Last night I had my students watch The Prince of Egypt. Instead of writing their responses, they were to pretend to do a movie review for YouTube. Tonight, they’ll watch some episodes of The Bible miniseries. I have them responding to one episode by creating a comic strip based on the episode. I hope these exercises diversify things a bit and make the homework more enjoyable. But I also hope they help students learn from different approaches.
‘You are what you’re born of.’
One of my students, in summarizing Nicodemus’ encounter with Jesus (John 3), said the passage teaches ‘You are what you’re born of.’ I think this is like the old adage, ‘You are what you eat.’
Never heard it put that way! You’re free to use it in a future sermon.
Pre-knowledge and reading
This morning I’ve been reading, slowly, through Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies and I’m reminded of something: pre-knowledge impacts how you read. I can hear you say, ‘Duh!’, but here’s why this matters to me. Every year I wrestle with what type of reading to assign to my students in class and as homework. Every year I reform both sets of reading banking on the ‘less-is-more’ approach. In other words, I’d rather lower the page count and keep wrestling with ways to make the shorter reading more meaningful. My rationale is pretty simple: for my students much of what I teach them is brand new. Even when students take my Bible-related classes, they may come knowing basic stories and characters, but it’s rare that they think of reading the Bible in ways that is academic in nature (rather than liturgical, devotional, etc.). Since almost everything they are learning is brand new it would be a mistake to try to introduce a ton of content.
Why do I argue this? Well, because of experiences like the one I’m having today. I know almost nothing about AI other than what I’ve seen in YouTube videos or heard on podcasts. Every page is filled with a ton of new information. Since I lack pre-knowledge, this means that there are many times when I have to stop and look up things I don’t know. Now, while this makes for great learning, if I had to read large chunks of the book every day I wouldn’t be retaining much.
In fact, when I try to speed read through books like this (where I’m unfamiliar with the content) I catch my eyes glazing over and moving without purpose. I’ll have ‘read’ a paragraph without actually having read the paragraph. If I do this as a teacher with years of academic training and experience doing research…then I’m guessing my teenage students are doing it too. Therefore, my own experience reminds me that while it may be easy for me to read ten or twenty pages on religion or Biblical Literature because I’ve been swimming in these thought-worlds for years, for my students it’s all new, and therefore they need more time to digest what they’re reading.
Slow reading with J.Z. Smith
A few days ago I wrote about how I’ve realized that guided questions aren’t doing what I hoped they’d do. By this I mean I would assign reading homework for the week (it’s my tradition to do a single homework assignment per week) that would be accompanied by a document that asks questions about the reading. These documents served as checkpoints to make sure my students weren’t just reporting that they had read but were showing they had done so. Unfortunately, there’s a dual temptation for students:
- Scan (not skimming which is like speed reading but scanning which is just looking for key words or phrases) for the answers in order to hit the checkpoints without actually reading the textbook/article.
- Since guided questions have a limited range of answers it’s easy to ask a classmate for their responses, alter those responses a little, and then submit your stolen answers.
Neither of these approaches pushes the student to learn from the reading. Now, part of my problem may have been that while I give students a week to do the reading, we know students don’t spread that work across a week. Instead, they wait until a couple hours before the deadline. This puts pressure on them to hurry meaning that if I assign 20 pages with 15 questions and they wait until an hour or two before the deadline they’re going to be tempted to take one of the aforementioned shortcuts.
I’ll be discussing some of the solutions I’m testing in the next few posts. I begin here with the first couple assignments I’ll be giving to my ‘Religion in the United States’ class in January. I’m asking them to read the famous essay by Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘Religion, Religions, Religious’. It’s about 13 pages long. The first week they’ll read 6 pages and the second week they’ll read the last 7. I’ve divided each week into small sections. As they read a section (their homework tells them where to start, stop, and resume) they’ll be asked to write a two-sentence summary in their own words. Since a page to a page and a half being summarized in two sentences can take many different shapes, it’ll be hard for student B to ask student A for their answer because their answer will be unique. Additionally, when you’ve got to read, write, and explain, it’s not wise to wait until the last couple hours before a deadline, even when the reading load is light.
Each of the weeks that Smith’s article is being read have class periods set aside for my class to discuss what they’ve read. This will mean (1) they’ll share their summaries and (2) they’ll try to answer each other’s questions. How exactly I’ll conduct this process over a 45 minute class period is TBD.
If you’re interested in the Docs themselves that my students must complete and turn-in, here they are:
Students scanned but didn’t read
Often I share ideas on this blog because they’re what worked for me. Well, here’s something that hasn’t been working: guiding questions.
Since my second semester as a teacher, I’ve used guiding questions as ‘check points’ to make sure that my students are reading. Last year I had a hunch that once we went to digital textbooks and books this wouldn’t be effective. Why? Because Kindle has a search option and students know keyboard shortcuts that help them look for key words and phrases.
Thanks to Google Classroom and Docs I’ve been able to get a sense of how long it takes some students to go from their first answered question to their last. Sometimes, it’s way too fast! Even when the time between the first and last questions doesn’t seem odd, this doesn’t mean students didn’t scan for the answers. It means they were multitasking while scanning.
But this isn’t my evidence that they scanned. I surveyed my students about homework which included asking them this question:
As you can see, 80% admitted they scan rather than read through (of 71 students). For context, I had them reading sections from Douglas A. Knight and Amy-Jill Levine’s The Meaning of the Bible. It’s a perfectly good book. For the most part, students appreciated the content but one student summarized how they read: usually, the main point could be made in about a third of the space. While this is likely true of all books, I think it’s a problem exasperated by my method of having them find ‘answers’ to questions.
Another problem with guided questions is that there’s a single answer to be found. This makes it tempting for a student who is running short on time to contact a friend to get their answers. Google Classroom allows you to see if a document has been shared, so they won’t do that, but they can send screenshots. All the receiving student has to do is reword things a bit and since guided questions point to a ‘right’ answer, similarly worded answers are expected.
What’s the solution? I’m not sure yet but I have a couple of ideas:
- At AAR/SBL, Nicholas A. Elder of University of Dubuque Theological Seminary shared an activity he called a ‘Top Five’ assignment. Students have to create a list of their personal top five observations based on their readings. They start from #5 (least important) and work down to #1 (most important). This encourages them to think deeply about what they’ve read. There are a few other guidelines but the basic goal is to get students (1) thinking about what they’ve read; (2) restating it in their own words; and (3) providing an opportunity to their to be more than ‘one answer’ which should motivate the slackers to do their own reading. This exercise should work especially well with shorter Bible Odyssey articles since five observations means basically an observation per paragraph much of the time.
- Since I’ll be asking my New Testament students to read a couple of chapters from Anthony Le Donne’s Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide, I’m opting to ask for two-to-three short sentences providing their key observation from each section of a chapter. I’ll use the book’s headers to guide them. In this book, a header appears every couple pages, so at the very least (1) they have to decide for themselves what was important about that section and (2) articulate their own insights rather than just answering a question.
In general, I give about an hour’s worth of homework per week…often less, rarely more. I think by keeping the readings shorter, and by centering the homework around their own subjective understanding of the book’s main insights rather than having them find mine, I can make sure that I’m not doing homework for homework’s sake while also continuing to teach my students how to read efficiently yet deeply. We’ll see!
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