My First Year Teaching (Part 2) – A Few Early (Hard-Earned) Lessons

After reflecting a bit on joining a faculty and thinking about myself as a scholar (I am still getting used to that) I began to think about what I have begun to learn about myself as a teacher and teaching more generally. Below I have sketched out 5 basic things that I have learned about teaching and about myself as a teacher in my first year so far. These are by no means authoritative, but more reflections about what I am beginning to understand about teaching. They are probably in books somewhere but I am not sure any book can quite prepare you for fear that strikes you when you stand before the 40 twenty year olds and realize the 50 minute lecture you took two days to prepare is not going to inspire a bulge in theology majors, or your carefully crafted discussion questions sink into an abyss of silence and there you are left with 20 minutes of class time and nothing left to do or say.

So, here are a few thoughts and please share any comments or additional ideas below!

1) I have authority. Being the student for so long, under the tuteledge of older wiser, more well read professors I was one who was learning and I often deferred to their knowledge, I kept quiet to wait to see what they would say, I often wouldn’t offer an opinion out of respect for their knowledge. Beginning teaching I didn’t realize that I was the older, more well-read, authority in the classroom, but even more so. It would require extra effort to cultivate an environment where student’s felt free to ask questions, to discuss. My power did not lay in my knowledge but in the environment I created. What this meant for me initially was creating moments where I was not the authority. Small groups worked best for this as students were much more willing to offer opinions to one another than to me. What I have come to realize that I need to be very careful in how I wield my authority and what I know. Students are savvy listeners and are more often than not taking in a lot more than what I am saying. They are responding to my tone, my demeanor, and mostly how I interact with the few questions that are courageously offered.

2) Bored faces are not unthinking students.  The students immediate response is not a measure of their enthusiasm or like/dislike of the course. It took me a while to understand that the sleepy faces I faced in the morning in afternoon were hiding a great deal of thinking, processing, and reflecting. In my first classes I took this for granted and augmented my class with the idea that they were not listening rather than with the aim of deepening or making visible what they were thinking about.

3)  Less is more. It’s cliche, but its true. The classes where I spent hours carefully crafting a lecture landed with a great thud. Conversely, classes I threw together with a picture, three main points, and two passages from the readings, and a handful of questions for class discussion  more often resulted in a much more dynamic class session that students pointed back to in papers and exams. Ironically, my evaluations pointed to the early period of the classes (the ones I spent hours laboring over lectures) as the least focused and difficult to understand while the latter sessions were cited as the most focused and clear.

4) I have to find my own way. In the midst of many wonderful teachers at my institution I had to find my own way, my own style and voice. Some things work for others and different things may work for me. This doesn’t mean I don’t ask. No, I am constantly asking folks how they do a, b, or c. But I don’t take these as rules. They are examples of ways to approach students. Every discipline (and even course within a discipline) has different objectives, different material, different skills that it is seeking to cultivate. I came to realize that what works for the Scripture professor is effective because there are dates to be learned, authors to be memorized, themes to be applied. Some of the methods needed for teaching Scripture effectively could be applied to my theology courses, but not all of them. It took me some time, but I am beginning to find a way that I feel is both conducive to student learning as well as suitable to my own gifts and my subject material.

5) Don’t underestimate the power of the small group. Again, this is a little cliche, but in every class I have taught so far the large groups were simply a sea of disregard (although not really… see #2). But when I met with students in smaller groups of 5-6 I found their level of interest and inquisitiveness to be really wonderful. Those small interactions translated into more engagement in the larger class discussions and lectures creating a much more dynamic learning environment overall. What I came to realize was that larger class settings have a wide set of dynamics going on that I am not aware of. There are students who had a bad experience in their previous theology course, a fellow student is a “know-it-all” whom everyone is just waiting to dominate the conversation, or any other seemingly mundane fact. I was always aware of the need to cultivate a certain culture within a classroom, but I did not imagine all of the factors at play especially in an undergraduate classroom. Small groups allowed me to look each student in the eye, learn their names, hear their particular questions. It was only after this (regrettably 7 weeks into a 10 week quarter) that I found the students begin to engage the class material in a different way. In my new quarter I deliberately found ways to incorporate small groups that I could sit in on early in the quarter and I have found the students to be much more willing to ask questions early on.

So those are a few lessons I have learned early on. I am sure these were in a book on teaching somewhere, but even then I am not sure I would have been ready for standing in front of 40 students with varying levels of interest and motivation. These are a few ways of approaching undergraduate teaching that have helped me so far. I am sure I will learn more in the coming years but I am glad to have at least learned something before the year is out.

For those of you who teach (or have had wonderful experiences with teachers) what are some of the biggest challenges you face as teachers? How have you learned to address them in your experience?

 

Watching LOST is like listening to Jesus

Just a quick follow-up to my LOST post on Monday.

While I realize many are somewhat displeased with the season premiere, I have to say the premiere only endeared me to the show even more. Why?

As I struggled to follow along – pick up little insights here and there only to be surprised by a dead person now alive, or the seeming discontinuity of two stories happening at the same time – it occurred to me that this must of been what it was like for the disciples following Jesus…

No, I am not saying the show is Scripture. But what I am saying is that the show caught our attention, asked us to follow it, and we did. We tried to enter into its logic, its myths. We did so because it was at once strange to us, but also familiar. It recalled sayings and themes that were familiar to us. It displayed Scripture or philosophy, science and industry in ways that were both new and old to us.

But as the show unfolded it began to twist those familiar stories into a different possibility. We struggled to understand how this could be the case. With every answer the show provided we were always confronted with more questions (almost like a parable!) The significance of this should not be lost on us (no pun intended.) We watch media for certainty. Shows are entertainment because they prod us to think, but within the terms of what we think is acceptable or in ways we are willing to be prodded. But LOST seems to take advantage of this impulse by alluring us with themes that we think we know, then twisting them into something uncomfortable, possibilities that seem ridiculous to us.

This seems most evident with the liberal treatment of death and resurrection in the show. Does anyone really die in this frickin show? And yet the frustration we exhibit about a seemingly contrived device of entertainment actually unveils how final we think death actually is. What if death really isn’t the final word? What if we existed in a space where resurrection was possible and frequent? This would not only be scary but perpetually disrupting to those who continued to live.

Watching LOST puts bones on the Bible for me. It calls to mind what it must have been like for the disciples who heard something familiar in Jesus’ proclamation of the promises to Israel but then had to stand awestruck and dumb as he turned those familiar phrases inside out just as he promised the fulfillment of those same promises. Most of all I am brought to the utter confusion disciples must have felt when they saw Jesus arrested and crucified. What did it all mean? Did we miss something? We thought we knew how this was supposed to end! Instead they were met only with questions and silence.

Of course, this silence was met with that most ingenious literary device, the death of death and, inconceivably, the possibility that Jesus’ resurrection is ours… and yet we still must struggle to discern what that means for our lives together.

In saying all of this, I am not saying that LOST IS the gospel. But I do think it gives us an imaginative way of thinking about what it could be like to see ourselves within the gospel.

 

LOST!

A few thoughts to ponder as the final season of LOST comes upon us….

While the themes of faith versus science, belief versus material has permeated LOST since its earliest shows, I have often waited anxiously for the resolution. Following the blogs interpreting the various “easter eggs,” the literary reference here, the theological theme there, the scientific theory everywhere… the fun was in trying to piece everything together, to make it fit. But then it hit me. There is no resolution. LOST is not trying to land us on one side or the other. We are all LOST. We are lost in a world of beliefs and beliefs in information.

The world of LOST represents a modern moment where the religious has not given way to the scientific, but rather the two have collided leaving us to muddle our way through a space in between. On this island we find a convergence of certainties, science and the physical world, faith and a world that cannot be seen but still known. The inhabitants of this world begin on one side or the other, interpreting the island as either:

1) A world bound to a phenomenon of nature
- To be studied
- Controlled
- To be used/utilized

Or

2) A world that can only be understood through the religious/philosophical
- To be believed
- To be followed/obeyed

The characters/inhabitants become immersed in this world and exhibit a disoriented desire for faith or science, but also the pervasive disturbances brought on by the science or faith. The people of faith, must acknowledge the physical properties of the island while the people of science must account for happenings that are beyond scientific comprehension. The world of LOST resists a dichotomy and in so doing shows us how much we depend on those dichotomies to give meaning to our lives.

The constant streaming of references (theological, religious, philosophical, scientific, etc.) become keys or sign posts of interpretation, but ultimately begin to echo off one another, destabilizing the certainty of any claim other than the fact of the island, its inhabitants.

The island’s inhabitants though cannot discern the significance of the sign posts but suffer a dizzying disorientation as they grasp onto the certainty of a transcendent or the material world. These certainties become fragmented upon the constant appearance of the other invading/refusing any notion of certainty.

Through its gluttony of information, the utter disorientation of its inhabitants in the face of a world of material and transcendent certainties, LOST expresses the dissonance of our present moment. Far from being “post” we exist in a wreck, “lost” in a cacophony of competing claims and their material realities we, like the survivors must piece together a sense of hope and purpose and yet cannot do either apart from the fact of the island and its inexplicable hold on us.

In its wake we are only left with a tragic freedom that allows us to be something new in this new world. Yet these acts of being new are bound to what we deem impossible or possible and thus keep us bound, not perceiving the truth of our place.

This became more apparent in the final episodes of this penultimate season as the disorientation began to fragment the community who struggled to discern the meaning of their presence in the island. While searching for destiny they may have, like Hugo, “mistaken a blessing for a curse”… or like (the one we thought was Locke – who saw that coming!) declare his own war against Jacob (or against God). In Scripture Jacob was the one who stole Esau’s birthright and yet went on to become the medium of God’s redemption of Israel. This becomes played out again in the life of Joseph and yet in both of these moments those close could not discern their time or their place or their people in such a confluence of claims and evidence. I wonder how these events will seemingly work together?

As we saw in the final episode Jack’s certainty that if the island is gone they all have their lives back, did not account for the possibility of “the island’s” presence in their life prior to their arrival or among them after their departure. Apart from Locke, their lives on the island had been constantly marked by their refusal of the island, of the redemption it seemed to set before them. And so the question posed at the end as Juliette (poor Juliette!) pounded the bomb… have those who were redeemed refused their own redemption or finally lived into it. Or even more… could any of them have even recognized it for what it was?

On this point, what is so interesting about LOST is that it does not attack religion or science, but shows both their possibilities and their perils when those who seek to live into them mistake themselves as the totality of its meaning. As pseudo-Locke declared his intentions to kill Jacob I could only think of modernity’s march towards certainty. Yet this is painted in the final episode not as the height of a zealot’s faith or the victory of reason, but simply another mark in the unfolding drama of this island and those who have been drawn into its world.

 

My First Year as Faculty – Midyear Review

This coming week will mark exactly the halfway point of my first year as a faculty member at Seattle Pacific University. I thought I would take a few minutes to reflect on the subtle or not-so-subtle shift from graduate student to faculty member. Soon I will post a bit about what I have begun to glean (through much trial and error!) about teaching itself, but for now I will stick to a few thoughts about the transition into faculty itself.

It so happens that this week was the first time I took time to exercise since I have been teaching. Surviving the first quarter onslaught of class prep, discerning which e-mails to reply to and ignore, trying frantically to pull together some articles (or ONE article) and moving my dissertation into a book was quite an accomplishment. Taking a moment to breathe, enjoying a long lunch and getting some exercise seemed overly indulgent.

In the midst of this I came to realize there was a personal and professional shift I was still struggling to wrap my brain and life around. I am not a student anymore. At first glance this would seem rather obvious. But what I realized was that in my first quarter of teaching I was still operating as a glorified grad student, rushing to read for the next class, frantically pulling together a paper to present, all while juggling family, jobs, etc. My life was determined by countless deadlines and a seemingly constant deficit of time.

I am not sure I could have done much differently, as I have heard countless other stories of the first year faculty members literally holding on by their fingertips to survive. But as I begin to come out of that frenetic pace, I am realizing I was approaching my vocation with the mindset of a student. As a student my goals were rather short-term –turn in a paper to get a grade, get a good grade to get into grad school, write a proposal, write a chapter, finish a dissertation. These are all important goals, but ultimately they served very particular ends.

I approached my first quarter in much the same way –write an article to put on the C.V., entertain students for good evaluations, get a handle on material for a particular class. My days were filled with attempts to complete tasks for the sake of immediate goals. In taking some time to exercise and with some time to think, my muscles still trembling slightly from that unfamiliar feeling of exertion, I saw not momentary tasks that could be completed and filed away, but a life of writing, classes, evaluations, manuscripts, proposals, committee meetings. Rather than feeling dread I felt hope. I felt hope because I realized that these tasks were not being completed for passage into a higher realm, but that they formed the particularities of my calling as a professor and teacher. This was the life I was called to.

Because this was “the life,” I could now settle into a rhythm within it. I was free to take an hour lunch, exercise, take a break to eat lunch with my kids at school. These tasks are part of the rhythm of my life, like making lunches in the morning, helping with homework, mediating my children’s disagreements over Bionicles and the last piece of candy, the day-to-day realities of being university faculty is both the joy of teaching and researching along with the mundane and the frustrating. These are all aspects of the life I had worked so hard for. They are not something to move past but to find joy within.

In the days and weeks to come I am going to do my best to eat my lunch, exercise, stretch as well as prepare for my next article, class, or committee meeting because this is my life now, not a step towards another place. All of its joys and difficulties are not to be looked past but incorporated into the regular beat of my life and calling. I am realizing that I am no longer a student, simply trying to make it through. I am a teacher, a scholar and this does not require skills of survival, but habits that are not dissimilar to those we inhabit as parents. We find joy in surprising moments, discipline through the mundane, and in the midst of it all make space to sit back, breathe and survey the wonder of where we are and what we have been so blessed to do. Someone pays us to teach and write.

 

Avatar – Racist?

In the recent flurry of debate about whether or not Avatar is racist I would like to offer a possibility that resists the dichotomy of yes or no. Certainly the film plays into old, tired tropes of the courageous white guy who learns the sacred, carefully-honed skills of a people in a few months. Yes, the salvation of a people seems to hinge on the peculiar knowledge and/or strength of the hero.

But Avatar shifts from this paradigm in one important way. Not only does Jake Sully enter into the Na’vi, but he literally becomes one of them. That is, while the characters of Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, and others took on the ways of a people, they also maintained a privilege in their given locations based on their whiteness. Costner’s character, Lt. John Dunbar, in “Dances with Wolves” could always go back into town, he would continue to be a representative to the white world even from within his adopted people. Return was always possible for the white hero.

And yet in Avatar Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) literally forsakes the privilege of his humanity. Undoubtedly, speculators from earth will return and who will Sully be? Perhaps he is a revered leader among his adopted people, but he also now has no standing among humans who may return to Pandora. He can be represented as nothing other than a Na’vi.

Does the fact that Sully can no longer be recognized as human, as apart from the native people change how we conceive of the movie’s racial undertones?

In fact, it could be said that Cameron offered a slightly more complicated (albeit still problematic) display of Western intellectual caprice. The Avatar Project’s premier scientist, a botanist, at once understands the “spiritual” aspects of Pandora better than the Na’vi’s mythic explanations of natural phenomenon. And yet despite her desire to be a part of the Na’vi it is precisely her knowledge that prevents her from entering into the people. Ultimately, she must die. And it is upon her death that she comes to understand that what she saw as a scientific phenomenon was, in fact, something far more. Perhaps the Na’vi were not as naive as the humans imagined.

While I am not considering Cameron’s “Avatar” a sophisticated portrayal of racial existence in the world, I am not sure we have given him enough credit for beginning to blur some of the certainty that previous instantiations of the assimilated hero myth.

 

Tiger (a few words, a few weeks later)

I have been sitting on this post about Tiger Woods for probably too long, but I think I am finally ready to post it so here goes…

In the following I am going to add to what is already an obscene number of words devoted to the Tiger Woods situation. But in part I want to write not so much about Tiger Woods, but about what Tiger’s situation makes visible about manhood in our modern world. To my fellow men… don’t take this too hard. I realize that we are not all Tiger Woods. I know that maybe the majority of us are doing the best we can. But at the same time we have to begin to account for the realities in our world that make Tiger Woods’ story sadly not uncommon.

Tiger’s disregard for his wife and children, his seeming obsession with women is disturbing and sad. And yet it seems to me that Tiger’s actions do not seem that far out of proportion to what too many men do on a fairly regular basis when considered in proportion to men’s various levels of power and access. What I mean is that Tiger’s infidelity brings to light (once again) a lifestyle that is, sadly, not uncommon among men with power. Frequent travel, incredible amounts of money, and universal recognition all mix to create countless opportunities for men who want to do whatever they please.

But I want to ask a slightly different question about what Tiger’s infidelity means for men more generally, you know the 99.9999% who are not billionaires with jets and travel and instant recognition where ever we go? There is nothing to excuse Tiger’s behavior, but given the vast difference in power and opportunity is there really a difference between Tiger and the guy who buys images of naked women? between the men who obsess over images of women (clothed or not) on the internet? between the all too common clergy who take advantage of their position and admiration?

Perhaps Tiger’s transgressions should bring us to ponder how we attempt to control our own spheres of desire and longing, however large or however small. As much as we would love to say, as much as we need to believe that we are different than Tiger, can we truly say that? Can we truthfully say that we do not take advantage of opportunities around us that dishonor the women we love and cherish or women more generally? There is a reason the porn industry is flourishing, why there is very little that is sold without the image of women, that images of beauty and “health” violently affect women of all ages.

I say this not to condemn men in general, but to simply ask the question what do we do with the power, the freedom we have? however great or however small? Sadly, I suspect the question of whether we are Christian will have little to do with how we answer this question (although it should) and perhaps that should give us the greatest pause.

In reading about Tiger I am reminded of how easy it is to become blind to the power we actually hold within our own local worlds. But even more, perhaps we should begin, with fear and trembling, to acknowledge how that power too often flows in service of our own bent desires so that those we see, those we speak with, those we meet become objects within a world meant to serve our needs.

 

Beyond Multiculturalism…

I recently gave a brief talk at Skin Deep: A Conference on Faith and Race in the Church. I have had a few folks ask for my notes to the talk. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything written up, but here is the link to the audio file.

http://www.seattlequest.org/audio/brian-bantum-church-cannot-be-about-multiculturalism

 

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Why Obama Can’t Win When He Wins.

On Friday October 9, 2009 it was announced to much surprise and bewilderment that President Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. This announcement was met with a fury of support as well as disbelief. “He hasn’t accomplished anything yet,” was a refrain repeated by Facebook status’ and opinion articles alike. One CNN report framed Obama’s accomplishment in this way, “Unlike his predecessors, Obama was chosen not for substantive accomplishments, but for inspiring “hope” at the start of his term.”

I am not sure President Obama deserved the prestigious award any more than Al Gore did in 2007. I am not sure you could point to Gore’s documentary as a turning point in environmental policy. But both Gore and Obama represented something. Each posed a significant question to the world through their candidacy or their advocacy. But what is so interesting to me here is not the question of whether the peace prize was deserved or not, but how the question of representation is so central to this issue and to the reality of our modern world.

The Obama presidency has come to exemplify the complication of minority identity in the modern world. On the one hand the arrival of dark bodies into a place of power is met with the inflammation (or explosion) of resistance (see a sign to “nigger rig the Obama healthcare plan”) or more explicitly “you lie” from a now emboldened southern congressmen. But Obama also faces a surreal elevation of his capacities and possibilities that are difficult to imagine any one achieving. Obama is trapped within these violent refusals or violent incorporations. He is quickly becoming bound within the tragedy of modern racial representation.

Obama’s presence within the walls of American power has seemingly coalesced a people who have long felt themselves under threat. For many the “American Way of Life” is under siege from a President who ironically personifies the “American Dream.” Congressman Joe Wilson’s donations have ballooned since his comment and represent a marked discontent for this particular president. But this resistance is more than a disagreement about policy. Cries of “socialism” could be seen as a simple euphemism for the racial estrangement some people now feel from “their” country. And now without a perceived ally in the White House, but even worse a “foreigner,” all that is left is to persistently undermine Obama’s progress because his progress can only mean the devaluing of “American” identity. These objections have little to do with Obama personally and have everything to do with what Obama represents.

But on the other hand Obama suffers from the elevation of post-civil rights yearning to claim some movement forward, perhaps even some easement of a burdensome white guilt. Many are so elated to have finally turned a corner in American racial politics that they will endorse his presidency a success just by virtue that he is a black man. Yet, this claim has little to do with Obama and more to do with how many hope to represent their own place in the world. They support a black president and therefore are progressive, forward thinking people, unlike other backwards-looking people. While the committee of the Nobel Peace Prize undoubtedly admired Obama, were they really seeing the man and his accomplishments or what they hoped for him and for themselves? Through these means of unequivocal support Obama comes to represent an ideal of Americanism or global citizenship.

But what is lost in the midst of these movements of refusal or assumption is who Obama is. People cannot extricate themselves from the veneer of his race to see how his ethnicity, his life, his relationships all participate in actually animating his decision making. Instead his blackness has been co-opted into a representation of his foreignness or refracted into a statement about white (European) hope.
Sadly, this is the predicament of minority existence in the modern world. We, non-white people are either refused because of our racial demarcation through perpetual interrogation of our qualifications, our intentions, our methods. Or we are quickly subsumed into a hope for a multicultural university, or institution, or church, or world. Our pictures become parts of marketing campaigns and we are invited to every lunch. But we are not heard, we are not made a part of these machines. We are used. We are represented and then deployed for a purpose that often has more to do with the one’s representing than the one who is represented. Our lives become represented for us rather than being heard for the complicated realities that they are and in that particular story we come to find hope and the possibility of change.

This reflex of co-opting representation is not new but sadly it is a mark of our human condition. The representation and deployment of bodies for those of us who claim the name of Christ must see this within the optics of theological representation and transformation. In Christ’s birth God was represented to us, shown to us. This presence was not for our redeployment but for our transformation. We consume Christ’s body to become something different. Instead we consume Christ in order to re-create ourselves. As we co-opt Christ into our world, our hopes we re-deploy Jesus to serve an agenda that has little to do with Jesus and everything to do with us.

The representation of Obama as facilitator of peace or as an evil foreigner has little to do with Obama and everything to do with how we must begin to think about ourselves anew when confronted with people of difference. For Obama (and all people of color) this is the tragedy of modern identity. We, people of color, become deployed within worlds of white assumption or refusal and are repeatedly left for dead in the encounter.

If we are to imagine a way forward we can no longer represent others for ourselves. We must enter into the life of God “represented” to us and as us. Jesus was bound between expectations of what could and could not be. His death and resurrection assumed these refusals and accommodations into his own body so that we might imagine ourselves in the life of another. Obama is not Jesus. But this violence of representation to him arises out of a condition of sin that Christ came to overcome.

Instead, we see in the vilification and the “heroification” of Obama a tragic reiteration of our human condition. In capitulating to an economy of representation and distancing we all make real personhood impossible.

I pray that Obama (or his work for us) does not die simply to sustain our hopes about ourselves.

 

On My First Week of Teaching – A Practice of Patience (and exhaustion)

My first week of teaching was frankly exhausting. Many a faculty and post-first year colleagues told me it was going to be this way. I believed them, but then classes started.

I have gleaned two things about teaching from the first week of classes. Exhaustion comes from unexpected places and teaching is a practice of patience.

Exhaustion

In a new university with professors I do not know, with a curriculum I am still learning, and students I know very little about, teaching as an exercise in learning has taken on new meaning. The constant mental energy in learning names, looking at faces and trying to figure out if that stare is attentiveness or boredom is draining. Thinking about lectures for tomorrow and how those relate to what I thought I was going to do next week and realizing I didn’t come up with enough material for an hour and twenty minutes all serves to make for an exciting week.

In a way I probably knew all of this. I was fairly prepared that I was not prepared. But one thing I was not prepared for was the influx of information and the energy required to filter through all of it. Naively, I thought that this job was more of what I was doing as a grad student, thinking, writing, teaching. But what has really caught me off guard is the sheer amount of information I find myself filtering through everyday. E-mails from facnet, conversations among colleagues, possibilities of new books, questions about curriculum seem to surround me.

Coming in I was told, “don’t get involved with the inner politics too quickly.” So that was my plan, I was just going to sit back and let other people fight it out while I focused on my classes and getting my dang book done. But what I have found is that it is not that easy, because I actually have opinions about some of these things. Some of the issues are issues that actually have something to do with my future at this institution and will be a lot more work to insert myself into in a year or two. So perhaps I should just say a little bit right now.

But even more than actually having the conversation is the mental energy required to think about whether I should have the conversation, send the e-mail, look at that book somebody suggested. The process of just filtering the information is what I have found to be the most exhausting aspect of my first week. I am sure it will only be a matter of time until I become more adept at this process, but this was honestly the most unexpected and most tiring part of my first teaching experience.

Patience

As I suggested earlier, I think I am a pretty good teacher. I taught classes on my own was teaching assistant for A LOT of classes in grad school. While there I had the privilege of learning from some folks who I consider master teachers. But what I came to find in teaching my own semester (or quarter) long courses as opposed to summer courses was that a great deal of patience is required. I don’t mean patience for annoying students. My students have been really wonderful. What I found is that teaching my own course required me to be slow in making my point. I am coming to find that in order for the students to truly learn I need to let the course unfold. The structure of the course has to be pedagogical, informative, transformative.

This is a bit of a change for me because as a TA I was guiding students through another person’a land, so to speak. I was helping them learn the ebbs and flow, the patterns and indigenous life. I was a mountain guide whose responsibility it was to help students find their way and in doing so there were moments when I would need to etch out a foothold, or make explicit a path, point out what was important so they wouldn’t miss it next time. I learned a lot of important skills (the power of analogies and illustrations, to name two) in doing this and I think the idea of students learning through the unfolding of a class became embedded in the structure of my syllabi.

But what I found was that I was trying to be a TA to my own class. I was trying to tell students the significance of a point rather than guide them to it. Rather than being a guide in another person’s land, I had to help these students become at home in my land. This, I have come to find, requires a great deal of patience. Instead of answering the question, we read through the text. Instead of pointing to what will be said in three weeks, I am letting questions lay for a week or so to let the readings lead the student into a possible answer to their question.

For a person who became adept at guiding folks through other people’s land it is a strange thing to leave a question unanswered, to be patient and trust the structure of the course and the readings. So I am learning patience in this process. I am learning to trust my students and trust the work that I have put in to crafting the course. The prospect of allowing this process to unfold has become somewhat freeing because I know the questions will be answered in time and this process is important for the student’s development. Of course knowing the process works and restraining myself from “oversteering” has been the distinct challenge of my first week teaching.

I am sure there is a sermon or spiritual lesson in there somewhere, but I am just too tired to tease it out right now…

 

Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” and the Future of Theology

Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”:The Order of Disorder and the Politics of Confusion

Houston Baker discussed the power of the Harlem Renaissance and black artistic expression as the “mastery of form and the deformation of mastery.” By this phrase Baker refers to the power of black artists to master the forms of European artistic expression and then turn them inside out to re-express notions of human freedom that were denied by the very same European forms that sought to oppress and enslave them.

Listening to John Coltrane’s 1961 version of “My Favorite Things” I could not help but be reminded of Baker’s analysis, but also being a theologian I began to imagine the possibilities for theological reflection.

The iconic “My Favorite Things” of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music” still reminds me of post-Christmas hot chocolate and the ideal of romping through the hills in familial bliss, leaving all of the nastiness of a Nazi regime far, far away.

But in Coltrane’s rendition only 2 years later, the familial bliss remains within the horror. Coltrane’s “favorite things” takes place not upon the placid hills of a neutral borderland, but within the torment of a violent America, and his own tortured soul.

The refrain recalling one’s favorite things are not uttered in secure possibility. In this time everything the black man or woman wants or desires is punctuated by their refusal. They are thirsty, but there is a fountain they cannot drink from. They want a house, but there is always a house they can never have, they want to teach, to be a doctor, to travel… all of these possibilities are always punctuated by a declarative NO.

In the gaps of these refusals they still find joy, they still find one another. In this respect to speak of your favorite things is to confess both the joys, the small things that bring meaning to your life and comfort you in moments of fear or despair, but these things can never be spoken of in a tidy way. They are always bound to the death, the refusal, the dehumanization of the modern world upon dark bodies.

Coltrane moves within the piece at one moment stripping down the melody to its barest elements and then flows into addition, to filling out the melody in ways that one could not have thought possible. Both moments deepen and widen the significance of the melody. But here additions and the reductions account for the paradox of one’s desires in Coltrane’s time. Desires here were always met with refusals, hope with death, an ebb and flow of finding enough in the scarcity and making something out of nothing, and yet in this paradox of wanting what one could not have: they yet had, they desired, they found joy.

The stripping down and the reductions do not distort the song, they do not render the song irrational but in fact point to the paradox of our own lives as having what we ought not to want, and bending towards that which is not meant for us, while still refusing that which is intended for us.

Coltrane deepens our understanding of our condition by laying bare our desires and the refusal of these desires. Within the churchly space we do not meet God with our own order, but with being laid bare and being shown who we are. This encounter throws us into the dynamic range of God’s song where we must lament our own failures, confess our own misshapen desires. We must cry out for we are refused and oppressed and yet in the midst of this we also sing that sweet melody of hope, that refrain of God’s promise that never grows quiet in the wailing of our brothers and sisters or their quiet meditations.

In the dynamic movement of this song we find order, we find God. Order is our being misshapen, “de-ranged” and re-arranged. Sometimes it is not us but our neighbor who is confronted with their own powerlessness and must cry out. sometimes it is our neighbor who bears a quiet certainty that witnesses to God’s faithfulness. Perhaps the question is not how do we order these two seemingly disparate moments, but rather what is it that prevents us from binding these realities (and the people who so often exhibit them) from finding a home in the same space? Thus it is not a question of ordering music or art, or thoughts, but becoming undone by a new social arrangement.

It is this amalgamation of despair and possibility that I find so compelling within Coltrane’s rendition. And while the song seemed rooted within a European ideal (or an American idealization of Europe), Coltrane’s rendition speaks to its deepest possibility, mastering the form of its quiet longings but also wrapping those longings within the deep pain of the present. In this way, it spoke dramatically to its contemporary moment in a way that Hammerstein probably could not have imagined himself.

Is it possible for theologians to re-imagine themselves and their work within Coltrane’s re-imagination of “My Favorite Things?”  So many concerned for justice and mercy have found Christianity or at least its doctrine as the central culprit. But is it possible for us to utter this tune anew, to master the form so that we might deform the mastery? Is it necessary that we leave the central claims concerning our God? That the child in the manger was God? That the resurrection was not a symbol, but a real moment of liberation for now and a time to come? Is it possible to think of theological liberation apart from these claims? This is the possibility of theological reflection. Theology done “classically” is a theology that idealizes a past imaging a possibility for a future in a neutral land. But perhaps theology (and our Christian lives) might be able to imagine the claims of the Christian tradition anew, mastering its forms in order to unleash it for new work in a broken world whose masters have mistaken themselves for gods.

Can our theology utter dissonant tones and shrieking of righteous anger and yet still remind us of “our favorite thing” even when “when the bee stings, when the dogs bark…”

I hope this is the case. For my darker brothers and sisters who have and are having questions concerning the possibility of theology, of the claims of the church that have stretched so long… Coltrane can speak to us about the possibilities of these claims. We can sing this song and in a way that can remind creation of its calling in the midst of its unfaithfulness.

To those who so vehemently “defend” the faith, who uphold orthodoxy in the face of its attackers… is it possible that in our stripping down of the melody we have sung it truer? Perhaps the improvisational runs and dissonant chords of we, your darker brothers and sisters have spoken to a truth not visible within the neat logic of Western philosophy.

I do not know the answer to these questions, but I do believe Coltrane has something to teach us on the way.