Category: Writing

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Giving an A

This ‘A’ is not an expectation to live up to but a possibility to live into.

From The Art of Possibility

In their book The Art of Possibility, Rosamund and Benjamin Zander discuss the freeing practice of giving yourself and others an ‘A’ inside and outside the classroom.

Ben Zander gives students enrolled in his year-long musical performance course the promise that they will get an ‘A’ if they complete the following assignment: within the first two weeks of the class, they must write a letter dated at the end of the academic year that begins, “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my ‘A’ because…”

I will be giving this prompt to my students for their first weekly letter because I’m interested to see what kind of work they think writing-intensive literature courses demand. More than that, I want them to exercise their imagination. What will they have done to live into the possibility of getting a superior mark in the class?

I will share them with my own letter. This is its first sentence: “Dear students of ENGL 101, I got my ‘A’ because I coached you through the process of reading and writing about literature in a way that made you more confident as a reader of and writer about literature while convincing you that both practices are of practical and spiritual importance.”

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Finding a Balance

As I approach the New Year, here are five areas for which I pray that God will help me find a happy medium.

  1. My commitment to discipleship at home (with my family) and at work (with my colleagues and students)
  2. My input (the things I read, watch, consume) and output (the things I read, teach, and create)
  3. My view of literature as a means for social action and source of delight
  4. My commitment to orthodoxy and my commitment to orthopraxy
  5. My pursuit of glorifying God and my pursuit of enjoying Him forever

The balancing act required for the goals I want to achieve are less quantitative than qualitative. I pray for the emotional and rational discernment necessary to feel and know how to let God work in my life in these areas today and in the days to come.

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Plagiarism and Self-Deception

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.

 

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Grateful for Voices

As the semester progressed, I started modeling more and more of the work I asked my students to do. It was fine to write rough drafts because then I could model revision. The tough part was writing a purposefully rough opening draft, and even more specifically, failing in that draft in a way that would help highlight typical student errors. My voice was always off. I seemingly cannot write like anyone but myself.

Today, I had the opportunity to revisit the essays of some students I taught in the spring. I was struck by how good one of them was, so struck in fact that I reached out to the student to say thank you. Not only were the insights unique, but they were expressed in a way that was totally unlike mine. I was encountering a student who had already developed her voice. Her critical acumen was still growing, but she had figured out how to write things effectively. The fact that she had something to say made the essay all the more a delight.

I’m so thankful for moments like this where I confront in my own students’ work the kind of reading and writing that I certainly could not imitate. I can only sound like me, which is a good thing and bad thing. It’s most often a bad thing when it becomes clear that I’m writing for an audience other than my students, the ostensible beneficiaries of the model. I don’t want students to produce essays I could write. I want them to write better, more diverse essays. This particular student nailed it.

I pray for the wisdom to hear student voices and the willingness to highlight and share them. When I am listening, they are indeed a beauty to hear.

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Going Back

But Jesus said to him, “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” – Luke 9:62

I read this verse today in an article on education, and it cut me to the quick. This blog is one place where I have put my hand to the plow. I need God’s grace to not look back.

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Revision and Discipleship

Revelation 2:19 “I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first.”

This is a season of revision for me and my students. I’m revising a journal article that’s been rejected. My students are going back through the semester’s first graded essay and, if they feel so inclined, revising them even as they’ve turned in a second essay and working on a third. I’m revising my teaching methods to address the concerns I have after seeing their first two essays.

In both my writing and teaching, I see the need for constant improvement.

This is happening in my discipleship as well. Books by Richard Foster and Shane Claiborne have called me out for my complacency, the ways that I explain away lingering selfishness or disregarding ways I know God wants me to live out the gospel. The books have pushed me to listen harder, seek growth in community, and find ways to bear fruit in my roles as a father, husband, friend, and teacher. In short, the books have given me reasons to serve and persevere: to confront the places in myself and others that most needs God’s help and what I can practically do to extend God’s care in love and faith.

One measure for me of that renewed commitment to service and perseverance is this blog—not just this site but this actual blog. It’s 9:20pm, and I’m long past being focused enough to offer substantive and constructive feedback on the 30+ papers I need to grade over the next few days.

I am trying. This is not an essay or extended argument, but it is an effort to think with a passage from my daily reading that spoke to me.

If you are familiar with the Thyatira sermon from Revelation 2, then you know the above verse is just a warm-up to the extended criticism of Jezebel and her relationship with the church. That is worth its own deep engagement.

For my purposes here, I singled out verse 19 which intrigues me because of:

  1. God’s attention to the church’s actions
  2. In particular, the attention to “love and faith” which are signs of compassion and reliance borne out in serving and doing so in the face of obstacles
  3. and the progress Thyatria has made in that service and perseverance

In the midst of revision and the inevitable pain that comes with knowing you didn’t get it right the first time, we find that iif we work in love and faith, God will complete the good work He began in us.

I pray for a commitment to daily writing and teaching, for those practices to be grounded in love (service to others) and faith (an allegiance to God), and the fruit from those practices to grow over time.

 

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Knowing Peace

John 14:27 “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

A short list of things I could be troubled about on the 10 of October in the year of our Lord 2018…

  1. Another hurricane hurtling toward South Carolina
  2. Enrollment woes at not just my university but many universities and the job anxiety and pressure that attend those flagging numbers
  3. Students who have stopped coming to class
  4. A cancerous tumor in my wife’s aunt’s brain
  5. Flagging membership and participation at 200-year-old churches
  6. The brouhaha in SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings as well as his eventual confirmation
  7. My caterwauling 3-year-old daughter

I love the verse from John because it identifies something I forget: that the world offers peace too. It is an ersatz peace, however, built on something that will not last or built on the fact that there is no peace that lasts.

Christ show us, however, that peace is acceptance, not passivity; it comes from the ability to recognize God’s hand in the storm, not just in its absence or its abatement.  God teaches us in the present not so that our learning will end but so that we will trust him when we inevitably reach the edge of what we know. I don’t know what items lurk in my future that will make the seven items above seem like child’s play. When I am focused on God, I realize that this doesn’t matter, that tomorrow will take care of itself. Peace does not preclude fear but it robs it of its sting by giving us a taste of eternity in the here and now.

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Feedback and Discipleship

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”

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Thankful In Little

Luke 19:26 “He replied, ‘I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but as for the one who has nothing, even what they have will be taken away.’”

Yesterday, I received two emails that should have made me elated. They did make me happy, but I don’t think I held onto that happiness for very long.

First, a student I taught in the spring got a writing gig with his current employer. He was pumped about the opportunity, and since we had spent so much time working on his writing for the freshman writing course he was part of, he wanted to let me know the good news.

Second, my uncle—my dad’s oldest brother—responded to an email I sent him early in the week. We last saw each other about this time a year ago, and he commented on how much that particular vacation—where he had, among other things, gotten to see my dad, Elisha, and me—had meant to him.

These are phenomenal blessings: written records of gratitude and appreciation that show God working in the lives of the people I have been in prayer for.

And yet. And yet. Continue reading “Thankful In Little”

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Hurry Up and Fail

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis suggests that one way for people to see how much they need Christ is to seriously attempt to rely on themselves. This is because

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

Only when we confront our own inability to be good will we truly rely on Christ. This is where real faith begins.

There’s an analogous principle in academic work, especially in the process of writing something as large and unwieldy as a research paper. I like to tell my students, “Hurry up and fail.” What I mean is that they often won’t know what kind of work they really need to do on a project until they attempt it, no matter how messy it is. The problem is not the rough draft: the attempt to be good. The problem is waiting until the last possible minute to hand in a rough draft: the attempt to be good never led to a new sense of reliance.

Lewis lets us know that the serious attempt to be good on our own can lead to a significant spiritual insight: not that we are lost forever but that we can never be found until we have faith in God.

The point of emphasizing failure to students is this: we ALL need to revise. Go ahead and start writing now so you can ask for help in improving it. Do it sooner rather than later.