Tag: Discipleship

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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.

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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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Never Enough

Yesterday as part of the couples panel Britt and I were part, we were asked to give advice.

I said something about your being a good dad or brother not being a substitute for being a good spouse.

Here’s what I should have said.

I’m not enough. I can’t give my wife what she needs: certainty and significance.

Only God can do that.

I’m lying to her and to myself if I try to fulfill those needs in a substantive and complete way. I’ll always fail. I’m broken, and I can’t fix Britt.

But God is merciful, and insofar as I can help Britt find the certainty and significance she needs in God, our relationship glorifies Him.

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Performing Marriage

This morning, Britt and I were part of a panel of Southern Wesleyan couples who talked about marriage. Britt was great, and I had fun sharing with the community what a joy it is to be married with her.

But at times it was awkward.

The entire panel discussion asked me to perform my relationship. We shared one mic. We took turns talking. We finished each other’s stories. It was a bevy of rhetorical minefields to navigate, and we were doing it in front of a bunch of students.

It was a privilege to talk with the SWU community about my marriage and specifically how my relationship with Britt has brought me closer to God. That comes with responsibility: obedience. This is true even when we’re talking about a low-stakes panel. I want to model what being a good husband looks like for my colleagues and students mostly because I know I’ve been the beneficiary of model marriages as I’ve tried to be the godly husband Britt needs.

I am not enough for my wife. I will never be. Only God can provide her with the eternal certainty and significance she desires. What I’m glad about is that God has given me a chance to help Britt get closer to the one who can provide her with the certainty and significance she needs. What an amazing gift marriage is.

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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.

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Get Personal

[S]tories can bring things to your attention in such a way that you might begin to think differently about something and then go on to act on these new thoughts in a very concrete way. Reading texts enables us to participate in life, not to escape it…

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

I brought this quotation from Gallagher and Lundin into class to urge my students to think through something important to them as they wrote their first papers about Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories. My example of how they might do this, however, was not personal. It came from a place of judgment. Many of them were writing about the sexual infidelity in Lahiri’s story “Sexy,” and I urged them to think about how that story might cause them to examine their own romantic commitments.

While this was not entirely unfounded, it missed the larger point. It was pedantic. It was tone-deaf. Most of all, it didn’t model for them the type of introspection I pray that they would have.

The irony is that I had a personal example sitting right in front of me.

For this first unit, I’ve revised a paper on Lahiri’s story “This Blessed House,” which concerns a newly married couple. As I’ve read and written about the story, I’ve realized it’s really about the part of us that wishes our significant other were just like us. The story’s protagonist Sanjeev cannot see the world from his wife’s point of view. It’s only at the end of the story that he realizes what she brings to his life, that it’s actually a good thing that she’s not a copy of him because he’s able to be strong where she’s weak and she’s able to be strong where he’s weak.

My worst times as a husband have been where I wished that Britt would simply be like me. When I’m loving her well, I’m letting her be who God made her and rejoicing in that. It’s a good thing she’s not like me! I have strengths, and so does she. Writing about Lahiri’s story is a great reminder of that.

This is what Gallagher and Lundin are gesturing towards. Literature does not take us out of life. It puts us in contact with life if we’re willing to be vulnerable enough to look in the mirror. I pray that I will keep looking and modeling for my students what that looking entails.

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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…

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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.