Paul Wallace shares some excellent thoughts about the validity of a Christian education. He uses Richard Dawkins’s recent comments against the idea of a school for atheists as his framework. Check it out: “Richard Dawkins’ Atheist Academy of Unguided Truth” at Religion Dispatches.

It sounds like Wallace’s school fits well with my sensibilities.

Occasionally, I like to post on a tool that has been useful for me, either in teaching or research. Today, I’d like to talk about a tool that’s useful for both: GoogleDocs.

By now, most folks are aware of the existence of GoogleDocs. It should come as no surprise that I, being a rabid Google fan, would be a user. Let me take you through two ways that I use GoogleDocs. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.

1. Reading, Annotating, Storing, and Sharing Research

Recently, I decided that my students at Houston Christian should read Bertrand Russell’s classic essay “Why I am Not a Christian.”¹ Fortunately, this essay is now public domain, and I could very easily find it out there on the Internet. Having done this, two conflicting issues arise within my soul:

1. When I read, I like to annotate — underline, write notes and questions in the margins, etc.
2. BUT, I like to be as green as possible, so I’d prefer not to print this article.

Enter GoogleDocs.

By copying and pasting the article into GoogleDocs, I’m able to read and annotate on my laptop, store the article and its annotations in the cloud for access from anywhere, and share that document with whomever I please.

I use two primary tools while reading and annotating:

1. The Insert > Comment feature (option + command + m on a Mac). If you select a piece of text and insert a comment, the text will be highlighted and a little comment field will appear on the outside of the page. Here you can type anything you want. The image below shows these comments.
2. Underlining. This is very simple, but I underline stuff that I find important or interesting, just as I would on a paper copy.

When a comment is selected, the highlighting turns orange, and the comment field floats so that it is next to the comment. When it is unselected, the highlighting turns yellow.

If you need to share this document with co-workers, all you need to do is use GoogleDocs built-in Share features, and you can easily share it with someone else who can collaborate with you on it.

Should you need to print your comments, you can download the document in Word format, and it will put your comments in as Word comments. Handy!

2. Striving for a Greener Classroom

Houston Christian is a one-to-one laptop school. Moreover, we use GoogleApps to handle student and staff email. Therefore, every student and every faculty member already has a login for our Houston Christian Google domain. This means that every student already has a login for GoogleDocs.

Because I know each student has access to it, I use GoogleDocs to create a more paper-free classroom by providing almost every handout via GoogleDocs. Each course that I teach has its own folder and that folder is shared with all of my students so that they can see its contents (at some point, I may make this folder totally public). Within the folder students will find:

• Class documents such as syllabi and rubrics.
• A reading calendar — complete with links to reading guides for various items that we read.
• Any handouts that I have created.
• Scanned copies of articles and other readings.
• Anything else that I would normally distribute via paper.

Again, this is all very easy because of GoogleDocs built-in sharing features.

If you want to take it a step further, you can even use GoogleDocs for paper submission. I used to do this, however, I have switched over to turnitin.com for a variety of reasons.²

If you have any questions, just comment below.

Footnotes

1. The essay is interesting as a historical document insofar as it documents anti-religious thinking from the beginning of the 20th century. However, I think that many of Russell’s arguments are still prevalent on college campuses.
2. NB: This still achieves my goal of a paperless classroom as Turnitin now features Grademark and Peermark which allow me to grade and create student reviews of papers.

During our teacher in-service last week, Dr. Stephen Livingston, our Head of School, asked the faculty this question: “Why are Christian schools afraid of academic greatness?”

The question assumes, of course, that Christian schools do indeed possess such a fear. I think that Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind as well as numerous observations and studies on the nature of Christian education (specifically, the desire of the community to shelter its students from alternative points-of-view while inculcating them into their own community) point to the dearth of top-notch intellectualism in Christian schools, especially those of an evangelical bent.¹

So, let’s accept Dr. Livingston’s premise and move on.²

To understand why Christian schools might be afraid of academic greatness, I think it’s necessary to reach into the collective psyche of the American evangelical movement and understand the divide between Protestants and Catholics.

I didn’t grow up in church, but I have learned over the last few years that many Protestant groups have a very negative opinion of Catholicism — some even deny that Roman Catholicism is “Christianity.” I wonder if this was really the intent of the reformers. Surely if we had Martin Luther here today, we’d be able to find some common ground between him and the Catholic church. Right?

This anti-Catholic sentiment has caused them to ignore a principle made famous by Augustine and then later by Thomas Aquinas:

All truth is God’s truth.

Whatever is true in the world, points to God. The source of that truth doesn’t matter — even if the devil speaks truth, it is still the truth.

After Dr. Livingston asked his question, I stood up and said something along these lines (I’m paraphrasing here):

I believe that many Christian schools fear academic greatness because they lack faith in the Truth. Many of these groups have built up walls of doctrine and dogma and worry that they are not really correct; they worry that if they allow anyone to shed light on it, it will be destroyed. In short, they fear the truth.

In reality, all truth is God’s truth — St. Augustine told us that some 1500 years ago. The source doesn’t matter. It could be the Bible or the rap lyrics of Eminem. If truth is present, then it points to God and can enhance our understanding.

We must lay open literature, science, mathematics, the arts, and even the Bible, and allow our students’ eyes to examine them critically and find the truth in them. We must separate the wheat from the chaff and allow untruthful ideas, no matter how closely we wish to cling to them, to be eradicated.

Honestly, if all truth is God’s truth, then we should not fear free inquiry neither as students nor as a faculty.³ Such a fear holds a school back from being academically great.

For the record, I don’t intend to use any Marshall Mathers tunes in my class this year.

Ummm…I may have polished that up a bit, but you get the idea, right?

Footnotes

1. Allow me to offer this caveat: I am not indicting all Christian schools. However, the results of Christian fundamentalism have been intellectually disastrous and have left evangelical Christianity on the fringes of the academy — an academy that, at least until the late nineteenth century, evangelical Christianity held in the palm of its hand.
2. If you disagree with the premise, feel free to voice your opinion in the comments below.
3. As Houston Christian High School moves closer to accreditation by the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest (ISAS), the issue of free inquiry has come up frequently. Me? I’m all for it!

The 2010-2011 academic year begins tomorrow for Houston Christian High School (HCHS), which means that I’ll be fairly busy teaching classes. During the course of the school year, I hope to blog quite a bit about my experience for two reasons: new courses and new methods.

New Courses

The first is a course required of all seniors at HCHS called “Forming a Christian Worldview.” This course is an exploration of three major topics: (a) What is religion? What is philosophy? How do they affect us? (b) What is Christianity? (c) What are the similarities and differences between Christianity and other faiths/philosophies? Here is the official course description:

Taking Tertullian’s challenging question (“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”) as a cue, students will explore the value of logical, philosophical, and theological thinking and how an understanding of these can significantly affect the production of a personal worldview. Students will begin by asking questions about the nature of religion: What is religion? Where did it come from? Why do humans yearn for a higher power. Then, drawing on nearly two millennia of great Christian thinkers, students will critically examine core Christian categories and doctrines. Students will use these categories to engage key theological, philosophical, and inspirational writings of various schools of thought.

This course will be a change of pace for our students, but I think they’ll enjoy it.

The second class I’m teaching is called “From Achilles to Christ” (a title I stole from Dr. Louis Markos of Houston Baptist University…I hope he doesn’t mind). This course asks students to read classical Greek and  Roman literature and consider (a) what universal truths these westerners had stumbled upon, (b) the nature and importance of myth to the human experience, and (c) why these works and authors were so widely read amongst early Christians.

So, I’ll be blogging about class because I am now teaching something that is really in my field and within the purview of Withering Fig. (You may remember that I taught English last year. I have now switched departments.)

New Methods

Last year, as things drew to a close, I switched one of my classes over to student-centered discussion very similar to Harkness. I did this as sort of a pilot program with one section of junior English in hopes that I’d be able to use it all year with my senior course this year. I feel like things went fairly well, and I learned quite a bit.

The core of Harkness is student-centered discussion of a text — an idea which lends itself very well to seniors discussing world religions and philosophy. Rather than have the teacher lead the discussion or lecture, students are tasked with mining the text for meaning, making connections, etc. No more chalk and talk! The teacher fades into the background as just one participant in the discussion or even as a pure observer.

The hope is that students will develop the study and class skills necessary for success in college. Furthermore, I expect that students will learn how to discuss rather than debate everything — I force them to support their claims with evidence rather than just blurting out assertions.

We’ll see how it goes.

If you’re interested in more of the theory behind what I’m doing with student-centered discussion, check out my previous series: “Colonizing the Student.”

In case you don’t care…

If you really don’t care about what’s going on in my classroom, then feel free to skip these articles. They will all fall under the “Education” category and will be tagged appropriately, so just pay attention to that stuff and you’ll be fine!

However, due to the content of these courses, I really think you might find some of it interesting.

In a previous post, I demonstrated the number of different interpretations that exist in a classroom. The question that I left with was this: “How does this serve the student? Is it constructive or chaotic?” The answer to the latter question is “YES.”

You can call me a silly-headed postmodernist or just plain crazy, but I’m okay with a little chaos in the classroom. Look, I’m not an engineer, I’m not a scientist, but I do like the idea of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics! If a system is not maintained, it loses stability and slips into chaos. Education is, by its nature, both constructive and destructive. In order to understand the systems we study, we have to break them down into their elements and rebuild them in a way that we understand. This new copy is never the same as the original as it has been altered by the baggage the individual brings to the new construct.

I was chatting with a colleague lately about the value of notetaking and different styles of doing it. She recalled a teacher in high school who forced the students to copy down pages of notes directly from the blackboard. While it was not the most exciting way to learn, she said she remembers this information because there is something about the act of writing that helps her to remember information.

“I’m the same way,” I told her. However, I went on to explain that I can copy mindlessly without paying any attention to what I’m doing. What works better for me is transforming things into my own words — paraphrasing!

What is the act of paraphrasing? Isn’t it taking a construct, breaking it down into its elements, and then rebuilding it? The new construct is similar to the first, but not exactly the same — it is a translation: different but same.

I tend to feel the same way about the act of learning. In order to learn, we must break things down and rebuild them. At some point in this act, we may have complete and utter chaos. In a room with 225 different interpretations of the classroom-text, chaos is immanent and necessary.

The grander issue is not chaos, but varying levels. This is where we separate the men from the boys, women from the girls, etc. — can you the teacher handle the fact that different students are at different stages in the deconstruction-reconstruction process? If I’m answering for myself, I have to say: NO. I’m sure that takes practice, and I’m just not there. Perhaps in years to come…

In my previous post, I mentioned that the teacher’s role was not to colonize the student’s brain in hopes of creating a perfect clone. This, in my view, is a dysfunctional student-teacher relationship.

Rather, I’d like to promote diversity and independent thinking.

A young mind is so malleable. As a teacher, I have the opportunity to leave a lasting impression on a student. These impressions can come in many shapes or forms: academic, professional, personal, etc. An impression is a two-way street made up both of what I am trying to convey (the message) and how the student receives or interprets that message. Therefore, I am not in complete control of the impression that I make on a given student. This is obvious enough when I walk into my classroom every day. Some students love me; others deplore me. Am I treating those students that love me any differently? Probably not.¹ As a teacher, I am putting signals out there; it is up to the student to receive and interpret. How they receive and interpret is completely out of my hands.

This brings me to today’s thought experiment:

Creating Diversity and Difference.

Excuse the following theoretical digression. It’s going somewhere, I promise.

Personally, I believe that an author is only in partial control over the meaning that is put into a text. The author can try and try and try to create an exact sense of meaning that expresses 100% of his/her thought, but at some point the conversation must be completed by the reader. The text reaches its full, but not complete,² meaning at the point in which reader and author connect via this shared experience.³ Both reader and author are working together to produce meaning.

The classroom is a text. Under traditional models of teaching, the teacher would be considered the author and the students are the readers. As the teacher attempts to convey monolithic meaning, the students receive and interpret the monolith in their own ways through their own viewpoints. Thus, if I have 15 students, then 16 of us are producing meaning: 1 author + 15 readers = 16 makers or meaning.

That’s quite a few viewpoints, and, no doubt, there will be diverse thoughts and opinions. However, in this model, who is able to benefit from those diverse viewpoints? Only one person: the teacher who is the only one hearing all viewpoints. So, from the student’s vantage, only one actual meaning has been produced: the conversation between a particular student and teacher. If we are student-focused in our educational modeling, then we must agree that this model does not afford the student the opportunity to hear from multiple viewpoints. In fact, depending on the student’s academic and mental acumen and leanings, this model in effect creates one monolithic teaching from the student’s vantage.

How then do we overcome this? How do we create an environment in which a student can take advantage of more than one production of meaning? The answer is obvious: open up the text to more authors. If we have 16 people coexisting in the classroom, then it is possible for the student to be participating as a reader/receiver in 15 different conversations at a time as the students publish thoughts through various means (discussion, blogs, message boards, etc.). In this model, an incredible amount of difference is being created. Because meaning is really the product of a handshake between reader and author, each student would be considering 15 different conversations, meaning that there is potential for 225 different interpretations of the classroom-text.⁴

OK. So, we can open up the text, allowing students to take part both as author and reader. Great. What’s the point? How does this serve the student? Is it constructive or chaotic? That’s the next topic…

Footnotes

1. Or, if I am, it is not an intentional, conscious decision to do so, and I apologize to all.
2. Meaning is never really “complete.” This business is always unfinished and imperfect.
3. Apologies to my friends out there who find me too postmodern.
4. In reality, there will be fewer as many students will produce meanings that are similar enough to be considered “same.” But, you get the idea, right?

Now we come it: colonizing the student. What do I mean by that?

As I mentioned earlier, I think that the relationship between teacher and student could, in dysfunctional situations, be compared to the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.

As the teacher, I represent the colonizer, an imposing powerful force who comes on the scene prepared to exercise my hegemonic privilege. I am the dictator who controls what happens in the classroom. Every word that they read has been vetted by my censors and every word they write comes under my careful and exacting scrutiny. With the stroke of my pen, I have the ability to enact legislation that can doom the poor, oppressed student to what seems like an eternity of academic servitude. This is the power I wield.

The student, on the other hand, has little autonomy once she enters the door of my classroom. She can do nothing but wilt under the pressures of my potency. I can subdue her will and force her to perform academic feats that meet my approval. My goal: To make her think exactly as I think.

This is the dysfunction. Why would I want a student to think like me?

I recall attending a church service back in high school when I was a “pagan”¹ The fellow leading the Bible study that morning, Lyle, was a middle-aged, red-haired gentleman who was nice enough. At one point during the study,² Lyle asks, “Wouldn’t the world be great if everyone thought exactly like you do?” I snickered, but he was serious. “How wonderful would it be if we all believed the same thing?” I answered by telling him that I thought it would be awful.

I don’t marvel at a snowflake because it is exactly like all the other snowflakes.

I don’t go to the Rocky Mountains and wish that every mountain looked the same.

I don’t look at a collection of clouds and hope that they all morph into the same shape.

Beauty in nature is not found in similarity but difference. Most people would hold this to be true. It’s incredible to us that there are millions of species of insects. Just insects! Not to mention all of the other types of animals. Everyone has different fingerprints, different smells, different different different.

So, why in the world would I want my students to think exactly as I do? Why would I want to impose my own thought patterns on them? If the beauty of the world is expressed in variety rather than similarity, shouldn’t the beauty of my classroom mirror that?

Unfortunately, I think that this is exactly what many teachers do. They come on strong, their brains invading the minds of their students with a powerful case of “shock and awe.” Once their borders have crumbled, the teacher begins to setup an infrastructure in the students’ minds. The teacher then fosters little gray matter clones with synapses that fire in exactly the same fashion so as to reproduce patterns.

These are the machinations not of a teacher but an ideologue, a diviner and desirer and devotee of dogma.

This is what I mean by colonizing the student: placing the student in the position of the “other” and then seeking to conquer her mind by whatever means necessary. I think there is another way, a better way. There is a reason that universities consider diversity a key initiative. While some may think that this is simply a marketing ploy because “diversity” is the academic buzz word du jour, I do not. I think there is something to very different minds from very different molds getting together and communicating.

Diversity. That’s part 4. Stay tuned, please.

Footnotes

1. NB: Not my term. I hate that word. I hate the us vs. them paradigm that it imposes on my thoughts. But, that’s what they called me! Now that I think of it, maybe my hatred for this term has something to do with my hatred of that experience.
2. By the way, I have no idea what the study was actually about.

The previous post ended with this question:

“What is my job as an educator in a pluralistic community? What is the teacher to do?”

What I should do is create opportunities for the student to learn.

The student’s brain is traveling down a dark road, and the teacher’s hope is to entice it to make a stop at some intersection and buy some goods, some snacks for the road. Occasionally, it will stop in for a full meal or maybe stay the night in one of the roadside motels. We put the student in front of our favorite authors, our favorite thinkers, our favorite teachers, the people and ideas that challenged and stretched us, and ask them to tell us what they think about it. This is the bait. If we get a nibble, we’re usually pleased. If we get a real bite and then we’re able to reel them in, then we’re really jazzed.

Mixed metaphors aside, education in my view is providing opportunities for students to gain enlightenment. My hope is always that students will find some different take on a piece that makes me re-examine it in a new light. This happened recently when my junior English class examined the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” as we studied McCarthyism and The Crucible. Here are the lyrics to the performance of the song that is found on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3:

Well, I was feelin’ sad and kind’a blue,
I didn’t know what I was a-gonna do,
Them Communists wus a-comin’ around,
They wus in the air,
They wus on the ground.
They wus all over.

So I run down most hurriedly
And joined the John Birch Society,
got me a secret membership card
And went back home to the yard,
Started lookin’ on the sidewalk,
under the hedges.

Well, I got up in the mornin’ ‘n’ looked under my bed,
I wus lookin’ every place for them gol-darned Reds.
Looked behind the sink, and under the floor,
Looked in the glove compartment of my car.
Couldn’t find any . . .

Looked behind the clothes, behind my chair
lookin’ for them reds everywhere
looked up my chimney hole,
even deep down inside my toilet bowl,
They got away . . .

I heard some foot-steps by the front porch door,
so I grabbed my shot-gun from the floor.
Snuck around the house with a huff and a hiss,
saying “Hands up, you communist!”
It was the mailman.
He punched me out.

Well, I wus sittin’ home alone an’ started to sweat,
Figured they wus in my T.V. set.
I peeked behind the picture frame,
Got a shock from my feet that hit my brain.
Them Reds did it!
Hootenanny Television . . .

Well, I quit my job so I could work alone,
got a magnifying glass like Sherlock Holmes.
Followed some clues from my detective bag
And discovered: red stripes on the American flag!
Betsy Ross . . .

Now Eisenhower, he’s a Russian spy,
Lincoln, Jefferson and that Roosevelt guy.
To my knowledge there’s just one man
That’s really and truly American:
That’s George Lincoln Rockwell.
I know for a fact he hates Commies cus he picketed the movieExodus.

Well, I fin’ly started thinkin’ straight
When I run outa things to investigate.
Couldn’t imagine nothing else,
So now I’m home investigatin’ myself!
Hope I don’t find out too much . . . Good God!

For many years I’d viewed these lyrics in a rather straightforward fashion. Here was Dylan lampooning the idiocy and paranoia created by the John Birch Society’s search for communists, especially among members of the Civil Rights movement.

One of my students, however, focused on the last verse, which I had never thought about that much. Specifically, the student focused in on these two lines:

“So now I’m home investigatin’ myself!
Hope I don’t find out too much . . . Good God!”

The student went on to explain how the John Birch member was truly opposed to a critical self-examination. He’s investigating himself, but his real hope is that he won’t find out too much. Aren’t we all like that? Don’t we all look into ourselves and think what the John Birch member thought: “Good God!”? The need for introspection and self-examination is sometimes outweighed by the fear that we have regarding what we might find.

I thought this was a really excellent point that augmented my appreciation and understanding of the piece.

That was a success story. Often, however, things are less successful, and that is where this series of thoughts is headed. My biggest fear is that the relationship between student and teacher will turn into the relationship between colonizer and colonized, that I will force my views upon them and not give them an opportunity to think things through for themselves and share their own views.

I really don’t want to impose my worldview upon a student and cause them to fear thinking differently.

In the next couple of posts, I’ll be exploring that idea a little more in-depth.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about educational theory. As I’ve been doing this, I’ve been reading a variety of essays about race and class struggles as well as some texts dealing with genocide and imperialism in Africa. Perhaps an odd combination when it comes to thinking about students…

What really got me going was the idea of cultural imperialism and cultural hegemony that came to mind while reading Sherman Alexie‘s “Superman and Me” in which he discusses some difficulties he had growing up on a reservation where being book smart wasn’t prized by his peers. Specifically, I became interested in the way that Superman serves as an important symbol for Alexie. This thoroughly patriotic, thoroughly American, thoroughly white, yet thoroughly alien savior would bust down the doors and help Alexie free himself from the chains of the reservation. How strange that a man who seems quite proud of his Spokane Indian heritage would seek to liberate his fellow tribesmen by asking them to assent to the cultural norms and expectations of whites.

Like it or not, we are living in a postcolonial¹ situation here in the United States. reading Alexie’s essay made this very real to me. As I am not a postcolonial theorist, I can’t begin to relate the history of scholarship on this topic, but I hope to just roll through this as a thought experiment. How has the Euro-American, colonial attitude infected the classroom? How has it infected my classroom?

To think about this, I feel that we must begin at the beginning, and consider some very basic questions. As I read Alexie’s words on the joys of reading and his desire to help the Spokane learn to feel that same joy, I began to think, “What is my job as an educator in a pluralistic community? What is the teacher to do?”

Part 2 of this series will look at that question a little more in-depth.

Footnotes

1. I realize that this particular word is a minefield. At this moment, I don’t wish to unpack it. However, I do hope to spend some time parsing out Alexie’s educational history as presented in this essay. At that point, I’ll hit the postcolonial thing a bit more. For now, check out wikipedia: “Poscolonialism.”

As mentioned previously, I am working through some hermeneutical issues, and, thanks to Merold Westphal, I am particularly interested in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. In reading Westphal, I came across this quote from Gadamer’s Truth And Method:

To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.¹

This quote comes from a section in which Gadamer is likening the art of interpretation to conversation. As such, I find it appropriate to think about in the light of Harkness.

Because Harkness, at its core, is about self-discovery and conversation, students interpreting a text on their own and sharing their ideas with each other, I found Gadamer’s idea of conversation to be enlightening. Sitting at the Harkness table, our goal should not be to lord our superior opinions over those of our neighbors. Rather, we should seek understanding.

The first step in this process is to be assertive and put forward our thoughts. The process toward understanding does not end here, however, nor does it end with a successful defense of our own thoughts. Instead, the next step is to enter into communion with our interlocutors in hopes of understanding all points of view. The end result is not necessarily a consensus, though sometimes it may be. Instead, the result is that we are changed by this communion. We have successfully listened, heard, and understood those around the table, and we have come away changed by the experience.

Footnotes

1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth And Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed. (New York: Crossroad, 2004), 371. Thanks to Merold Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2009) for pointing me in that direction.