Unlearning Thankfulness

Tonight, I am shirking my responsibilities. Tonight, I am writing a blog post instead of planning that 90-minute C.S. Lewis lesson plan that I have to teach at the end of the week. I'm not reading the church fathers.

Yep. I'll regret this later. But for now, I have something to ponder.

Tonight I stumbled on "Are We Calling This a Win-Win?", a post from Jamie the Very Worst Missionary on the dangers of "poverty tourism". Jamie spent a number of years as a missionary in Costa Rica. In this post, she suggests - sarcastically, with humour - that short-term missions designed to make white American kids thankful are a waste of time.

I get her point. I agree. Last year, I taught a unit on diversity in my English Composition class. With this unit, my goal is to convince students that social privilege is a thing and that, as Christians, whether we are rich or poor, our responsibility is to love and support those who struggle in life. Unfortunately, a few students always walk away from this unit believing that the main lesson is simply that we need to be thankful for what we have and give some extra money to those who slept in the day that God passed out dollar bills. While no student has ever articulated this, the assumption is that we are somehow more blessed than those who are in poverty. I thank thee, God, that I am not like other men. 

I don't want to condemn generosity, of course. Yet if the only lesson that we take from hearing about the trials and suffering of other people is that our life is pretty comfortable and so we should give to those who are uncomfortable, we've missed the boat. Thankfulness and generosity that celebrates our social and financial status over the status of those around us is not particularly Christlike.

That doesn't mean, of course, that we shouldn't ever learn about those who are in worse straits than us. Obviously, I teach a unit on diversity, which includes poverty. There is value here for American Christians, just not where we usually find it.

A humour website called "White Whine" (Caution: Strong language and some really insensitive people) catalogs status updates of privileged people who think the world is coming to an end for the silliest reasons. They're upset because the barista got their soy latte wrong, because their parents are making them drive the Audi instead of the BMW, because the weather is too cold to go boating, because they wanted the black iPad instead of the white iPad that their parents bought them. (No joke. I've seen these examples or similar ones on White Whine.) These people desperately need a reality check. The world will not come to an end because you have a black iPod.

Yet we too think our world is coming to an end, often for much more legitimate reasons: a lost job, n unexpected illness, breakup, a paycheck that doesn't stretch as far as it used to. For us, as for the White Whiners, there is value in learning about the sufferings of other people. That value doesn't have much to do with thankfulness. Okay, the White Whiners need to be thankful. Yet that's not what most of us need to learn.

For those who are going through real heartache, thankfulness doesn't cut it, at least not in the middle of the trial. Yes, losing a job in America is better than being continually hungry and seeing your children hungry in Africa. That doesn't make losing your job any less scary and frustrating. Yes, going through a breakup in America is better than contracting AIDS in Africa. That doesn't make the breakup hurt any less.

The value of learning about other people with other heartaches is twofold.

First, it keeps us from becoming myopic. Whatever our heartache is, it consumes a lot of emotional energy; we spend so much time and thought trying not to fall apart in the middle of a workday that we forget that other people too are going through their own private Hells. Then we learn about someone who lost their husband, someone who was diagnosed with an incurable disease, someone who had to say goodbye to a life dream. Perhaps we know this person in real life. Perhaps we only hear about them on the Internet. Either way, we are more alert to the suffering that is going on around us, and we are better able to respond to it. That we ourselves are suffering, even if only in some small way, makes us better comforters and better ministers than if we did not suffer at all. It is intolerable to have those with very little trouble pat you on the shoulder and say, "There, there. It will be all right" - because, of course, it may not be all right. It isn't all right now. Yet we who go through trials are the best comforters, and learning about other people's difficulties gives us an opportunity to comfort.

Second, and more personally, the value of learning about other people's heartache is learning that we are survivors. People have suffered since the world's beginning and somehow - inexplicably, unbelievably - survived. When a loved one dies, part of them dies too. When they lose an eye or a hand or a leg, part of who they are dies. When they lose a life dream, part of who they are dies. But life itself continues. Sometimes, the one who experienced pain will go on to better things, sometimes not. Either way, for those of us who are faced with greater troubles than owning a white iPad instead of a black one, it is good to know that there is life after the actual tragic event. My point here isn't really that we should be content with our troublesome life, simply because other people are content. As one of the comments on Jamie's blog post points out, many people who are in poverty aren't content, any more than the White Whiners are. Contentment is not the issue; that's a virtue that we cannot learn by visiting Africa. It is a virtue for which we need to look to God. Yet regardless of whether we are content in life, we can be comforted that there is in fact some kind of life waiting for us, something that does not involve the current trials and tribulations.

In the end, we need to stop assigning a virtue to our trials and difficulties; we need to stop pretending that we become more virtuous simply by looking on when other people struggle. Whatever our struggles, it is good to remember to reach out to those who are also struggling; it is good to remember that, no matter how dark the present, joy comes - miraculously - in the morning.

The Problem of Pain

Do you ever feel that God cannot be trusted?

April, T.S. Eliot writes, in the cruelest month, but all days are cruel. There are bombings in Boston and in Tel Aviv. My uncle, or my co-worker’s friend, has cancer. I am midway through an unexpected financial crisis that may not end at all well.

Yes, I know my Bible. I know that the Bible assures me that even in the darkest times God can be trusted.  He is, the Psalmist writes, “the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” No matter what happens to us on this earth, no matter how bad it gets, God will still be there.

Unfortunately, this rings surprisingly hollow in the middle of tragedy.

Did you have your legs blown off in an explosion? Sorry, but it’s a good thing that God is your portion and not your legs.

Are you falsely accused of a crime? That’s really too bad. Good thing that it’s God and not your reputation which is the strength of your heart.

Are you poor? Struggling? Desperately lonely? No matter. You don’t have anything on this earth besides God anyway.

Shrug it off, advice says. Deal with it. God is waiting for you in Heaven.

The thing is, the teaching that God is our heavenly portion only goes so far. I know my Bible, and I know that he also promises that “no disaster will come near” you. He is the Good Shepherd, and he tells us that he will lead us among green pastures and quiet streams – places of rest, not of flurry.

This doesn’t happen. At all.

No matter how much we tell ourselves that God is our portion, that we will enjoy being with Him in Heaven, sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes it feels like God hurts us deeply.

Would an earthly father let his children be crushed if he could stop it? Yes, earthly fathers let their children deal with relatively minor problems all the time, but I’m not talking about a little peer pressure in high school here.  People die in violence every day. People’s whole lives are ruined every day. A good father would stop that if at all possible.

Yet God doesn’t. God lets us live through it.

Why do we trust Him? Is He even trustworthy? How can we trust a God that sent His own chosen people through the Holocaust?

I have no answer. Is there any answer?

Yet In her novel The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell, a convert to Judaism, writes this:

There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists."

So God just leaves?

No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering."

Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it."

But the sparrow still falls.

Yes, the sparrow still falls. We still fall. Tragedy happens, and it is inescapable.

Perhaps there never will be an answer. Yes, the sparrow falls. God did not push him, but God did not stop him falling either. God will never stop tragedy from entering our lives. He won’t. He never has.

The only thing that we can do in such circumstances is what God does: We can weep.

Enough with the preaching that God will protect us. Enough with the preaching that God will  comfort us in the middle of tragedy.  I am in the middle of tragedy, and there is little comfort.

All we can do is what we know – we know, whether from Judaic tradition or our own Scripture – that God does: weep.

Sometimes there is nothing to do but cry.

God cries.

Let us weep with those who weep, and let us ask no questions for there are no answers. 

Teaching Boys (and Girls): Don't Be Distracting

Here's what I learned last week: Your classroom management is supposed to help students pay attention. If you distract the students even more, you're not doing it right. I figured this out myself.

Several weeks ago, I turned around to find that one of my students had plastered a silver gum wrapper on his teeth. This is apparently a fad akin to planking among the teen generation. I have no problem with my students looking as dorky as they please in class. I do have a problem when they distract each other, so I halted the lecture and said, "Jake, take the gum wrapper off your teeth."

Later, I shared my frustrations over the incident with my dad. "I just don't know what I'm going to do with this class," I said. "I swear, some days I feel like I'm teaching middle school."

Dad taught high school science for a number of years. He has a fair share of experience dealing with unruly classes. "Don't yell at them," he suggested. "Don't say, 'Stop chewing gum.' Get their attention back some way." His suggestion? "Hang a spoon on the end of their nose. When you have their attention back, you can go on with the lesson."

Huh.

At home, I tried hanging a spoon from the end of my nose. Apparently I don't have a big enough nose. Cyrano de Bergerac I am not.

In fact, I find my attention-getting tricks to be pretty limited. I can't do magic tricks. I can't make funny faces. I can't tell jokes (Actually, that's not entirely true. I can tell jokes, just not ones that my students find funny. I never feel so old as when I tell a joke.)

There is one thing that I can do: I can do accents. I can drop my voice down till it's low and gravely like a man's. I can do a passable Southern accent. I can also do a German accent, and I could probably pull of a stereotypical Asian one.

So the next week, I pulled out the accent trick. My class succumbed to an inexplicable giggle fit, and I dropped my voice low like a man's. They all snapped to attention in surprise, giggled nervously, and we continued the lesson.

Yes! I thought. This really works. 

Sometimes.

On Thursday, one of my students got bubble gum on her face. Instantly, my students were like the dog in Up: Squirrel! Bubble gum! I'd lost their attention. Again.

So I put on blue felt cowboy hat from one of my students, pulled out the Southern accent, and started talking. I got their attention.

I got a lot, lot more. They stopped giggling, and they started laughing out loud, as in can't-breathe, leaning-over-the-desk, crying laughter.

They asked for another accent - this time, a Russian one.

They told me I was the only teacher to make the students laugh so hard.

Oops. Pretty sure I did not want that distinction.

In five minutes or so, we resumed the lesson on outlining. At the end, we reviewed what we'd learned, and they patiently repeated back to me the three things that go into an outline and the four characteristics of a good quotation. They repeated to me that the writing process is more about a circle than a straight line. So I suppose that despite my accents, they did learn something.

All's well that end's well.

Next time, I'm just going to learn how to hang a spoon from my nose.

Doubting Thomas

Among all the disciples, I identify most closely with Thomas.

Poor Thomas. His reputation was sealed the moment that Jesus appeared to the other disciples, and he wasn't there to see it. Tradition holds that Thomas later traveled as far as India in order to share his faith with people, but we will always know him as "Doubting Thomas", a byword to urge evangelicals reach higher levels of trust. Yet despite this rather selective use of Thomas's history, I do not find his story to be one of condemnation for those who doubt. I find his story to be one of grace and encouragement, a reminder that Jesus Christ Incarnate is always with us and is always compassionate.

When we read the story of Doubting Thomas, we tend to start with what is (to us) the subject: Thomas's doubt. Thomas's doubt, however, is not as extraordinary as we sometimes believe. Yes, Thomas had traveled with Jesus for three years and had seen men raised from the dead before. Yet in this case, the person who was doing the raising from the dead was Himself dead. Who was there now to raise Jesus from the dead? Is it any surprise that Thomas doubted? Even the words with which Thomas voices his objection suggest how understandable his doubts were:

Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.

That Thomas asks to "place my finger into the mark of the nails" and "place my hand into his side" recalls the extensive physical torments of the crucifixion. When Jesus raised people from the dead, they were usually physically intact. Jairus's daughter daughter died from an illness. The widow's dead son was being carried out of the city in one piece by a crowd. Yet crucifixion did not leave the body intact. To ask after the wounds of Christ as Thomas does is to remind the reader that there is no coming back from this death. We are told that Jairus's daughter looked like she had fallen asleep. Jesus looked like nothing human after the crucifixion. Much as we like to read Thomas's story as if we could somehow have expressed a stronger faith than he, the story does not allow such self-congratulation. Indeed, the horrors of crucifixion render Thomas's doubts relatively reasonable. 

Yet, as with most biblical stories, the real subject of the story is not Thomas but Jesus. It is his words, not Thomas's, that are most important. Importantly, the words of Christ are words of encouragement and grace. The narrator John, having told us of Thomas's doubt, then tells us this:

Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve but believe." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

Incidentally, even the greeting that Jesus uses signals that this encounter is one of blessing. Peace be with you was of course a traditional greeting in Roman Israel, but its frequent use makes it all the more remarkable here. John could have left these words out. He could have glossed over them like this, "Jesus greeted the disciples". Thus, that John, writing in the Spirit, includes the full greeting reinforces to the reader what Jesus's purpose is here: His purpose is not to vent frustration with Thomas's doubt but to bring peace and rest to His disciple's troubled soul.

Perhaps what is most striking in this passage is how accommodating Jesus is. Thomas has asked to touch the nail marks on Jesus's hands and to put his hand in Jesus's side, and Jesus tells Thomas to "put your finger here" in the nail marks and to "put out your hand and place it in My side." The parallelism speaks to Jesus's great patience. There is nothing that He withholds from his disciple Thomas. Sometimes, we expect Thomas to reach heights of faith for which the disciple was not ready. We believe in Jesus without touching Him, and we expect Thomas to do the same. Yet Jesus had no such expectation. He allowed Thomas to touch the wounds of the crucifixion. In doing so, he shows us what grace is: The whole point of grace is that Jesus helps us when we are most helpless. We who live two thousand years after the time of Christ do not receive the exact help that Thomas does, but make no mistake: We will receive help. Jesus is glad to give whatever help we need.

Even Jesus's words speak to his grace for us. I think we read His command, "Do not disbelieve" as condemnation of Thomas's doubt, as if Jesus gets up in Thomas's face a bit. Certainly Jesus could get in people's faces; think of the money-changes in the temple or the Pharisees. Yet I don't think that's what Jesus is doing here. Only the NIV translation, which renders this line "Stop doubting!", sounds harsh. All the other versions render Jesus's words more gently, in some variant of the ESV translation above: "Do not disbelieve". What Jesus is doing is not so much criticizing Thomas but inviting him out of his own self-imposed darkness into the light of grace and faith. To get the idea, imagine advice about more ordinary matters, perhaps from a parent to a child: "Do not worry about the bully. Mom and Dad love you." I am not saying that our sins are never condemned. They are, of course; Jesus is just as well as merciful. Yet we must not imagine that Jesus is impatient with our faults and go to him out of fear or, worse still, try to make ourselves into an independently virtuous person. This will not work. Jesus is saddened by our sins but is infinitely patient with us. His words to Thomas remind us of His mercy: The invitation is not to come and be judged but to come and rest our troubled soul in Him.

Thus, Thomas's story is not really about condemning unbelief or doubt. It is not an encouragement to work really hard at becoming more faithful (as if we could do that without grace!) It is a beautiful reminder that Christ invites us to rest our troubled soul in Him, that He heals all wounds and darkness.

Such an invitation, of course, does not mean the wounds and darkness will not come. Eight whole days elapsed between when Thomas first expressed his doubt and when Jesus appeared to him. To someone who is troubled or worried, eight days can feel like a very long time. Job suffered for weeks before God eased his pains, and even Jesus was forty days and forty nights in the desert before the angels came and ministered to him.

Yet the invitation remains: Jesus Christ Incarnate waits to ease all our burdens and anxieties and to bless us with His presence. Ultimately, this is what Easter is about. People sometimes point out that Easter is only a Christian variation on a pagan celebration of spring. So what? What the pagans celebrated when Spring returned was a forerunner, a preparation, for the reality that we celebrate on Easter weekend: the Incarnate Christ, who calls us out of Winter and reminds us that Spring is coming.

For what it's worth, I do not find this story compelling because I have managed to lay my burdens down but precisely because I haven't. I am better than Thomas at looking at what I consider realities, at harping on all the problems, at fretting over my worries for a long period of time. Yet we believers, as much as unbelievers, need the reminder that Jesus gives us rest. Thomas had walked with Christ for three years. He was there when Peter proclaimed Jesus the Son of God. He was there when Jesus predicted His own death. He was there for the Triumphal Entry. He knew who Jesus was. Yet he, one of the Twelve, is nevertheless again welcomed to rest in Christ. We too, even though we are believers, even though we are champs at worrying, are also welcomed to rest in Christ.

Easter is an opportunity for that reminder.

Uncertainty & Faith

One of the most telling memories of myself as a child is standing on a chest in a friend's bedroom, pointing down with one finger, vehemently arguing my side of a particular issue.

As a child, I was a debater. I was sure I was right.

Perhaps the sign of growing older is that I am no longer sure that I am right, and that I think such uncertainty is a step towards personal and even spiritual maturity.

In American Christianity, there is a push to eliminate uncertainty from the faith. As a teen, I remember attending Christian apologetic conferences. The speakers laid down arguments as if, following one conference in a large Midwestern church, there could nevermore be legitimate discussion on these topics. The timing of Christ's return, courtship as an alternative to dating, and the need for more stringent Christian laws in our country were all obviously decided. Faith was no longer a choice but rather an intellectual certainty, explicated by knowing speakers from the platform.

Indeed, believers assume that, provided sufficient attention is given to a problem in the Bible or in personal life, there need be no uncertainty. We can, they suggest, know without doubt what every single Scripture passage means. We can know every step and action that must be taken for us to live as Christians. No doubt about it.

A writer on the blog "Project TGM: Theology, Gospel, Mission" sums up this belief: He suggests that "uncertainty . . . leads to destruction" and that our faith should be marked by "peering into the mind of God" - presumably, understanding what we see there.

I agree, of course, that we have great certainty in our God. Proofs for His existence and for His goodness abound. If it were not so, C.S. Lewis would not be a household name, and we would not have such pleasure in Nature, seemingly outfitted (especially in the springtime) expressly for our pleasure.

Yet the fact that we can know some things about God does not change the fact that we cannot possibly know everything about God, that "peering into His mind" may well leave us with more questions than answers. Indeed, uncertainty is a crucial part of our faith.

The Apostle's Creed begins, "I believe in God the Father, Almighty".

Stop.

"Almighty."

Who are we to think that we can fully comprehend God the Almighty? That we can offer reason and proof for his existence? That we can conclusively and without doubt describe His character?

Yes, He has offered us the Bible, but the Bible is His Word to humanity - the Word of Infinite Being to finite Creatures. Can such words be wholly understood? Do any of us really stand ready to accurately interpret the flaming wheel of Ezekiel? Are any of us ready, unlike Moses His servant, to look upon the face of God?  No? Then God, even in the Bible, transcends intellectual apprehension.

Mystical Christianity flourished a thousand years ago, as writers such as St John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Lady Julian of Norwich reminded us that God cannot be wholly known. Like the horizon that is perceived but never reached, such writers, in contrast to contemporary apologists, suggested that God may be perceived but never apprehended. Indeed, they suggested that only by admitting the failure of intellectual machinations can individuals perceive God clearly.

The mystics' legacy lives on in T.S. Eliot, and it is to Eliot that I turn in order to explain why uncertainty is such a crucial part of our faith. Eliot, known for The Waste Land, is often not known for his mid-life conversion to Christianity. After his conversion, he wrote Four Quartets, poems that clearly express both his faith and his uncertainty regarding how he ought to approach God. In the second of four poems, Eliot writes,

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God. (East Coker)

Most believers lean hard on "the wisdom of old men" to guide our faith, wisdom we find in books published by Francis Chan or John Piper.

Yet is is in the "folly" of old men that Eliot finds wisdom - in other words, what such men don't know about God. Moses, who wrote portions of the Scripture, saw only the back of God, and certainly Chan and Piper and others like them know no more. This is why Eliot begs to know the "folly" of wise men: That which is unseen is perhaps the truest part of the divine; it was the face of God, the most identifying characteristics, that Moses did not see. Let no one imagine that what we understand about God describes His character at all completely. Who God is baffles our intellect, so that the closest we come is, compared to the divine reality, but folly.

Such uncertainty ought not to alarm the orthodox Christian. Yes, God is eminently logical, but He also calmed the storms while He was on earth. Perhaps the story is too familiar now to raise the shock that such an illogical event ought to raise. Storms, we know, are not the outpouring of Zeus' wrath but the meteorological consequence of a high-pressure front meeting a low-pressure one. That Jesus averted such a natural event conflicts with the wisdom of modern science. Yet the storm was calmed, and so we see that God is sometimes seen best in that which is unexplained and considered folly.

Perhaps this is why Eliot follows up his demand for the "folly" of old men with this passage:

As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

In the first stanza, Eliot suggests that the observable world is but a "bold imposing facade" - in other words, no more significant than the cardboard tree that appears in an elementary-school production. Such crafts do not accurately represent the world as it exists, so why, Eliot implies, do we expect our senses to accurately represent God as He exists? As the facade must eventually be rolled away, so eventually our senses must be rolled back so that the soul may perceive God without the errors introduced by human cognition.

Ultimately, Eliot recommends that we believers lay aside cognition to "wait without hope" and "wait without love" and "wait without thought" for God to reveal who He is. Perhaps Eliot's advice sounds anti-Christian, but it is not. Have we, for instance, never hoped that God would cure someone of cancer, yet that person died? Have we never thought that God will provide a job or a spouse for us, only to find ourselves out of work and single? So often, what we think and hope and love about God is not at all aligned with who God is. The Pharisees thought they loved God, until He showed up on their doorstep forgiving tax collectors and hanging out with prostitutes.

Consider the demon-possessed man that God healed, the man named "Legion". When Legion was healed, the entire town came out to beg that Christ leave their city. This too is another portion of Scripture we gloss over too easily: Glad as we are that Legion is healed, a herd of pigs and thus an entire city's economy is destroyed on behalf of that one person. Will you pretend you understand this miracle? Will you say, "Well, the soul is worth more than anything?" To save Legion, Jesus Christ doomed an entire city to hunger and continued poverty (they weren't raising the pigs for fun!).

In part, this is why robbing Christianity of its inherent uncertainty is dangerous. If we claim to know who God is, then we must likewise claim to know why He permits particular instances of human suffering, which is (as Job learned) a question far beyond us. If we, however, know that we do not wholly know God, we also know that we cannot explain His actions.

The only answer is trust. 

I am watching Battlestar Galactia right now. At the beginning of the third season, Admiral Adama sends out on a crucial mission one of his officers: a Sharon Valerii, who belongs to a race traditionally at war with Adama's.

Sharon, though proud of her appointment, nevertheless asks Adama, "How do you know you can trust me?"

"I don't," Adama replies. "That's what trust is."

That's what trust is. 

If there were no uncertainty, faith could not exist. Towards the end of his poems, Eliot writes this:

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

"Verifying" faith with proofs is, in the end, not faith at all. "Instructing yourself" in the supporting evidence misses the point of faith. Ratiocination has its uses but also its limits. We who believe in God ought most of all to "kneel / Where prayer has been valid". Faith is ultimately about laying aside questions upon questions about the complexities of religion and worshiping what we know, and what we do not know, of Christ.

Uncertainty is not a bad word. It is not a faithless word. It is part and parcel of a faith that asks us believers, in the end, to lay down our weaponry of intellectual debate and experiential proofs. All we can do, in the end, is trust that the God who is never fully seen is the God of Peace.

Teaching Boys, Post #3

You who read my blog (all 40 of you) know from previous posts that the first two years or so of teaching were rocky ones for me. You may also know that what pulled me out of that period and set me on the path to becoming at least a decent teacher was Bruce Wilkinson's excellent book The Seven Laws of the Learner. 

Reading this book, I learned to accept responsibility for students' learning. I told more stories to keep class attention. I used pictures and graphs to illustrate how papers should be set up. I pushed back paper deadlines when I discovered that I had confused students. It was a big step forward. 

Now, the next step forward is to give responsibility back to the students. 

In The Trouble With Boys, Peg Tyre writes (unexpectedly enough for me) that one way to reach difficult boys is strict accountability for academic and personal performance. In other words, boys, and presumably girls, do better not when class is made easier but when class is made harder. 

I am guilty of the opposite. I have at times made class easier (too easy!) for students, personally and academically.

Two particular student encounters from the last five years of teaching illustrate what I mean when I say that my teaching has become "too easy": 

Some time ago, a student arrived 20 minutes late to my class, well over the time that I would count her absent. When I called her up after class, she apologized for missing and said, "Yes, go ahead and count me absent. I deserve it." I, grateful for the student's admission of error, gave her a tardy instead. Thinking back on it, I wish I'd given the absent. One absence would not have failed the student, and it would have sent a clearer signal: I the teacher expect you to manage your time appropriately in order to arrive on time at my class. Instead, I sent this signal: I the teacher will allow you to get away with anything if you apologize. 

Oops.

Another time, I was holding paper conferences with my student. The students were required to bring a certain amount of homework in to class. Halfway through my three days of conferences, a student arrived with all his homework completed. I, unthinking, praised his work. He responded, "Uh, yes. That's what we were supposed to do." My heart sank to the floor. During the conferences, student after student with their homework half-finished had managed to convince me that I expected nothing more. I expected that my students would not complete their work.

May God forbid that is what I expect of my students. 

To expect students to fail is to guarantee failure. To take responsibility for a finished paper or project into my own hands is to deny college students, all on the cusp of adulthood, a shot at personal maturity. 

Never again will I excuse students who arrive without homework completed.

Never again will I delay the deadline for a paper because students were not prepared.

Never again will I grant general amnesty on homework because half the class didn't complete it.

Never again will I turn a blind eye when students walk into class ten minutes late on the day a paper was due because they were still printing it. 

I will not allow students to be disruptive in class. I will not allow them to ridicule fellow students. I will not allow them to disrespect me as the teacher. 

Yes, I say this very confidently on my blog. Yes, I will continue to make mistakes in granting excessive leniency. Among other things, five years of teaching have taught me that I am a softie. Yet I cannot allow myself to grow soft with my students.

Of course, "never" statements only guarantee a kind of negative accountability. I have positive expectations for my students, too:

I expect them to work on papers in advance, not in the last three days of the semester. To hold students to this, I will enforce rigid deadlines: all sources submitted by one date; a rough draft, by another.  

I expect students to teach themselves. Some material is too basic to cover in class, such as selecting quotations from research to use in papers. Other material is too boring: All MLA citation information is easily available at OWL at Purdue. Class time is better spent reviewing the finer points of rhetoric than reviewing what is in italics and what in quotation marks on a Works Cited page. To hold students accountable for independent learning, I will provide them the resources (the OWL link, the information about the writing center) and require correct submission. 

I expect students to use strong grammar. If the appropriate use of the colon is beyond them, avoiding comma splices and fragments is not. I will grade students on grammar, and I will teach those that still confuse you're / your and there / their / they're to distinguish between these words. We will practice fragments and run-on sentences.

Regarding my responsibilities as a teacher, nothing has changed. It is still up to me to teach in such a way that students master the content. Yes, this responsibility may extend to delaying a paper assignment if my teaching has confused the students. Yes, it includes making allowances for students challenges: legitimate sudden illness, for instance, or learning disabilities. 

Regarding my students' responsibilities, everything has changed. They are wholly responsible to produce the best that they personally are able to produce. That standard is at different places for different students, of course, but the fact remains. They are accountable. 

And when they are made accountable, they are more likely to learn.

Teaching Boys: Lesson #2

If Lesson #1 was that boys do, in fact, learn differently than girls, then Lesson #2 is not to make preconceived judgments about how boys learn or what they like to read.

Last week, I gave my Intro to Literature students a test on the basic literary skills we'd been learning for the first four weeks. For this test, I offer students a choice of several poems, ask them to pick one, and to thoroughly interpret it: find literary devices, write out a theme, and answer an analysis question that I wrote regarding the poem.

This year, the students were asked to choose between a nature poem about the starry heavens, a poem by a (female) slave celebrating her spiritual life, and a World War II poem. At first, I had considered assigning students poems: Some boys would get the war poem, some girls would get the starry nature poem, and a control group of boys and girls would get one or the other. Ultimately, I allowed students to choose, and here's what I found:

Only one boy (in a class of perhaps 12) wrote about the war poem. A girl also wrote about the war poem. The entire rest of the class was split between the slave's poem and the nature poem. Moreover, some of the most thoughtful, detailed responses were by men on the nature poem, or by men on the slave's poem.

Writers such as Peg Tyre in The Trouble With Boys do well to remind us that boys and girls learn differently. 5-year-old kindergartner boys cannot be expected to plant their bottom on a carpet square and stay there for more than a few minutes. 5-year-old kindergartner girls cannot be expected to react will delight and awe in a unit that studies bugs and insects.

Yet this example, similar to many Tyre herself gave, illustrates the danger of assumptions about how boys and girls react in the classroom. While biological reality dictates that (on general) little boys need more physical activity than little girls, biological reality does not dictate that little girls recoil in horror from slugs and snails. What dictates that little girls recoil from a fat, glistening slug is simply a stereotype: that a little girl, whose nails Mommy painted two days ago, could not possibly get dirt on her that Barbie-pink polish.

Thanks to the feminist movement, Americans are alert to stereotypes of women and vigilant in avoiding them. It is thus no shame to me, a woman, to admit, for instance, that I prefer Battlestar Galactica to Downton Abbey and have never seen Ryan Gosling in anything.

Unfortunately, Americans are less aware of stereotypes about men and less able to dismantle them for men who prefer subjects outside the assumed interests such as slugs, or (for older boys) cars and football. Tyre's book, though excellent in some regards, provides evidence of this: Suggestions such as picking books with boy-friendly content and inviting policemen to read aloud are well-meant, even useful, but also based on broad assumptions about what boys are interested in.

Gender stereotypes run deep in our society. Last semester, one of the classes I pulled up short when a young man announced that he loved to quilt. I have no memory of what brought on this confession, nor of how I responded. I do remember the sudden silence, in a class almost never silent, as we all mentally connected the student before us with an activity stereotypically enjoyed by your 80-year-old grandmother.

Between this experience and the test results, I have thus learned not to make assumptions about what the young men (and sometimes, older men) in my class will or will not enjoy.

Yes, J.K. Rowling was asked to use her initials instead of her name (Joan Rowling) to encourage boys to pick up the Harry Potter series. That her publisher, however, pandered to stereotypes about young men does not mean that we teachers should.

False dichotomies must be avoided in class planning and management. As a girl, I speak from experience: To assign us Anne of Green Gables is not to guarantee engagement in the class. Ender's Game may do the trick just as well. For boys, I speak from my observations: To assume that a war poem is more likely to grab their attention than a quilting manual (apparently) is to deprecate the lived experiences of the young men in our classroom - young men who like crafts, who enjoy studying the stars and nature.

Where does that leave me? After all, I rewrote my syllabus to include more boy-friendly texts.

I don't regret anything.

It is one thing to pander to stereotypes of boys' interests. It is quite another to read and discuss material that will affect most men in the population - in this case, the father-son relationship. The young man who quilts and the young man who hunts down slugs both have fathers, and both of them will likely become fathers by the end of their lives. Even gay men who choose to adopt will become fathers.

Moreover, the trades that I made were good. I gave up the beautiful but difficult "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T.S. Eliot. In return, I gained the ambiguous, haunting and substantially more accessible "Those Winter Sundays," by Robert Hayden and "My Papa's Waltz," by Theodore Roethke.

Thus, the lesson to be learned about teaching boys is perhaps not, "Teach literature that appeals to boys' interests". Danger lies there: Not all boys have the same interests.

The lesson would be better worded like this: "Teach literature that is accessible and personally meaningful to all students". That literature may be written from a young man's perspective, as "My Papa's Waltz". It is equally likely to be written with a woman's voice, as in "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter".

What's important is not a pseudo-classification of poetry as "for boys" and "for girls" but the fact that poetry represents what both boys and girls recognize as their own lived experiences.