Tag: Reading

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Repulsions: How To Think Chapter 3

If our beliefs are often shaped by who we want to be in community with, our communities are often strengthened by who they refuse to have community with, those people who are no are longer neighbors but “others.”

Jacobs’s examples and analysis in this chapter are only more poignant now as we enter a new presidential election cycle. He begins by talking about how people negatively reacted to a blogger who expressed his happiness that Osama Bin Laden was dead and how those same people then gleefully celebrated the death of Margaret Thatcher. He ends by quoting the vulgar exchanges Sir Thomas More and Martin Luther had during the Reformation. Scorched earth.

Jacobs offers two pieces of advice to help temper our repulsions.

  1. Find people who you trust who do not hold your same views. This act of intellectual humility will force you to consider that you don’t have everything figured out and that someone who doesn’t share your view on X issue is still your neighbor.
  2. Emotions are not the problem. Making rationality and emotions mutually exclusive is much more dangerous.

In an effort to help students acclimate to this advice, I will have them pick a third-tier belief of theirs (e.g NASCAR is the best sport in the world; that Chick-Fil-A has the best chicken sandwiches on the fast food market; that Star Trek is better than Star Wars), something that they feel passionately about but where the stakes are not too high. Then, I will ask them to find someone who articulates the opposite view (e.g. that NASCAR blows, that Zaxby wipes the floor with Chick-Fil-A, or that Star Wars eats Star Trek’s lunch every day of the week). We’ll do our same summary/analysis exercise with the articles/write-ups they find and pray that with some engagement, our opponent remains, despite being an adversary, our neighbor.

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Means and Ends: How To Think Chapter 2

In the second chapter of How To Think, Jacobs further develops his insight that thinking is social. Because we want to belong, we must be aware of the extent to which that desire for membership influences our beliefs. We can often sacrifice our willingness to scrutinize our beliefs because doing so may cause us to lose membership in a group that has come to define our identity.

When evaluating our memberships, we should start by looking at the ends our group prefers, so that even if we disagree about means, we can find enough solidarity to help sustain us in those disagreements. Prudence allows us to evaluate when it is time to hold our most cherished beliefs up to the light and when it is time to hold firm to our commitments. As Jacobs points out, the people most likely to resist coercion by true evil are those who are part of a group with deeply held beliefs.

Assigning my freshmen students the book How to Think appears to make my ends for the course quite clear. I am subtly arguing that research and writing are means by which one can think better, and I would prefer if students left the course better able to think, which as I’ve discussed in the two previous posts is not so much about specific beliefs as it is the process by which we reach those beliefs.

Here’s the problem. If someone asked me what my goal for every class was, I would say that in an overarching sense, I’m trying to glorify God and enjoy Him forever and that my particular courses were attempts to foster a desire for those same things in my students (which I could call “discipleship” as shorthand). Here, my means would be the same (reading and writing) my goal for the course would be a kind of thinking, a Christ-honoring form of thinking which would necessarily lead to certain ends and not others.

I build my class around one kind of assignment: summary and analysis. Students get handed an opinion editorial and are asked first to summarize the argument then evaluate whether or not the author has made the argument effectively. This assignment is a means to get them to be able first to clearly state what someone else is arguing and before thinking critically about the way that argument was presented. In the abstract, I would say that it’s possible to have an argument you agree with while still maintaining that the argument is made poorly while it is possible to have an argument that you disagree with while admitting that it’s one made well. But what end does that kind of observation serve?

Beliefs are not enough. The means by which we reach those beliefs and the way we live out those beliefs matter. These are fundamentally spiritual insights. I have to think more rigorously about how to foster discipleship through the process of thinking.

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How to Think: Introduction

I’m rereading Alan Jacobs’s fabulous How to Think this summer because I’m teaching it again in the fall. Below are my takeaways from the book’s introduction. After the break, you’ll find some prompts to help you personalize the takeaways.

  • Thinking is hard. There are tons of ways to get it wrong. That’s why we don’t work at it (much less do it) even though we know it’s important.
  • Thinking is the process that goes into making the decision, not the decision itself. It’s the work we did to come up with the answer, not the answer itself.
  • Thinking is social. We never do it alone, and when we fail to think, we often do it because it’s socially discouraged.
  • Thinking is emotional. Thinking is rational too. It’s just that it’s easy to make thinking one rather than both of these things.
  • Thinking is oblique. That’s why the best way to approach thinking is not by contemplating thinking in itself but by approaching it indirectly.
  • Thinking is ultimately moral because it’s primarily a matter of our wills.
Continue reading “How to Think: Introduction”
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Reading Notebook

I’m trying to figure out a way to encourage my students to read and take notes in a way that’s productive. After watching some videos by a high school teacher named Tim McGee, I’m thinking about something like the reading notebook he encourages his students to keep.

McGee’s system asks you to divide each page into two halves: the left hand side for before class and the right hand side for during and after class.

On the left side, you track: 1) what happened in what you read (i.e. a summary), 2a) what it means and 2b) how the author says it, and 3a) what other literary works the text under discussion reminds you of and 3b) what personal events the text reminds you of.

I’m leading a reading group discussion of Jane Eyre this summer, so I’ll be keeping the journal as I read it to use as a model. I listened to this episode of In Our Time today to simulate the classroom lecture I was taking notes on. I was really encouraged by how the process worked, and I’m excited about honing it for use in the fall. Who knows? I might even start using it for my Bible reading.

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Providential Reading

As I prepare to teach a new course in the fall—The English Novel—I’ve been preparing the best way I know how: by watching lectures on youtube. Yesterday, I found this lecture given by Dr. Melanie Holm, an IUPUI professor, who posted some lectures from her graduate course on the origins of the English novel. The lecture I watched covered the introduction to Michael McKeon’s influential book titled…wait for it…The Origins of the English Novel.

Holm knows her stuff. She elicits the questions that the introduction provoked in her students then proceeds to work through McKeon’s argument. Her focus is less on McKeon’s thesis—that the rise of the English novel coincides with the rise of the English middle class—than how a critical theorist like McKeon makes his argument. In short, you can learn as much by following the way someone makes an argument as you can by simply reading someone’s thesis.

McKeon’s chief insight is to analogize Marx’s analysis of political economy—the dialectical method—to the historical formation of genre. McKeon manages to synthesize the structuralist critics like Frye with more dialogic critics like Bakhtin to put a properly historical spin on the novel’s origins. McKeon’s prose is knotty, and Holm does a good job of unpacking these dense ideas in ways that were easier to grasp.

But my main takeaway from the lecture was not something about the novel’s origins. It was Holm’s words of encouragement to her students about how to read. To put it bluntly, she talked to her graduate students like they were disciples. Holm urged her students to keep reading even when they got confused because it would all make sense in the end. They simply had to have faith, and they would see that McKeon’s way of getting to his main point—the journey—would be just as meaningful as the main point itself—his destination.

Holm advocated for a kind of providential reading, even though she seemed to buy McKeon’s secularizing thesis about how people rejected scriptural truth authority did not appear to be a Christ follower. Still, Holm’s language indicates that how we read, our posture towards reading, can be a way to work our discipleship. We can believe and hope with faith because our relationship to language and meaning has Christ at its center.

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Compelling

When’s the last time you picked up a book and finished it the same day?

It had been awhile for me, but Saturday I started and stayed up late to complete Ron Rash’s Saints at the River.

Even better? I plan on teaching the book, so I’m thrilled that it’s such a page-turner.

The hook for me was its setting: Tamassee, SC, which is only a 45-minute drive from campus.

In the same way that I want books to occasionally confuse me so I can remember what it’s like when you don’t know what to do with a book, it’s great to have a book suck me in so that I don’t really care about the paper you would write because the story is so compelling. Too often, my head outweighs my heart. This novel won over my heart, and my head followed.

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Sentence By Sentence

I’m helping a student revise a paper for another course. Yesterday, we hashed out the paper’s main argument. Today, it was time to start revising.

I separated each of the paper’s paragraphs into a separate page, made the individual sentences in those paragraphs into bulleted lists, and worked through as many paragraphs as we could get through in two hours.

I had five takeaways.

  1. I was really impressed with the student’s willingness to engage in that intense kind of revision work for two hours.
  2. I need to do this kind of work (on a smaller scale) with as many of my students as possible. I may institute this as mandatory work for anyone who scores below a certain number on the first essay. It would get them in my office and give me a chance to show them what intense revision looks like.
  3. The revision happened as part of an actual conversation between the reader and writer. I asked for clarification, and the student asked me questions too. This is ideal.
  4. It can’t all be like this. The student came in with 3000+ words and something to say as well as the motivation to get the best possible score on the assignment.
  5. I think it is a way of helping the students learn because it shows that good writing is often collaborative.

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Close Reading the Beatles

As I wade through a pile of papers during finals week, I’m constantly in search of good body paragraphs built around close, insightful readings of the novel or play or poem under consideration.

When the pickings are slim, I gain sustenance from what I imagine is a typical source of comfort for literature professors, this paragraph from Rob Sheffield’s wonderful book Dreaming the Beatles where he details what Paul McCartney gets wrong in the song, “My Love.”

“My Love” is a fascinating disaster, if you happen to love Paul, because it’s a string of very un-Paul-like mistakes. He forgets all the Paul tricks he knows better than anyone else ever has. In fact, he goes so wrong here breaking his own rules, it’s an index of everything he usually gets right. His lifelong attention to pronouns fails him—this is a love ballad where the word “you” does not appear, nor do “she” or “her,” not even “we.” It’s all “I,” “me,” “my.” You can’t call this a rookie mistake since rookies know better, mostly because rookies are imitating Paul. So he wrote a love song and left out the woman; he also invited an orchestra, without giving them anything to play. He adds a colossally terrible guitar solo, when the track’s already way too long (four minutes, practically a minute per word). Not his own guitar solo: he lets a sideman barge in to make this butt-ugly (and no doubt sincerely self-expressive) noise. A ghastly sax solo would have made a certain sense, but this is a bluesy guitar solo, with no place in a lounge ballad like this.”

It begins with a nice debatable claim (i.e. “This song is a clunker, albeit one that clunks for intriguing reasons”), and follows it up with a brilliant analysis of the song’s pronouns. Of all the evidence Sheffield could give, I think his observation that “you” or “she” never appears in the song is so smart. He then develops this observation in a witty sentence: “he wrote a love song and left out the woman.” Sheffield never leaves a song half-analyzed, and in the remaining half of the song, he articulates what’s wrong with the song’s orchestration and guitar solo. It’s a new kind of evidence, and it receives its own development.

If Sheffield can muster up this kind of insight about a song just to show how poor it is, how much more should we be able to articulate the beauty of God’s truth both in our explication of scripture and in the books we’ve read that demand further unpacking.

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All Truth

On the final day of class last week, I had students read Arthur Holmes’s classic statement on Christian education: “All truth is God’s truth.”

It forced me to try and articulate for my students the truth I felt we had discovered together in our literature and writing courses. I realized that if I began and ended the course with Holmes’s statement, I probably would have had a good litmus test for what to emphasize and omit over the course of the semester. I tend to be so fixated on tactics that I forget to reiterate the deeper reason for the tactics. In other words, I err on the side of teaching students efficiency rather than effectiveness.

If the goal is to discover and learn the truth about the world, we’ll have a different orientation to reading and writing.

The basic premises of a Christian orientation to literature and writing are that:

  1. When we reading and interpret books, we exercise an aspect of God’s image in our lives and find a concrete place to see the gap between ourselves and our maker (i.e. our interpretations are limited and prone to error).
  2. Thus, reading provides us a place to discover truth (facts) and meaning (interpretation) about God’s world. Literature allows us to access those facts and interpretations in a different, and potentially more powerful, way then descriptive prose.
  3. When we write, we engage in a special form of communication that God used to reveal Himself to humanity.
  4. Thus, writing provides a means to more truthfully and faithfully think God’s thoughts after Him.

If I kept coming back to these points and used literature to illustrate them, I would give students a more affective relationship to the idea that all truth is God’s truth. It’s not enough to know or repeat this. This idea should be formative. As I consider that statement’s effect on my life, I will be more able to convey its important to my students so that their own wisdom begins with a proper relationship to God and truth.

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100%

Our university’s ENGL 101 course focuses on writing about literature. After writing about assigned poems, short stories, plays, and a novel, students get to pick the novel they’ll write their final paper about.

In order to let each student share what they learned, I let them present their project to their peers and me on the final day of class. I did make a subtle change this semester. Rather than having the presentation include complex analysis, I insisted it only feature three things: the novel’s title, the project’s thesis, and whether or not the presenter would recommend the novel and why. The recommendation section was my new wrinkle. I wanted to see if students would ride hard for the books they wrote or insist that their classmates stay away.

One of my ENGL 101 sections reveling in their post-presentation freedom…

Do you know how many of my students recommended the novel they read? Every. Single. One. 100%.

From adult classics (Pride and Prejudice) to YA staples (The Fault in our Stars), from romances (Even Now) to dystopian morality tales (1984), from the allegorical (The Shack) to the horrifying (It), the students told their classmates to read whatever book they had. In some cases, students were already reading the book over again. This was their fourth or fifth time through the book.

This wasn’t my doing. I didn’t tell them they had to like the book the picked. I fully expected the ones who picked high school English staples like The Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird to find the books boring or ineffective. On the contrary, they found the books more compelling and more insightful.

We’ll see if this necessarily translates into stronger papers, but for today, it didn’t matter. The biggest delight was seeing and hearing their delight.