings and deep respect for Lahiri’s stories to withstand those poor readings and actually become deeper and more well-constructed than I had thought. I kept going back to the stories to see if they had the evidence that I felt was lacking in the students’ papers. Not only was the evidence there, it was always aesthetically handled. The stories were so much richer than the students were giving them credit for.

I thought of Zadie Smith’s line about reading as a way of playing a piece of music. You want your playing to match the beauty of the piece that’s been written. Here, to borrow a David Foster Wallace line, it appeared my students were being handed a piece fit for a Stradivarius and were using their glorious instrument to hammer nails.

True, violins can make nails go deeper into the surface you want them to go into…but it’s not efficient and it permanently damages the violin so that when you want to actually play music with it, you’re lost.

But in the midst of those feelings, I wondered about my own reading of scriptures. I believe that it’s true that God’s word always accomplishes its work, whether it brings us closer to God through the work of the Holy Spirit or confirms in our cold response to it just how much we need God. If I was honest about the way I read and used scripture on a day to day basis, I think I would be hammering away at nails with something far more valuable than a Stradivarius.

I pray for the wisdom to read God’s words well even more than I pray for my students to gain the ability to read a short story well. More than that, I pray for the power to live it out after reading it well.

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Taking Time

I’ve been staying in my 11am MWF classroom for 30 minutes or so after class to do some work, collect my thoughts, and planning the rest of the work day. Today, I got to see what the open space could become: a space for more personal engagement with students who want help.

Two students who were particularly flummoxed during class stayed after for 30 minutes to discuss their first essays and possible revisions. Topics we covered included:
1. Thesis statements

2. Claims

3. Suitable evidence

4. Development of that evidence

5. Using CTRL – F or CMND – F to search a text

6. The way I evaluate organization

7. The way I evaluate a paper’s ethos

These students wanted to learn. I had to be humble enough not to skip any steps with them and reward their extra effort by explaining as simply as I could the things they could do to improve as writers.

God was in that room. We left with a stronger rapport. They knew I cared. I knew they did too. God was merciful.

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Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy

I have learned that teaching doctrine and teaching obedience are two very different things.

From Contagious Disciple Making

I read Paul and David Watson’s amazing book Contagious Disciple Making this week and left with this insight into teaching: I can say all the right things as a teacher, but if I don’t do them myself my students will not listen.

The doctrines in English lit are clarity and concision, a commitment to revision, and a desire to interpret the world in a way consistent with your faith.

This is so much easier to say than do.

God, help me to do all of this: not just in my reading and my reading but in my personal interactions with each of my students.