Tag: Teaching

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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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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.

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Asking Questions

Last week, I had lunch with a colleague. As we parted, he said, “I enjoyed this, but next I have to ask you questions. It felt like you were interviewing me.”

This morning, I arrived to class 15 minutes early, and I had a ten minute conversation with a student about her two brothers, her dad’s motorcycle fascination, her summer job as a lifeguard, and her athletic injury. In the other five minutes, I discovered a a student had been playing Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” on repeat.

At lunch, I asked questions of two other friends between bites of food, discovering that one had taught Spanish in public high schools for 16 years and another had been a youth minister at a church plant in New Zealand.

During office hours, I recorded an interview with a senior English major about her honors project.

This, apparently, is one of my daily practices.

After lunch today, my friend asked me why I ask so many questions. I replied that so often, people never ask someone else how they’re doing because they just want to talk about themselves. I decided I would be the outlier and try to address that imbalance. I like hearing about how others are doing.

During the interview today, I was particularly engaged. I wanted to know what my student would say, and while I had questions to get to, I was never preoccupied with the next question while the student was providing a current answer. It was a real conversation. I left having learned something and, hopefully, I gave the student a chance to articulate some things that would otherwise have gone unsaid.

The only problem is that question asking can be a way of hiding. I can ask questions for selfish reasons: because I don’t feel like talking or feel like I don’t have anything smart to say or because I want to be seen as a good question asker.

The way I know my question asking is doing some good is if I’m not thinking about the person I’m having a conversation with more than myself. I pray have more opportunities like today to exercise this habit: informal conversations with students, longer conversations with colleagues from different disciplines, and celebratory interviews with budding scholars. I also pray that I help my interlocutors feel heard, and that when it’s time for me to open my mouth, I add something to the conversation.

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Writing to Remember

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

From Billy Collins’s “Forgetfulness”

At the beginning of the semester, my ENGL comp students had to memorize a poem. While some struggled, all of them tried, and many of them recited their selected poems perfectly, everything from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 to Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.”

Yesterday, we read the above lines from Billy Collins’s poem out loud, and I asked them to take 30 seconds and write down one line from the poem they had memorized in January. Only half of them could do it.

We did this exercise as a way to explain why I had given them a reflective essay for their final exam. For this exam, students have to reread something from one day of class earlier in the semester. Depending on the day, they could reread a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri, an act from Macbeth, or some chapters from Mother Night. Their task is to then reflect on how the second time through compared with the first: whether or not what they got out of the reading changed (or didn’t) and how they altered their reading methods and to what effect.

I told them that given the fact that their memory could be spotty (as demonstrated by the fact that some of them had already forgotten a poem they had tried to memorize just ten weeks earlier), they should plan on writing about something they had already written a paper on. If they wrote their first paper on Lahiri’s story “The Third and Final Continent” they should think about rereading it. Why? They already have the paper as a testament to what they had gotten out of it the first time. It makes it a whole lot easier to tell how the second time through it had changed (or not changed) things.

The students are telling the story of their semester in this assignment, and it’s powerful to see them exercise their memories through their writing even as they use writing to jog their memories.

Yes, I hope they’ll see how they’ve grown as a reader and writer over the semester, but the other takeaway I hope they’ll get is that writing is a powerful way to remember. To use Billy Collins’s simile, writing is the phone service that allows you to get ahold of your memories when they’re in a Brazilian fishing village.

I’ve got a file in Dropbox with my daily prayers from every day since the end of 2016. It’s an amazing time machine, better even than a diary, because it reminds me of conversations with God: a whole heap of gratitudes, requests that have been answered for others as well as myself, and the scriptures that helped me hear God’s voice in response to my petitions. I never wrote the prayers down to have something to remind myself of that particular day’s events. I always did it to focus myself in the moment. But now that the past two years have gone by in a blur with significant changes in my personal and professional life, it’s amazing to have that repository available. I hope my students start building one like that too.

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Asking the Question

How can I help?

What can I pray for?

These are just two questions I’ve asked my students repeatedly over the past two weeks, and I’ve been bowled over by the answers I’ve received.

Yes, they want help with writing. Great. That’s what I’m here for.

But they also have real prayer concerns that come from places of pain and guilt and shame.

The two are not unrelated. I am asking them questions because I’m teaching them how to read and write more effectively. My ethos as a Christian comes from my ability to show Christ to them through our shared coursework.

My students’ concerns are bigger than the course, however, and when I ask a spirit-led question and have the God-given patience to listen, I am right where God wants me to be.

I can’t address every need I here, even if it is more about writing than it is someone’s life. I know who can though. I know that He hears my questions too.

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Emotional Solidarity

Today, I spoke with a student who had just run four miles…as a warm-up. He’s a long-distance runner on the track team, and he had miles to go before he slept.

I like to run, but if I had just run four miles, that would be my workout for the day. His warm-up is my workout.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember what it’s feels like to do the work I ask students to do with the same kind of anxiety they feel about it. That’s because my warm-up is their workout.

I can write the 1000-1500 word papers I ask them to write without breaking a sweat. If they get a good 750 word paper, they feel gassed.

Today, I felt their pain.

I’m writing a book review, and it’s hard. I don’t want to do it because it feels like I might fail at it, like I can’t offer any sort of criticism, just a summary. So today has been a day where I’ve seen all my old strategies for procrastination creep in. It turns out, I’m really good at working hard at not working.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell my students this story. I’ll see if it resonates with them. They’ll want an answer about what I do. I’ll answer that:

  1. I pray and ask God for help. I admit I can’t do it on my own and ask for grace.
  2. I read book reviews of similar books and book reviews that I myself have written. I know I can do this. I’ve done it in the past.
  3. I listen to motivational speakers who can be the voice inside my head when I’m tired and am engaged in negative self-talk.
  4. I sit in a chair with the book and read and write for a specified set of time.

It used to be so much worse. God has given me ways of answering this anxiety. I can name it and respond accordingly.

Here’s the biggest difference. I’m not looking for the difficulty to go away. I’m figuring out what to do with it. I pray my students do too.

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Temples and Hearts

And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know’st…

Paradise Lost, Book I, 17-1

Because I begin my Brit Lit I survey with Beowulf and end it with Paradise Lost, I like to have students think about two different kinds of epic: grand stories of external and internal action. While Beowulf features climactic battles with hellbeasts and dragons, Paradise Lost offers us two human beings deciding whether or not to eat a piece of fruit.

Continue reading “Temples and Hearts”
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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.

Continue reading “Hopeful Education and Easter Sunday Christians”