Out of the Whirlwind, He Will Wipe Every Tear

The lectionary reading this week brings us to the end of Job, where Job responds to God’s questions by repenting and humbling himself. While Job’s perplexities concerning divine justice have not been explicated, his encounter with God leads him to recognize his own limitations and to experience God’s comfort. The illumination in The Saint John’s Bible ties this passage not only with the beginning of Job, but also with Pentecost and the new Jerusalem that John sees in Revelation. Such encounters with God form the foundation of the Kingdom of God, both the Kingdom the church embodies now and the Kingdom we wait for. Continue reading →

Out of the Whirlwind, Where Were You

Oct19 by Jeff Bilbro

Last week, we reflected on Job’s desire for God to speak to him, and this week, we read the scene a few chapters later where Job gets his wish. The manner in which God speaks to Job, however, probably wasn’t what Job had in mind. When Job imagines this opportunity, he says, “I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments.” What happens, though, is that instead of Job asking God his questions, God asks Job questions. In some of the most beautiful, profound poetry of the Bible, God questions Job for the better part of four chapters, asking him questions that reveal Job lacks the knowledge to even engage God in a discourse about the justice or injustice of his own situation: Continue reading →

Student Resilience and the Threat of Bad Grades

Oct13 by matthewamoser

Yesterday, Megan Von Bergen published a helpful essay on learning. There was also an interesting article by Peter Gray over at Psychology Today on the lack of emotional resilience in the student population. Von Bergen’s essay and the PT article play off of each other nicely, both highlighting a significant question in higher education: how can professors invite students to risk the difficult process of genuine learning? The PT article suggests the educational task of the professor is more challenging than we might expect, due to the emotional fragility of our students (something Von Bergen has experience herself and witnesses in her students).

This fragility—melodramatic as it may seem to some professors—is nevertheless shaping the academic culture of our universities. I’ve written previously about the “besieged” state of our students and the Jesuit ideal of the cura personalis, but it is increasingly difficult for faculty and administrators to know how to care for the entire person in a way that pushes them toward excellence while showing sensitivity to students’ struggles:

Faculty at the meetings noted that students’ emotional fragility has become a serious problem when it comes to grading. Some said they had grown afraid to give low grades for poor performance, because of the subsequent emotional crises they would have to deal with in their offices. Many students, they said, now view a C, or sometimes even a B, as failure, and they interpret such “failure” as the end of the world. Faculty also noted an increased tendency for students to blame them (the faculty) for low grades—they weren’t explicit enough in telling the students just what the test would cover or just what would distinguish a good paper from a bad one. They described an increased tendency to see a poor grade as reason to complain rather than as reason to study more, or more effectively. Much of the discussions had to do with the amount of handholding faculty should do versus the degree to which the response should be something like, “Buck up, this is college.” Does the first response simply play into and perpetuate students’ neediness and unwillingness to take responsibility? Does the second response create the possibility of serious emotional breakdown, or, who knows, maybe even suicide?

Less resilient and needy students have shaped the landscape for faculty in that they are expected to do more handholding, lower their academic standards, and not challenge students too much.

There is a sense of helplessness among the faculty. Many faculty members expressed their frustration with the current situation. There were few ideas about what we could do as an institution to address the issue.

Students are afraid to fail; they do not take risks; they need to be certain about things. For many of them, failure is seen as catastrophic and unacceptable. External measures of success are more important than learning and autonomous development.

Faculty, particularly young faculty members, feel pressured to accede to student wishes lest they get low teacher ratings from their students. Students email about trivial things and expect prompt replies.

Failure and struggle need to be normalized. Students are very uncomfortable in not being right. They want to re-do papers to undo their earlier mistakes. We have to normalize being wrong and learning from one’s errors.

Faculty members, individually and as a group, are conflicted about how much “handholding” they should be doing.

Growth is achieved by striking the right balance between support and challenge. We need to reset the balance point. We have become a “helicopter institution.”

“Resetting the balance” is, I think, a helpful way of framing the issue. But how do we actually reset this balance? What does this look like in practice? I think Von Bergen’s essay illustrates one way of resetting this balance. But notice that in Von Bergen’s post, the balance isn’t reset by administrative programming. It isn’t reset through strategic planning or by anything that can described as “best practices.” It is reset through the slow and risky process of learning through personal mentorship; it is reset through good teaching.

So two questions:

How can university administrators safeguard and the kind of good—but not necessarily well-evaluated—teaching that demands excellence from our students? How can we rethink the importance of student evaluations for evaluating the effectiveness of a professor’s teaching? How can we encourage professors to do the risky work of actual teaching rather than playing it safe by coddling students in the interest of self-preservation?
Are there other ways that we can “reset the balance” on a more global, administrative level? How can administrators participate in re-imagining the university as a place of difficult, transformative learning?

Job Frontispiece

Oct12 by Jeff Bilbro

I’m not sure what this says about my personality, but one of my favorite books growing up was Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. The Old Testament lectionary reading this week comes from the book of Job, whose protagonist has a lot in common with Alexander. The book of Job begins by recounting Job’s great wealth, but after God agrees to allow the Adversary to test whether Job loves God or loves the blessings God provides, Job experiences a pretty terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. He’s sitting at home, minding his own business, when a messenger comes to tell him that all his oxen and donkeys were stolen by raiders. “While he was still speaking,” another messenger tells Job that fire from heaven consumed his sheep. “While he was still speaking,” another messenger tells him other raiders took all his camels. “While he was still speaking,” another messenger told him a wind blew down the house where his children were feasting, killing all of them. Like I said, this was a pretty terrible day.

The lectionary reading comes from later in the book, where Job expresses his frustration with these undeserved calamities and, even more intensely, his frustration that God won’t appear before him to explain why all these things happened to him. Continue reading →

The Long Way to Learning: A Story

Oct12 by Megan Von Bergen

When I collect student papers, I ask students to include a reflection, a short description of what they feel are the strengths and weaknesses of their writing. One of my students, on a recent assignment, noted with sincerity how much she enjoyed putting her thoughts into words, and how much she wanted to become a better writer. Sadly, her writing was not excellent work. It wasn’t terrible either, but I know this student will be disappointed in her grade, and my heart hurts for her.

I am especially touched because ten years ago, I was that student.

I started my freshmen year confident in my writing abilities. Taking English Composition did nothing to knock me down a peg; I did better than most of my classmates, and received a strong final grade in the course. But then I took Expository Writing. My first paper received a C. My second paper received a C. My third paper received a C. I revised them all, but try as I might, for the first ten weeks of the semester I received nothing higher than a B minus on my papers.

I know from personal experience how disappointing it can be to receive a poor grade, when you think you’re good at writing and love it. And that disappointment does not go away quickly. In fact, it returns again and again, as we discover, and overcome, new weaknesses in our writing.

Years after I took Expository Writing, when I had improved enough that I’d begun to think of myself as a good writer, I wrote a thesis for my masters’ degree. I was proud of my work when I turned in my rough draft, all 120 pages of it, to my major professor. I was horrified when he turned it back, complaining of its wordiness and its vague and unconvincing analysis. I tried to make the corrections suggested, returned the thesis to him, and again received the same complaints. I felt as though I were caught in a time warp, back in my freshmen year and beating my head against the wall in a fruitless attempt to become a better writer.

The truth is, becoming a better writer is not something that happens overnight. We expect it to, deluded by a society which offers 10-week fitness plans and pizza on delivery into thinking that the things we want should come quickly and easily. But learning a new skill is not that easy.

For me, becoming a good writer took years. Indeed, I am still becoming a better writer; this blog post, for instance, probably suffers from wordiness, a chronic weakness of mine. When I think of my students, I am gladdened by their interest in improving their writing, but I worry that interest will not survive the long learning process. I worry that after a poor performance or two, my students will throw their hands in the air, declare themselves bad writers, and give up. I want to reach out to my students and say, Don’t give up. Learning to write may be a long process, but it is so very worth it.

This is not to say, of course, that the process is easy. Far from it. It can be emotionally wrenching. I know that receiving negative feedback on their writing crushes some of my students, because receiving negative feedback crushed me. When I took Expository Writing, my teacher recorded comments on cassette tapes. I took the tapes to the library to play, and when I learned that I had received yet another C, that I had committed the same errors in one paper that I had in the last, I folded my arms across the tape player, put my head down, and sobbed. I owe a great deal of thanks to my freshman RA, who listened to me vent about Expository Writing, and to my parents, who listened to me vent about my thesis work.

I wish I could make writing a wholly positive experience for my students. I wish I didn’t have to disappoint them with bad grades, and with the truth that they have a long ways to go yet to become a good writer. But that’s not the way that learning works. It hurts to discover weakness, and to turn that weakness into strength. There is no way to remove the pain from the learning process and still learn.

I’m somewhat embarrassed that learning to write made me cry, but I am a better writer today because after every good cry, I picked myself up and went back to work. There was nothing else do to, of course; I was enrolled in a class. But because I picked myself up and tried again, I got better.

I hardly feel as though my experience is a good example for students, since although I persevered, I complained and wept through the whole process. But persevere I did, and I want my students to persevere too. Even if they complain about their grades, even if they cry over them, I want them to pick themselves up and try again. There is no other way that they will become good writers; I cannot zap them and magically transform them into good writers. Learning is something you have to do for yourself; no one else can do it for you.

We live in an culture which assumes anything worth doing comes naturally, and quickly. We live in a culture which conflates data with knowledge, and knowledge with wisdom; data can be swiftly memorized, and thus students assume that they can swiftly become experts in any given field. Those of us who teach in fields which seek to shape students’ habits of mind know this to be false, and to our students we must pass on the truth: that learning new skills is worth it, but that the road is long and hard.

I plan to share my story with students next week, telling them how disappointed I was with my first papers, sharing with them how long I have worked, and am still working, to become a better writer. My hope is that they too will be willing to take the long way, their commitment the first steps towards becoming the thoughtful, effective writers they hope to be.

The Garden of Eden

Oct5 by Jeff Bilbro

Garden of Eden, Donald Jackson with contributions from Chris Tomlin, Copyright 2003, The Saint John’s Bible, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

One of the lectionary readings this past week was from Genesis 2, which relates the second version of the creation story. Whereas in Genesis 1, God creates humans on the last day, as the crown of creation, in Genesis 2 God creates man, plants a garden around him, and forms other beings to inhabit this paradise with him. When none of these animals are a suitable partner for man, God creates woman, completing humanity and setting it as a frame around the rest of his creation.

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

this one shall be called Woman,

for out of Man this one was taken.”

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. (Genesis 2:18-24)

Continue reading →

Esther

Sep28 by Jeff Bilbro

The Old Testament lectionary reading for Sunday, September 27 comes from Esther. This complex and fascinating person receives a rich portrait in The Saint John’s Bible, one that foregrounds her liminal position between two cultures and the difficulties and opportunities this position brought her. The story comes to a head in chapter 7:

So the king and Haman went in to feast with Queen Esther. On the second day, as they were drinking wine, the king again said to Esther, “What is your petition, Queen Esther? It shall be granted you. And what is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled.” Then Queen Esther answered, “If I have won your favor, O king, and if it pleases the king, let my life be given me—that is my petition—and the lives of my people—that is my request. For we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated. If we had been sold merely as slaves, men and women, I would have held my peace; but no enemy can compensate for this damage to the king.” Then King Ahasuerus said to Queen Esther, “Who is he, and where is he, who has presumed to do this?” Esther said, “A foe and enemy, this wicked Haman!” Then Haman was terrified before the king and the queen. . . . Then Harbona, one of the eunuchs in attendance on the king, said, “Look, the very gallows that Haman has prepared for Mordecai, whose word saved the king, stands at Haman’s house, fifty cubits high.” And the king said, “Hang him on that.” So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then the anger of the king abated. (Esther 7:1-6, 9-10)