Tag: teaching

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Classes I’d like to teach because of topics about which I’m curious (sports, video games, and growing up)

It’s a new year, so I’m thinking about new things. Next school year, I’ll be teaching the same slate of core class: “Philosophy of Human Flourishing”; “Religion in Global Context”; “Introduction to the Bible”. While I enjoy teaching all three of these, I’d like to someday, possibly teach courses on the following topics, because I’m curious about them:

1. “History and Philosophy of Games”

    This may be a 1.a and a 1.b option, maybe even a 1.c depending on what would draw the most interest from students (presuming that there would be any). 1.a would be “History and Philosophy of Games” but if that’s too broad, 1.b would be “History and Philosophy of Sports”. If 1.a was doable, I’d open with Unit 1, “What Is a Game?” I’d consult the thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Bernard Suits (The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia), Jane McGonigal (Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World), and the philosopher who I’m currently reading: C. Thi Nguyen (Games: Agency as Art). Unit 2 would likely focus on, for lack of a better word, physical games ranging from baseball to Uno, or “sport” if the former idea is too broad. Unit 3 would likely focus on video games. Each unit would begin with a history of those types of games. I’m not sure what other lessons I’d add yet, though I imagine.

    If this is too much to stuff into one class, then my 1.b option would just be, as mention, “History and Philosophy of Sports” and my 1.c option would be “History and Philosophy of Video Games”. Both of these topics would be much easier to plan for separately. Paradoxically, I don’t play video games all that much, but they were a massive part of my childhood, so I find them interesting still. I watch a ton of sports, but don’t play much. I think the history and philosophy of sports would be easier to create, as I’m more familiar, but I imagine, if somehow I could incorporate some video game play time into the class, the history and philosophy of video games would be a lot more fun to create/teach.

    2. “Philosophy for Becoming an Adult” or “Philosophy for Adulthood”

    I imagine this being an elective for seniors. Unit 1 would focus on meaning-generation. I could see myself teaching lessons on what major philosophical and religious traditions have presented as the meaning of human life. (For the religious traditions, I could use Stephen Prothero’s four key components of religions (problem, solution, technique, and exemplars) which might map onto schools like Stoicism, Epicureanism, Confucianism, etc.

    Then, Unit 2 would focus on relationships. Maybe something related to Confucius’ ranking of relationships and teachings about filial piety combined with something on friendship (maybe consulting Robin Dunbar’s Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships) and maybe something—if I’m brave—on romantic relationships, though I’d be super cautious about this, and may want to choose some novel angle. Unit 3 would focus on work and career, maybe built around Matthew Hammerton’s “What Is Wrong with Workism?” Hammerton mentions Aristotelean “perfectionism,” which would be worth a lesson in itself. I think a discussion of AI’s relationship to work and whether we want a “post-work future” would be a great fit here.

      An introduction to ethic could be a lot of fun too.

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      Song of the Day

      This week I was talking to one of our seniors who took my classes when she was either a freshman or a sophomore. She told me that those were difficult years for her but then she shared something that made my day. She told me that the days that she had my class she would brighten up a bit because she thought, “I wonder what song will be played in LePort’s class today?” She’s referring to a daily tradition of mine that I derived from my friend and mentor Ruben Dupertuis. I begin each class with a “Song of the Day” that is playing toward the end of the passing period between classes. As they enter my classroom, the song is connected in some way to that day’s lesson content. It could be the artist, song title, album cover/music video, or the excerpt from the lyrics that are on the screen.

      I’ve turned “Song of the Day” into a daily extra credit (“Bonus Point”) opportunity where I allow up to five students to try to tell me what the connection is. It functions as a fun pregame show, if you will, for the lesson’s content. But it’s also a culture builder. It creates a warmth to the classroom as they enter. Or, at least that’s what I hope it creates! And I think for many it works to get them thinking about what we’re about to learn as they listen to their peers try to bridge the gap between the song and the title of the lesson written on a white board.

      For the aforementioned student, it was just the idea of a class beginning with music that brighten her day. I don’t think my pedagogical goals were being accomplished because of all that she was experiencing but as I’ve learned over the past eight years as a high school teacher, your main priority is helping young people become adults. What you teach does matter. I don’t want to downplay that at all. The subject-matter matters! But your goal in high school is different than being a college professor who is teaching to students who happen to be majoring in your field of expertise. Most of your students won’t go on to become the same type of professional that you are. (So far, only one of the several hundred students that I’ve taught has gone on to seminary. Two others minored in religious studies and another minored in philosophy. I could be wrong but I think that’s the extent of the students who have gone on to focus on the type of content that I teach once they graduated.) They will become contributors to our society which I hope will remain a functioning democracy. Sometimes the best you can do is help them continue forward through their rough patches. That may mean that your classroom feels like a place where they can be happy during unhappy days.

      But there’s a pedagogical method to the madness as well. Music helps our brain make connections and memories. I’ve had students walk past my classroom and tell me, “I remember that song and we talked about…”! They don’t remember all the details but they have some retention. I was never one to memorize Bible passages, or lines from plays, etc., but what I do remember all the way from childhood was information that was connected to music (for example, I can tell you the “fruits of the spirit” because I was taught it to music as a kid).

      On a final note, I don’t think teachers need to start each class with music but I do wonder how much music could improve a class. I imagine teaching modern American history and dropping certain songs into different lessons that were important at the time. My guess is that this would enliven any class but also tie the content to music which should help students remember what was taught a little better!

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      Education as rooted innovation

      Several days ago, I was reading James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility. While a book of philosophy, it’s full of aphorisms, including “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.” With regard to this particular aphorism, he unpacks it with a paragraph that I’ve been chewing on. He writes (p. 19):

      “Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.

      “Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.”

      I’ve been pondering these statements in relation to my own context. I teach in a school that can be best described as the intersection of several forms of education. We’re not a “military school” but we do have a prominent Corps of Cadets. We’re a religious school but we’re not fundamentalist, sectarian, or exclusive, as we’re grounded in the openness of Episcopal Christianity. We’re a college preparatory school but we’re not a school that grounds itself primarily/only in what happens in the classroom. We value athletics but we’re too small and too private to ever be a factory for D-1 athletes. We have an “Arts and Innovation” department but I wouldn’t characterize us as an art school or a tech school. We value STEM but we’re not myopically STEM based. I mean, we have a daily chapel service and a religious studies requirement to graduate, so I think you get the idea.

      In many ways, we try to do too much. But if you knew the school and its context in San Antonio, you’d know that this is package makes sense as a product. The question I ask myself when wanting to move beyond mere consumerism is, “How does it make sense beyond being a product for a particular audience/demographic?” This is where Carse’s comments about education may be valuable.

      All schools train students but training isn’t the only goal, or even the primary one, of most institutions of learning. Sure, there are nursing schools, and mechanic schools, and so forth. Their purpose is to train students. The methods are set. Innovation isn’t desired. We don’t want nurses experimenting on patients. I want a mechanic to fix what needs to be fixed when I bring my car to the shop, and I want it done quickly and efficiently. Training is good. In my context—secondary education in a school with middle and upper school divisions—this isn’t why we exist though. We don’t exist merely to train; we exist to educate.

      Education can’t be just memorizing facts. Education can’t be just trivia. As Carse said, education “discovers the richness of the past”. This doesn’t mean knowing history for pragmatic, negative purposes (e.g. “avoiding the mistakes of the past”). Or just to do well on an AP exam. Instead, it’s for the purpose of rooting a student. We’re storied beings and we want to be part of something, something bigger than our own individuality. The past doesn’t just provide us with a map toward success or a warning of pitfalls. It invites us into an ongoing, collective project, where our individuality is enhanced by its interconnection with others.

      This may sound like I’m talking about teaching history, religion, or philosophy only, but I don’t think this is the case. Algebra can be training but it can be story. What has algebra done for us humans. How did we discover/create it? What great things have we done with it? What great things might we do with it? What is it like to be the type of creatures who can do algebra? What is it like to be part of a species that can use our mind this way to do this type of thinking? This is true of teaching biology, and calculus, and chemistry, and physics.

      We can train someone in physics or we can educate them in it. Or, to my area of teaching, we can indoctrinate students in religion or we can educate them about religion. The first assumes finality; the second openness. The first assumes training; the second education. To educate a student about religion isn’t to close off their future, so that their ideas about religion are complete once they get their high school diploma. To educate about religion is to point students to the past, and to contemporary realities, so that they can simultaneously (A) ground themselves in the collective, ongoing exercise of meaning making that we humans call “religion” (even if their path is irreligious, they need to know what it is that they’re departing from) and (B) so that they can be agents in this process going forward into their own shared future. The goal isn’t to memorize who the Prophet Moses is, or the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, or interpretations of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment. The goal can’t be to simply “know things”. The goal is to have them critically (i.e. thoughtfully) evaluate and consider these things, asking why their forebears valued these people/concepts, and to ask what we should do with them going forward. Are these the stories we want to identify with? Are these the projects within which we want to ground ourselves? Is this the language of the communities with which we want to associate? If so, how should we understand them, adopt them, and adapt them?

      Education takes the narratives, communities, and identities of the past into the future. This includes the good and the bad. The good which we celebrate, recreate, and extend; the bad which we lament, safeguard against, and work to eliminate. This means education isn’t about just “getting a job” but getting a job that feels like it’s part of something bigger and ongoing. It’s not just about “making money” but wisely making money with a purpose/goal for that money, an awareness of our indebtedness to the people who have paved the way for us to make that money, an ethic that asks how much of it we need and what we should do with it, and a reasonableness that remembers our own temporality and interconnectedness so that we don’t fall prey to the disease of greed which when spread too far results in an unsustainable future for us all.

      For some, this sort of collectiveness may sound dangerous. It may seem like the type of error that postmodernity has attempted to correct. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-Françios Leotard spoke of the “postmodern condition” as “incredulity toward metanarratives”. As Ashley Woodward explains, “…metanarratives are understood as totalising stories about history and the goals of the human race that ground and legitimise knowledges and cultural practises”. We may do well to remain generally suspicious of metanarratives. There are many forms of religious dogmatics, nationalisms, and other ideologies that can be dangerous when adopted en masse, especially by the masses! But we do need narratives. We need interconnected narratives. We need narratives that can be linked together with interchangeable parts. And I don’t think the narrative of “training” alone can fulfill us humans. This means that personally, I must ground myself in the narratives of being human, being Christian, being American. We can’t have a view from no where. We can’t start building our identity suspended in the air. Instead, we must become educated in our inherited metanarratives into which we were born while simultaneously taking responsibility for our contribution to what those metanarratives will mean in the present and in the future. The harm of metanarratives can be addressed by accepting them as lacking concreteness; as being dynamic. But abandoning them completely leaves us creating metanarratives out of thin air—metanarratives about the danger of metanarratives which puts us as risk of the worst of unchecked, selfish individualism and nihilism.

      With this in mind, I can imagine our Corps of Cadets educating based on their commitment to the values and virtues of discipline, comradely, self-sacrifice, etc., that come from the traditions of military preparation. Our athletics can teach us the same things, pointing back to exemplars, both physical and spiritual. (As a Giants fan, I think of Willie Mays who just passed, and what he meant as an athlete to Black Americans, Americans in general, Giants fans, baseball fans in general, people in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, etc. In other words, for example, we shouldn’t just teach kids to play baseball but invite them into the story of baseball. I could go on but I think the ideas is clear.) Even in a school like mine that feels like it could be three or four schools rolled into one, the unifying reality that keeps it all rolled together can be this commitment to not merely train but to educate: to prepare students to be surprised; to help them discover the richness of the past; to give them a glimpse of what remains unfinished and in need of work; to invite them into self-discovery; to bridge the past to the present to the future so that students become part of an ongoing human project that aims for the greater good for us all.

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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.