thirty-nine theses (16)
Another S.O.:
16. I agree with James; “peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.”
Another S.O.:
16. I agree with James; “peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.”
A few more strong opinions:
Elaboration (7):
Thesis: A professor should not distribute a hard copy of the syllabus the first day of class.
I’m tempted to “punt” here and list thirty-nine much more profitable uses of time on the first day of a class, but I’ll spare you.
So let me say this instead. This thesis was a cheap way to provoke responses and comments. It worked. I especially like Kelly’s comment; her request for elaboration assumes a story. And I think, in general, our strong opinions are formed much more by our stories than by the endless pontification and qualification of so-called “logical” argumentation. I also think that this is as it should be.
But back to my initial claim about this thesis being a cheap way to provoke comments. Is this tactic cheap? Maybe Brent is right. Maybe this is simply one tactic the teacher (or the blogger) has at her disposal as a means of provoking thought and interaction. Or perhaps it only makes one appear moronic.
Is it a cheap trick? Is it a cheap trick when I make the claim, as I frequently have in classes, that “any time two characters in a story or a film share a meal, it’s ‘communion?’” Or when I say, “To read a story is to re-write it for yourself.” Or how about, “If they go somewhere, it’s a quest narrative.”
This tactic—using a statement of “normative absoluteness”—can be pretty effective (if not used too often, and especially if spoken in a tone that hints at comedic self-mockery) as a discussion stimulator.
Of course I don’t think all teachers or professors everywhere should never distribute hard copies of the syllabus the first day of class. In fact, selfishly speaking, I kind of hope most of them will continue the practice. I’m inclined to think their practice makes the kinds of things some of us do instead refreshingly novel for students grown over-accustomed to (at worst) being scolded in syllabus-ese the first day of class.
See also: http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-fa07/le_fa07_myview.cfm
p.s. I haven’t yet put into practice the collaborative construction of the syllabus by the community of learners, but I’m both convicted and tempted by this guy’s ideas.
Strong Opinions #8-10:
8. If you want comments and requests for elaboration on your blog series called “thirty-nine theses,” make your claims as pompously pithy as possible.
9. If Tim Tebow can’t be a quarterback in the NFL, the problem is with the NFL.
10. A book must be an ax for the frozen sea inside us. (Kafka)
Strong Opinion #7:
A professor should not pass out a hard copy of the syllabus the first day of class.
Strong opinions, the first six:
Well, now that I got those thirty-nine memories out there, now what? I had this conversation with Jeanie the other day. Once my series ended, what was I going to write about. I said:
How about “thirty-nine strong opinions”?
I didn’t really like the idea. I don’t think I even have 39 strong opinions. But she liked the idea. Maybe I should call them, as Martin Luther would have, “theses."
Well, whether you want to think of them as opinions or theses, that’s what you’re gonna get. Thirty-nine of them. They’ll be brief–they’ll be theses. And a thesis, my little lovers of composition terminology, is a simple, brief claim–typically a sentence or two.
You’ll have to give me feedback if you want them developed in greater detail or supported with an argument. Here’s one.
thirty-nine theses (example): School Uniforms
Bethel professors should wear uniforms.
Memory #39: She’s Got a Way
39 things I like about my wife:
None of those are memories, precisely, so here's one.
When I was in a kind of shooting slump my senior year in college, getting frustrated over not playing very well for a stretch during the first semester, she asked me something that I've never forgotten.
"Are you looking at the rim?"
This might seem silly and I did laugh when she asked it. But I also thought about it. And I still do. Sometimes, because I have taken umpteen gazillion shots in my life, I just sort of look in the general direction of the basket and rely on muscle memory to help my (and I don't mean to brag here) picture perfect jumpshot to find its mark.
But you really ought to look at the rim. Zone in on the particular. If you aim at nothing, you'll probably hit it.
So I try to remember, when I'm shooting hoops, to look at the rim. Make your own metaphorical connection here, gentle reader. Seriously.
So you can see why I love this person. I didn't write this song, but it might as well have been written from me to her. After all these years, she's still got a way.
Memory #38: Top Five Basketball Memories
5. The summer I was seventeen, playing by myself, in my driveway, every day of that summer for hours on end. I improved more in those three months than at any other time in my life.
4. I don’t mean to brag, but playing with (arguably) the best starting five in Bethel history my sophomore year: Jody Martinez, Dave Troyer, Bob Knebel, and Pat Adkins.
3. I don’t mean to brag, but the night (with that team above) when I didn’t miss a shot–12 for 12 FGs and 5 for 5 FTs for 33 points. When you play with two all-american post players, you get some good looks at the basket.
2. Scoring 46 points against Jimtown my senior year in high school. I don’t mean to brag, but I think I had a stretch where I made nine shots in a row. It was my mom’s birthday, 1988.
1. NCCAA National Champions, 1992. I don’t mean to brag, but we broke the ice with the first basketball national championship, and the 1990s came later to be known as a “decade of dominance.”
Memory #37: Birthdays
When your birthday falls less than two weeks after Christmas, one of two things can happen. One, you can get screwed in the presents department by people who write “Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday” on some card. Or, two, you can have a mom like mine who made sure that your birthday was always a big deal.
When I was a kid, the entire extended family always came to my house on or near my birthday to celebrate me. That was a lot of people. My mom did that. She made sure that I knew I was important and loved. On your thirty-ninth birthday you care a lot less about this sort of thing. But when you,re eight or twelve, this stuff matters. My mom knew.
Memory #35: Yoga, etc.
Today I did an entire 90 minute yoga workout. Is it a workout or a routine? Anyhow, the whole time I was doing it, I was looking at the people in the video that I was trying to follow and thinking things like: “I have got to be doing this wrong”; “Wow, that’s an uncomfortable position”; “Breathe? Are you serious?”, and so on.
And then, incredibly enough, when I was done, I was stunned at just how good I felt. I felt strong. I felt limber. I felt amazingly relaxed.
That’s not much of a memory. Here’s a memory. I can remember a time when people I knew well and thought pretty highly of thought yoga was some sort of instrument of the devil to get us all to become wierded out new age hinduist hippies. I think they might have been some of the same people who encouraged my entire youth group to burn our satanic records in a giant pyre outside the church one Sunday night. When the wind whipped up and it started to storm, it was taken as a clear sign that the devil didn’t want us to burn our records. But lots of people did anyhow.
I didn’t have any records. But that presentation by some vagabond youth minister, with all those backward masked records and creepy album covers, sure got me curious. So curious that I went to the drugstore day after day and thumbed through albums, looking for devilish symbols hidden in the cover art.
I remember my best friend Dave telling me that one of the stupidest things he ever did was to burn all of his Doors albums in one of those cultic record burning/smashing youth group sessions so popular in the late seventies and early eighties.
I wonder if those records, given up in a moment of misguided zeal, have come back to him ten or a hundred fold where he resides now?
I remember the day she was born: 3:06 p.m. on May 18, 2006. I remember the day she came home from the hospital, tiny and helpless, and Morgan kissed her gently. I know her first word was “no,” which doesn’t really trouble me at all. I hope she remembers that word when the inevitible peer pressures come some day.
I do not remember the first time she called me “papa,” but she still does, and I hope she always will.
She’s playing “Hungry, Hungry Hippos” behind me as I write this, talking non-stop to no one in particular. I tell Jeanie regularly, with wonder, with affection, with pride, “That girl never shuts up.”
I adore this little miracle child–so much so that I can scarcely recall what it was that, for all those years, terrified me about being a papa.
Memory #32: Buncha Bethel
I’ve been around Bethel a fairly long time, now. This is actually my seventeenth year on campus. Here’s a buncha Bethel memories.
I remember when…
Memory #31: Three Pages a Week
When I was fifteen and a sophomore in Mrs. Yoder’s English class, I started to keep a journal. Not because I thought it would be good to keep a journal or because I had a lot to say. I did it because it was an assignment. Mrs. Yoder made us write three pages a week, every week, all year in a little spiral steno notebook. There were no other requirements for the journal. You just had to write three pages a week about anything you wanted to write about.
I will be thirty-nine years old next week, and I have been writing in notebooks (sometimes in notebook computers, but more often in notebooks) for twenty-five years. It is a habit that borders on obsession.
You got bonus credit in Mrs. Yoder’s class if you wrote more than three pages a week. For most of the weeks during the past twenty-five years, I would have gotten a lot of bonus points.
I would thank Mrs. Yoder, if I knew where she was. I wonder whether any of her other students took the gift she gave us–the gift of habitual journaling–and ran with it as I have.
Old journals sit in a big box in my basement office, piles of them.
And just today, while writing in my journal, I figured out what to do with them.
Memory #30: Softball at “The Campgrounds”
My dad played church league fast-pitch softball in a league of mostly Missionary Church teams on the back diamond at Prairie Camp. I remember the smell of mosquito repellent.
I also remember one night when my dad, who played right field, leaped high in the air near the fence to take away a homerun from some poor sucker. And the time he hit a long flyball that landed on the roof of the concession stand just beyond the rightfield fence for a homerun.
I got to play in some games with him by the time I turned fifteen. I wonder, what on earth would I do in the summer now if I hadn’t been introduced to this game when I was so young?
Last summer I played about fifty games. This summer, Lord willing, I’ll play in at least that many again. I’d play a hundred and fifty if I could.
This is no exaggeration: I think about playing fast-pitch softball every day. It’s a dying sport, and they haven’t played fast-pitch at the campgrounds for almost twenty years. But there was a day when the Wakarusa Missionary Church had no trouble fielding two fast-pitch teams in that league.
I guess people have a lot of tv to watch these days, instead.
Memory #27: Skunked
So this fall, Anne and Joel and I are sitting around the campfire in our back yard, and Morgan is behind the giant compost pile maybe ten yards away rooting around in the dark for something, the way he always does, when I hear him let out a sharp yelp and I slowly start to smell the most potent burning tire odor ever, and Morgan comes staggering out of the dark, frothing at the mouth and stinking to high heaven and clawing at his face and sliding his body and head around on the grass trying to get the skunk stink off.
Apparantly some sort of peroxide mixture works. We bathed him using that stuff; the house smelled like skunk for a little while.
You can still faintly smell skunk on Morgan’s face if he gets his head rained on. They say it can take as much as a year for the smell to go away entirely.
Memory #28: Yellow Jacket
A few days later, Morgan ate a yellow jacket. He’s eaten roughly four thousand bees in his life, and never had any kind of reaction. This time, though, his face got all bumpy and mumpy and swollen and he acted like he wanted to scratch the inside of his skull. He was on the brink of berserk.
A hundred and fifty bucks, a short trip to the emergency vet, and two shots later he was ok, though he still smelled like skunk.
Later that week he crashed into Jeanie while playing ball in the back yard, giving her a lovely black eye.
Memory #25: Zapallo Grande
Allow me to continue the story from my previous post.
Our transportation from Borbon to Zapallo Grande was this long canoe thing with an outboard motor that rattled your teeth and tickled your nose. The woman and child beside me were hitchikers; we simply gave them a ride from one village to the next. Our ride was in the neighborhood of four hours long, mostly in the hot sun, and then four hours back, only a small part of it in the rain.
Can you see how narrow that board is that I’m sitting on? I don’t have a lot of cushion down there, so to say the least, my bum was sore after this trip.
Jim Stump took this picture (and the picture in the previous post). Not pictured, then, is his everpresent Boston Red Sox hat. When we got to the jungle village we were showered by a chorus of “Boston sucks! Boston Sucks!"
Apparantly, even in the remotest equatorial jungle, they know.
Memory #24: The Best Literature Class Ever
It was all about context. I’m the one in the orange jacket, looking professorial. This is the first class meeting of the course–Multicultural Literature for students in the Ecuador semester abroad program. We’re sitting in an open courtyard of our hotel in the mountain town of Otavalo, Ecuador.
What did we do? Simple. We read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” a story you should read right now if you never have, and maybe even if you have. Click here for the story: http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/garciamarquezoldman.html
After we read the story, someone said, “Tomorrow, when we get to Borbon and then when we go up river into the jungle to Zapallo Grande, WE will be the ‘very old man with enormous wings.'”
I liked that.
Other people said many insightful things. I said, “Sometimes stories signify; sometimes they are also self-reflexive. This is a story about the way we interpret stories. This story itself is ‘a very old man with enormous wings,’ and this story has dropped into our little western village, and here we sit trying to make sense of what to do with it in the only way we know how.”
The next morning we went out into the marketplace in Otavalo and bought alpaca wool sweaters and blankets. Later we drove to Borbon.
I love my job.
Memory #23: Warm Christmas
On December 24, 1982, the high temperature was 60 degrees in Wakarusa. A day later it was 65. I remember this. I played basketball outdoors in shorts. On December 25, 1998, it was 87 degrees in Kingston, Jamaica. I remember this as well; I played basketball outdoors. On December 25, 1981, it was 86 degrees in Campinas, Brazil. I played basketball outdoors.
I’m sure I played basketball outdoors on many other colder, snowier Christmas days, but those are much more forgettable.
One of the best parts about waking up every morning in Kingston was looking out the window toward the hills of upper St. Andrew, and in the deep distance, the peaks of the Blue Mountain range.
Eleven years ago today, Jeanie and I hiked Blue Mountain Peak in Jamaica, and that is where we squat, smiling, in the picture above. On a clear day, you can see Cuba from this spot. I must tell you, a breezy 50 degrees felt like heaven, after months of relentless, hellish heat in the dusty asphalt jungle that is the city.
The peak is a seven mile hike (an ascent of 3000 feet through a stunningly fertile and dense forest) from where we stayed the night before–a quaint cottage among giant eucalyptus trees called Whitfield Hall with our friends the Allens and their three children.
The walking was easy compared to the drive from Mavis Bank to Whitfield Hall–another seven miles of one-lane dirt, carved into the side of a mountain.
Trying to turn around on that road I nearly drove the pick-up off a sheer cliff to an inglorious end. For some reason, my heart still races and I twitch nervously when I think about how close a call that was. But I have not the words to describe it well.
When people ask me what is one thing not to be missed on their Jamaican vacation I always say Blue Mountain Peak. I don’t think anyone I’ve ever said that to has bothered to make this trek.
Memory #21: “I’m a Rebel”
It was July and I was driving home from mowing the lawn at Church on a Saturday evening a couple summers ago. “Prairie Home Companion” was on the radio. Garrison Kiellor introduced a group I’d never heard of–no big surprise there. He called them the Old Crow Medicine Show.
Have I mentioned that sometimes I really miss Jamaica?
The guy said, “We’re gonna take you on back to the Caribbean for this next number.” And then they played this…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUU6jbBmJ6U
In some mysterious and secretly unique way, I was taken on back to the Caribbean with that little number.
I love that song; I love reggae music. And now I love bluegrassed reggae.
Have I mentioned yet that I love bluegrass music, also? I love it all the more because a lot of it is the best happy-feet before bedtime dance music any two and half year old blondie of a little girl ever heard. One of my best memories from this past summer is the early evening Jeanie, Syd, and I spent at the Osceola Bluegrass festival. We ate rib tips. We bought a one dollar piece of junk toy for Sydney–a fuzzy wire spider attached to stick with elastic like string that helped you to make the spider dance.
And we all danced–Sydney and the spider the least self-consciously–as the sun set in Fern Hunsburger Park.
What can I say. “I’m a soul adventurer.”