Tag: Teaching

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Critical Thinking Applied: Part 1

Consciously raising the questions “What do we know . . . ? How do we know…? Why do we accept or believe . . . ? What is the evidence for . . . ?” when studying some body of material or approaching a problem.

From What the Best College Teachers Do

In his chapter on what the best college teachers expect from their students, Ken Bain gives a list of ten things the best professors use to assess critical thinking.

In my introduction to literature courses this week, I will be asking them why we turn to fiction to help us understand the truth. Part of my case to them will be the fact that Christ’s parables were certainly not standard features of Judaic rabbi training. Christ made a point of telling stories that were not literally true in order to convey deeper truths about the coming kingdom of God. If we figure out why, then we will be on our way to establishing why the work we do in the literature course is important.

I might fill in the ellipses in Bain’s questions this way:

What do we know about fiction?

How do we know that fiction isn’t simply lying?

Why do we accept or believe fictional stories as a valid means of communicating truth?

What is the evidence for using fictional stories this way from scripture?

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Giving an A

This ‘A’ is not an expectation to live up to but a possibility to live into.

From The Art of Possibility

In their book The Art of Possibility, Rosamund and Benjamin Zander discuss the freeing practice of giving yourself and others an ‘A’ inside and outside the classroom.

Ben Zander gives students enrolled in his year-long musical performance course the promise that they will get an ‘A’ if they complete the following assignment: within the first two weeks of the class, they must write a letter dated at the end of the academic year that begins, “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my ‘A’ because…”

I will be giving this prompt to my students for their first weekly letter because I’m interested to see what kind of work they think writing-intensive literature courses demand. More than that, I want them to exercise their imagination. What will they have done to live into the possibility of getting a superior mark in the class?

I will share them with my own letter. This is its first sentence: “Dear students of ENGL 101, I got my ‘A’ because I coached you through the process of reading and writing about literature in a way that made you more confident as a reader of and writer about literature while convincing you that both practices are of practical and spiritual importance.”

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Of Houses and Cars

Learning requires us to use powerful metaphors.

With that in mind, check out the following paragraph which I’ve had in my syllabus for the past five years:

This course’s promises don’t mention specific grades. That’s important. The specific grades you receive at midterm and after finals are neither a reflection of your worth as a human being nor the ultimate purpose for the class. Think of your education like a house. Grades are like a house inspection. They simply tell you that the house meets basic building codes. You live in the house. You put the inspection in a drawer and eventually forget about it. As you assess your progress towards realizing the course’s promises, remember what matters.

There’s nothing wrong with the metaphor. It’s apt. When I’ve shared it with a colleague, they always nod their head in agreement.

But my students don’t really feel its truth. Few of them have built a house, much less been involved in a house inspection.

So here’s how that paragraph will read from now on.

This course’s promises don’t mention specific grades. That’s important. The specific grades you receive at midterm and after finals are neither a reflection of your worth as a human being nor the ultimate purpose for the class. Think of your education like your ability to drive a car. Grades are like your driver’s license. They simply tell you that you can legally get behind the wheel of a car. You probably know people that you would never want to drive you anywhere even though they have their license. This is the person who gets all As and Bs and manages to not have learned anything. The grade is a necessary step in learning, but it’s not the same as being educated. As you assess your progress towards realizing the course’s promises, remember what matters.

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The Best Teachers Are Disciples

Fundamentally, they were learners, constantly trying to improve their own efforts to foster students’ development, and never completely satisfied with what they had already achieved.

From What the Best College Teachers Do

This quotation from Ken Bain identifies a common trait in the best college teachers: they never stop learning. I was particularly struck by how the great teachers Bain examines pursue a goal that is more communal and larger in scope than any one class or skill. Great teachers are community builders who realize how what they do requires collaboration with their colleagues who can share a larger goal for education. For the best Christian teachers, that shared goal is discipleship, and thus a common trait for a great Christian professor is that they never stop being disciples.

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Mother Night as Meta-fiction

Scrutinizing meaning systems more closely will help us to distinguish the good from the bad in the systems we develop as we seek to live in God’s world in a manner pleasing to him.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin make a case for the benefits of reading meta-fiction, a newer genre that seems in its very philosophical premises to oppose Christianity.

The work work I teach that most explores the epistemological skepticism undergirding meta-fiction is Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The novel purports to be the diary of an American Nazi name Howard Campbell who is writing from an Israeli jail cell pending a trial for war crimes. Vonnegut, the novel’s author, claims only to be the book’s editor. Campbell is himself a writer, a playwright more specifically, and Vonnegut-as-editor meditates on what that means for the diary’s veracity.

Continue reading “Mother Night as Meta-fiction”
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Teaching Statement for 2019

As I enter the new year, I have tried to articulate my teaching purpose. Here is as concise a statement about who my courses are for, who I will focus most on helping, and the promise I make to those students.

My courses are for people who believe words matter and our God-reflecting imagination rivals reason in its power.

I will focus on people who want to connect—to God and others through the power of words— and grow—in their ability to interpret and communicate what they’ve interpreted.

I promise that my courses will help students get closer to God and others. They are about discipleship. The ability to read and write well draws you closer to the God who made you and the people who were made in God’s image.

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Lit Eval

A responsible reader will 1) grant that values always inform the act of reading, 2) attempt to put Christian values to work in his or her reading, 3) consider the purpose and point of view of the text, and 4) realize that texts may be immoral in other ways than by using profanity and sexual explicitness.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

These are Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin’s guidelines for evaluating work in a Christian way that neither discourages reading something just because it has an immoral act in it nor dismisses ethical perspectives in favor of a work’s aesthetic achievement.

Two cases in point…

In my Intro to Lit course, I teach Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The former is an example of a work filled with explicit violence that never gives us a sense that the text supports what’s being represented. Macbeth is not completely irredeemable, though he tries to act like he is, and it would be a perverse reading indeed that says he’s supposed to be praised for killing Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff’s wife and children. John Cox’s article “Religion and Suffering in Macbeth” works out a pretty convincing Christian interpretation of the play.

Mother Night, on the other hand, wants to make a moral statement, but I don’t think it’s central insights can be completely reconciled with Christianity. Vonnegut wants to make the point that everyone can hate and that the worst kind of hate is to believe that God supports your hate. We get all of this filtered through the novel’s conflicted and unreliable Howard Campbell, however. By the novel’s end, he believes that evil is a more ultimate force in the world than good. It’s a grim view that Vonnegut’s authorial comments–“We are what we pretend to be”–cannot wholly ironize. The novel criticizes adroitly, but I don’t think it’s positive view matches anything like Christianity. Vonnegut was a virulent atheist who thought religion encouraged evil rather than stemming it.

Gallagher and Lundin call for me to make these evaluations much more overt as I teach and to model the four steps above that avoid simplistic aesthetic approval or dismissive moral disapproval.

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Christian Texts and Intro to Lit

Texts that focus on Christian topics, or include biblical references or Christ figures, require careful interpretation, not rash conclusions.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin insist that like most good interpretation, parsing the relationship between Christianity and a specific piece of literature requires time and care. Below I try to think through how I will demonstrate that time and care in my intro to literature class, specifically in how we read our short story collection by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Continue reading “Christian Texts and Intro to Lit”
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Conflicting Interpretations

How do we discover that truth? We discover it by the slow and arduous task of weighing any interpretation against what we already hold to be the truth about the matter in question.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin outline a guide for discovering truth when we encounter conflicting interpretations.

The key words in their advice are “slow” and “arduous.”

It takes time to understand a poem, story, or novel before interpreting it. This is where we are first comparing what we’ve read against truth we already know, most likely from scripture or reason or experience or tradition. Then begins the long process of figuring out which interpretations of the work we’ve just read are complementary and which are mutually exclusive.

I can focus on the biographical interpretation of Hamlet (the death of Shakespeare’s child in 1596; the Catholic recusancy of Shakespeare’s father), and this does not necessarily stop me from also interpreting the play’s commentary on education.

As I begin to focus on specific scenes, lines, or characters, however, I will run into mutually exclusive interpretations (is Hamlet’s tragic flaw memory or pride; is the play ultimately Catholic or Protestant in its commitments).

I think it’s worthwhile for my students to see and know the difference between complementary and competing interpretations so I will need to work up examples of these for most of the works we read.

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Finding a Balance

As I approach the New Year, here are five areas for which I pray that God will help me find a happy medium.

  1. My commitment to discipleship at home (with my family) and at work (with my colleagues and students)
  2. My input (the things I read, watch, consume) and output (the things I read, teach, and create)
  3. My view of literature as a means for social action and source of delight
  4. My commitment to orthodoxy and my commitment to orthopraxy
  5. My pursuit of glorifying God and my pursuit of enjoying Him forever

The balancing act required for the goals I want to achieve are less quantitative than qualitative. I pray for the emotional and rational discernment necessary to feel and know how to let God work in my life in these areas today and in the days to come.