…canvassed from current students…
Sixty Seconds of Trust
I’ve been cribbing exercises from The Pocket Instructor: Literature for awhile now, but spurred by a friend’s idea I introduced a new exercise from the book’s bag of 101 tricks today: the Sixty Second game.
Like Little Children
A colleague gave a devotional at our faculty meeting two weeks ago that compared some of our students to lost sheep. In Christ’s parable, the shepherd leaves the other 99 sheep safely penned in order to retrieve the lost sheep, and there is consequently great rejoicing when that lamb has been found. My colleague encouraged us to seek out our students that were hurting and in need of our help.
His message resonated with verses from Matthew that I’ve been reading, verses that speak to Christ’s prizing of children. The shepherd/lamb dynamic in the classroom is occasionally apt, but it can also encourage us to patronize our students. Truly, it is more Christ they need than us. Christ prizes children for a reason different than lambs, however. When a child desires to connect with someone, they cannot participate in the the transactional economy of the adult world. They have nothing to offer. They are in need and thus picture the bare-faced neediness we must assume if we wish to enter the kingdom of God. Here, it is a good thing to be a child, to put away the sense that we can do something to repay God for his kindness or that this blessings are strictly quid pro quo.
When we see education through the lens of discipleship, we will be less likely to reduce our students to numbers, pragmatically deal with every problem by addressing grades, or even play a kind of cultural capital game where our students should like our classes because what we offer them is more valuable than money.
A student tells you they will miss class because of a funeral. You ask how they are doing but then quickly retreat to business-mode. “I’ll send you the quiz.” As if that’s what they wanted. Maybe they did want that. If a student comes with a real concern, however, the practice of addressing only assessment-related matters will quickly fail.
I need help. My students need help. That’s why we need education. That’s why we need discipleship. Let both come to God like little children.
When I think about how to organize my classes, I start with this premise: 5 segments per class with a (potentially) changeable order.
Those sections are:
- Review
- Textual Engagement
- Lecture about a key idea
- Writing/Small Group Discussion
- Application
Now I can see swapping #1 and #2 or having #4 follow #2 and having #5 come out of the lecture.The point is that as I develop my plan for the day, I have something substantive in each of these categories.
Day #1, for instance.
- Textual engagement with the syllabus, including a quiz to help students get into it.
- Review: the key points of the syllabus’s promises and requirements
- The Key Idea: the artist/author as a creator in the image of God; literature as part of the redemption of the world
- Writing/Small Group Discussion: a goal for the class
- Application: talking as an entire class about how to tie their individual goals to what the course specifically asks of them
It’s not a perfect structure, but it gives me a good start to evaluate whether I’m ready with a given lesson or not.
A Question about Reading
This week, I finished Alan Jacobs’s provocative A Theology of Reading.
This is a book I’ve needed to read. Last week, I wrote a statement about faith integration for a promotion application, and the book’s refrains of love and generosity were ringing in my ears. Jacobs explores the way our readings can change over time, exemplified by a detailed examination of WH Auden’s relationship to Soren Kierkegaard (probably my favorite part of the book). And most of all the book gave me some follow-up reading; the book convinced me to return to John Milbank and (especially) Mikhail Bakhtin.
The book also left me with a question. At the book’s close, Jacobs examines Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and its satirical take on the “institutionalization of charity,” a dangerous pitfall if one substitutes a bureaucratized love for one a personally vulnerable one. Jacobs turns his eye to the academy at the book’s conclusion, but I was left wondering about another extension of Jacobs’s insight.
As an English professor, I feel conflicted about the fact that I am part of the institutionalization of literature and of a certain kind of reading.
My question then: is this kind of “institutionalization” a potential problem?
Does it contribute to the analogous problems as charity’s institutionalization?
If so, what are some ways we can combat those potential problems?
I’ve written about using Shawn Coyne’s story structure as a way of thinking about the structure of things I’m teaching. Now I’ve been experimenting with using that structure as a way to organize analysis papers.
In these two samples, I let students see how they could organize a paper on King Lear and John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and respectively. Several students told me after class they dug the process and will try to implement it themselves on their upcoming research papers.
The Story Grid and King Lear
I’ve been working through Shawn Coyne’s book The Story Grid and its accompanying podcast the past couple of weeks, and it’s been creeping into my teaching.
Coyne edited novels for Random House and Doubleday for 25 years and wants to teach fiction writers how to become their own effective editors. At the heart of Coyne’s work are the five building blocks of every scene:
The five elements that build story are the inciting incident (either causal or coincidental), progressive complications expressed through active or revelatory turning points, a crisis question that requires a choice between at least two negative alternatives or at least two irreconcilable goods, the climax choice and the resolution.
I’ve started internalizing this heuristic by applying to things I’ve been teaching. When we add to this five-part structure Coyne’s idea that every longer work should have a beginning hook, middle build, and final payoff, we get this schematic for Shakespeare’s King Lear.
A couple of comments:
- The play is divides more evenly into three acts then five: banishment, reconciliation, final separation.
- The play’s heartbreaking conclusion (which Shakespeare famously altered from the play’s sources) is so crushing because of the reconciliation that ends the Middle Build.
- The Gloucester subplot works more as a two-act structure: Edmund’s deceit through Gloucester’s punishment through Edgar’s performance for his father through his final battle with Edmund.
RateMyProfessors and Providence
Curses. Blessings.
Thursday night gave me both.
Here’s the odd thing: I received a blessing BECAUSE of a curse.
It was late Thursday, and I have no idea why, but I decided to check out my RateMyProfessors page.
Oh, no.
Political Standards
This was the kind of freshman English student I was…
In my Honors Composition class, we were asked to write a rhetorical analysis of Mark Twain’s essay, “The Lowest Animal,” which facetiously argued that humans were the lowest creature on earth. Being the wag I was, I wrote an equally facetious rhetorical analysis that claimed I had figured out how to assess creature-dom and that humans had just beaten out manatees for the crown of Greatest Creature on Earth. My categories? Food, Mood, and Peace Corps. Of course, humans were the only creature to come up with the Peace Corps, so that was their trump card. (BTW – I somehow managed to make an A- on that paper which still boggles my mind).
The takeaway? The standard matters. Continue reading “Political Standards”
Meditation
For my devotions on Monday, I read Psalm 1, and verse 2 hit me like a semi-truck: “[Blessed is the man] whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night.”
First, it would be an exaggeration to say I delight in God’s law. I delight in chocolate and NBA playoff basketball and a good book and playing music with my brother and going on walks with wife and daughter. I read my Bible every day, but do I delight in God’s law? Not so much.
Second, if you asked me at any given moment what I was thinking about, the answer would be food 80% of the time. So I’m falling short on the whole day/night meditating on God’s law thing too.
Suitably convicted, I decided to do two things: pray every day that I would begin to delight in God’s word, and try to keep one verse from my devotional reading in my mind each day as something to come back to.
This week, God, in His infinite wisdom, decided to show me first-hand what constant meditation looks like, and how I am (for now) doing it wrong. Continue reading “Meditation”