Tag: Reading

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Reader Types: The Professional and The Status Seeker

As I continue to think about kinds of reading and readers, I turned to C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism today. The book’s entire premise is that it’s easier to talk about differences among kinds of readers instead of kinds of books.

In the book’s second chapter, Lewis makes clear that people who love reading (“the few”) are not morally superior to those who do not love reading (“the many”). He also makes clear that not everyone who seems to be part of “the few” is really in that number. We have the professional and the status seeker to deal with.

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Signs

Matthew 16:3 “You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.”

The Pharisees indicted in the passage above have two interpretive problems: scope and application.

First, their scope is limited. They can interpret things well as far as weather goes, but they get caught up in the clouds and can’t think of anything more than if they will get caught in the rain this afternoon. Ultimately, the weather is less important than their soul.

Second, they fail to apply their interpretations. They think of themselves as pragmatic but in hurrying to apply a small reading they miss the broader application of the interpretive principles they’ve used. If you’ve got a high-powered laser, it seems a shame to use it to engrave your name on a penny.

In this way, their problems of scope and application are connected.

This is convicting. I already spend an inordinate time reading and writing, and it feels like a lot of the time when I’m not reading and writing, I’m thinking about how to get more time to read and write.

So, in this verse I hear Christ tell me:

“You know how to interpret Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, but you cannot interpret the needs of your own wife and child.

“You know how to interpret what the literary analysis paper from your student in a 9am literature class needs, but you cannot interpret the clear command to pray without ceasing.

“You know how to interpret the theme of addiction as worship in post-modern literature, but you cannot interpret your own restless heart.” 

God, have mercy on me a sinner.

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Final Comments – ENGL 2703

For the first time in my teaching career, I’m typing up something like final remarks for my courses. I’ll be sharing them over the next few days. I gave a slightly modified version of the following remarks today in my one upper division course, Non-Fiction and Its Process. 

I’d never taught this kind of course before. In fact, no one had taught this kind of course at SWU before. It had been on the books for multiple years before I showed up and hadn’t been taught once.

If you didn’t know that I’m not an expert in this field, then listening to our guest speaker Jeremy Jones on Tuesday surely clued you in to what a dude who’s an expert sounds like. I think he dropped more quotations and article references in an hour than I have all semester.

You probably didn’t know what you were getting yourselves into when you signed up for the course. I really didn’t either. And here we are.

So here’s some of what I’ve learned: Continue reading “Final Comments – ENGL 2703”

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The Long Game and Reading

In the summer of 2017, I finished reading Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, a book I had started back in March of that same year because a friend was writing about it.

I stalled out about 300 pages in once April hit, but in a rarity for me, I picked it back up at the beginning of July and sped through the last 200 pages.

I had been holding onto the novel for nearly twenty years.

Dr. Thayle Anderson assigned the novel to our American Novels class when I was sophomore, but I blew it off. However, I kept the novel despite having never read it, because my first serious girlfriend was in Dr. Anderson’s class with me and introduced herself to me under the auspices of talking about the novel, which she loved. Side note: I probably should have known the relationship was doomed when I didn’t even read the book.

As I finally began reading it nearly two decades after first receiving it, I thought it well-written, but underwhelming. All it took was an April crush, and I put it down.

But when I returned to it in July, I felt as if my eyes had been opened. I realized that it was about marriage and the tension of individual flourishing in the context of said marriage. The heroine, a 19th Century American woman, is constantly having to move for her husband’s career though she was every bit the artist/professional he was. The novel poignantly explores the shame and guilt that comes with trying to love your spouse when you don’t have any spiritual foundation for things like grace or forgiveness.

To have read this in the summer of 2017, the summer where my wife took a new gig and moved 3.5 hours away with our daughter, absolutely devastated me.

It made me realize that:

1) I was no more ready to read that book at 19 than I was when I was 10. It would have been lost on me.

2) I wasn’t even ready to read the book two months before.

3) Only through the peculiar circumstances I found myself in now with Britt was the book able to speak to me.

This is the kind of experience that I hold onto as a teacher: the possibility that something I assign may not matter for a student in the moment but may come back to them fifteen years later.

My friend and I call it the long game, and I want God-given patience to continue playing it as an educator and disciple.

 

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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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The Power of Teaching

In the preface to his On Christian Doctrine, St. Augustine answers objections to his intention to give rules for interpreting scripture. The objections are.

  1. People can’t understand his rules.
  2. People can understand his rules but can’t understand the scripture they apply them to.
  3. People can interpret scripture without his rules and thus say that no one needs rules.

St. Augustine says that the objectors in Camps 1 and 2 need to pray to God for sight. Their inability to see does not make St. Augustine’s project worthless. The objectors in Camp 3, however, get ST. Augustine’s sternest rebuke, mainly because their objection comes from pride. In answering their objection, St. Augustine makes clear the role that human teaching plays in our relationship to not only scripture, but the world. Here it is… Continue reading “The Power of Teaching”

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Listen and Respond

[S]uit the action to the word, the word to the action… – Hamlet

I once had a whole batch of School Certificate answers on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale by boys whose form-master was apparently a breeder of poultry. Everything that Chaucer had said in describing Chauntecleer and Pertelote was treated by them simply and solely as evidence about the precise breed of these two birds. And, I must admit, the result was very interesting. They proved beyond doubt that Chauntecleer was very different from our modern specialised strains and much closer to the Old English ‘barn-door fowl’. But I couldn’t help feeling that they had missed something. – CS Lewis

Paul admonishes the Roman church to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. There’s an aptness there, a symmetry, a decorum. Hamlet wants his actors to adopt a similar method. Match what you say with what you do. Respond accordingly. Reciprocate. Continue reading “Listen and Respond”