Category: Teaching

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Hrothgar and David

In the middle of Beowulf, the Danish king Hrothgar warns the titular hero about pride.

0 flower of warriors, beware of that trap.
Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part,
eternal rewards. Do not give way to pride.
For a brief while your strength is in bloom
but it fades quickly; and soon there will follow
illness or the sword to lay you low,
or a sudden fire or surge of water
or jabbing blade or javelin from the air
or repellent age. Your piercing eye
will dim and darken; and death will arrive,
dear warrior, to sweep you away.

From Beowulf

The next time I teach this poem, I will pair this passage with these verses from Psalm 90…

Continue reading “Hrothgar and David”
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Truth and Conflict

We are called to the difficult task of discerning the truth, but at the same time we are reminded that we are, in a very real sense, only children at play in God’s kingdom. We laugh and dispute and long to know the truth. And though our experience is often one of conflict, including the conflict of interpretations, as Christians we also have a genuine hope…

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Gallagher and Lundin get at a crucial problem my students have with English courses: sometimes it feels like there’s more than one right answer.

Or, to state it more radically, sometimes it feels like there’s no answer because everyone is entitled to their own answer.

Christians believe that just because we can’t have God’s total knowledge of something doesn’t mean our partial knowledge is false. In fact, we don’t need to worry about inevitable gaps in our knowledge or the conflicts that come with our pursuit, if indeed we are searching after Truth.

My students handed in their outlines for their first papers this past weekend, and none of them had exactly the same argument. I told them this was a good thing. Either their papers could complement one another so that they get closer to the truth together then they would separately, or in their very conflict they would clarify key issues that would help us pinpoint the key question or truth in the story under debate.

I’m excited to learn more about the stories these students are writing about, but I’m even more excited about seeing my students actively pursue truth through the writing their doing.

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Doing the Reading

We’re at the point in the semester (week 4) where we’ve finally had the “oh, so nobody read” class.

In a pleasure/pain model of motivation, it’s easy to appeal to pain:

  1. You’ll flunk your quizzes.
  2. You’ll flunk your essay (which is based on a story you’re supposed to have read).
  3. You’ll flunk the class.

But that’s coming from the outside, and I know that part of what they’re implicitly asking is, “Of what practical value is doing the reading?” The absolute worst thing I could do is to try and make a practical case and get locked in a war of pragmatic attrition.

The first week of class, I had them write me a letter that was dated May 10th and began, “Dear Dr. Sircy, I got my ‘A’ because…”

Here were some of the things they wrote…

I made sure to keep up with assignments and the required reading as this course went on in order to receive an A at the end of the semester.  

While this class has given me difficulty in the past, I really worked on dedicating the time and energy to the course that it deserves. I put the appropriate amount of work into writing my papers, reading the texts, and completing assignments.

I got an A in your class because I read all the books and material you assigned us. 

I got my ‘A’ because I put in the work and I cared enough to get the grade I wanted.

I got my ‘A’ because I committed to completing all my assignments and homework on time to the best of my ability. 

I strategically began dividing up the reading and other assignments for the week among each day so I would not have to do it all in one day and feel rushed.

Today, I’ll be reading some of these letters in class. Yes, this will be painful for some of them, but the letters they wrote were premised on pleasure: on what they were willing to do in order to get the grade they wanted. If they’re internally motivated to do better work, that’s worth more than all the pragmatic appeals I could ever hope to make.

I’ll end with I Corinthians 10:31.

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.

We’re not just doing this work for ourselves. We’re doing it for God.

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Representation: Part 3

I’ve been working this week on a view of representation that takes into account Christian presuppositions. You can find my earlier posts here and here.

In what follows I respond to the nine points made by WJT Mitchell in his essay on the topic for the Critical Terms in Literary Study volume. I put his points in italics and mine in bold. The point is to sketch out ways in which the Christian description and deployment of the term “representation” would overlap and differ from the non-Christian description and deployment of same.

  1. The study of literature begins with the “naive intuition” that literature represents life (i.e. mimesis) and that humans are symbol making creatures. At the heart of God is the Son’s perfect representation of the Father (Heb. 1:3). At the heart of creation is the Logos creating the universe and calling it good (Gen. 1) which implies that creation is a perfect creative representation of what God intended to make. Moreover, both men and women are made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26). So the study of literature begins by acknowledging that humans are not just symbol-making creatures. They are symbol-made creatures who reflect a symbol-making God.
  2. Representation is not just aesthetic or semiotic. It’s political, particularly in this country. Representation is not just aesthetic or political; it is spiritual. Or rather, because it is spiritual, it is necessarily aesthetic and political. Representation is at the heart of the godhead. It manifests itself in our being as creatures made in God’s image. We live in a world sustained by God’s eternal Word. Any field of study that asks us to consider representation gets us closer to understanding metaphysical truth.
  3. Representation always costs something, be it presence, immediacy, or truth. While this claim may be true ethically (i.e. the right or wrong uses of human representation) it is not true metaphysically. For the reasons listed above, I don’t think a Christian cannot agree that representation has a necessary cost. Our image-bearing nature is premised on distance. Creation reflects God’s power and glory. He called it good although it was different than him. Christ was not suddenly sinful because he became a person. We were only able to see the Father truly because of that representation. After the fall humans can and do use God-given tools (e.g. logic, language) for ethically malicious ends, but that is different than saying that there is a cost always built into representation. In fact, it is because of representation that redemption is possible (Rom. 5:12-15).
  4. This same gap in presence, immediacy, and truth makes literature possible. It’s telling that the perfect representation of God, Christ, is the Bible character who uses the most blatantly literary form: the parable.
  5. We can never totally control representation. As soon as we start using it to communicate, it will also be a tool for miscommunication. This is ethically true before redemption, but God’s word will always accomplish what it was intended to accomplish (Isaiah 55:11) which means that even in an ethically fallen world, the metaphysics of representation are not tainted.
  6. Representation has always had its skeptics, from the philosophical (e.g. Plato) to the religious (e.g. any religion that prohibits idols) to the aesthetic (e.g. modernism and its rejection of representational art). The God of Christianity is both transcendent and immanent. The law forbids graven idols or images (Exodus 20:4) but establishes symbols and types that will represent the divine. God wants to communicate with humanity. He does so through creation, his revealed word, and ultimately Christ. Christianity is wary about representation primarily because of how crucial it is to the nature of God, creation, and humanity.
  7. The structure of representation includes the representation OF something BY something TO someone. My problem with this model is that it means that the audience (the one who receives the representation) is the only necessary agent in the process. It leaves the agent representing TO someone blank, as though all we can talk about is a person who imputes meaning after the fact. If the Christian story is true, then meaning and representation are ethical and personal because they both begin with God. Creation itself represents God’s glory (Psalm 19:1, Romans 1:20), and the Psalmist and Paul tell us we should be able to discern from creation the existence of the one who created the world. (Note: my thinking here is not as clean and precise as it should be.)
  8. You can classify representation according to the icon, index, and symbol triumvirate. Icons represent by resemblance, indexes represent by causation, and symbols represent via arbitrary signs. Writing is the third of these. This taxonomy gives us a way of thinking about the differences among Christ (God’s icon), people (God’s index), and the Bible (God’s symbolic revelation). One note: just because symbolism can be arbitrary doesn’t mean it has to be, however.
  9. Our theory of representation plays a key role in how we interpret the identity of a work of art, that art’s meaning, the integrity of the author, and the validity of any interpretation of that art. Truth. That’s why it matters if Christian presuppositions clash with those of scholars like Mitchell.
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Representation: Part 1

The core of Christian theological aesthetics is the religious experience of reestablished communion with God, mediated in this case by aesthetic structures which create, facilitate or sometimes even require a triune meeting between the work of literary art, the spiritually awakened human person, and the divine life of God revealed by faith and reason.

From Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice

In their book on Christianity and literature, David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet argue that Christians experience the communion above through literature when they apprehend the true, good, and beautiful in what they read.

At the core of this experience is mimesis, literature’s imitation or representation of human life.

Jeffrey and Maillet spend an entire chapter arguing for a correspondence view of truth over and against coherence and pragmatic views. The correspondence view holds that a verbal statement is true insofar as it corresponds with external reality. The way that literature’s “fiction” can claim truth is through aesthetics, its participation in the expression of the beautiful.

Beauty is an important theological concept, one that is not ultimately subjective but, as they argue, “is intrinsically linked, inseparably interdependent, with the intellectual truth and moral beauty existent within the life and presence of the Christian God.”

All this is crucial to explaining to my students what literature is and how it fits into God’s work in the world.

My next two questions are this: what are the biblical presuppositions undergirding literature’s use of representation (conceptual), and what are some concrete ways I could teach these abstract ideas (pedagogical)?

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The Opposite

This paragraph appears in the preface of the Christian Worldview Integration Series.

By contrast, the Bible presents faith as a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true. Understood in this way, we see that faith is built on reason and knowledge. We should have good reasons for thinking that Christianity is true before we completely dedicate ourselves to it. We should have solid evidence that our understanding of a biblical passage is correct before
we go on to apply it. We bring knowledge claims from Scripture and
theology to the task of integration; we do not employ mere beliefs or
faith postulates.

Here, Francis Beckwith and J.P. Moreland argue that faith comes out of our knowledge, that because something is reasonable we will believe it.

In other circles I have seen people describe this process as one where faith makes up the gap between what we can know and the truth of the world. Our reason and knowledge may get us 65% there, but faith is able to fill that remaining 35% because it is built on that sure foundation.

The problem is that this is flies in the face of what scriptures teach about all wisdom beginning with the fear of God and our acceptance of facts (e.g. eyewitness accounts of Christ) being less important than revelation. As Augustine argues, faith provides the foundation for reason, not vice versa. We understand because we believe.

Beckwith and Moreland are right to distance themselves from a faith that is inimical to logic and evidence, but the only way we can have confidence in that logic and in the facts we find is because of our ultimate faith in God.

This is an easier point for me to make here than actually consistently live out, so I pray that as I read, talk, and learn I will discover how this crucial distinction has real consequences.

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Spelled Out

This paragraph from Ken Bain’s book on teaching spells out the questions that good teachers ask themselves.

That question breaks into four subquestions, all prominent in
the thinking of the teachers we studied, regardless of their discipline:
(1) Is the material worth learning (and, perhaps, appropriate
to the curriculum)? (2) Are my students learning what the course is
supposedly teaching? (3) Am I helping and encouraging the students
to learn (or do they learn despite me)? (4) Have I harmed my
students (perhaps fostering short-term learning with intimidation
tactics, discouraging rather than stimulating additional interest in
the field, fostering strategic or bulimic rather than deep learning,
neglecting the needs of a diverse student population, or failing to
evaluate students’ learning accurately)?

From What the Best College Teachers Do

I would like to ask these questions each Saturday during a scheduled planning period as I assess my week’s work and then use the questions to help me plan what I’ll be doing the next week.

This week, my Intro to Lit students are learning about poetry and my Brit Lit students are studying the epic.

Just from asking these questions about my lessons tomorrow, I changed my focus on how to address memorizing a poem. I want to make sure that students see the real point of the exercise: their living with a poem for a longer time than they would if they simply wrote a paper about it or read it from a book 10 times. In order to recite it well, they will have had to dwell with the poem for a week or so. Because this having dwelt with the work is the hallmark of any good interpretation, I’ve come up for a way to practice it without writing another paper about “Stopping By Woods…” My prayer is that they will learn something about meditating on God’s word as well, the way that constant thought and reflection on certain words can help them remain with you throughout the day.

I’m excited about continuing to think through these questions and to use them to better contribute to my students’ growth as readers, writers, and disciples.

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Poetry and God

“When St. Philip asked our Lord to ‘show us the Father’ (John 14:8), he was an example of what St. Anselm called ‘faith seeking understanding.’”

From Father George Rutler

Today, we start looking at poetry in my Intro to Lit course. I typically have students survey five or six poems about God and love respectively as they start to get a feel for how to read a poem.

Fresh off of a class about interpretation and paradigms, the poems we look at today concerning God should get some discussion started. Poetry intensifies our interpretations of and emotional reaction to the world. These poems are pitched high emotionally as they seek understanding about some aspect of God.

In “Batter My Heart,” John Donne feels trapped. The fact that he needs God means that he needs God to help him do what’s right. If he good choose God on his own, he wouldn’t need God in the first place. Donne is intensifying language from the Old and New testaments, from the laments of the Psalms and some of Paul’s most despairing cries in Romans.

In “Love (iii)” George Herbert offers an allegory for the gospel. Christ offers the speaker a chance to eat with him. While the speaker finds himself unworthy to either be a guest, the Lord offers grace and love in the form of food and fellowship.

In “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” William Blake reflects on how different creatures reflect their creator. If God is like the lamb, then we see Jesus. If God is like the tiger, then he is terrifying.

In “Battle Hymn of the Republic” Julia Ward Howe gives us a God who actively participates in human affairs and, with war-like proficiency, advances His cause on the earth.

Finally, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” tries to not only represent but give us the experience of witnessing God’s beauty in nature.

I’m excited to see if one of these poems resonates with my students more than others. We’ll spend time on Donne and Blake, but I will call for them to re-examine Herbert and Hopkins in light of our discussion.

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Assessment

To make learning-based assessment work, the best teachers try to
find out as much as possible about their students…

From What the Best College Teachers Do

Early this semester, I’ve done two things to help me gain crucial information about my students. The first is that I’ve offered extra credit for filling out an information sheet. The sheet contained the following questions:

  • What are three things you believe are true?
  • If you were given an unplanned Saturday to do with as you please, how would you spend your time?
  • What is the high school or college course you’ve benefited the most from? Explain.
  • Who are three people in your life whose advice you listen to? What advice have they given you that you cherish?
  • What are the two most important ways you’ve grown as a person in the last year?
  • What’s your favorite story? Why?
  • How are you currently contributing to the lives of your family members, friends, or neighbors?
  • What do you hope to learn in this class?

In the future, this will simply be a quiz grade, rather than extra credit. These are the kinds of questions that I want from every student, not just the overachievers.

The next thing I’ve done is give every student I’m teaching this first-week writing assignment:

Write yourself a letter dated May 10, 2019 and address it to me. Begin “Dear Dr. Sircy, I got my ‘A’ because…’” then tell me what you will have done to earn your ‘A.’

I’ve only read a few of them, but it may be one of my favorite reading experiences ever. Students are telling me (with more or less detail) what they think they’ll need to do to succeed. With only two classes under our belts, they don’t really have a sense of me as a grader or the exact nature of the work they’ll be asked to perform. It’s cool to see what they’re thinking about their own emotional and intellectual abilities and how they can put them to work this semester.

I pray this will contribute to better assessment on my part. I certainly feel like I know these students better after just one week. Of course, assessment is just one part of the Christian teacher’s gig. I’m praying their souls as well and their growth as disciples. Through the information questions I ask as well as the “I got an ‘A'” assignment, I’m trying to suss out where they’re at in terms of their faith and how that faith interacts with their educational goals. I pray that I don’t forget this part of my task.

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Imagination

“I’m not imaginative,” says the diehard sports fan who just watched the Tigers of Clemson battle the Tide of Alabama (who have an elephant mascot) in a football game.

The rules of football are arbitrary. You can’t use empirical reasoning to explain why a field is 100 yards, each team can only have eleven men on the field on any play, or a touchdown is worth six points. It’s a game. Those are just the game’s rules.

This does not mean that the effects of the game aren’t real. People tear ligaments in their knee in the game’s middle, show themselves able to throw the ball measurable distances during regulation p;lay, and trade their success at this particular game for lots of money. The imaginative space of the football field reveals real things about the world: most importantly, mental and physical strength. Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco was a laboratory on Monday night where players from Clemson and Alabama worked out a debate about who was national champion, not “in nature” but through a controlled experiment. On this day and at this time, these two teams played and the result was final. In this particular experiment, Clemson was superior.

And oh the joy! There’s a lot of emotional and economic resources tied up in the success of both of these teams. I live about 20 minutes away from Clemson, and it’s a huge deal that they’ve just won their second national championship on Monday night. What strikes me is that the same person who is fanatically devoted to this team and will show up for the parade and wear the t-shirt and generally crow over any other college football team is the same one who will tell me, “I don’t like fiction because it’s made up.”

So is sports. Yet sports isn’t a lie. It’s an experiment in imagination. Literature isn’t a lie either. It’s a laboratory for the heart where we go to find experiments in ways of interpreting the world and how we feel about it. We can use our reason inside this lab, but the experiment begins with us exercising our imagination. Everyone can do that much.