Tag: Teaching

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Purpose and Origin

For several centuries, however, the emphasis has been shifting from questions of ends to questions of origin. When we seek to explain something, we are no longer likely to ask, “What was the end for which this object has been created?’ but “What was its source?’ To understand something, we tend to want to learn where it has come from and how it works; we think of facts as items to be calculated or explained to help us understand how things have developed.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Roger Lundin and Susan Gallagher identify one sign of our culture’s move away from Christianity: we ask for something’s origin instead of its purpose.

The “origins” move is genealogical. My wife and I joke about how literary theory’s constant dictum is “everything is constructed.” What that discussion tends to obscure is the purpose or end of the cultural practice under examination.

As I put together biographical notes for my upcoming literature classes, it’s far easier to find facts that explain the origins of an author’s work. Jhumpa Lahiri was a Bengali immigrant who had academics as parents and spent a key time of her life in New England. This would go a long way towards explaining where the key elements in her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies came from, but it does very little to explain why she wrote the stories in the first place.

In an interview last year, Lahiri commented, “I know that writing is a way of expressing oneself, of communicating. But it’s not made for the reader. Of course there will always be a reader; but when I write I don’t think about that hypothetical person.” Writing, she contended, is “an internal dialogue.” Given the role that interpretation, translation, and just plain old communication play in her collection’s stories, this claim about writing’s purpose can go much further in helping us figure out what her writing is doing than simply providing biographical facts that can be matched one-to-one with details inside the story.

I will take Lundin and Gallagher’s admonition to focus as much if not more on something’s purpose than its origins and will attempt to direct my students to do the same.

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Interaction, Not Substitution

This discussion of the history of changes in our language, and in specific Christian uses of language, has brought us to a point where a redefinition of metaphor is in order. In place of the long-standing Aristotelian view of metaphor as substitution, as a process in which poetic words “stand in’ for literal ones, we could perhaps say that the metaphorical process is one of interaction. When we use a metaphor, we say that one thing is another. We take a word from its conventional context and apply it to a new situation.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Roger Lundin and Susan Gallagher present a new way of understanding metaphor. Since this site’s title–Education is Discipleship–is a metaphor, it’s worth thinking about how those two words interact.

The current connotations of discipleship and education are spiritual and secular respectively. The interaction between the two stresses the similarities between the two enterprises, that both discipleship and education produce growth through the act of learning. For Christ’s followers, the language of education–of students and teachers, disciples and rabbis–was the easiest way to understand the Messiah’s work. The great commission contains the word that means “teach” and commands us to go create more students.

A great deal of money and research over the past three decades has been spent figuring out we learn best. All of this material should be grist for our discipleship mill. No, education will never fully encompass the work of discipleship, but noticing the interaction between the two is a way of both understanding what Christ has called us to do and discovering new ways of learning more about him and the world.

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Games

This week, I’ve been thinking about education as a long game enterprises, but I realized this morning I’ve thought very little about literal games inside my classroom. This is primarily because I hate games. I despise them. I would never want to sit through them as a student, and I certainly wasn’t going to inflict them on my students.

But this is selfish.

My students aren’t me. My students don’t relate to the books they read like I did. This is not a bad thing. It’s a basic awareness that what works or doesn’t work for me should not exhaust my teaching repertoire. 

Games might in fact be a long-game strategy. 

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The Long Game, Continued

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.” – Matthew 13:44

“The excellence of the heavenly life is not perceived, indeed, by the sense of the flesh; and yet we do not esteem it according to its real worth, unless we are prepared to deny, on account of it, all that glitters in our eyes.” – John Calvin’s Commentary on Matthew 13:44

I worry about not being able to help the students I teach who most need my help, that I’m a physician who helps wealthy people get into better shape but can’t really aid the direfully ill in their need.

This anxiety reveals that playing the short game, one that’s built on the idea that every subsequent semester will always be like this one; that if I can’t see results now, nothing substantive has happened; and that I know what I’m looking for in the first place.

The parable Christ tells typifies the long game approach, a total commitment to what eternally matters most.

I pray for kingdom eyes to see and the spirit-filled stamina required to play this long game.

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Prayed Over

This afternoon, a colleague took me to The Potter’s Place, a kind of prayer resort near our campus that gives disciples an “environment of quiet solitude where those who come can seek God.”

My colleague described the place as “prayed over” and just from my 45 minutes there with him today, I felt clarity and the ability to articulate some deep concerns in my own family and personal life.

Right now, my colleague is separated from his wife and children who are in Canada as they try to get proper visas for the US. This weekend, he said, he had finally put together and prayed over the beds his daughters will sleep in when they arrive.

The story cut me to the quick. This weekend, I was inside our new, still-under-construction home, and it never occurred to me to pray. As I continued to reflect on the semester, I had to admit that while my classroom was prayed in I couldn’t honestly call it prayed over. I’ve prayed for a place as a kind of metonymy for the people in it, but only as an abstraction.

So this evening, I prayed: “God, thank you for the spaces you’ve provided me to pray and share and serve. I commend to your continual care the home we are renting, the home plan to live in, as well as the office and classrooms I teach in. Remove any impediment in these places that would hinder your spirit’s work. Grant the family and students and neighbors and strangers who come into these spaces to know your love. Fill each of these spaces with your presence, and grant me a servant’s heart so that I may love you and others there.”

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Final Comments – ENGL 1013

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 yesterday in my Intro to Lit course.

It has been difficult for me to see many of you struggle with this course. When I taught a version of this course at Charleston Southern University in the spring, I had 24 students, and while I had students who struggled, I also didn’t have the luxury to look at multiple drafts or give wholesale revision opportunities. It was tough to tell whether or not it was the students, the material, my teaching or some combination of all them. The answer is all three, and I’ve had the chance to see that play itself out this semester.

I care deeply about you and about this class because I do believe that all truth is God’s truth and that we are able to access truths about how to feel and interpret the world through our imaginations in a way that we can’t through logic. Of course, that means there’s a balance, and your assignments in this course asked you to be more logical and analytical about the imaginative truths you found in poetry, short stories, drama, and novels.

The insight Joya gave during her presentation on Tuesday—the fact that you should not love someone just for themselves but as a way of honoring God—can be preached in a sermon, encapsulated in a motivational quotation you encounter on Facebook or Twitter, or discovered through the trial and error of your real life experience. But Joya got there through a story: a novel. Not because someone had laid out a logical case for it and she, after twenty hours of deliberation and hearing both sides, finally assented, but because in some key way the novel helped her feel it. Continue reading “Final Comments – ENGL 1013”

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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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Guest Speakers

But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.” – James 4:6

Yesterday, Jeremy B. Jones came and talked to my Non-Fiction and Its Process class. He teaches non-fiction at Western Carolina University, and he  read some of his super fascinating current book project and liberally dropped quotations from cool people like Anne Lamott and Richard Hugo and Marianne Moore and used Harry Potter references to explain how essays should work (e.g. memoirs should be filled with “portkeys”) and was just a consummate professional.

Now, Jeremy’s got pedigree and the ethos to spare. Boasting an MFA from the University of Iowa and a first-book memoir that’s won awards will do that.

Add to that that I’ve felt like an imposter all semester teaching this class and that the topic was the real deal for him? You have the ingredients for seeing a master display that left invigorated and more than a little humbled. Continue reading “Guest Speakers”

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Playing Injured

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. – II Cor. 12:9

When I watch sporting events and the announcers tell me that so-and-so is questionable because of a sore hamstring or right bicep, I expect the person to perform well regardless. It’s not a fair expectation, but I have it anyway. I think it’s because I have never had never had those particular injuries, I can’t immediately put myself into the position of imagining what playing the sport while nursing those injuries feels like.

Here’s what I do know about: sore throats. Over the past two weeks, I’ve had what amounts to a canker sore on my epiglottis. My entire mouth hurts any time that I swallow. This consequently makes simple and important tasks like eating and sleeping and talking painful.

This is a comparatively small thing. I wonder if I had this ailment for a month, I would adjust and the pain would start to become cognitively dull for me. It doesn’t feel that way today.

What I do know is that it makes teaching hard. I feel like I’m playing injured. I have not told my students about my ailment, but I wonder if my demeanor is different or if they have same faulty expectations of me that I do of athletes: “Hey, if he’s up there teaching, he must be at full strength.”

I realize how often I’m guilty of assuming things just by examining students’ demeanors. They’re in class so they must be at full strength. Their waning attention is a moral or intellectual lapse, not a result of the physical or emotional toll outside circumstances have taken on them.

My sore throat has made me thankful. I take smaller bites of food and end up savoring it more. I choose my words sparingly and end up listening more.

It also makes me think about all the things I consider my strengths. If God’s strength is made perfect in weakness and I’m waiting for my own perfection to perform well, I’m elevating my own strengths above God’s. I don’t want to play hurt and because of that, I can’t see the ways I play hurt even when I think I’m fine. A sore throat is better than the millstone of pride, and I pray that emerge from this ailment healthier and humbler.

 

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Sustainability

On a moment to moment basis, a large portion of my mental bandwidth is spent worrying about the present moment being repeated into the future ad infinitum or figuring out how to replicate the present moment forever.

Examples range from my daughter’s coughing (will she ever stop?), to some new reading method (how do I apply this to every book I own?), or some classroom exercise that works (how do I do this all the time?) to a good day with my wife (can’t we do this all the time?).

These feelings are often distortions of a very real prayer: “Let your kingdom come, let your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

My desire for positive sustainability is a yearning for eternity here on earth. I must say, a lot of times I’m glad God doesn’t give me what I want.

God has dealt with me a lot this year about my tendency for longing for the past, either in regret over what I failed to do or in longing to do again what I used to do. When I carry that tendency into the present, it’s like I’m in perpetual state of melancholy.

The reality is that this is always happening:  “Therefore [Christ] is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.” (Hebrews 7:25)

I pray for a child’s faith to rejoice in that reality to know that because of Christ my Father gives bread and not stones. Because of Christ, I can live in true thankfulness: for when my daughter does stop coughing, for when I have a reading experience that proves fruitful, for when something I do in the classroom helps my students, and when I have a great day with my wife.