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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

Jonathan Z. Smith (Photo by Chris Salata/Chicago Maroon via uchicago.edu.)

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:

Homework (Week 1)Download
Homework (Week 2)Download
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Guiding students toward a critical use of Internet resources

Traditionally, one might end a semester of teaching the Hebrew Bible with a large cumulative assessment to see if students can tell you who ‘Abraham’ and ‘Moses’ are and what happened during the Exodus. I received permission to go a different direction. I created a project that tries to focus more on what they will learn than what they have learned. I called it ‘Reading the Bible Digitally‘ and the point of the project was to teach my students to think critically about the Internet resources they use.

If you’d like to see the basic rubric, you can access it here:

Reading the Bible DigitallyDownload

In gist, the project consisted of three parts in two sections: (1) analyze Ronald S. Hendell’s article ‘The Search for Noah’s Flood’ written for The Biblical Archaeological Society and then do the same for Answer in Genesis’ YouTube video ‘What Are Some Evidences of the Flood?’ featuring Andrew Snelling; (2) write a short reflection (five to six sentences) in response to this exercise.

In part 1, I want my students to see what they could learn about Hendell and Snelling (credentials, vocation, publications, etc.) as well as the organizations giving them a platform—The Biblical Archaeological Society and Answers in Genesis. Then I wanted them to comment on things like whether their arguments seemed based on evidence or conjecture and anecdotes; whether evidence (a line of thought that could be followed) was provided or just claims made (which doesn’t make them wrong, per se); whether there was an obvious religious or political bias (not necessarily a ‘bad’ thing but something worth knowing); and whether the article/video tended to sensationalize or even dip into conspiracy theory type thinking (e.g., Snelling attacks the ambiguous group ‘scientists’ at the end of the video).

In part 2, I asked students to tell me what this exercise taught them about doing research on the Bible, how it might help them in their other classes, and how it might help them in life in general.

As I begin grading I’m happy with what I’m seeing. There’s some questions I’ll word differently next year but I’ve already had a couple of students tell me how much they enjoyed this project and I’ve heard from a colleague that a student told them about it. My main motivation was this: most of my students won’t major in Religious Studies, or go to seminary, but they’ll hear claims made about the Bible the rest of their lives. I know that the first place most of them will go to find out more about something is Google. So, the question I’m asking myself is this: Will my students be prepared to be discerning life-long learners in our digital age after they’ve left the guidance of my classroom? I hope the answer is a little closer to ‘yes’ now.

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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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Teaching (graduate/doctoral) students to become teachers

When I was working on my PhD it dawned on me that I could go through the whole program without obtaining any teaching experience. Lucky for me, I had come into contact with Ruben Dupertuis of Trinity University here in San Antonio. I reached out to him about being a voluntary TA. He countered with an opportunity to be part of a ‘teaching internship’, which wasn’t a program already in place but something he invented along with the department head of the Religion Department at that time (I think it was Sarah Pinnock). I was able to ‘shadow’ Ruben for a semester and then lead a seminar with him and Chad Spigel for another. I’m confident that this experience played an important role in landing me my current job.

The other day I suggested that people with PhDs should consider the possibility of applying for high school teaching jobs rather than spinning their wheels in the world of adjunction and short-term contracts. I’m not here to kill anyone’s dreams of being a professor at a college or university but at some point realism strikes and it becomes evident that not everyone who is talented and smart enough to find that type of job has an actual job waiting for them. But there’s a problem: when you apply to teach high school, the thing they watch closest is how you function in the classroom. Your CV means little. I was told by one faculty who was interviewing me that they had no doubt about my intellectual capacity or my qualifications with the course material but that high school teachers don’t teach topics, they teach emerging adults, and they just happen to use their area of expertise to do that.

Which leads me to my main point: doctoral programs, if they’re going to continue accepting more students than have jobs waiting for them, need to make them competitive in ways that transcend the market for research professors. In Biblical Studies and theology, the ‘fall back’ for many is the pastorate, but not everyone is qualified for that or even close to a good fit. (I was asked over and over about being a pastor and the older I get the happier I am that I recognize that was not me!)

This is why I was thrilled to Justin Weinberg’s article ‘Course to Teach University Students to Engage Philosophically with High Schoolers’. Weinberg shares how the ‘University of Pennsylvania is offering a course that will teach undergraduates how to teach philosophy to high school students.’ He writes, ‘The course, “Public Philosophy & Civic Engagement,” is one of the university’s “Academically Based Community Service” courses.’ You can read more about it in the article but let me suggest this: a program like this could be very successful if the university students come to a class that is assigned to a high school teacher and that teacher remains present in the room as a coach and to assist with classroom management. Also. I would suggest that the high school teacher be the one who chooses homework assignments, homework loads, and does the grading. But I can imagine a class where four or five different university students (especially doctoral level students) split the actual class time across a semester under a high school teachers coaching and supervision. Even if the university student goes on to grab one of those teaching jobs in higher ed, I guarantee they’ll be better prepared that if they don’t get teaching experience while doing their research or if they only do something like TAing, which doesn’t give you the same responsibilities or opportunities as something like this.

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Teens on their phones: two interpretations

On the one hand, as a ‘Millennial’ who uses his phone too much, I’m sympathetic toward teens who seem to have something of a phone addiction. On the other hand, as a teacher, I’m grateful to our school’s administration for banning phone use in the classroom (unless the teacher gives permission to use it for something related to class). Teens on their phones can be learning more, faster, than most of us could at their age. Teens on their phones can also be zombies who fell into the rabbit hole of YouTube, Tik Tok, or Snapchat. Because of this, I got a kick out of two tweets commenting on a picture of teens sitting in a museum using their phones. (FWIW, these two tweets reinforce the ongoing Boomer v. Millennial battle.)

Tweet #1

Tweet #2

Interestingly, a side-by-side comparison of these tweets invites us to do something similar to what a walk through an art gallery does: it invites us to experience to subjectivity of our own interpretation and to reinterpret it in light of the interpretation of other.

I’ve heard it said ‘everything is ethics’ but I prose ‘everything is hermeneutics’.

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Students’ life satisfaction and the meaning of life

Saw this comic after I posted this blog entry but had to add it!

A philosopher I follow on Twitter tweeted this today:

Obviously, as a high school teacher, this caught my attention. Evans backed down a bit on his critique of secularism in another tweet but the question remains: ‘Why do British teens think life is meaningless?’ To be accurate, if I understand the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results (‘a worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development‘) the average life satisfaction of British teens (they survey 15-year-olds) is 6.16 of 10 (61.6%), so that means they’re more satisfied than not. But what alarmed the philosopher and the author of this article is a 0.81% drop in three years.

What of the United States? The average is better than the UK. Students in the US reported 6.75 of 10 (67.5%) but like the UK, the US dropped as well. We saw a drop of 0.60%. The UK, Japan, and the US showed the greatest drop in life satisfaction over the past three years.

What about ‘meaning and purpose’? The teens surveyed responded to three statements: (A) My life has clear meaning or purpose; (B) I have discovered a satisfactory meaning in life; (C) I have a clear sense of what gives meaning in my life. US teens had scores of 71/65/69. UK teens 57/52/58. The average? 68/62/66. (Panama’s 86/82/85 led the way.)

If you want to read more on their findings on this particular topic, see 11. Students’ life satisfaction and meaning in life. If you don’t have time, here’s there big take-aways:

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Have a PhD? Looking for employment? What about teaching high schoolers?

Arguably (?), the reliance upon adjuncts by colleges, universities, graduate schools, seminaries, etc., is immoral. I’m not saying it’s immoral to be an adjunct teacher. Nor do I think every institution that uses adjuncts is wrong to do so. But I do see a lot of institutions using adjuncts as a means of ‘cheap labor’. They know they if they can get three adjuncts to teach two classes each for a few thousand dollars per class they can avoid paying one or two people a full wage with benefits, retirement, etc. It’s a business decision because whether or not we like it, education is (has become?) a business.

So, I’ve met immensely talented people who teach on short contracts with no promise of long-term work. They need to take adjunct gigs to have a chance at making it to the ‘big leagues’. Sadly, the acceptance of these gigs reinforces the system, empowers the institutions who are misusing adjuncts, and makes the job market the worst kind of buyers’ market imaginable.

In the fields of Biblical Studies and Religious Studies the statistics are depressing. Browse the SBL career center. Read the AAR’s ‘Employment Trends’. It’s not encouraging.

Interestingly, many people who teach undergraduates have realized that they’re receiving students who don’t know how to do a close reading of a text, or sustained reading, or much reading, period! They can’t contract an argument let alone a full-blown term paper. This means they’re not being prepared at the high school level. That leads me to my point:

What if more people with doctorates chose to work at the high school level?

There’s a trade-off, for sure. You won’t publish as much, if at all. You may not teach in the field that you did your research, especially if your focus was religion and/or theology. But you can be an educator.

This might mean you teach in private school. It might mean you teach in public. It doesn’t have the glory of teaching college or graduate students. You might be asked to lead a club, coach a team, advise students, or a million other tasks that don’t seem to align with your motivations for earning a doctorate, but you’d be educating.

It’s hard work but it’s rewarding and it compensates better than adjuncting.

If you’ve ever thought about teaching at the high school level, and you have questions, feel free to reach out to me. I’ll tell you what I know. I think many people who are willing to go through the hell that is doctoral work do so because they love the life of the mind. You don’t have to lose that if you’re willing to teach students a tad younger than what you imagined originally.

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Recently read: Altman’s Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu

Michael J. Altman, Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893 (Oxford: OUP, 2017).

In Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893, Michael J. Altman attempts to avoid telling an ‘essentialist’ history—a history where we predetermine something called ‘Hinduism’ and then its existence in the United States (a common project in ‘American religious history’). Instead, he offers a ‘genealogical…method’ (p. 140). This method tells the story from a perspective that recognizes ‘religion’ as a ‘classificatory system’ used by people that’s essentially a ‘political act’. In the span of six chapters, Altman paints a picture for us of Americans who are trying to understand their own religious identity—namely, American Protestants (or Protestant Americans) who do so by contrasting their ‘true religion’ with ‘the Other’.

‘The Other’ has sometimes been presented as arriving during the ‘World Parliament of Religions’ in Chicago in 1893 but Altman reframes the subject in order to shed new light on it. The ‘essentialist’ approach begins with the World Parliament of Religions because it’s organized around the belief in a stable ‘Hinduism’ (a ‘world religion’). Altman takes us back to 1721 showing us that a better approach is to recognize that when people like Cotton Mather write about the ‘heathen’ of India, they’re constructing their own view of the same collection of practices organized as ‘Hinduism’ by many today. This is where Altman begins in Chapter 1, ‘Heathens and Hindoos in Early America’, showing how British depictions of India, and those depictions as processed through Enlightenment thinking, resulted in the depiction of ‘the Other’ as exotic and ‘false’.

In Chapter 2, ‘Missionaries, Unitarians, and Raja Rammohun Roy’, we are shown how battles between conservative and liberal Christians resulted in different depictions of Indian religion. Raka Rammohun Roy takes center stage as his monotheistic take on Indian tradition became ‘Christianized’, if you will, with Roy serving as an example of what a purer form of Indian religion could be if it would just look more like Christianity. A similar theme appears in Chapter 4, ‘Transcendentalism, Brahmanism, and Universal Religion’, as those who embraced ‘metaphysical religion’, like early Transcendentalist, sought not to embrace what ‘Hinduism’, per se, but to find in India an underlying spirituality that could be connected to similarities in Christianity resulting in the discovery of a ‘universal religion’ beyond the dogmas, rituals, and magic of most religions. This struggle reappears in Chapter 5, ‘The Theosophical Quest for Occult Power’ and it’s embodied in the Henry Steel Olcott and Madame Helena Blavatsky’s attempt to unite with Swami Dayanand Sarawati and the Arya Samaj being interpreted as nothing but an imperialistic act wherein Olcott ‘attempt[ed] to fold Saraswati and the Arya Samaj’ into their universalizing ‘wisdom religion’ (p. 110).

Chapter 3, ‘Hindoo Religion in American National Culture’, tells the story of how Indians were presented in schoolbooks, books, and magazines, thereby shaping the American imagination of India. Chapter 6, ‘Putting the “Religions” in the World Parliament of Religions’, is a fascinating look at American attempts to create broader unity across various religions but on the terms of Protestantism.

This is a well-written, well-researched book that does what it sets out to do: provides a genealogy and avoids the essentialist narrative. This approach forces us to think deeper about the meaning of ‘religion’ and how this word functions and has functioned, especially in American society.

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Presentation on a ‘lesser-known’ religion

When I began teaching comparative religion to high schoolers I was lucky enough to inherit a semester (mid-term or final) project from my colleague, Fr. Nate Bostian, that I has been useful since the first time I used it and that I’ve kept mostly intact. It’s withstood the test of time. The project is centered around research-and-presentation. In gist, student have to take what they know about studying and comparing religions and then do it themselves for a lesser-known (to them) religion like Jainism, Scientology, Sikhism, or Zoroastrianism.

The small changes I’ve made have had to do with the emphasis on the categories of ‘Belief’, ‘Behavior’, and ‘Belonging’ promoted by scholars like Benjamin Marcus and adopted by the AAR’s ‘Guidelines to Teaching about Religion in K-12 Public Schools in the United States’. As I continue to reform my curriculum it’s my goal to organize my units and assessments around these subunits. (I don’t teach comparative religion again until fall 2020, so I have time.) For the most part, the ‘3 B’s’ is clean, simple, and easy-to-understand, so it’s the skeletal structure around which I ask my students to build their presentation.

This year our school’s administration wanted us to explain our projects before releasing them to our students. So many teachers have embraced a form of project-based learning that there’s been a risk of overdoing it so that students have nothing but projects for the final few weeks of the semester. When I had to explain the assessing value of this project, it was easy. I’m not teaching Religious Studies so that my students can memorize data. Sure, there’s data to know: What does Easter celebrate? Why do many Muslims organize their spirituality around the ‘Five Pillars’? Why have Indian thinkers understood time as cyclical rather than linear and what does that have to do with Samsara? You get the idea. But data memorization isn’t the point. Critical thinking skills about religion is the point.

By having my students research and present on a ‘less-known’ (I used to say ‘minor’ but that’s not quite accurate) religion, they’re forced to ask what qualifies as ‘belief’, ‘behavior’ and ‘belonging’ when analyzing a religion about which they don’t know much. They get to show me that they know how to research, interpret, classify, and present the gist of a religion to another. In my opinion, this is a much better use of the last week of school than having them memorize key words and ideas to regurgitate to me in a multi-choice exam!

For those who’d like to see the exam’s content, you can download it here:

WR_F19_SEMESTER PROJECTDownload
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Job: a cosmic drama (table reading)

Yesterday, I taught my last bit of fresh content for the semester. In my ‘Old Testament’ class, I end with the Book of Job. In fact, this last week I’ve used the Books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job to summarize our discussions because as I’ve written in other posts, rather than building the course around the canon of the Tanakh/Old Testament simply because it’s canon, I’ve chosen to build it around the traumas that I believe inspired the writing, editing, and collecting of many of these texts that would eventually be canonized: the Babylonian Exile and the subsequent occupations by the Persians, Ptolemies, and Seleucids.

Job stands in contrast with not only the Book of Proverbs, but also the Book of Deuteronomy, and many of the other texts that argue for a kind of karmic, cause-and-effect view of reality, where the righteous who do good will be blessed and the wicked who do evil will be cursed. I end with this to exhibit how the texts we have read aren’t all in unison all the time. Instead, they create a dynamic conversation about God, our origins, our purpose, or teleology, and more. And while there’s some key agreement—most notably the superiority of Israel’s God—there’s also a whole lot of diversity. Job itself seems like a inter-canon critique of other parts of the canon. Or, as I framed it for my students, Job is the dissenting voice in the roundtable conversation we call the Bible.

But since I can’t expect my students to read Job in its entirety (though we did read key excerpts), I needed a way to get them the gist of the book. So, I turned Job into a script for a drama and I had my students do a ‘table read’. This was one of the most enjoyable exercises of the semester. My students really owned it and at times there was a lot of laughter as certain personalities played their roles. If you’re interested, I’ve uploaded a PDF version of the script. Remember, I’m not script writer but it got the job done:

Job_ a cosmic dramaDownload