Your life might need some structure if…

- your (usually problem-free) back hurts from standing up long enough to make Rachel Ray’s 30 Minute Black Bean Soup.

- your roommate jokes that, if you didn’t have to leave home to get take-out, you would have bedsores.  (I laughed harder at this than I have laughed in about 2 years.)

This may give you a glimpse of what my first month of candidacy has looked like.

My second year of grad school, a dissertating friend (who wasn’t GSI’ing) told me that she hadn’t worked in a month.  Beleaguered as I was by taking 3 classes and GSI’ing for the first time, I despised her for it.  How are the mighty fallen.

Priorities in Undergraduate Education

Today the prof for the class I’m TA’ing announced that anyone who is caught surfing the web during lecture, by him or a GSI, will be kicked out of the class (permanently), no questions asked.  Even if it happens on the last day of class.

Well, this GSI, for one, will not be doing the policing.

I think it’s inappropriate to say anything at all about web-surfing, let alone throw people out for it.  I wrote a long manifesto about how policies like this, and even keeping attendance, in my opinion, only encourage lazy students with a sense of entitlement to approach their studies like juvies or spoiled prep school kids who want to beat the system without learning, steal a march on their instructors if possible.  About how students who can skip class or surf the web without compromising their grade/learning experience ought not to be penalized, and those who can’t pull it off will penalize themselves, by getting bad grades.  I think if we expect students to take responsibility for their education, they’ll adapt, learn what works for them and what doesn’t, and maybe even come to see learning as a reward in itself that’s worth struggling for.  I’m all for grading participation in a discussion section or seminar, but if a student participates well most of the time, when he is in class, who cares if he misses sometimes, as long as he figures out what he missed on his own without bugging the instructor?

But my web connection fizzled and the post got lost.  Dang it, Beanby!

The icing on the cake is that this prof punishes web-surfing more severely than plagiarism.  (A student in a class of his that I TA’d plagiarized a couple years ago, and as a result of which he got a  C in the class.  Then he had the audacity to complain to me about his grade.)

If this were Prime Minister’s Question Time, I’d be hissing and calling out “Shame!”

I’m alive and I’m present and there’s nothing controlling me.

One of the few non-addled statements made by the infuriating and solipsistic but ultimately being-redeemed heroine of Rachel Getting Married, a movie about addiction, its consequences, recovery and forgiveness. And other things.  All in the context of a family that has hurt each other in unspeakable and in more mundane, irritating ways, but (with the exception of one member)  is ultimately there for each other. The dad in this movie is so amazing – he reminds me of my dad.

Also, the only realistic portrayal I can think of right now of a 12-step program. Ignore the contrived crap you see on shows like Mercy and Desperate Housewives!

We’re wasting our time

In one of my student’s papers, she claims that one of the sources Mel Brooks used for his movie “The History of the World” is our course textbook, “Jesus Outside the New Testament” by Robert Van Voorst.  “Indirectly,” of course – since both the movie and the book mention the apostle Thomas.

I am furious!  I am giving her a C just for that (and other “indirect” sources).

German Christians Encouraged by Government Minister to Participate More in Politics

(Thanks to sometime commenter L for this story.)

Wow, has Germany come full circle?  Here’s a story about the German Education Minister encouraging German Christians to keep on engaging actively with society and politics.  “Without Christians, Germany wouldn’t be what it is.”  And lest any of you think that’s  a slam, she seems to mean post-Nazi Germany, which is a pretty impressive place (despite all my moaning).  (Besides, as a lecture in Jesus in the Gospels revealed further to me today, the Nazis were far outside the mainstream of Christianity – they were basically a cult, in so far as they were “Christian” at all, that argued that Jesus was not Jewish and called for drastic reevaluation of the Old and New Testaments along racial lines.)

The Simpsons on Grad Students

My brother just forwarded me the link to this 19-second video, and I had to post it.

Teaching is Fun

A girl came up to me after class and said: “Sorry that this is kind of off-topic, but I don’t know anything about religion.  What’s the Holy Spirit?”  What a question!  So gratifying to be asked, but hard to answer.  Here’s my rambling attempt:

• the third person of the trinity
• “I’ve heard him called the “shy” member of the trinity”
• “I’m tempted to define him as the Person that’s not God the Father or Jesus”
• told her the story of Pentecost – probably TMI
• not present in the OT, and believers back then knew God but didn’t have the Holy Spirit.  One difference that Jesus made is that Christians today have the Holy Spirit in their hearts.
• maybe it’s fair to say he’s the presence of God down here, in the “realm of becoming” (which we learned about this week).

I enjoyed this discussion section so much, which was all about the subjects lectured on by our guest lecturer, the Trinitarian Controversy (featuring Arius) and the Christological Controversy (with Cyril and Nestorius).  This lecturer, one of the new assistant profs in my department, managed to make a subject that’s always bored me seem fun and not too hard and relevant.  The students responded really well, and I had the best discussion sections this week that I’ve ever had.   I’m almost tempted to wish that I did something in the line of Judeo-Christianity or philosophy (not really) … you can have discussions about history and ANE religion, but you have to know a lot before you do so – and I’ve never succeeded in getting my undergrads to that point.

I’m realizing this semester how rewarding teaching can be when your goal isn’t to expend as little time or emotional energy as possible.  It’s so annoying when students seem sullen and unengaged, but such a shot in the arm when they respond.

Go scholars!

I learned two encouraging things last Friday in the class I’m TA’ing this semester on Jesus and the Gospels.

Given that I had spent the morning practically trying to convince my undergrads that not all the details of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke could both be true (or at least asking them to tell me *how* for example Jesus could have been both presented as a newborn in the Temple and on the run from Herod, to Egypt), this was a welcome change.

The professor told the story of how one of the many apparent discrepancies between John and the Synoptic Gospels was resolved by a secular academic.  They Synoptics record that Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples before he died, while in John he dies on the Friday before Passover (which was the following Shabbat).  How could both be true?  Well, some French scholar postulated that different groups within Judaism celebrated Judaism at different times — which is definitely true for the Essenes, for example – and so at least some scholars say that the chronology of both John and the Synoptics is acceptable. The Prof actually came out and said, “so scholars aren’t always showing that the different Gospels are incompatible – sometimes they help to harmonize the Gospels, too.”  At this I wanted to cheer.

There was another interesting tidbit: the prof reads the references to Thomas, Peter, and the disciple “whom Jesus loved” in the book of John as responses to what was going on in their respective communities in the early church at the time John was written.  So he thinks the post-resurrection story about the beloved disciple outrunning Peter to the tomb but waiting and letting Peter go in first (Jn. 20: 1-10) has an anti-Gnostic, anti-Gospel of Thomas message: if a follower of Jesus understands the truth before the others, his job is not to treat the latter as second-class Christians, but to wait for them – to serve the community as a whole instead of clinging to membership in the elite.

I wish all apparent discrepancies between the Gospels could be harmonized like the Passover story above.  I’ve arrived at the point, though, where instead of clinging to far-fetched solutions at all costs, I’m willing to admit that some things didn’t actually happen.  It’s kind of scary – but I hope ultimately God-honoring.

wise words

“Unless you’re cool in the Lord, you’re always going to be in competition.”

What Dad told me yesterday after I moaned to him about going to a party where I felt uncool and uninteresting, drab and plain white bread.  Repressed, perpetually single white bread — with braces.

Oh, and then last night, I was out with a doctor friend and some friends from her research fellowship program, all of whom are married doctors about my age or a several years older.  After I finished telling them what I study, one of them asked me in a kindly voice, “Are you an undergrad?”  WTF!  We all either laughed it off or played it as a compliment, but I saw it as a judgment on my general lack of polish (and braces), and nothing to do with the smoothness of my complexion.

Sometimes I feel like grad school is a never-ending competition to see who’s smartest, who’s making the fastest progress (now that most of my acquaintances are candidates, unlike me), who’s got an in with profs, who’s wittiest, and, around certain people, who knows the most about obscure arts and culture.

I really don’t know if the people who seem to “beat” me are also competing, or if the competition is all the creation of my tormented, insecure mind.  (Probably somewhere in between.)  I just know that this is one rat race I want to get the hell out of.

Thank goodness for Paul, that trembling, suffering, shat-upon apostle, who decided to know nothing but Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

“Where is the one who is wise?  Where is the  scribe?  Where is the debater of this age?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the follow of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.  But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even the things that are not, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.  He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption.  Therefore, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (I Cor. 20-31)

considerate undergrad

I asked this undergrad girl on the quad today where the Flynn building is.  She said “Hi, I’m Alex,” and walked out of her way so she could point it out to me.  I’m choosing to look at this as a good omen for fall TA’ing.