Tag: Teaching

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Teaching Children

III John 4 “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.”

When Catherine was first born, people asked me if I felt any different now that I was a father. I could honestly say no and that this was because I had always felt like a dad; I just didn’t realize it.

This feeling came primarily from teaching.

My students were never kids, and I made sure never to call them that. They were of age, capable of enlisting in the military or voting, when they came into my classroom. But I still cared for them like I would my children, a collection of sons and daughters even if they were (as was sometimes the case) older than me.

I’m now at the time of the month in my prayer calendar where I send a prayer to former students once a day. Over the past few weeks, I’ve contacted Zack Cook, Logan Crowder, Shayla Hoff, Hugh Pressley, Erica McCrea, Sarrah Strickland, and Chris Reyes to name a few…

Some are caught in purgatory, still looking for that post-college landing spot. Some are teachers or professionals and have made the transition successfully. Some of them are living out their faith in ways that I long to emulate. Some are struggling with their relationship to God.

No matter, I count it one of the privileges of my life that I get to reach out to them once a month, let them know I’m praying for them, and share God’s love with them.

And when I hear that they are walking in the truth? Incredible joy…

 

 

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Human Praise

John 12:43 “…for they loved human praise more than praise from God.”

I’m selective enough in my desire for human praise that I can tell myself I really don’t want it. But I do.

The fact that I don’t want huge swaths of the public to adore me doesn’t change the fact that I want very specific kinds of human approbation.

I want my wife to think I’m the best husband.

I want my daughter to think I’m the best dad.

Even worse, I want other people—often strangers—to think I’m a good dad when I’m out somewhere with Catherine.

And yes, I want my students to think I’m a good teacher and my scholarly peers to think I’m intelligent.

I’ve had two experiences, one professional and one personal, that has alerted me to my weakness in this area, the kind of susceptibility to temptation that sends me to my knees when I read a verse like this one in John.

The first came during my first professional gig at Charleston Southern. A couple of years into the job, I looked up to realize that I was writing my papers differently. I was looking for truth, not looking to be interesting. It was a distinction I had long ago blurred as I sought to make a compelling and theoretically sophisticated argument in my dissertation. I realized, in hindsight, that I had sought to please my dissertation director more than God. This wasn’t as a result of some Faustian bargain on the type of my director. He let me determine the subject and argument. No, the irony was that I had tempted myself. I had made his praise—and by extension the praise of every other smart person who could potentially hire me—more important that the wisdom of God, often to the detriment of my own argument.

The second came about six months ago as I realized that in parenting, I was unnecessarily worried about what strangers thought of my parenting skills. I realized that if Catherine were screaming her head off in a store, I would worry more about quieting her for appearance-sake than for taking care of her problem. I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, and it caused me to compromise clear parenting dos and don’ts in an order to covet approval from people I didn’t even know.

Our hope, of course, rests in the fact that God doesn’t actually see us at all when he looks at us. Instead, he sees Jesus, the model of sacrificial love in all his perfection. If I’m excessively worried about receiving praise from people, I won’t be willing to properly love or sacrifice myself for them. One of Christ’s profound lessons is that he loved you and me while we still sinning: that is, before we were able to praise him for what he was going to do.

I pray for the patience to wait for God’s praise, for the humility to set aside excessive energy devoted to coveting or disavowing human approval, and the wisdom to love my wife, daughter, students, and peers in such a way that they would praise not me, but God.

 

 

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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”

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The Best Class

On the first day of my Brit Lit I survey, I typically give my students the following writing prompt:

08.24 Best Class

The answers are remarkable. First, hardly anyone ever chooses something that applies to their major. Second, they always mention the teacher. Third, there’s a pattern of rewriting the script: they take a class they don’t think they will like and end up loving it.

Some of those classes include:

  • A college survey of the Old Testament
  • A high school course on children’s literature
  • An AP Us History course
  • A management/leadership course
  • A high school physics course
  • A senior AP Calculus course
  • A freshman writing-about-literature course

Here’s my takeaway. A Brit Lit course can make a difference in these students’ lives, even if they never take another English class.

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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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Taking Time to Listen

I had 10 minutes.

To make it to my next class that’s a seven minute walk across campus.

To collect this pile of papers on my teacher’s desk because I rely on handouts so much that it takes a flurry of shuffling and paper clips after class to get things into or the kind of order necessary to even fit inside my bag.

To erase the board that’s filled, edge-to-edge, with class comments about the play Hamlet.

To thank my colleague from kinesiology who not only sat in on today’s class but brought with him a medical company skull for our performance of Act 5 Scene 1 (“Alas, poor Yorick!”) and actually read lines as the gravedigger.

And there they were, standing in front of me, two students with real questions about the play. One wanted to know more about Ophelia. Why did we keep calling it a suicide? Wasn’t it an accidental death? One wanted to discuss the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in more detail. She had always read the speech as referring to two responses to internal struggles.

And despite the fact that I had talked on Tuesday about listening and responding…

I was short and curt with my students in my haste to get out the door.

In reality, I wanted to sit and talk with my colleague for as long as I could about what worked and didn’t work in the class. The questions my students asked demanded more from me and asked for answers I couldn’t provide in 30 seconds. So

I had the chance to apologize later, which I’m grateful for. I want students to want to talk with me after class, especially after a class like that one.

Maybe that means coming to my office and discussing the question there. Maybe it means admitting I don’t have answers to the questions they have.

I know that it definitely means I need to listen, to wait, to be patient.

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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.

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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:

  1. Review
  2. Textual Engagement
  3. Lecture about a key idea
  4. Writing/Small Group Discussion
  5. 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.

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What Are the Digital Humanities?

In his article “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” from the Debates in the Digital Humanities volume, Matthew Kirschenbaum turns self-reflexive. He notes that the definitional essay is already a DH sub-genre. You can easily track down the genealogy for the term “Digital Humanities,” and a google search will lead to a satisfactory Wikipedia definition. First and foremost, Digital Humanities is a branch of the humanities with a common methodology, namely the intersection of computing and humanities.

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Continue reading “What Are the Digital Humanities?”

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What is a Digital Humanist?

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be reading through the list of resources found here on the Digital Humanities. For each source, I hope to write a summary and the start building some work around the lessons I’m learning.

The first entry today summarizes Matthew Gold’s introductory essay, “The Digital Humanities Moment” from the book Debates in the Digital Humanities.

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Continue reading “What is a Digital Humanist?”