In teaching The Rule of Benedict, I find myself thinking about the dynamics of teaching a lot more. Great emphasis is placed on the role of obedience in learning virtue, that one cannot become ‘good’ apart from learning how to be good. In other words, we don’t start from scratch, but with all sorts of bad habits that have to be unlearned. Locke was absolutely wrong on this, that we don’t start without native inclinations or insights, but too often, in the pursuit of the good as defined by any number of schools, our native insights are totally bat-guano crazy. For Benedict, this happens in a communal setting, under the guidance of the abbot–one advanced in virtue–with varying degrees of correction and instruction given to the monks as they need it. It’s not a ‘rule’ in the sense that everyone gets exactly the same treatment; in fact, the only thing like that is the readings of Scripture prescribed. Everything else is pretty loose and relies on the judgment of the abbot.
Anyway, so I’m teaching this in a discussion setting, which in some ways defiantly undermines the very nature of this text. In a discussion format, all insights are allegedly valuable, but some insights–as anyone who’s led a small group discussion will attest–are remarkably worth less than other insights. Some thinkers dive right to the heart of the matter; some thinkers manifestly misread stuff and need more guidance. Not all thoughts or thinkers or students are created equally.
Hence, I’d argue that Benedict’s Rule holds a great number of insights into the pedagogical process, namely, 1) that obedience of student to teacher is imperative for this to work, 2) that learning is done as a class and not as individual monads, and 3) that while all students are not created equally, this doesn’t mean the lesser are hopeless; it simply needs they need a different measure of prodding and motivation. What? The teacher not just as purveyor of information, but needing to be a model of the kinds of virtues they convey? The student as needing to learn various virtues and not having native sense enough to know what they need to know? That learning isn’t a matter of just imparting nuts and bolts, but what those nuts and bolts are for, and that sometimes you have to share knowledge rather than horde it?
Preposterous. Or…absolutely right. In many ways, it means the teacher can’t just slack off, show up to class, and spew information, but has to model the right ways to read, think, learn, teach, and be as a human being. It’s tough, but if I expect anything out of my students, for Benedict, it’s the only way to go.
In no particular order:
***Christmas travel is more exhausting than normal travel. Part of it is due to the sheer volume of things that must be taken with a person during Christmas travel (inordinate numbers of gifts, “free time” projects, bulky clothes), but part of it’s due to what I take to be the natural desire to stay still in the midst of cold months. I’m reminded of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” in which the narrator describes freezing to death as a still sleep; there’s something appealing about that, that in the coldest months, one should stay as still as possible, while just barely avoiding freezing to death.
**I’m on a literary roll. Over the break, I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is undoubtedly the best work of fiction from the last decade, as well as devouring Stephen King’s new behemoth Under the Dome, which is a total success. I’ve taken to keeping fiction as bedtime reading, not only to give myself something non-academic in my literary diet, but also because, good night, good fiction is like dessert for the brain. Prior to this, I read Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities (non-fiction, but astounding) and Tim O’Brien’s The Things We Carried, which was breathtaking. I’ve just cracked American Pastoral by Philip Roth, and after six pages, don’t expect it to be as good as the previous ones, but worth finishing.
**Today, I begin class prep for the Spring, which involves reading mountains of medieval texts. I’m teaching “The Medieval Intellectual Tradition” in the Great Texts Department, involving a number of works I’ve read before but never taught, which means that it’ll be both stretching for me personally, and cut into my dissertation writing inevitably. So it goes. The goal for this semester is to write the Yoder chapter of the dissertation, which I take to be the easiest of the remaining chapters, so I’m not terribly worried.
**Married going on seven months, and honestly, I can’t believe it’s been that long already. Every day, it feels like only a few weeks. Last night, we sat on the couch and split a frozen pizza; she sat with Harry Potter and me with Season 3 of 30 Rock on the laptop. That’s the good stuff, I think.
**No New Years’ Resolutions on this end. As Oscar Wilde noted, we always resolve the wrong things because we resolve too early in the year. I know the things that need changing, namely, less time on frivoulous computer things and more time on the real deal stuff; more time with friends and less time sweeping floors; fewer purchases which keep me in fashion and more which sustain my soul.
**I have a tremendous life and have no complaints. In the last year, I discovered who my true friends are and where my true life lies. I expect this year to be nothing short of that.
Vacations for academics aren’t, for the most part, time off, I’ve discovered. One of the things you inherit as you enter ‘the guild’ is a monkey who lives in your car, occasionally coming to live under a bed or a couch, but only when he decides that your back is no longer an inhabitable place to be. The monkey’s name is “legacy”.
Legacy is there when you’re contemplating picking up the new Michael Chabon book or blowing off an hour watching 30 Rock, reminding you that you are indeed turning to worm food as fast as you can type, and chances are, twenty years after you’re dead, a handful of people will be talking about you….
Unless…
Unless, you kill the unicorn that is called “scholarship”. Unless you can find that mythical creature which goes by many names, and has known many imitators in the form of shinier animals, who for a time shimmered and swayed and now lie discarded in bins called “historical-critical method” or “critical theory” or “post-liberal theology”–if you can find this creature who has glided in and out of classrooms, offering fleeting glimpses in panel discussions on the importance of aviary flu for theologians, you may very well be able to attain that which the unicorn brings: immortality.
And with that immortality, people will talk about you. They’ll talk about you when they think they’re talking about your future, more pale imitators. They’ll talk about how irresolvable your paradoxes are and how deft your writings remain. But again, you were the one who woke up, ate a bowl of cereal, and sweatily tried to deny the monkey’s existence just like everyone else.
***
Grades are in, and I’m torn between needing to read for next semester, work on the dissertation, and finish The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and Season 2 of 30 Rock. I suspect that, tonight, it’s Michael Chabon, and tomorrow, it’s class prep and cutting the grass. Vacations never truly are. They monkeys fly in and out the windows, and I might forget them for a while, but they usually return. One can only hope that they stay away long enough for me to remember that I really do love good fiction, for no other reason than an excellent novel is hard to find.
The end of the semester brings with it the advent of the first six months of marriage, and with it, the realization that so many things have changed. I feel far less sociable than I have in the past, if only because there is more riding on my getting on with a dissertation and getting a job than there was a year ago. There’s more riding upon surviving this program, making a paycheck, and doing something other than squeaking out the occasional book review. It sounds so feduciary when I put things like that, but it’s honestly what I think about.
I don’t consider as much the art of living, or how to enjoy a work of literature, or how to blow off an entire evening with a beer and a dumb movie. I don’t chalk it up to marriage itself, or to Sarah, but rather to some internal turning-over of some internal lake, opening up what has been long dormant, unleashing new ambition and drive where once I think there was the contentment to loiter.
But still, I wonder about these changes. I wonder about them being for the better, or if somehow, new drive is code for a subtle submission to a logic of production. These are the things I think about these days, with papers done and grades submitted. Students, you all passed; take that verb loosely in some cases.
**
I sat in Common Grounds with David and Matt this afternoon, drinking tea and reading in public for the first time in two months, and it was good. Matt and David talked about all kinds of inter-department things that I’m somewhat glad to be ignorant of, but in some ways, I miss the drama. I miss the inside shenanigans. I miss camraderie, which I have traded for a lonely third-floor office and solitude. In that looming space, I produce and write and read, but apart from having other voices in my ear, I can’t say it’s worth it.
These are the things I think of in Advent: change, silence, products. These are the things Advent comes to damn: silence, production, focus–in favor of an apocalyptic promise of new life and excessive grace, a metaxological explosion of promise and joy. And so, before the next semester strangles me on Anselm and Boethius, I’m off to read for fun and drink for pleasure.
1) No matter who your students are, they will always ask for clarification on the syllabus. This will happen regardless of how much time you’ve spent on the syllabus prior to the class.
2) Never write a syllabus more than two pages. See Thesis #1.
3) Writing assignments given to students will be done one hour before class by 85% of the class. The outlier will be the student who does all of the assignments for the semester within the first month and hands them in accordingly, reeling you in like a fish.
4) The amount of coffee drunk before class is directly proportional to the clarity of the lecture.
5) The amount of time spent preparing a lecture is inversely proportional to the clarity of the lecture.
6) The most effective way to prep a lecture is to snort instant coffee and never crack a book.
7) The chances my fly will be down while teaching is inverse to the preparation I have given to class.
8 ) Never trust the markers to be working. Throw one against the wall at the class beginning for effect anyway.
9) There is no ” perfect time” of day to teach. Students will always have a limited attention span, and you will always have more material than that span.
10) There is such a thing as a stupid question.
Waco has entered that season when the sky unzips, prior to that season when the wind blows and gives us relief for a few months. It’s a good time to be in Waco, as I cohere better to the blustery weather than the good. Today is lunch with one professor for no particular reason, and a session of reading through a chunk of the dissertation with my director. This morning, I told my wife this morning that the dissertation is what some guys call “the other woman”; she asked me what I meant by that, at which point I realized that the metaphor is both sexist and kinda stupid–it’s not like I’m sexually attracted to my dissertation, or that I’m slipping off to meet my dissertation in the afternoon, but rather that, like any relationship, it requires a lot of time and attention. So, let’s just call it “that friend”, the one who overstays their welcome and asks a lot.
***
I’m putting together an Advent mix, but with a slightly different spin on it. Instead of doing the thing where I just put a bunch of Christmas-y songs together, I want to do a mix that traces out the nativity story, in song. For example, “Sit Down/Stand Up” by Radiohead is a fairly ominous tune, perfect for mornings like this when the rain deluges the city streets.
OR.
It could be the perfect song to put in between a song for Jesus’ birth and escape to Egypt, when the children of Bethlehem are murdered. It starts off slow and steady, and erupts into a torrent of sound and energy, retaining the mood and sorrow.
So, I need suggestions. I don’t have any master plan for the mix yet, but I want to play fast and loose with it. In other words, this is more a mix of mood suggested by the contours of the nativity story, rather than songs that specifically talk about camels or angels. I mean, the songs COULD talk about those things, but I’m looking more for mood. Be creative, and let’s put something different than the normal Christmas song mixes.
There’s still life in this old blog yet, which was begun back in 2005. But like all continual series, occasionally, there’s a loss of focus. Scrubs lost its way for about two seasons; MacGyver jumped the shark more than once, bringing the infamous Murdoch back from the dead once or twice until it could figure out how to limp forward to its eventual demise. Sometimes, I wonder that my beloved Office is starting to move that direction by bringing a wedding and a baby into the mix. A thing starts off with a small, managable premise, and before long, life has inhabited the skeleton and flesh of the thing and taken it by the hands in directions it did not want to go.
All this is to say that this blog, in the future, will not be about a few things:
1) Anne Lamott. I loved her back in the day, but not so much anymore. There’s a few reasons for that, but mostly, I don’t need her anymore. I don’t need her breaths of fresh honesty, because I grew into my own skin and can speak my own honesties without needing someone to do it for me.
2) Marriage. Sure, I’ll tell some funny stories here and there, but this is not a confessional. I have my confessors and my confidants, and the wicked wide web is the worst of all possible places for the ins-and-outs of something as mysterious as marriage.
3) My dissertation. I spend at least an hour a day on the damn thing, and I’m not going to let it invade this blog as well. I’ll probably start a separate blog to work out problems with that, but that’s not what this is about.
Once you cut out the last two, you’ve cut out a large swath of my life to draw reflections from, either from sacredness or sheer redundancy. But I’m discovering that virtuality only gives us the illusion of intimacy or the simulation of life, and that giggles and farts don’t translate well into ones and zeros. The Internet is what it is, or what it will be, or what it must be–namely, a vast intertwining of random tidbits and laughters, dark corners, t-shirt kiosks and the occasional light. But it is not a comfortable couch, a cold beer, or an old friend.
So, here’s to you, Internet. You serve us, and may it never be said that we serve you and your endless stomach, chewing, ever-hungry, fattened and never full.
I’ve just finished reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried for the first time, and as I told my wife, it’s the kind of book that’s so wonderful, I want to throw it against the wall. I want to throw it against the wall because the beauty and the sorrow in its pages are like butterflies trapped inside a hardened cocoon; if I throw it enough times, the shell will break, and the wings will spread and smear all over the wall for me to remind me every day that death too can be beautiful.
On one level, it’s a collection of short stories about Vietnam. But as the author says, this book is much, much more than that. It’s an extended meditation on storytelling as a kind of resuscitation, breathing back into life those who have been dead. But the dead only live in circumscribed parameters; they can only live as we remember them, or as we imagine them. I was mesmerized by Atonement when it did the same thing, providing the dead with the lives they can now never live without us.
And in that, the tragedy of this book really spreads its wings: O’Brien tells beautiful and tragic stories inspired by true lives, but lives who can never do what lives do, that is, live freely. The dead of his stories rise again, but only to die the same death fifteen pages later, alive only as our memories, alive only in our reflections. None the less, this book is phenomenal. Take and read.
A number of the links to the left are completely dead, or wandering off into the snow, waiting for the five-finger death punch to take effect. Thus, I’m reworking that section.
If you want your blog to be put in the links, lemme know.
As a theologian, I spend most of my life dealing with things as if there were a thing called the ‘as-is’, as if there were a realm of life that simply ‘was’ apart from people screwing around with it. Whether or not that realm exists or not is a different question for a different day, but the part I want to wrangle with is what it means for someone who spends most of their day talking and thinking about theology in clean ways to dive head-first into a world populated by dust ruffles and matching sheets.
Let me say this: marriage is wonderful in all sorts of ways. It’s home in the most profound sense. I’ve not had the sense of waking up and being completely settled in at least two years, and so waking up next to my wife and confidante is fantastic. This isn’t to say that it’s all perfect, but it’s all very good. ‘Very good’ in the biblical sense of God standing over something that was growing and breathing and calling it pretty damn nice.
So, it’s a challenge bringing together two worlds–one that deals with gritty realities of mental illness and homeless clients (her work), and one which deals with academic problems of theory and ontology and copious amounts of coffee. These two worlds need each other; air cannot exist without ground, and water needs land to call the shoreline. And love, sweet love, needs to find love to fling it back out into the world, stronger than it was and more able to love than it was before.
There was a moment prior to getting engaged when we she had just started her job, and I had just started teaching when our dinner conversation went something like the following:
She–”How was your day?”
Me–”It was crazy. This student came in and blah blah blah noxious comment complaint about student ridiculous philosophical distinction”…”And how was your day?”
She–”Well, I had to talk a guy out of his machete when I went to his house today”.
Me—(silence).
So, it’s two vastly different 8 to 5s now melding together. I spend most of my days, until the semester starts, in the same clothes I woke up in, reading, thinking, pacing the floor and muttering to myself. She gets ready and does battle with social ills, state policies, and bureaucracy. But this is where it gets good for both of us–that for theology, there is always the earth and creation, and for social work, there is always more than reacting to problems.
