Education Blog

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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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Splitting Terror

Job 23:16 “God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me.”

When was the last time I admitted something like the verse above? When was the last time this was true for me?

Yesterday, our minister preached on II Samuel 12 and David’s sin with Bathsheba and Uriah. He made a passing comment about these events being the darkest chapter in David’s kingly career.

My mind immediately went to II Samuel 24 where David’s rash census-taking cost 70,000 people their lives. The passage is all the more problematic because in verse 1, we read, “Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.’” A parallel passage, I Chronicles 21:1, on the other hand, says, “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel.”

Leaving aside the contradiction and assuming the harmonic interpretation, the entire story is faint-inducing and terrifying.

Today in class, I taught my students about lumping and splitting. Both are means of categorizing the world, of sorting the innumerable bits of data we confront into tidier categories. Lumping, however, only uses existing categories. There’s a reason for this kind of categorization, and life without lumping is, frankly, impossible. But it’s also a refuge from the storm of thought and too often leads us to compromise our characters and discipline in the name of “facts.”

In my effort to find a passage from the Bible each day that’s simple to apply, I tend to lump my verses into two categories: personally edifying or not. If it’s not, I don’t highlight or meditate on it. I move on.

As a result, I never really engage with the nitty, gritty details of God’s word, which is (according to Hebrews 4:12) capable of its own kind of splitting. It helps create categories that were not there before, exposes nuances to me that I had covered over, and invites me to occasionally faint and be terrified at the image of God that emerges from such nuances.

I want to find spaces where God can allow me to hear the truth, even the truth of Job and the passage in II Samuel. If these passages contain something I need to know about God, then I want to see them and have my lumped view of God split.

Lord, have mercy.

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Imperative Prayers

Daniel 9:19 “Lord, listen! Lord, forgive! Lord, hear and act! For your sake, my God, do not delay, because your city and your people bear your Name.”

There are times when it feels like all my academic training has done is ensure that I am never fully convinced of anything, that no matter what my stance on a topic is that I will have failed to cover all my bases.

I feel like this when I pray. God, if it be your will…God in taking into account x, y, and z, please…God, if this and this are fine, then maybe this thing too if I am…
It’s exhausting.

Or worse, I only let these endless caveats fill my mind when I’m outside my devotional space and never confess them to God. It may be helpful to actually ask God what to do with the complications I’m feeling about how and when to extend mercy to a student, the best way to discipline my daughter or how best to talk to my wife.

What a bracing tonic, then, to encounter this passage from Daniel where the prophet uses the imperative in his prayers and calls for God’s immediate action.

What a progression! First that God would listen, then that God would forgive, then that God would act on our behalf…

This is the confidence of a believer certain of his own incapability and equally certain of God’s power.

Not every moment demands this kind of prayer. I pray that I am ready to pray this kind of prayer when the moment comes.

 

 

 

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Washing Feet

John 13:14 “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.”

What is our culture’s equivalent of washing someone’s feet? What is the educational version of that act of service?

Christ speaks to me as a teacher in this verse. He has just demonstrated his willingness to make himself vulnerable in caring for them, and now he calls on them to do the same.

Today in class, we read a sample essay that responded to the prompt my students are currently working on. It was one of those drafts that appeared solid on the surface, and for a rough draft, it really was promising. It featured motivated research, a clear thesis, decent organization, and some really compelling information about dormitory visitation policies.

The more closely we looked at it though, the more flaws appeared. The research didn’t really bear on the project, and so many citations were missing that the author’s authority was shot by the end of the second paragraph. The essay is supposed to be a report, but it turned into an argument at its end, and by the time I was done discussing it, it seemed like the paper was awful.

So what do we do with that?

Well, in class, I left them to start their own research, and it seemed to me the sample essay now felt like a cautionary tale.

But was it?

Well, I would thank God if my students came up with that draft by the end of next week. They would have two weeks to work on the revision, and they might up come up with something really special.

And as I sit here writing this, I know that what I need to do for this particular sample is write the revision. I need to do the work and offer it to my students on Monday as an example of what they can do. Our discussion will come out of those improvements.

I can’t write a revision for everyone, just as Christ could not wash the feet of everyone in Jerusalem.

But I can wash the feet of this particular essay, and from that attitude of service I can call my students to begin the process of washing one another’s feet and helping each other become better readers and writers.

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Teaching Children

III John 4 “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.”

When Catherine was first born, people asked me if I felt any different now that I was a father. I could honestly say no and that this was because I had always felt like a dad; I just didn’t realize it.

This feeling came primarily from teaching.

My students were never kids, and I made sure never to call them that. They were of age, capable of enlisting in the military or voting, when they came into my classroom. But I still cared for them like I would my children, a collection of sons and daughters even if they were (as was sometimes the case) older than me.

I’m now at the time of the month in my prayer calendar where I send a prayer to former students once a day. Over the past few weeks, I’ve contacted Zack Cook, Logan Crowder, Shayla Hoff, Hugh Pressley, Erica McCrea, Sarrah Strickland, and Chris Reyes to name a few…

Some are caught in purgatory, still looking for that post-college landing spot. Some are teachers or professionals and have made the transition successfully. Some of them are living out their faith in ways that I long to emulate. Some are struggling with their relationship to God.

No matter, I count it one of the privileges of my life that I get to reach out to them once a month, let them know I’m praying for them, and share God’s love with them.

And when I hear that they are walking in the truth? Incredible joy…

 

 

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Human Praise

John 12:43 “…for they loved human praise more than praise from God.”

I’m selective enough in my desire for human praise that I can tell myself I really don’t want it. But I do.

The fact that I don’t want huge swaths of the public to adore me doesn’t change the fact that I want very specific kinds of human approbation.

I want my wife to think I’m the best husband.

I want my daughter to think I’m the best dad.

Even worse, I want other people—often strangers—to think I’m a good dad when I’m out somewhere with Catherine.

And yes, I want my students to think I’m a good teacher and my scholarly peers to think I’m intelligent.

I’ve had two experiences, one professional and one personal, that has alerted me to my weakness in this area, the kind of susceptibility to temptation that sends me to my knees when I read a verse like this one in John.

The first came during my first professional gig at Charleston Southern. A couple of years into the job, I looked up to realize that I was writing my papers differently. I was looking for truth, not looking to be interesting. It was a distinction I had long ago blurred as I sought to make a compelling and theoretically sophisticated argument in my dissertation. I realized, in hindsight, that I had sought to please my dissertation director more than God. This wasn’t as a result of some Faustian bargain on the type of my director. He let me determine the subject and argument. No, the irony was that I had tempted myself. I had made his praise—and by extension the praise of every other smart person who could potentially hire me—more important that the wisdom of God, often to the detriment of my own argument.

The second came about six months ago as I realized that in parenting, I was unnecessarily worried about what strangers thought of my parenting skills. I realized that if Catherine were screaming her head off in a store, I would worry more about quieting her for appearance-sake than for taking care of her problem. I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, and it caused me to compromise clear parenting dos and don’ts in an order to covet approval from people I didn’t even know.

Our hope, of course, rests in the fact that God doesn’t actually see us at all when he looks at us. Instead, he sees Jesus, the model of sacrificial love in all his perfection. If I’m excessively worried about receiving praise from people, I won’t be willing to properly love or sacrifice myself for them. One of Christ’s profound lessons is that he loved you and me while we still sinning: that is, before we were able to praise him for what he was going to do.

I pray for the patience to wait for God’s praise, for the humility to set aside excessive energy devoted to coveting or disavowing human approval, and the wisdom to love my wife, daughter, students, and peers in such a way that they would praise not me, but God.

 

 

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Keep Listening

As occasionally happens, the students in my Intro to Lit course didn’t do their reading for yesterday’s class.

I was initially flummoxed. Half the class still didn’t have the book. The half who had it didn’t read.

I know I had an electronic copy of the book that I had planned to make available. Had I forgotten?

No, it was up on our learning management system, posted last week.

I know it listed it on the syllabus and that the syllabus is the first thing a student sees when they go to our course Canvas page. The students said they found the syllabus listning confusing (“Who wrote that story again?”), but I knew nobody had emailed me for clarification.

I knew I had posted practice quiz questions on Monday night too.With each additional “I know I did this” I knew I was sounding more and more like I was maintaining plausible deniability instead of offering an honest to goodness teaching moment. Continue reading “Keep Listening”

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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”