In his opinion editorial titled “Aspirational parents condemn their children to a desperate, joyless life,” George Monbiot argues that our culture’s quest for success is actually guaranteeing its opposite. Children are told they can improve their lives, but they are looking at a world that is worse than the one their parents grew up in. Childhood is being stripped from young people as they must begin training for success immediately. Everything from internships in college to getting into the right elementary show how success rather than happiness is culture’s ultimate goal. What makes it worse, Monbiot argues, is that the British government doesn’t seem to care about the mental toll this is taking on the country’s youths. Recent survey results show there is cause for concern. Children are hurting themselves and getting eating disorders more frequently. They feel less secure about their future and have less of a desire to go to school. Monbiot concludes that the very ambition that motivates these children to endure these hardships will rob them of the joy that their material success is supposed to bring.
Continue reading “Educational Aspiration: Rhetorical Analysis”Conversation Piece
At this time a year ago, I was finishing up my final year at Charleston Southern University. Because I had accepted my new gig at Southern Wesleyan in March, I had a month to say goodbye to everyone who had made my time at CSU so special. This included not only colleagues but students too. Before I left, I sent the students who had meant something to me an email asking for a conversation piece. It said this:
Before I hoof it up I-26 to the upstate (it’s happening this week!), I wanted to ask you for something to remember you by: a particular poem, song, novel, video game, graphic novel, tv show, movie, food type product—you get the idea—that you think I should check out but that I either don’t know exists or haven’t made time for. Some of you have already given me elaborate playlists, and now particular songs from Hamilton and Fall Out Boy’s Mania are inextricably connected with you forever and ever Amen. This is a good thing! I wouldn’t have listened to either of them without the two of you, tbh, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!
You each will be in my prayers, and I will do my dead-level best to keep up with you. Commiserating over the too-good-to-pass-up deliciousness of Market Pantry Fiddle Faddle will be an excuse to say hey. (Note: I don’t know if Target makes good fiddle faddle. That’s just a made-up example, but you get the kind-of point, right?)
This week, I made my way back through some of the emails and listened to the song below that had been recommended from one of my fave non-English major students. It gave me an excuse to pray for the student, reach out and say hello, and give thanks that I get to do what I do for a living, where an ongoing personal connection can be made over books and writing and education and discipleship. I’m blessed.
Of Houses and Cars
Learning requires us to use powerful metaphors.
With that in mind, check out the following paragraph which I’ve had in my syllabus for the past five years:
This course’s promises don’t mention specific grades. That’s important. The specific grades you receive at midterm and after finals are neither a reflection of your worth as a human being nor the ultimate purpose for the class. Think of your education like a house. Grades are like a house inspection. They simply tell you that the house meets basic building codes. You live in the house. You put the inspection in a drawer and eventually forget about it. As you assess your progress towards realizing the course’s promises, remember what matters.
There’s nothing wrong with the metaphor. It’s apt. When I’ve shared it with a colleague, they always nod their head in agreement.
But my students don’t really feel its truth. Few of them have built a house, much less been involved in a house inspection.
So here’s how that paragraph will read from now on.
This course’s promises don’t mention specific grades. That’s important. The specific grades you receive at midterm and after finals are neither a reflection of your worth as a human being nor the ultimate purpose for the class. Think of your education like your ability to drive a car. Grades are like your driver’s license. They simply tell you that you can legally get behind the wheel of a car. You probably know people that you would never want to drive you anywhere even though they have their license. This is the person who gets all As and Bs and manages to not have learned anything. The grade is a necessary step in learning, but it’s not the same as being educated. As you assess your progress towards realizing the course’s promises, remember what matters.
Teaching and Power
Job 36:22 “God is exalted in his power. Who is a teacher like him?”
This passage makes me uncomfortable, mainly because it connects power and teaching. The two sentences form a causal relationship. Because God is exalted, Elihu appears to say, who is a teacher like him?
The answer is no one. In his absolute power, God confronts us with our powerlessness and offers to teach us contingent on our fear and awe.
It jars against the image we have of Christ in John 13 washing the disciples feet, telling them they are right to call him rabbi and to do as he has done: serve their students.
The Job verse makes me uncomfortable because I don’t want to think through the kind of power that I have at my disposal: be responsible for the factor I play in a student’s educational future or the duty I have to God to make sure that what I’m teaching glorifies him.
The power God has is not an end in itself. He does not teach in order to exert power. He uses that power in order to teach, love, and serve. In the same way, Christ lowers himself not as a way of making himself less the Son of God but as a way to show us that his power is a means to an end: communion with us through service.
I pray that I will use the power God has given me to better serve my students: neither denying or remaining unconscious of that power nor using it as an end. It is by following Christ’s example that I can best merge education and discipleship.
Asking Questions
Job 31: 15 “Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?”
I like to ask questions. The problem is that, more times than I’d like to admit, I ask questions because I don’t want to accept an answer rather than out of a desire to know the answer.
The book of Job is filled with questions and, in fact, culminates with the questions God asks Job.
Job knows the answer to these two questions he asks about his accusers.
Yes.
Most definitely.
God made Job, and God made his accusers.
That is, Job and his accusers are alike at the deepest level.
Job brings up the womb quite pointedly. For the past several chapters, he’s heard his “friends” declare what’s been wrong with Job’s life post-birth. Their categories have been simple: righteous and unrighteous. Since God only punishes the unrighteous, Job’s current predicament indicates his sinfulness.
But these categories are examples of what Alan Jacobs calls “lumping” in his book How to Think. Lumping is an important cognitive exercise where we group data into existing categories, but precisely because those categories are old standbys, they tend to get trotted out as a way to avoid reflection.
Job’s category—a single one that includes both him and his accusers and everyone else—is made up of people God created. This is what Alan Jacobs calls splitting, an example where Job has categorized data by a new set of categories. In this sense, he’s “splitting” even though he trots out one less category than his friends.
This push and pull between familiar and unfamiliar categories is old hat for me, and I’ve been feeling it a lot lately: namely, the need to evaluate more, to lean into difficult questions and underlying tensions with my faith and my relationships even while trying to practice a kind of patience that allows these tensions to exist without me trying to fix them right away.
Keeping that balance on my own is impossible. It requires the Spirit.
What’s particularly difficult about this balance is that this tension is never lived out in a vacuum. It’s not an experiment in some laboratory. I can see my own inner turmoil play itself out in my family life or inside my classroom.
Am I separate or part of the community? Am I trying to reach an agreement and find commonality or is it my job to divide and separate? Am I to apply existing categories to new data or do my best to find new categories to apply to old data?
As a disciple and educator, these are questions I will be asking the rest of my life.
Unlike Job’s questions, I don’t know the answer.
Like Job, I know the one who does.
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.
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”
Sircy Speaks 08.11.2018
https://youtu.be/LkX2IB-JQjY
Sircy Speaks 08.10.2018
https://youtu.be/voxKPJNIkhQ