"Sometimes when a student tells me that being on campus is painful, that a course is too difficult, that an idea is too upsetting, that a program is too offensive, I respond by talking about my friend Jesper. Were Jesper to follow the easy, painless path with massive pieces of mountain, were he to limit his activity merely to the exterior, then the forms inside never would be revealed. To release the treasures hidden in a twenty-ton block of marble, Jesper has to break through the surface, cut into the interior, saw, strike, and gouge. It is only after that brutal, even savage process has been completed (during which a beautiful form gradually emerges) that Jesper can refine the work by burnishing its surface. It seems to me that the hard treatment Jesper inflicts on those rough blocks of freshly quarried stone is analogous to what happens to some of our most successful students as they learn. Students who take the familiar route, who choose to follow the path of least resistance, who avoid the difficult course or stay away from the controversial lecture, who never feel tension or pain, who never test the ideas or challenge the beliefs they carried with them to college not only miss the very point of education but also diminish their potential. For those willing to push themselves, to dig deep rather than skim along the surface, the rewards (at least in retrospect) can be profound. But while the heavy excavation is in progress, they may feel a lot of pain. 

On my wall hangs a small photo of an elegant, slender sculpture that Jesper named after me.When advisees tell me they are uncertain or confused, or that learning hurts, I reach into a cabinet to retrieve a picture of the artist standing next to the block of freshly quarried marble from which “Aaron’s Rod” may have emerged, note that students can be at once both sculptors and sculptures, and suggest that we get to work." (Aaron Shatzman, "When Learning Hurts")

This fall I will begin my 14th year of teaching English at Bethel.  I don’t know where the time goes other than to say that the present has a way of becoming the past very quickly.That will be fourteen years worth of essays I’ve read.  Sometimes I wish I would have kept some stats.  Here are some estimates.

Essays read/graded: 25,000
Portfolios graded: 1400
times reading the Odyssey: 25
add/drop forms filled: 120
student drop in office visits: 4200
committee meetings attended: 260
lunch time basketball games played: 4680
photocopies made: enough to wipe out a forest
number of times I’ve worn a tie: 0
number of times I’ve taught Lolita: 2
number of  Speech (COMM 171) sections I taught in 1999-2000: 5
number of sections of COMM 171 I’ve taught since 2004: 0
Office moves: 1
Office rearranges: 16
times I’ve wanted to quit and become a peach farmer who writes nature poetry:13
plagiarism cases I reported: 30
plagiarism cases I dealt with myself: 200
Bethel softball games attended: 45
chapel speeches: 7
faculty retreat presentations: 5
dissertations completed: 1
number of visits Morgan has made to my office: 23
humanities major graduates: 6
humanities major graduates prior to 2010: 0
days of class missed due to sickness: 13
snow days: 3

“For when she was hardly more than a girl, Miss Minnie had gone away to teacher’s college and prepared herself to teach by learning many cunning methods that she never afterward used.  For Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other.”

-Wendell Berry, “A Consent”

"The act of knowing is an act of love." 

"The known seeks to know me even as I seek to know it; such is the logic of love . . . I not only pursue but truth pursues me. I not only grasp truth but truth grasps me. I not only know truth but truth knows me. Ultimately, I don't not master truth but truth masters me." (Parker Palmer, To Know as We Are Known)

At Bethel we have what are called “FYE” (Freshmen Year Experience) blocks–two courses blocked in a single time slot on Tuesday and Thursday of the fall semester that two professors teach teach. Cristian and I teach FYE together.  FYE is a sort of a misnomer because it only runs the first semester.  Nevertheless, since the program was begun eighteen years ago it has had a fairly dramatic impact on student retention and has enriched the overall Bethel experience.  While it is not a unique program–there are many similar across the country–it is one of the things that makes the Bethel experience unique. 

Often at the end of the semester our students have expressed their sadness that the block experience ends with the semester.  More times than I can count, students have told me during second semester that they “miss block."

We’ve been thinking a lot about SYE (Sophomore Year Experiences) that might build upon the FYE.  There are many things that could be done, but lets just say that at our institution curricular changes don’t come easy.  One day driving into school I had a brainstorm about a way to “reconnect” with my block during second semester that wouldn’t require any curricular change.  All it would require would be permission to meet one day per week during chapel (for chapel credit) during the second semester of sophomore year.  The VP for Student Enrichment liked the idea and gave our block permission to give it a trial run.

So yesterday Cristian and our two “block mentors” (Karli and Cassie–the best FYE student mentors in the history of the program) started brainstorming together about what this thing might look like.  We set a launch date, came up with a name (“B7 Reconnect”–FYE Block 7, reconnecting on many levels), talked about how to generate excitement about it, and discussed themes and topics that might be most helpful to sophomore’s in college–something in the general neighborhood of life calling or vocation and our identity in Christ without using such tired and over-used lingo as that.  Anyhow, I’m looking forward to the many layers of “reconnection” that may be possible in a setting that is as “un-classlike” as possible.

I love my work.  It’s the place God has called me–as Buechner says, it’s the place where (my) deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

p.s.  This song just started on my Last FM reggae station, and I’ve been singing it to my wife. :-)

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

"Nothing," replied the artist, "will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be overcome." (Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson)

In blog entry #11, I commented on “Visigoths” and the visigothian idea of grades. See that entry here. http://robbyprenkert.blogspot.com/2012/01/11-on-visigoths.html

We asked the class whether they thought–considering their graduating class–the Athenians would outnumber the Visigoths. I suppose the value of a question like that isn’t so much in the answer we get to the specific question, but to the discussion the question sparks and the perspectives it reveals.

I think it would be fair to say that most of them felt that the majority of their classmates were in the Visigoth camp, and seem to show few signs of relocating themselves.

Taking a bit longer view, I remain hopeful. My teaching partner and I think that seeds do get planted, and that sometimes–maybe even years later–students and former students slide on the scale and become a little less “V” and a little more “A.”  Of course, the two categories are not Christian, but a robust faith will always push one toward the “A” and away from he “V.”  t

Sadly, a superficial faith may very well slide a person deeper into visigothian territory.  But that’s a thought for another time.

Here is, by far, the best insight from class on Tuesday.

We read Neil Postman’s “My Graduation Speech” for class, a speach where he contrasts two groups that come to be metaphors for important ideas–the “Athenians” and  the “Visigoths.”  It’s a fantastic little piece and will only take you five minutes or so to read.  You should read it now if you never have.

http://www.ditext.com/postman/mgs.html

We asked the class think about their own (future) graduating class at Bethel, and then to speculate whether they thought the Athenians would outnumber the Visigoths.  One student suggested that a barrier to being an Athenian was actually “grades.”  My teaching partner chimed up right away and said, “That’s great!  Grades aren’t a value of the Athenians–grades are a value of the Visigoths."

I was reminded of Phaedrus' proposed university without grades in Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  But that’s an entry for another time.  (btw, You should read that book, too, but not right now.).

So grades are a visigothian idea–I like that. Some of our supposedly “best students” are Visigoths in their approach to education. And who do we have to thank for that?

It wasn’t students who invented the idea of grades.  It took a group of Visigoths called “professional educators” to up with that one.

She knocks at my office door, enters.  She is the student who shows up far too infrequently to class, and in what little writing she has submitted, she gives just a glimpse of a life teetering on the brink of chaos. 

“I wanted to recite psalm,” she says. 

It is an assignment–memorize and recite ten psalms over the course of the semester.  This is her first–somewhere at the midpoint of the semester, and considering her lack of work and attendance thus far, and our recent interventions to encourage her to come to class and to do the homework, I take this as a positive sign that she is making an effort to turn her semester around. 

“Which one?"

“Psalm 6.”  She is pretty and extremely bright.  But her eyes have an omnipresent, weary sadness about them.

I flip to Psalm 6 in our textbook–The Message–so I can follow along as she recites. 

^1-2 Please, God, no more yelling, no more trips to the woodshed.
Treat me nice for a change;
I’m so starved for affection.


^2-3 Can’t you see I’m black-and-blue,
beat up badly in bones and soul?
God, how long will it take
for you to let up?


^4-5 Break in, God, and break up this fight;
if you love me at all, get me out of here.
I’m no good to you dead, am I?
I can’t sing in your choir if I’m buried in some tomb!


^6-7 I’m tired of all this—so tired. My bed
has been floating forty days and nights
On the flood of my tears.
My mattress is soaked, soggy with tears.
The sockets of my eyes are black holes;
nearly blind, I squint and grope.


^8-9 Get out of here, you Devil’s crew:
at last God has heard my sobs.
My requests have all been granted,
my prayers are answered.


¹⁰ Cowards, my enemies disappear.

Disgraced, they turn tail and run. 

She does not stumble.  She does not pause awkwardly searching for the right word.  She recites flawlessly, as if she has written the words on her soul, and allowed me for just a moment to peer into it.  It is beautiful.

“Wonderful!” I say, and she manages a half smile.  I pause.  “I like this psalm.  Why did you choose it."

The sad eyes mist over, she glances at the floor, and then quickly back up.

“Because it’s exactly how I feel."

I take it she means especially the first seven verses.  Now I fight back tears.  “You keep praying that prayer,” I say. Then, as if to set her free from what must feel like confinement–the office of her professor–I say, “Thank you, for this. I needed to hear this psalm.” And she’s gone.

She does not make it to the end of the semester at my college, and I do not know where she is now.  It wouldn’t be all that hard to find out, for we live in a world with Facebook, a world where virtually no one disappears forever anymore. I have thought of that day from time to time since then, but I had forgotten the psalm until this morning when I read it again and remembered and wanted to say to the sad eyed one, “I remember you, I have thought of you, I will pray for you."


And “Thank you.”

My approach to education would be like my approach to everything else. I’d change the standard. I would make the standard that of community health rather than the career of the student. You see, if you make the standard the health of the community, that would change everything. Once you begin to ask what would be the best thing for our community, what’s the best thing that we can do here for our community, you can’t rule out any kind of knowledge. You need to know everything you possibly can know. So, once you raise that standard of the health of the community, all the departmental walls fall down, because you can no longer feel that it’s safe not to know something. And then you begin to see that these supposedly discreet and separate disciplines, these “specializations,” aren’t separate at all, but are connected. And of course our mistakes, over and over again, show us what the connections are, or show us that connections exist.