Tag: Teaching

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Hammering Nails With a Violin

This week, I graded my freshmen’s analyses of short stories from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.

Making my way through them, I felt two things: disappointment in the students’ readings and deep respect for Lahiri’s stories to withstand those poor readings and actually become deeper and more well-constructed than I had thought. I kept going back to the stories to see if they had the evidence that I felt was lacking in the students’ papers. Not only was the evidence there, it was always aesthetically handled. The stories were so much richer than the students were giving them credit for.

I thought of Zadie Smith’s line about reading as a way of playing a piece of music. You want your playing to match the beauty of the piece that’s been written. Here, to borrow a David Foster Wallace line, it appeared my students were being handed a piece fit for a Stradivarius and were using their glorious instrument to hammer nails.

True, violins can make nails go deeper into the surface you want them to go into…but it’s not efficient and it permanently damages the violin so that when you want to actually play music with it, you’re lost.

But in the midst of those feelings, I wondered about my own reading of scriptures. I believe that it’s true that God’s word always accomplishes its work, whether it brings us closer to God through the work of the Holy Spirit or confirms in our cold response to it just how much we need God. If I was honest about the way I read and used scripture on a day to day basis, I think I would be hammering away at nails with something far more valuable than a Stradivarius.

I pray for the wisdom to read God’s words well even more than I pray for my students to gain the ability to read a short story well. More than that, I pray for the power to live it out after reading it well.

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Taking Time

I’ve been staying in my 11am MWF classroom for 30 minutes or so after class to do some work, collect my thoughts, and planning the rest of the work day. Today, I got to see what the open space could become: a space for more personal engagement with students who want help.

Two students who were particularly flummoxed during class stayed after for 30 minutes to discuss their first essays and possible revisions. Topics we covered included:
1. Thesis statements

2. Claims

3. Suitable evidence

4. Development of that evidence

5. Using CTRL – F or CMND – F to search a text

6. The way I evaluate organization

7. The way I evaluate a paper’s ethos

These students wanted to learn. I had to be humble enough not to skip any steps with them and reward their extra effort by explaining as simply as I could the things they could do to improve as writers.

God was in that room. We left with a stronger rapport. They knew I cared. I knew they did too. God was merciful.

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Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy

I have learned that teaching doctrine and teaching obedience are two very different things.

From Contagious Disciple Making

I read Paul and David Watson’s amazing book Contagious Disciple Making this week and left with this insight into teaching: I can say all the right things as a teacher, but if I don’t do them myself my students will not listen.

The doctrines in English lit are clarity and concision, a commitment to revision, and a desire to interpret the world in a way consistent with your faith.

This is so much easier to say than do.

God, help me to do all of this: not just in my reading and my reading but in my personal interactions with each of my students.

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Get Personal

[S]tories can bring things to your attention in such a way that you might begin to think differently about something and then go on to act on these new thoughts in a very concrete way. Reading texts enables us to participate in life, not to escape it…

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

I brought this quotation from Gallagher and Lundin into class to urge my students to think through something important to them as they wrote their first papers about Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories. My example of how they might do this, however, was not personal. It came from a place of judgment. Many of them were writing about the sexual infidelity in Lahiri’s story “Sexy,” and I urged them to think about how that story might cause them to examine their own romantic commitments.

While this was not entirely unfounded, it missed the larger point. It was pedantic. It was tone-deaf. Most of all, it didn’t model for them the type of introspection I pray that they would have.

The irony is that I had a personal example sitting right in front of me.

For this first unit, I’ve revised a paper on Lahiri’s story “This Blessed House,” which concerns a newly married couple. As I’ve read and written about the story, I’ve realized it’s really about the part of us that wishes our significant other were just like us. The story’s protagonist Sanjeev cannot see the world from his wife’s point of view. It’s only at the end of the story that he realizes what she brings to his life, that it’s actually a good thing that she’s not a copy of him because he’s able to be strong where she’s weak and she’s able to be strong where he’s weak.

My worst times as a husband have been where I wished that Britt would simply be like me. When I’m loving her well, I’m letting her be who God made her and rejoicing in that. It’s a good thing she’s not like me! I have strengths, and so does she. Writing about Lahiri’s story is a great reminder of that.

This is what Gallagher and Lundin are gesturing towards. Literature does not take us out of life. It puts us in contact with life if we’re willing to be vulnerable enough to look in the mirror. I pray that I will keep looking and modeling for my students what that looking entails.

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Hrothgar and David

In the middle of Beowulf, the Danish king Hrothgar warns the titular hero about pride.

0 flower of warriors, beware of that trap.
Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part,
eternal rewards. Do not give way to pride.
For a brief while your strength is in bloom
but it fades quickly; and soon there will follow
illness or the sword to lay you low,
or a sudden fire or surge of water
or jabbing blade or javelin from the air
or repellent age. Your piercing eye
will dim and darken; and death will arrive,
dear warrior, to sweep you away.

From Beowulf

The next time I teach this poem, I will pair this passage with these verses from Psalm 90…

Continue reading “Hrothgar and David”
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Truth and Conflict

We are called to the difficult task of discerning the truth, but at the same time we are reminded that we are, in a very real sense, only children at play in God’s kingdom. We laugh and dispute and long to know the truth. And though our experience is often one of conflict, including the conflict of interpretations, as Christians we also have a genuine hope…

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Gallagher and Lundin get at a crucial problem my students have with English courses: sometimes it feels like there’s more than one right answer.

Or, to state it more radically, sometimes it feels like there’s no answer because everyone is entitled to their own answer.

Christians believe that just because we can’t have God’s total knowledge of something doesn’t mean our partial knowledge is false. In fact, we don’t need to worry about inevitable gaps in our knowledge or the conflicts that come with our pursuit, if indeed we are searching after Truth.

My students handed in their outlines for their first papers this past weekend, and none of them had exactly the same argument. I told them this was a good thing. Either their papers could complement one another so that they get closer to the truth together then they would separately, or in their very conflict they would clarify key issues that would help us pinpoint the key question or truth in the story under debate.

I’m excited to learn more about the stories these students are writing about, but I’m even more excited about seeing my students actively pursue truth through the writing their doing.

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Doing the Reading

We’re at the point in the semester (week 4) where we’ve finally had the “oh, so nobody read” class.

In a pleasure/pain model of motivation, it’s easy to appeal to pain:

  1. You’ll flunk your quizzes.
  2. You’ll flunk your essay (which is based on a story you’re supposed to have read).
  3. You’ll flunk the class.

But that’s coming from the outside, and I know that part of what they’re implicitly asking is, “Of what practical value is doing the reading?” The absolute worst thing I could do is to try and make a practical case and get locked in a war of pragmatic attrition.

The first week of class, I had them write me a letter that was dated May 10th and began, “Dear Dr. Sircy, I got my ‘A’ because…”

Here were some of the things they wrote…

I made sure to keep up with assignments and the required reading as this course went on in order to receive an A at the end of the semester.  

While this class has given me difficulty in the past, I really worked on dedicating the time and energy to the course that it deserves. I put the appropriate amount of work into writing my papers, reading the texts, and completing assignments.

I got an A in your class because I read all the books and material you assigned us. 

I got my ‘A’ because I put in the work and I cared enough to get the grade I wanted.

I got my ‘A’ because I committed to completing all my assignments and homework on time to the best of my ability. 

I strategically began dividing up the reading and other assignments for the week among each day so I would not have to do it all in one day and feel rushed.

Today, I’ll be reading some of these letters in class. Yes, this will be painful for some of them, but the letters they wrote were premised on pleasure: on what they were willing to do in order to get the grade they wanted. If they’re internally motivated to do better work, that’s worth more than all the pragmatic appeals I could ever hope to make.

I’ll end with I Corinthians 10:31.

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.

We’re not just doing this work for ourselves. We’re doing it for God.

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Spelled Out

This paragraph from Ken Bain’s book on teaching spells out the questions that good teachers ask themselves.

That question breaks into four subquestions, all prominent in
the thinking of the teachers we studied, regardless of their discipline:
(1) Is the material worth learning (and, perhaps, appropriate
to the curriculum)? (2) Are my students learning what the course is
supposedly teaching? (3) Am I helping and encouraging the students
to learn (or do they learn despite me)? (4) Have I harmed my
students (perhaps fostering short-term learning with intimidation
tactics, discouraging rather than stimulating additional interest in
the field, fostering strategic or bulimic rather than deep learning,
neglecting the needs of a diverse student population, or failing to
evaluate students’ learning accurately)?

From What the Best College Teachers Do

I would like to ask these questions each Saturday during a scheduled planning period as I assess my week’s work and then use the questions to help me plan what I’ll be doing the next week.

This week, my Intro to Lit students are learning about poetry and my Brit Lit students are studying the epic.

Just from asking these questions about my lessons tomorrow, I changed my focus on how to address memorizing a poem. I want to make sure that students see the real point of the exercise: their living with a poem for a longer time than they would if they simply wrote a paper about it or read it from a book 10 times. In order to recite it well, they will have had to dwell with the poem for a week or so. Because this having dwelt with the work is the hallmark of any good interpretation, I’ve come up for a way to practice it without writing another paper about “Stopping By Woods…” My prayer is that they will learn something about meditating on God’s word as well, the way that constant thought and reflection on certain words can help them remain with you throughout the day.

I’m excited about continuing to think through these questions and to use them to better contribute to my students’ growth as readers, writers, and disciples.

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Poetry and God

“When St. Philip asked our Lord to ‘show us the Father’ (John 14:8), he was an example of what St. Anselm called ‘faith seeking understanding.’”

From Father George Rutler

Today, we start looking at poetry in my Intro to Lit course. I typically have students survey five or six poems about God and love respectively as they start to get a feel for how to read a poem.

Fresh off of a class about interpretation and paradigms, the poems we look at today concerning God should get some discussion started. Poetry intensifies our interpretations of and emotional reaction to the world. These poems are pitched high emotionally as they seek understanding about some aspect of God.

In “Batter My Heart,” John Donne feels trapped. The fact that he needs God means that he needs God to help him do what’s right. If he good choose God on his own, he wouldn’t need God in the first place. Donne is intensifying language from the Old and New testaments, from the laments of the Psalms and some of Paul’s most despairing cries in Romans.

In “Love (iii)” George Herbert offers an allegory for the gospel. Christ offers the speaker a chance to eat with him. While the speaker finds himself unworthy to either be a guest, the Lord offers grace and love in the form of food and fellowship.

In “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” William Blake reflects on how different creatures reflect their creator. If God is like the lamb, then we see Jesus. If God is like the tiger, then he is terrifying.

In “Battle Hymn of the Republic” Julia Ward Howe gives us a God who actively participates in human affairs and, with war-like proficiency, advances His cause on the earth.

Finally, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” tries to not only represent but give us the experience of witnessing God’s beauty in nature.

I’m excited to see if one of these poems resonates with my students more than others. We’ll spend time on Donne and Blake, but I will call for them to re-examine Herbert and Hopkins in light of our discussion.

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Assessment

To make learning-based assessment work, the best teachers try to
find out as much as possible about their students…

From What the Best College Teachers Do

Early this semester, I’ve done two things to help me gain crucial information about my students. The first is that I’ve offered extra credit for filling out an information sheet. The sheet contained the following questions:

  • What are three things you believe are true?
  • If you were given an unplanned Saturday to do with as you please, how would you spend your time?
  • What is the high school or college course you’ve benefited the most from? Explain.
  • Who are three people in your life whose advice you listen to? What advice have they given you that you cherish?
  • What are the two most important ways you’ve grown as a person in the last year?
  • What’s your favorite story? Why?
  • How are you currently contributing to the lives of your family members, friends, or neighbors?
  • What do you hope to learn in this class?

In the future, this will simply be a quiz grade, rather than extra credit. These are the kinds of questions that I want from every student, not just the overachievers.

The next thing I’ve done is give every student I’m teaching this first-week writing assignment:

Write yourself a letter dated May 10, 2019 and address it to me. Begin “Dear Dr. Sircy, I got my ‘A’ because…’” then tell me what you will have done to earn your ‘A.’

I’ve only read a few of them, but it may be one of my favorite reading experiences ever. Students are telling me (with more or less detail) what they think they’ll need to do to succeed. With only two classes under our belts, they don’t really have a sense of me as a grader or the exact nature of the work they’ll be asked to perform. It’s cool to see what they’re thinking about their own emotional and intellectual abilities and how they can put them to work this semester.

I pray this will contribute to better assessment on my part. I certainly feel like I know these students better after just one week. Of course, assessment is just one part of the Christian teacher’s gig. I’m praying their souls as well and their growth as disciples. Through the information questions I ask as well as the “I got an ‘A'” assignment, I’m trying to suss out where they’re at in terms of their faith and how that faith interacts with their educational goals. I pray that I don’t forget this part of my task.