Tag: Writing

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Grateful for Voices

As the semester progressed, I started modeling more and more of the work I asked my students to do. It was fine to write rough drafts because then I could model revision. The tough part was writing a purposefully rough opening draft, and even more specifically, failing in that draft in a way that would help highlight typical student errors. My voice was always off. I seemingly cannot write like anyone but myself.

Today, I had the opportunity to revisit the essays of some students I taught in the spring. I was struck by how good one of them was, so struck in fact that I reached out to the student to say thank you. Not only were the insights unique, but they were expressed in a way that was totally unlike mine. I was encountering a student who had already developed her voice. Her critical acumen was still growing, but she had figured out how to write things effectively. The fact that she had something to say made the essay all the more a delight.

I’m so thankful for moments like this where I confront in my own students’ work the kind of reading and writing that I certainly could not imitate. I can only sound like me, which is a good thing and bad thing. It’s most often a bad thing when it becomes clear that I’m writing for an audience other than my students, the ostensible beneficiaries of the model. I don’t want students to produce essays I could write. I want them to write better, more diverse essays. This particular student nailed it.

I pray for the wisdom to hear student voices and the willingness to highlight and share them. When I am listening, they are indeed a beauty to hear.

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Going Back

But Jesus said to him, “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” – Luke 9:62

I read this verse today in an article on education, and it cut me to the quick. This blog is one place where I have put my hand to the plow. I need God’s grace to not look back.

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Revision and Discipleship

Revelation 2:19 “I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first.”

This is a season of revision for me and my students. I’m revising a journal article that’s been rejected. My students are going back through the semester’s first graded essay and, if they feel so inclined, revising them even as they’ve turned in a second essay and working on a third. I’m revising my teaching methods to address the concerns I have after seeing their first two essays.

In both my writing and teaching, I see the need for constant improvement.

This is happening in my discipleship as well. Books by Richard Foster and Shane Claiborne have called me out for my complacency, the ways that I explain away lingering selfishness or disregarding ways I know God wants me to live out the gospel. The books have pushed me to listen harder, seek growth in community, and find ways to bear fruit in my roles as a father, husband, friend, and teacher. In short, the books have given me reasons to serve and persevere: to confront the places in myself and others that most needs God’s help and what I can practically do to extend God’s care in love and faith.

One measure for me of that renewed commitment to service and perseverance is this blog—not just this site but this actual blog. It’s 9:20pm, and I’m long past being focused enough to offer substantive and constructive feedback on the 30+ papers I need to grade over the next few days.

I am trying. This is not an essay or extended argument, but it is an effort to think with a passage from my daily reading that spoke to me.

If you are familiar with the Thyatira sermon from Revelation 2, then you know the above verse is just a warm-up to the extended criticism of Jezebel and her relationship with the church. That is worth its own deep engagement.

For my purposes here, I singled out verse 19 which intrigues me because of:

  1. God’s attention to the church’s actions
  2. In particular, the attention to “love and faith” which are signs of compassion and reliance borne out in serving and doing so in the face of obstacles
  3. and the progress Thyatria has made in that service and perseverance

In the midst of revision and the inevitable pain that comes with knowing you didn’t get it right the first time, we find that iif we work in love and faith, God will complete the good work He began in us.

I pray for a commitment to daily writing and teaching, for those practices to be grounded in love (service to others) and faith (an allegiance to God), and the fruit from those practices to grow over time.

 

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Washing Feet

John 13:14 “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.”

What is our culture’s equivalent of washing someone’s feet? What is the educational version of that act of service?

Christ speaks to me as a teacher in this verse. He has just demonstrated his willingness to make himself vulnerable in caring for them, and now he calls on them to do the same.

Today in class, we read a sample essay that responded to the prompt my students are currently working on. It was one of those drafts that appeared solid on the surface, and for a rough draft, it really was promising. It featured motivated research, a clear thesis, decent organization, and some really compelling information about dormitory visitation policies.

The more closely we looked at it though, the more flaws appeared. The research didn’t really bear on the project, and so many citations were missing that the author’s authority was shot by the end of the second paragraph. The essay is supposed to be a report, but it turned into an argument at its end, and by the time I was done discussing it, it seemed like the paper was awful.

So what do we do with that?

Well, in class, I left them to start their own research, and it seemed to me the sample essay now felt like a cautionary tale.

But was it?

Well, I would thank God if my students came up with that draft by the end of next week. They would have two weeks to work on the revision, and they might up come up with something really special.

And as I sit here writing this, I know that what I need to do for this particular sample is write the revision. I need to do the work and offer it to my students on Monday as an example of what they can do. Our discussion will come out of those improvements.

I can’t write a revision for everyone, just as Christ could not wash the feet of everyone in Jerusalem.

But I can wash the feet of this particular essay, and from that attitude of service I can call my students to begin the process of washing one another’s feet and helping each other become better readers and writers.

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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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Hurry Up and Fail

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis suggests that one way for people to see how much they need Christ is to seriously attempt to rely on themselves. This is because

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

Only when we confront our own inability to be good will we truly rely on Christ. This is where real faith begins.

There’s an analogous principle in academic work, especially in the process of writing something as large and unwieldy as a research paper. I like to tell my students, “Hurry up and fail.” What I mean is that they often won’t know what kind of work they really need to do on a project until they attempt it, no matter how messy it is. The problem is not the rough draft: the attempt to be good. The problem is waiting until the last possible minute to hand in a rough draft: the attempt to be good never led to a new sense of reliance.

Lewis lets us know that the serious attempt to be good on our own can lead to a significant spiritual insight: not that we are lost forever but that we can never be found until we have faith in God.

The point of emphasizing failure to students is this: we ALL need to revise. Go ahead and start writing now so you can ask for help in improving it. Do it sooner rather than later.

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What Does Theology Have to Say About Grammar?

Reading a book on Christian Curriculum yesterday, I ran across this sentence:

Grammar and language are indeed relative to a culture, but the fact of a degree of relativity does not make it necessary (nor sensible) to affirm a radical relativism.

I then ran across this meditation on covenantal ethics.

The covenant teaches that man is a conditioned creature. Only God is unconditioned, meaning unbounded by time or place. Man’s response to God must always be conditional. Man is bounded by God’s law, but he is also bounded by history. He must faithfully apply the law to historical circumstances. The covenant (the law as a whole, as well as the historical books of the Bible) provides us with the details of these historical circumstances. These details must be respected.

So here is the false dichotomy that I find both statements attempting to answer:

  1. Human knowledge is absolute and unchanging.
  2. Human knowledge is radically relative.

Continue reading “What Does Theology Have to Say About Grammar?”

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Why Scholarship Is An Part of Discipleship

A peer told me his new litmus test for deciding whether or not to pursue a longer work of scholarship: would it be spiritually edifying? Would it help him become a better disciple?

Not simply in content, mind you.

As a process.

Would the process of reading and thinking/writing about his topic help him grow as a disciple of Christ?

In this regard, this quotation from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning has always stuck with me.

“[I]t is everywhere evident in this book that the questions I ask of my material and indeed the very nature of this material are shaped by the questions I ask of myself.”

I should not only practice this but teach it. In fact, Greenblatt advocates this kind of full-bodied application of your worldview. Don’t ask of the text something you would not ask of yourself.

I will be incorporating this Greenblatt quotation into my future research paper prompts.