Of Birds, Cherubim and the Good Creation
On one of the lists on which I write from time to time, this message arrived this morning:
Psalm 80:1
Hear, O Shepherd of Israel, leading Joseph like a flock; *
shine forth, you that are enthroned upon the cherubim.
Cherubim are winged angels that carry prayers to God.
An osprey called my attention to this verse this morning. She cried as I passed under her perch on the power lines when I was leaving the neighborhood for a walk. She flew in front of me to perch on a house when I returned.
Like the writer, I love the psalms. Though laced with violence and hierarchical imagery, they are also the repository of some of ancient Israel’s most pastoral imagery, here quite literally. In this verse the people of Israel are compared to a sheep (don’t want to think too long on that one – sheep are often quite literally stinky and stupid) led by a shepherd. And the verse refers to cherubim who, as the writer notes, are the winged angels carrying prayers before the presence of G-d. It’s beautiful imagery emerging from lyrical wordsmithing. It’s not hard to like the psalms.
The writer’s reference to the osprey nesting atop the power lines prompted this response:
I have always seen the presence of birds as the presence of the spirit. I am always happy to encounter birds in my daily life as I see them as a good omen. I have created a small sanctuary of trees amidst a city of 2 million people so the birds have a place to rest.
On Sept. 11, 2001, air traffic was halted in the face of the emergencies in NYC, Washington and PA. I was so troubled that day that I went for a walk with my husband to try to calm myself. As we walked along the lake near my house, I was struck by how quiet it was without the noise of airplanes which fly over my neighborhood enroute to landing at either of the two airports here in Orlando.
The birds were singing like crazy that day, perhaps a eulogy to the thousands of their fellow creatures, human animals, who had died that day under horrible circumstances. Suddenly, it struck me that they had probably been singing all along. But I hadn’t heard them for the noise and the hustle of daily life. And what a loss to my life that had been.
I try to pay attention to the birds these days. Unlike my Protestant fellow writer, the birds do not prompt me to think of scripture. But they do remind me of the overwhelming generosity of G-d and the goodness of G-d’s creation of which we human animals are a part but only a part.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Monday, November 28, 2011
Saturday, November 26, 2011
In Gratitude for Random Acts of Kindness
One of the things I teach my world religions students is that the basis of most indigenous religions is gratitude. These traditions evidence an underlying awareness of the many aspects of the natural world which are required to create and preserve life. Humanity exists because of the generosity of nature. Indigenous people never forget that and their spiritual lives are based in gratitude for those many blessings. Among them are the people the Puritans and their European cousins largely made extinct, replacing them with a world in which human beings have come to find their identity in being consumers.
In a consumerist world we human animals see ourselves as the center of existence. We tend to focus on what we want (or at least what we’ve been hoodwinked into believing we need by consumer advertising and their media cheerleaders) but we often fail to be grateful for what we have. As a white male of the first world who has had ongoing opportunities to see what living on $2/day or less looks like up close on multiple occasions, I am aware of the privilege I enjoy as a matter of course in my daily life. I take none of it for granted (not the least of which is the opportunities to make those journeys). Nor do I not see my privilege as an entitlement. Rather, I recognize it as little more than the luck of the draw in what Warren Buffett calls “the ovarian lottery.” And with that privilege comes responsibilities.
On Thanksgiving Day each year, my list of those aspects of my life for which I am grateful becomes a little longer even as I recognize it is inevitably incomplete. But, this year, an unexpected gift of a random act of kindness dominates my list. To appreciate this gift, I must put it into context.
Context: 297 days until retirement and counting
For those who have read many of my blog postings, it’s hardly any secret that I increasingly find teaching college undergraduates in the impersonal factory setting where I work to be trying on a good day. I work like a slave, bringing to bear the educational attainment of three graduate degrees and a lifetime of highly varied life experience around the world in an effort to help students become educated human beings. I make little money to show for it. Indeed, my goal these days is to make enough money to pay off my student loans by retirement so it will not decimate my meager pension, assuming our governor and legislature have not reneged on that promise and taken our retirements away by then.
Of course, I knew when I became a university instructor that I would not get rich nor did that particularly bother me. If I’d simply wanted to rake in the cash without much concern for how it was made, I would have remained in the law business. But it’s not the lack of compensation for my work that troubles me. What does bother me is the steady stream of ingratitude - if not outright abuse - for the poorly compensated hard work I regularly offer the people of Florida. It seems no good deed goes unpunished.
Among many (though not all) of the students at the factory, it appears as a deadly combination of an inordinate sense of entitlement to good grades along with an inordinate aversion to any semblance of hard work which would make such grades meaningful. That sense of entitlement sometimes translates to public postings on online sites on which disgruntled student consumers make scandalous, highly personal statements about their instructors. There is absolutely no requirement that the statements be true nor do faculty members have an opportunity to respond.
Among the corporate bureaucracy of the university, it often appears as a mindless obsession with credit hours (think sales) and ratings on consumerist surveys confused with faculty evaluations (think customer satisfaction). There is far too often little concern for quality as an obsession with quantity predominates. Though these technocrats ostensibly run an educational institution, pedagogy is low on the totem pole among their imperatives.
Among the supposed leaders of our state, it comes as an ongoing polemic against public servants who are regularly constructed as somehow overcompensated and seemingly inevitably incompetent. It comes in attempts to kill our largely impotent public worker unions which are the only thing standing between public servants and absolute corporate tyranny. More recently it has appeared as attempts to reduce the pensions of workers nearing or already in retirement, a rather frightening specter for those of us with more work days behind us than ahead of us. Nothing like sticking it to folks unable to defend themselves. Little wonder these boys want to get rid of the courses that raise questions about values and behaviors.
Finally, it has manifest in the mindless ranting of a governor who would destroy any semblance of liberal arts education in higher education in the pursuit of business imperatives - assuring a steady supply of obedient and largely mindless worker drones. Such inevitably occurs under the cynical and intellectually dishonest guise of concern for jobs. Ironically, the governor himself provides an unparalleled teaching moment regarding jobs –a testament to the power of wealth to avoid responsibility for white collar crime (medicare fraud) and to use the profits to buy elections.
I can take the lack of compensation that often marks the ingratitude of a public which always relies upon the service of public workers but consistently takes their service for granted. When it comes to public service, everyone expects a free lunch. That is particularly true regarding public education. Indeed, in a culture with as low a value for education and as high an animosity toward intellectuals historically as our own, that probably should be expected.
But when the failure to be paid the wages that one’s credentials and hard work merit is added to personal public defamation by students, never knowing if one’s job or retirement is safe and enduring demonization and the tinkering with one’s pedagogy by demagogues, the situation becomes increasingly untenable. Little wonder that this veteran of nearly 30 years in higher education can tell you exactly how many days in the classroom he must complete until – hopefully – he retires. As of Thanksgiving Day, that number was 297.
"I would like to thank you for that."
This is the context that makes the unexpected gift from a former student days before Thanksgiving so touching. In my university email last week, I received the following:
tried to send this to you on linkedin but couldn't because we are not yet friends...
I took two semesters of humanistic traditions with you at UCF. One semester you had a particularly large class, about 75 students, and it was clear you devoted a large amount of time preparing for each class. I recall you mentioning to me that initially you were worried because of the class size, but you ended up enjoying teaching that class more than any other that semester. It was very apparent that you were passionate about the discussions and it was clear to me that you held yourself at a higher standard than any other professor I've had. Five years later, I still continue to benefit from your lesions in psychological projection, cognitive dissonance, and comparison between eastern and western theologies. I’m an engineer by trade but ironically no professor facilitated my growth more than your classes. I would like to thank you for that.
I am hoping that the reference to “lesions” is simply an ironic typo or a pun. No doubt, the cognitive dissonance my pedagogy is designed to induce can be painful. Critical thinking about ideas you thought to be settled which - drawn into the harsh light of reason, empathy and responsibilities to others - are not so obvious and self-evident anymore can indeed inflict lesions on the mind if not the soul. But, this student found a way to realize the benefit of the willingness to delay gratification, wrestle with hard questions and endure the pain of cognitive dissonance that M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Travelled) recognizes as necessary for growth. And four years after attending the last class with me, this student found a way to say thank you.
In turn, I found my own way to say thank you in return, sending the following response on Thanksgiving Day:
On this day of giving thanks, I am thankful for students like you, who are willing to wrestle with ideas and work up to your potential. It's students like you that keep me going in the face of an awful lot of whining and resistance.
Thank you for taking time to send me this. Hope you are having a wonderful day. And I hope the lesions have healed (that's either a rather ironic typo or a pun). :)
It is hard to estimate how much simple acts of random kindness can impact the world. If the Ripple Effect is true, an ongoing pattern of random kindness would certainly make this world a much better place to live. In my own case, coming amidst a week of grading a mountain of lackluster essays and meeting classes half empty from students leaving early for Thanksgiving holidays, this totally unexpected note from a former student lifted my spirits immensely. And on Thanksgiving Day, I found myself giving thanks for this very trying career which, despite an ongoing tsunami of vexation, allows me the privilege of touching the lives of people like this.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
One of the things I teach my world religions students is that the basis of most indigenous religions is gratitude. These traditions evidence an underlying awareness of the many aspects of the natural world which are required to create and preserve life. Humanity exists because of the generosity of nature. Indigenous people never forget that and their spiritual lives are based in gratitude for those many blessings. Among them are the people the Puritans and their European cousins largely made extinct, replacing them with a world in which human beings have come to find their identity in being consumers.
In a consumerist world we human animals see ourselves as the center of existence. We tend to focus on what we want (or at least what we’ve been hoodwinked into believing we need by consumer advertising and their media cheerleaders) but we often fail to be grateful for what we have. As a white male of the first world who has had ongoing opportunities to see what living on $2/day or less looks like up close on multiple occasions, I am aware of the privilege I enjoy as a matter of course in my daily life. I take none of it for granted (not the least of which is the opportunities to make those journeys). Nor do I not see my privilege as an entitlement. Rather, I recognize it as little more than the luck of the draw in what Warren Buffett calls “the ovarian lottery.” And with that privilege comes responsibilities.
On Thanksgiving Day each year, my list of those aspects of my life for which I am grateful becomes a little longer even as I recognize it is inevitably incomplete. But, this year, an unexpected gift of a random act of kindness dominates my list. To appreciate this gift, I must put it into context.
Context: 297 days until retirement and counting
For those who have read many of my blog postings, it’s hardly any secret that I increasingly find teaching college undergraduates in the impersonal factory setting where I work to be trying on a good day. I work like a slave, bringing to bear the educational attainment of three graduate degrees and a lifetime of highly varied life experience around the world in an effort to help students become educated human beings. I make little money to show for it. Indeed, my goal these days is to make enough money to pay off my student loans by retirement so it will not decimate my meager pension, assuming our governor and legislature have not reneged on that promise and taken our retirements away by then.
Of course, I knew when I became a university instructor that I would not get rich nor did that particularly bother me. If I’d simply wanted to rake in the cash without much concern for how it was made, I would have remained in the law business. But it’s not the lack of compensation for my work that troubles me. What does bother me is the steady stream of ingratitude - if not outright abuse - for the poorly compensated hard work I regularly offer the people of Florida. It seems no good deed goes unpunished.
Among many (though not all) of the students at the factory, it appears as a deadly combination of an inordinate sense of entitlement to good grades along with an inordinate aversion to any semblance of hard work which would make such grades meaningful. That sense of entitlement sometimes translates to public postings on online sites on which disgruntled student consumers make scandalous, highly personal statements about their instructors. There is absolutely no requirement that the statements be true nor do faculty members have an opportunity to respond.
Among the corporate bureaucracy of the university, it often appears as a mindless obsession with credit hours (think sales) and ratings on consumerist surveys confused with faculty evaluations (think customer satisfaction). There is far too often little concern for quality as an obsession with quantity predominates. Though these technocrats ostensibly run an educational institution, pedagogy is low on the totem pole among their imperatives.
Among the supposed leaders of our state, it comes as an ongoing polemic against public servants who are regularly constructed as somehow overcompensated and seemingly inevitably incompetent. It comes in attempts to kill our largely impotent public worker unions which are the only thing standing between public servants and absolute corporate tyranny. More recently it has appeared as attempts to reduce the pensions of workers nearing or already in retirement, a rather frightening specter for those of us with more work days behind us than ahead of us. Nothing like sticking it to folks unable to defend themselves. Little wonder these boys want to get rid of the courses that raise questions about values and behaviors.
Finally, it has manifest in the mindless ranting of a governor who would destroy any semblance of liberal arts education in higher education in the pursuit of business imperatives - assuring a steady supply of obedient and largely mindless worker drones. Such inevitably occurs under the cynical and intellectually dishonest guise of concern for jobs. Ironically, the governor himself provides an unparalleled teaching moment regarding jobs –a testament to the power of wealth to avoid responsibility for white collar crime (medicare fraud) and to use the profits to buy elections.
I can take the lack of compensation that often marks the ingratitude of a public which always relies upon the service of public workers but consistently takes their service for granted. When it comes to public service, everyone expects a free lunch. That is particularly true regarding public education. Indeed, in a culture with as low a value for education and as high an animosity toward intellectuals historically as our own, that probably should be expected.
But when the failure to be paid the wages that one’s credentials and hard work merit is added to personal public defamation by students, never knowing if one’s job or retirement is safe and enduring demonization and the tinkering with one’s pedagogy by demagogues, the situation becomes increasingly untenable. Little wonder that this veteran of nearly 30 years in higher education can tell you exactly how many days in the classroom he must complete until – hopefully – he retires. As of Thanksgiving Day, that number was 297.
"I would like to thank you for that."
This is the context that makes the unexpected gift from a former student days before Thanksgiving so touching. In my university email last week, I received the following:
tried to send this to you on linkedin but couldn't because we are not yet friends...
I took two semesters of humanistic traditions with you at UCF. One semester you had a particularly large class, about 75 students, and it was clear you devoted a large amount of time preparing for each class. I recall you mentioning to me that initially you were worried because of the class size, but you ended up enjoying teaching that class more than any other that semester. It was very apparent that you were passionate about the discussions and it was clear to me that you held yourself at a higher standard than any other professor I've had. Five years later, I still continue to benefit from your lesions in psychological projection, cognitive dissonance, and comparison between eastern and western theologies. I’m an engineer by trade but ironically no professor facilitated my growth more than your classes. I would like to thank you for that.
I am hoping that the reference to “lesions” is simply an ironic typo or a pun. No doubt, the cognitive dissonance my pedagogy is designed to induce can be painful. Critical thinking about ideas you thought to be settled which - drawn into the harsh light of reason, empathy and responsibilities to others - are not so obvious and self-evident anymore can indeed inflict lesions on the mind if not the soul. But, this student found a way to realize the benefit of the willingness to delay gratification, wrestle with hard questions and endure the pain of cognitive dissonance that M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Travelled) recognizes as necessary for growth. And four years after attending the last class with me, this student found a way to say thank you.
In turn, I found my own way to say thank you in return, sending the following response on Thanksgiving Day:
On this day of giving thanks, I am thankful for students like you, who are willing to wrestle with ideas and work up to your potential. It's students like you that keep me going in the face of an awful lot of whining and resistance.
Thank you for taking time to send me this. Hope you are having a wonderful day. And I hope the lesions have healed (that's either a rather ironic typo or a pun). :)
It is hard to estimate how much simple acts of random kindness can impact the world. If the Ripple Effect is true, an ongoing pattern of random kindness would certainly make this world a much better place to live. In my own case, coming amidst a week of grading a mountain of lackluster essays and meeting classes half empty from students leaving early for Thanksgiving holidays, this totally unexpected note from a former student lifted my spirits immensely. And on Thanksgiving Day, I found myself giving thanks for this very trying career which, despite an ongoing tsunami of vexation, allows me the privilege of touching the lives of people like this.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Stepping Back to Take a Second Look – Part II
(continued from Part I)
The Mother of the Bride
I left the Franciscans after lunch to attend a wedding of one of my former students. She is one of the brightest young people I have ever taught and her performances in my classes were inevitably stellar. I had the pleasure of supervising an independent study with this young woman on the subject of torture and human rights just as the atrocities at Bagram and Abu Ghraib were breaking. This student brilliantly synthesized the increasingly depressing news accounts with the cultural perceptions of the same as they were being portrayed in the Fox television program 24 and as well as the Battlestar Galactica program on the then Science Fiction channel. Her Honors in the Major presentation on rape, cultural presumptions and legal standards by which the accused is too often placed on trial was provocative, well-written and well-defended.
She had invited me to her wedding yesterday and I had put it on the back burner of a psychic stovetop brimming with pressing obligations to Fulbright reporting and Florida Humanities Council presentations. When I saw this woman at the Occupy Orlando march a few weeks ago, I asked her when the wedding was to occur and promised her I’d come. While I don’t generally like weddings, I figured I owed this one to my former student.
The wedding was truly beautiful. In perhaps typical Unitarian unconventional style, it began with a procession of the couple’s dog on leash down the aisle to an incredibly beautiful rendition of the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili, Baba Yetu. It opened with a lyrical reading from the Massachusetts’ Supreme Court’s decisions Goodridge v. Department of Public Health in which the Court there struck down the restrictions of marriage to different sex couples and continued with readings from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and a very moving excerpt from an interview with the widow of Carl Sagan upon his death.
All members of the family participated and the couple essentially married themselves, proclaiming as much in their exchange of rings. The recognition of the marriage was pronounced by the community assembled: “We who are gathered here today join you…in the name of love.” It was just beautiful. And it was unique, much what I would have expected from my former charge.
What I had not anticipated was what her mother told me. She thanked me profusely for attending the wedding, saying that I had no idea how much her daughter appreciated it. She then went on to say how much my teaching had meant to her, that I had been her life-line at the university and that her finishing her degree there was due in no small part to my role in that process.
Again, an embarrassing and humbling place to be. It came at the end of a day in which I had been taken back to a prior time in my life when my interactions with a legally blind impoverished man had been used as the example in a sermon of “feeding my sheep.” It also came at the end of a long week in which my enrollments for classes in the fall hovered in the single digits prompting me to fear those classes may yet not make for the spring. In a consumerist university, diligence and hard work are not necessarily values, they are frequently liabilities.
To be faithful, not successful
What has occurred to me over these past few hours of trying to make sense of yesterday’s events is that the calling to feed the sheep – the people of G-d I feel I am called to serve – is different from dealing with the flock. The former speaks to relationships with individuals, the latter to popular affirmation. And what I have struggled with all of my life is the balancing of the need for authenticity and devotion to the calling I perceived with the need for a sense of effectiveness, for reaching every single student that crosses the threshold of my classroom, indeed, for changing the world – the goal that drove me into public school teaching, the practice of law and the ordained ministry, all with some fairly disastrous consequences. Most of all, I have struggled with trying to be authentic in the pursuit of that calling even as the affirmation I so badly wanted has often eluded me.
These things are not comfortable for me to confront, much less to state publicly. But confession is good for the soul. And ENFP types often reason out loud to find their way.
For the record, I am grateful for the many sheep whose lives have touched my own and whom I have had the privilege of touching in return. I need to quickly point out that I do not see them as sheep in any blind following sense of that archetype – my sheep have been quick to ignore my advice and to call me on my crap historically - nor do I ever take them for granted. Even as I sting from the ridicule and abuse my own enthusiasm and zeal seem to draw from the flock to which I am assigned each semester, I am grateful for the privilege to know, teach and hopefully inspire the handful I will actually reach. And I live in hope that this will prove sufficient consolation for the wounds left by so many of their classmates.
Often in my adult life I have found myself returning to a statement by Mother Theresa, one of the great saints in my own life, a statement I understand intellectually even as I grapple with living into it existentially. In her usual simple but powerful manner, the saint of Calcutta said, “G-d does not call me to be successful. G-d calls me to be faithful.” That message came back to me Saturday with the force of a tsunami. As usual, I find myself standing on the edge of the chasm, hoping to find a way to make that leap of faith, to bridge the gap between what my intellect recognizes as sound advice even as my wounded heart stands timidly, self-pityingly at the lip of the abyss.
May Charles Simeon pray for us who follow in your way.
May Mother Theresa pray for us who like her seek to be faithful
And may the Holy Mother pray for us
now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
(continued from Part I)
The Mother of the Bride
I left the Franciscans after lunch to attend a wedding of one of my former students. She is one of the brightest young people I have ever taught and her performances in my classes were inevitably stellar. I had the pleasure of supervising an independent study with this young woman on the subject of torture and human rights just as the atrocities at Bagram and Abu Ghraib were breaking. This student brilliantly synthesized the increasingly depressing news accounts with the cultural perceptions of the same as they were being portrayed in the Fox television program 24 and as well as the Battlestar Galactica program on the then Science Fiction channel. Her Honors in the Major presentation on rape, cultural presumptions and legal standards by which the accused is too often placed on trial was provocative, well-written and well-defended.
She had invited me to her wedding yesterday and I had put it on the back burner of a psychic stovetop brimming with pressing obligations to Fulbright reporting and Florida Humanities Council presentations. When I saw this woman at the Occupy Orlando march a few weeks ago, I asked her when the wedding was to occur and promised her I’d come. While I don’t generally like weddings, I figured I owed this one to my former student.
The wedding was truly beautiful. In perhaps typical Unitarian unconventional style, it began with a procession of the couple’s dog on leash down the aisle to an incredibly beautiful rendition of the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili, Baba Yetu. It opened with a lyrical reading from the Massachusetts’ Supreme Court’s decisions Goodridge v. Department of Public Health in which the Court there struck down the restrictions of marriage to different sex couples and continued with readings from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and a very moving excerpt from an interview with the widow of Carl Sagan upon his death.
All members of the family participated and the couple essentially married themselves, proclaiming as much in their exchange of rings. The recognition of the marriage was pronounced by the community assembled: “We who are gathered here today join you…in the name of love.” It was just beautiful. And it was unique, much what I would have expected from my former charge.
What I had not anticipated was what her mother told me. She thanked me profusely for attending the wedding, saying that I had no idea how much her daughter appreciated it. She then went on to say how much my teaching had meant to her, that I had been her life-line at the university and that her finishing her degree there was due in no small part to my role in that process.
Again, an embarrassing and humbling place to be. It came at the end of a day in which I had been taken back to a prior time in my life when my interactions with a legally blind impoverished man had been used as the example in a sermon of “feeding my sheep.” It also came at the end of a long week in which my enrollments for classes in the fall hovered in the single digits prompting me to fear those classes may yet not make for the spring. In a consumerist university, diligence and hard work are not necessarily values, they are frequently liabilities.
To be faithful, not successful
What has occurred to me over these past few hours of trying to make sense of yesterday’s events is that the calling to feed the sheep – the people of G-d I feel I am called to serve – is different from dealing with the flock. The former speaks to relationships with individuals, the latter to popular affirmation. And what I have struggled with all of my life is the balancing of the need for authenticity and devotion to the calling I perceived with the need for a sense of effectiveness, for reaching every single student that crosses the threshold of my classroom, indeed, for changing the world – the goal that drove me into public school teaching, the practice of law and the ordained ministry, all with some fairly disastrous consequences. Most of all, I have struggled with trying to be authentic in the pursuit of that calling even as the affirmation I so badly wanted has often eluded me.
These things are not comfortable for me to confront, much less to state publicly. But confession is good for the soul. And ENFP types often reason out loud to find their way.
For the record, I am grateful for the many sheep whose lives have touched my own and whom I have had the privilege of touching in return. I need to quickly point out that I do not see them as sheep in any blind following sense of that archetype – my sheep have been quick to ignore my advice and to call me on my crap historically - nor do I ever take them for granted. Even as I sting from the ridicule and abuse my own enthusiasm and zeal seem to draw from the flock to which I am assigned each semester, I am grateful for the privilege to know, teach and hopefully inspire the handful I will actually reach. And I live in hope that this will prove sufficient consolation for the wounds left by so many of their classmates.
Often in my adult life I have found myself returning to a statement by Mother Theresa, one of the great saints in my own life, a statement I understand intellectually even as I grapple with living into it existentially. In her usual simple but powerful manner, the saint of Calcutta said, “G-d does not call me to be successful. G-d calls me to be faithful.” That message came back to me Saturday with the force of a tsunami. As usual, I find myself standing on the edge of the chasm, hoping to find a way to make that leap of faith, to bridge the gap between what my intellect recognizes as sound advice even as my wounded heart stands timidly, self-pityingly at the lip of the abyss.
May Charles Simeon pray for us who follow in your way.
May Mother Theresa pray for us who like her seek to be faithful
And may the Holy Mother pray for us
now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Stepping Back to Take a Second Look – Part I
There are times in my life where I have been required to back up and take a second look at something I thought I’d already figured out. In years past when I was a little closer in orbit to the Episcopal Church, I would have described that as G-d using an existential 2 X 4 to get my attention and perhaps that’s not such a bad description to use. This past weekend provided my life one of those events.
The Franciscan Third Order held its every other month meeting Saturday. Given that it was my turn to host the meeting, I had originally suggested that we meet in our home as we had previously done but one of our members is highly allergic to cats and so we had to go to Plan B.
The closest I have to any real connection to the Episcopal Church in this diocese is St. Richard’s Church in Winter Park. The new rector is a graduate of my seminary in Berkeley and so the chances of encountering the fundamentalist and homophobic mindlessness that has gripped this diocese for two decades now are pretty slim there. The parish was having a work day but the folks on site provided us their hospitality in the form of a gracious welcome as we entered, meeting space and coffee and tea for our gathering.
Feed My Sheep
I chose to use the feast day on the Lesser Feasts and Fasts calendar for the readings for our eucharist. Frankly, I only vaguely remembered reading about Charles Simeon in seminary whose feast day was celebrated Nov. 12. But his biography and appointed lessons made for a provocative morning.
The Gospel lesson was the rather puzzling passage in John 21 where Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him and each time responds, “If you do, then feed my sheep.” Years ago before I left to go to seminary, the then-dean of St. Luke’s Cathedral downtown where I was a parishioner used this passage for a mini-homily at a noon service. Pointing into the congregation, he used me as an example of how I fed the parish’s sheep, watching out for the interests of a fellow parishioner who was legally blind and destitute. He spoke of how I often transported Charles to where he needed to go which often included events at the cathedral. The dean concluded his little homily with the exhortation to others to take this example of Jesus’ call to feed his sheep seriously.
It was both embarrassing and humbling. On the one hand, being held up as an example of a sermon always puts a parishioner on the spot even when it is merited. On the other hand, while I felt I was doing nothing special, simply living into what I saw as my obligations to others in the manner that was available to me, it was humbling and affirming to hear the positive way others saw this.
The biography of Charles Simeon that served as the basis for our discussion following the lessons mentioned that he attended Cambridge. He quickly realized that the required chapel attendance rule there had caused a good bit of hypocrisy and what he saw as “the irreverent reception of the sacrament.” What Simeon’s conscience told him was that if he was to go to chapel, he would have to take it seriously, reconsider his life (the actual meaning of the word repent) and “turn to God.”
Simeon: His zeal brought him much abuse
This turning point in his life led to a career as chaplain at one of the colleges at Cambridge. The LF&F biography notes that “Simeon’s enthusiasm and zeal brought him much ridicule and abuse which he bore uncomplainingly.” But the point of the bio was not to make a martyr out of Simeon as too many enthusiasts for their faith tend to seek out of ego-centrism. Rather, it was to note that while Simeon bore an awful lot of crap from the undergraduates under his charge, he also managed to inspire a handful of his students.
One, Henry Martyn, was convinced by Simeon to turn from a proposed career in law (Hurrah!) and become a missionary, ultimately translating the New Testament and the Book of Common Prayer into several different languages. A second, William Wilberforce, would become inspired to lead the fight to abolish slavery.
As we discussed the life of Charles Simeon, I began to think of how a handful of my own students have told me over the years how I had impacted their lives. Clearly they stand in stark contrast to the vast majority who readily decry that impact by both word of mouth to fellow students, in the online consumerist surveys which are erroneously and dishonestly described as instructor evaluations and at the various online sites designed to warn fellow slackers against taking demanding instructors like me. If, as the psalmist says, my sins were not already "ever before me," there is certainly no shortage of folks who are more than happy to tell me of their dissatisfaction with the diligence and the seriousness I bring to my calling as an educator.
Like Simeon, my enthusiasm and zeal for my vocation readily bring me much ridicule and abuse, though clearly I am not as willing to bear it uncomplainingly as Simeon. No doubt that is why he is on the saints’ calendar and I am unlikely to ever make it there.
On the other hand, I have had a handful of students over the years say to me that my teaching had meant a great deal to them. Some say it has inspired them to go and serve the world, something that truly warms the heart of this Enneagram 2 Helper type/ENFP Champion teacher. And others have told me that while they hated the class while they were in it, they later realized how it had helped them learn to think critically and to view the world in a more expansive manner. That is no small amount of consolation in the face of a raft of grief.
This is where the 2 X 4 comes in.
(continued in Part II)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
There are times in my life where I have been required to back up and take a second look at something I thought I’d already figured out. In years past when I was a little closer in orbit to the Episcopal Church, I would have described that as G-d using an existential 2 X 4 to get my attention and perhaps that’s not such a bad description to use. This past weekend provided my life one of those events.
The Franciscan Third Order held its every other month meeting Saturday. Given that it was my turn to host the meeting, I had originally suggested that we meet in our home as we had previously done but one of our members is highly allergic to cats and so we had to go to Plan B.
The closest I have to any real connection to the Episcopal Church in this diocese is St. Richard’s Church in Winter Park. The new rector is a graduate of my seminary in Berkeley and so the chances of encountering the fundamentalist and homophobic mindlessness that has gripped this diocese for two decades now are pretty slim there. The parish was having a work day but the folks on site provided us their hospitality in the form of a gracious welcome as we entered, meeting space and coffee and tea for our gathering.
Feed My Sheep
I chose to use the feast day on the Lesser Feasts and Fasts calendar for the readings for our eucharist. Frankly, I only vaguely remembered reading about Charles Simeon in seminary whose feast day was celebrated Nov. 12. But his biography and appointed lessons made for a provocative morning.
The Gospel lesson was the rather puzzling passage in John 21 where Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him and each time responds, “If you do, then feed my sheep.” Years ago before I left to go to seminary, the then-dean of St. Luke’s Cathedral downtown where I was a parishioner used this passage for a mini-homily at a noon service. Pointing into the congregation, he used me as an example of how I fed the parish’s sheep, watching out for the interests of a fellow parishioner who was legally blind and destitute. He spoke of how I often transported Charles to where he needed to go which often included events at the cathedral. The dean concluded his little homily with the exhortation to others to take this example of Jesus’ call to feed his sheep seriously.
It was both embarrassing and humbling. On the one hand, being held up as an example of a sermon always puts a parishioner on the spot even when it is merited. On the other hand, while I felt I was doing nothing special, simply living into what I saw as my obligations to others in the manner that was available to me, it was humbling and affirming to hear the positive way others saw this.
The biography of Charles Simeon that served as the basis for our discussion following the lessons mentioned that he attended Cambridge. He quickly realized that the required chapel attendance rule there had caused a good bit of hypocrisy and what he saw as “the irreverent reception of the sacrament.” What Simeon’s conscience told him was that if he was to go to chapel, he would have to take it seriously, reconsider his life (the actual meaning of the word repent) and “turn to God.”
Simeon: His zeal brought him much abuse
This turning point in his life led to a career as chaplain at one of the colleges at Cambridge. The LF&F biography notes that “Simeon’s enthusiasm and zeal brought him much ridicule and abuse which he bore uncomplainingly.” But the point of the bio was not to make a martyr out of Simeon as too many enthusiasts for their faith tend to seek out of ego-centrism. Rather, it was to note that while Simeon bore an awful lot of crap from the undergraduates under his charge, he also managed to inspire a handful of his students.
One, Henry Martyn, was convinced by Simeon to turn from a proposed career in law (Hurrah!) and become a missionary, ultimately translating the New Testament and the Book of Common Prayer into several different languages. A second, William Wilberforce, would become inspired to lead the fight to abolish slavery.
As we discussed the life of Charles Simeon, I began to think of how a handful of my own students have told me over the years how I had impacted their lives. Clearly they stand in stark contrast to the vast majority who readily decry that impact by both word of mouth to fellow students, in the online consumerist surveys which are erroneously and dishonestly described as instructor evaluations and at the various online sites designed to warn fellow slackers against taking demanding instructors like me. If, as the psalmist says, my sins were not already "ever before me," there is certainly no shortage of folks who are more than happy to tell me of their dissatisfaction with the diligence and the seriousness I bring to my calling as an educator.
Like Simeon, my enthusiasm and zeal for my vocation readily bring me much ridicule and abuse, though clearly I am not as willing to bear it uncomplainingly as Simeon. No doubt that is why he is on the saints’ calendar and I am unlikely to ever make it there.
On the other hand, I have had a handful of students over the years say to me that my teaching had meant a great deal to them. Some say it has inspired them to go and serve the world, something that truly warms the heart of this Enneagram 2 Helper type/ENFP Champion teacher. And others have told me that while they hated the class while they were in it, they later realized how it had helped them learn to think critically and to view the world in a more expansive manner. That is no small amount of consolation in the face of a raft of grief.
This is where the 2 X 4 comes in.
(continued in Part II)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Saying “Something About Our Institutions and Even Our Values…..”
At the Inside Higher Ed site this week, Joshua Kim posted a column entitled “The LMS: 10 Things I Don't Know.” It was an interesting post but, as often is the case with proponents of technology in higher education, it begins with a number of presumptions. Joshua has been pretty good about posting my responses. But I feel this merits a little wider audience (assuming, of course, that people actually read my blog – a shaky assumption to say the least). Here’s the post:
Joshua Kim said: “The learning management system (LMS) has become our academic Rorschach test. We all see different things when looking at the same LMS platforms. We all seem to be convinced that the choice of an LMS "says something" about our institutions, and even our values.”
That’s a pretty broad claim to say the least. I’d say there are a lot of academic “Rorschach test[s]” that we could administer in today’s academy. Given all the woes besetting higher education today, I’m not sure that concerns about LMS are necessarily the primary consideration, perhaps not even a major consideration. At best, LMS are a means to an end, that end being human users, and never an end in themselves, to paraphrase Kant.
However, I do agree that decisions about the LMS do more than just “ say something” about our institutions and our values. I would say they reveal much more than institutions realize. To wit:
• What does it say about the use of LMS to respond to over-enrollment and a resulting shortage of classroom seating at mega-universities? What does it say about the requirement that students take classes online because it is a) the only way they can get such classes since they’re not offered in F2F settings, and b) thus, it’s the only way they can graduate? What does it say about the growing tendency to charge students extra for such classes to cover the “technology fee?” What values are observable here?
• What does it say about an institution which relies heavily on LMS courses in which the problem of cheating on exams is epidemic and taken for granted by both the university and its students? What values does it teach a student when cheating is not only possible but essentially encouraged by this reality?
• What does it say about an institution whose over-enrollment which has made actual classroom teaching impossible carries over in online usage slowing responsiveness of LMS to a near-stop, this for students attempting to take timed examinations? Correspondingly, what does it say about institutions who make it virtually imperative that instructors use LMS systems but who now must spend increasing amounts of their own, non-compensated time to deal with the fragilities of those systems and their slowdowns?
• What does it say about an academy opting for a means of teaching which renders substantive examinations increasingly impossible in deference to multiple choice exams which more often than not hover at the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy?
• What are the meta-lessons being taught by such conduct by universities? And what does a society look like 10 to 20 years down the road when the products of such systems are in control?
These are questions about values, Joshua. Such questions do not begin with the presumptions of Technopoly that all technological innovation is by definition progress and that if we can build it we must use it. Nor do they begin with presumptions that technology is by definition essential to the educational process. Moreover, such questions critically assess where technology might actually serve to hinder learning due to distractions with non-pedagogical concerns from the technology itself. And the answers to these questions say tons about our institutions.
It’d be easy to simply stone the prophets who raise such concerns. Those of us who raise them are accustomed to being called “Luddites,” the modern epithet for “heretic” hurled by those who serve at the corporate altars of technology. But is such a response intellectually honest? Is it responsible? Indeed, what might that say about the values such a response evidences?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
At the Inside Higher Ed site this week, Joshua Kim posted a column entitled “The LMS: 10 Things I Don't Know.” It was an interesting post but, as often is the case with proponents of technology in higher education, it begins with a number of presumptions. Joshua has been pretty good about posting my responses. But I feel this merits a little wider audience (assuming, of course, that people actually read my blog – a shaky assumption to say the least). Here’s the post:
Joshua Kim said: “The learning management system (LMS) has become our academic Rorschach test. We all see different things when looking at the same LMS platforms. We all seem to be convinced that the choice of an LMS "says something" about our institutions, and even our values.”
That’s a pretty broad claim to say the least. I’d say there are a lot of academic “Rorschach test[s]” that we could administer in today’s academy. Given all the woes besetting higher education today, I’m not sure that concerns about LMS are necessarily the primary consideration, perhaps not even a major consideration. At best, LMS are a means to an end, that end being human users, and never an end in themselves, to paraphrase Kant.
However, I do agree that decisions about the LMS do more than just “ say something” about our institutions and our values. I would say they reveal much more than institutions realize. To wit:
• What does it say about the use of LMS to respond to over-enrollment and a resulting shortage of classroom seating at mega-universities? What does it say about the requirement that students take classes online because it is a) the only way they can get such classes since they’re not offered in F2F settings, and b) thus, it’s the only way they can graduate? What does it say about the growing tendency to charge students extra for such classes to cover the “technology fee?” What values are observable here?
• What does it say about an institution which relies heavily on LMS courses in which the problem of cheating on exams is epidemic and taken for granted by both the university and its students? What values does it teach a student when cheating is not only possible but essentially encouraged by this reality?
• What does it say about an institution whose over-enrollment which has made actual classroom teaching impossible carries over in online usage slowing responsiveness of LMS to a near-stop, this for students attempting to take timed examinations? Correspondingly, what does it say about institutions who make it virtually imperative that instructors use LMS systems but who now must spend increasing amounts of their own, non-compensated time to deal with the fragilities of those systems and their slowdowns?
• What does it say about an academy opting for a means of teaching which renders substantive examinations increasingly impossible in deference to multiple choice exams which more often than not hover at the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy?
• What are the meta-lessons being taught by such conduct by universities? And what does a society look like 10 to 20 years down the road when the products of such systems are in control?
These are questions about values, Joshua. Such questions do not begin with the presumptions of Technopoly that all technological innovation is by definition progress and that if we can build it we must use it. Nor do they begin with presumptions that technology is by definition essential to the educational process. Moreover, such questions critically assess where technology might actually serve to hinder learning due to distractions with non-pedagogical concerns from the technology itself. And the answers to these questions say tons about our institutions.
It’d be easy to simply stone the prophets who raise such concerns. Those of us who raise them are accustomed to being called “Luddites,” the modern epithet for “heretic” hurled by those who serve at the corporate altars of technology. But is such a response intellectually honest? Is it responsible? Indeed, what might that say about the values such a response evidences?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Dilemma
Increasingly I find the process of teaching to be overtly - and uncomfortably - political. The question that increasingly confronts me as an instructor is not what is the right thing to do, indeed, not even what is most likely to lead to education, but rather how must I respond to the context in which I am spending my last working years before retirement. It is a context in which students see themselves as consumers in an academy which more and more confuses itself for a provider of consumer goods and services. Walt Disney World, one of my former employers, had a very Disney way of putting it: “The guest may not always be right but the guest is always the guest.”
What that means in real terms in today’s academy – at least at the mega-factory version on whose degree assembly line I labor – is that every aspect of your work is now subject to consumerist review, a review which increasingly has real-life consequences in universities which have come to understand themselves as once academic versions of the Disney corporation. Assign too much work –“too much” always defined by the demands of student-consumers – your student “evaluations” fall, online surveys which begin with the questions “What did you like best about this class?” Or you might get comments on the online sites designed to help slacker students avoid anything but easy As about the outrageousness of your work load even when it falls well short of the Carnegie Unit two hours prep for each class hour. Grade with any rigor – translation: everyone doesn’t get an A – and you get urgent exhortations on those sites from honors students to avoid the class at all costs because it’s impossible to make an A, even as those who write such messages almost to the student actually received one in the class in question.
Draw attention to inappropriate student behaviors and failures to live into responsibilities to their classmates and the class itself and you may find yourself reported to administrators in an increasingly bloated bureaucracy desperate to coddle cash cows and insure their own survival. The guest may not always be right but they are always the guest and thus, at the academic theme park, entitled to set the conditions upon which any encounter between employees and guests occur.
Such are the conditions in which real life dilemmas arise, such as the one I encountered two weeks ago in one of my classes.
One of the skills I have historically tried to develop in my students is the ability to make presentations to classmates. These presentations are designed to encourage actual development of ideas only cursorily touched upon in their introductory texts. They require students to think a little more deeply about the subjects and then relate those understandings to their classmates. Presentations allow for the development of technical skills in the use of power point and the selection of art and video clips. My assignments also require the development of handouts to accompany the presentation, an aspect designed to help students determine the critical points of the information presented and to allow students in their audience to follow the presentation and make notes without having to write down everything on the screen as a handful of them always feel compelled to do. Because the classes are generally small, the public presentation of the power point provides a generally friendly, non-threatening audience with which to gain some experience and confidence in public speaking and answering questions. Finally, presentations require students to learn to work with others, for honors students in particular to break out of the hypercompetitive and often highly narcissistic bubbles in which they live to learn skills of cooperative productivity.
When the presentations are completed, students are required to evaluate their own performance and that of their group members, complete with a grade from 0-10 and a reason for that grade, as well as to serve as an audience for other groups, again grading them and providing reasons for that grade which are then used for feedback to the group presenting. The final components of the grade are the instructor’s evaluation of the presentation and the instructor’s assessment of the student evaluations to insure students don’t just blow them off (e.g., We were great! 10/10).
Two weeks ago, a student group came to the front to set up their final presentation (in this honors section, each group has two PPT presentations plus one brochure presentation per semester). It was immediately apparent that the whole group was not present. When I asked the students who were present if they had heard anything from the two missing students, they said no. Knowing one of the missing students to be habitually late for class, I stalled, using the time to pass out papers I had planned to return at the end of the class and to make comments on where I saw areas for improvement in their papers. Now 15 minutes into the class, I finally decided that with only 35 minutes remaining, we would have to start the group presentation without the AWOL members. I began by asking the present group members what it felt like to be abandoned by their classmates upon whom they had relied. “It sucks” was the articulate response from the first. The other, a demure Asian woman, merely blushed and nodded in agreement. And so the presentations began with the students presenting their own assigned parts and noting the parts they were covering for other students.
About 25 minutes into the class (the classes are only 50 minutes total), one of the remaining group members burst through the door. With a wave of commotion of books and papers in the back of the class, the student stalked to the front of the classroom, passing in front of the student’s group member who was actively presenting at that moment. No apologies. No explanation. No consideration for the interruption caused. Later, when the student was asked during the presentation about a particular part to be covered, the student responded by saying “I sent that to you last night.” No sense of group responsibilities, no consideration for the audience. Remember, it’s all about me.
For the record, the other student never showed.
To date, neither student has even explained their behaviors – much less apologized – to the class or their instructor. When I asked the group members if they had received an apology, they said the no-show student had apologized for “spacing out and missing the class” (this from a student who previously had a virtually perfect attendance record) but the other had neither apologized nor explained their late arrival.
This point was hardly lost on their classmates. One of them noted in their reasons for giving the group a less than stellar grade that “There overall powerpoint was good but because the whole group didn't show up it was sort of a mess. The two speakers that came on time and presented knew their parts and individually I would give them 10s but part of being a group is working as a team and having everyone participate.” The grammar and usage may not be stellar but the observation is pretty solid: these students failed to be responsible to their group and the class as a whole and their presentation - and thus their grade - suffered as a consequence.
While that's easy for a consumer/student to say, remembering that the guest is always right, it poses a dilemma for the instructor. What does an instructor in an self-described academic institution do with such performances? How does the instructor respond to such inconsiderate and immature behaviors? How does the instructor grade such non-performance?
In years past, I would have had no question about my responses. The students in question would have failed the exercise. I would have pulled them aside individually and spoken to them about their inconsideration and suggested that they should first apologize to their group members for the untenable position in which their lack of performance had placed them. And I would have ended by suggesting that they probably owed their classmates an apology as well. Such a procedure could prove a valuable learning experience for all the parties involved, albeit painful. Indeed, without any kind of negative response in the face of such behavior, does it not encourage more of the same in the future?
But in a world where universities have become corporate theme parks and where students have become entertainment seeking guests who are always right, at what cost to the employee does such a direct confrontation come? And in the cost/benefit analysis that non-tenured personnel such as myself – a status I share with more and more colleagues these days - are inevitably required to make for every one of our actions these days, do the benefits of doing the right thing exceed the potential costs? Does the ethical instructor do anyone any good in the unemployment line?
What would Socrates do?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Increasingly I find the process of teaching to be overtly - and uncomfortably - political. The question that increasingly confronts me as an instructor is not what is the right thing to do, indeed, not even what is most likely to lead to education, but rather how must I respond to the context in which I am spending my last working years before retirement. It is a context in which students see themselves as consumers in an academy which more and more confuses itself for a provider of consumer goods and services. Walt Disney World, one of my former employers, had a very Disney way of putting it: “The guest may not always be right but the guest is always the guest.”
What that means in real terms in today’s academy – at least at the mega-factory version on whose degree assembly line I labor – is that every aspect of your work is now subject to consumerist review, a review which increasingly has real-life consequences in universities which have come to understand themselves as once academic versions of the Disney corporation. Assign too much work –“too much” always defined by the demands of student-consumers – your student “evaluations” fall, online surveys which begin with the questions “What did you like best about this class?” Or you might get comments on the online sites designed to help slacker students avoid anything but easy As about the outrageousness of your work load even when it falls well short of the Carnegie Unit two hours prep for each class hour. Grade with any rigor – translation: everyone doesn’t get an A – and you get urgent exhortations on those sites from honors students to avoid the class at all costs because it’s impossible to make an A, even as those who write such messages almost to the student actually received one in the class in question.
Draw attention to inappropriate student behaviors and failures to live into responsibilities to their classmates and the class itself and you may find yourself reported to administrators in an increasingly bloated bureaucracy desperate to coddle cash cows and insure their own survival. The guest may not always be right but they are always the guest and thus, at the academic theme park, entitled to set the conditions upon which any encounter between employees and guests occur.
Such are the conditions in which real life dilemmas arise, such as the one I encountered two weeks ago in one of my classes.
One of the skills I have historically tried to develop in my students is the ability to make presentations to classmates. These presentations are designed to encourage actual development of ideas only cursorily touched upon in their introductory texts. They require students to think a little more deeply about the subjects and then relate those understandings to their classmates. Presentations allow for the development of technical skills in the use of power point and the selection of art and video clips. My assignments also require the development of handouts to accompany the presentation, an aspect designed to help students determine the critical points of the information presented and to allow students in their audience to follow the presentation and make notes without having to write down everything on the screen as a handful of them always feel compelled to do. Because the classes are generally small, the public presentation of the power point provides a generally friendly, non-threatening audience with which to gain some experience and confidence in public speaking and answering questions. Finally, presentations require students to learn to work with others, for honors students in particular to break out of the hypercompetitive and often highly narcissistic bubbles in which they live to learn skills of cooperative productivity.
When the presentations are completed, students are required to evaluate their own performance and that of their group members, complete with a grade from 0-10 and a reason for that grade, as well as to serve as an audience for other groups, again grading them and providing reasons for that grade which are then used for feedback to the group presenting. The final components of the grade are the instructor’s evaluation of the presentation and the instructor’s assessment of the student evaluations to insure students don’t just blow them off (e.g., We were great! 10/10).
Two weeks ago, a student group came to the front to set up their final presentation (in this honors section, each group has two PPT presentations plus one brochure presentation per semester). It was immediately apparent that the whole group was not present. When I asked the students who were present if they had heard anything from the two missing students, they said no. Knowing one of the missing students to be habitually late for class, I stalled, using the time to pass out papers I had planned to return at the end of the class and to make comments on where I saw areas for improvement in their papers. Now 15 minutes into the class, I finally decided that with only 35 minutes remaining, we would have to start the group presentation without the AWOL members. I began by asking the present group members what it felt like to be abandoned by their classmates upon whom they had relied. “It sucks” was the articulate response from the first. The other, a demure Asian woman, merely blushed and nodded in agreement. And so the presentations began with the students presenting their own assigned parts and noting the parts they were covering for other students.
About 25 minutes into the class (the classes are only 50 minutes total), one of the remaining group members burst through the door. With a wave of commotion of books and papers in the back of the class, the student stalked to the front of the classroom, passing in front of the student’s group member who was actively presenting at that moment. No apologies. No explanation. No consideration for the interruption caused. Later, when the student was asked during the presentation about a particular part to be covered, the student responded by saying “I sent that to you last night.” No sense of group responsibilities, no consideration for the audience. Remember, it’s all about me.
For the record, the other student never showed.
To date, neither student has even explained their behaviors – much less apologized – to the class or their instructor. When I asked the group members if they had received an apology, they said the no-show student had apologized for “spacing out and missing the class” (this from a student who previously had a virtually perfect attendance record) but the other had neither apologized nor explained their late arrival.
This point was hardly lost on their classmates. One of them noted in their reasons for giving the group a less than stellar grade that “There overall powerpoint was good but because the whole group didn't show up it was sort of a mess. The two speakers that came on time and presented knew their parts and individually I would give them 10s but part of being a group is working as a team and having everyone participate.” The grammar and usage may not be stellar but the observation is pretty solid: these students failed to be responsible to their group and the class as a whole and their presentation - and thus their grade - suffered as a consequence.
While that's easy for a consumer/student to say, remembering that the guest is always right, it poses a dilemma for the instructor. What does an instructor in an self-described academic institution do with such performances? How does the instructor respond to such inconsiderate and immature behaviors? How does the instructor grade such non-performance?
In years past, I would have had no question about my responses. The students in question would have failed the exercise. I would have pulled them aside individually and spoken to them about their inconsideration and suggested that they should first apologize to their group members for the untenable position in which their lack of performance had placed them. And I would have ended by suggesting that they probably owed their classmates an apology as well. Such a procedure could prove a valuable learning experience for all the parties involved, albeit painful. Indeed, without any kind of negative response in the face of such behavior, does it not encourage more of the same in the future?
But in a world where universities have become corporate theme parks and where students have become entertainment seeking guests who are always right, at what cost to the employee does such a direct confrontation come? And in the cost/benefit analysis that non-tenured personnel such as myself – a status I share with more and more colleagues these days - are inevitably required to make for every one of our actions these days, do the benefits of doing the right thing exceed the potential costs? Does the ethical instructor do anyone any good in the unemployment line?
What would Socrates do?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thursday, November 03, 2011
The First Obituary for the Academy
Yesterday I read what I fear will prove to be the first obituary for the university as we have known it. In an article entitled “Socratic Backfire?” on the Inside Higher Ed website, Kaustuv Basu reported the following:
Some students didn't take well to Steven Maranville’s teaching style at Utah Valley University. They complained that in the professor’s “capstone” business course, he asked them questions in class even when they didn't raise their hands. They also didn't like it when he made them work in teams.
Those complaints against him led the university denying him tenure – a decision amounting to firing, according to a lawsuit. Maranville filed against the university this month.
Last year, a professor at Louisiana State University was removed from teaching a course after a majority of her students received failing grades, while another professor at Norfolk State University was denied tenure in 2008 for similar reasons.
Granted, Utah Valley may not be the best example of higher education to begin with. It has only been a university since 2008 having outgrown its former vocational school and community college origins. It chooses not to participate in the US New rankings which, as politicized and commercialized as they might be, do provide some basic information about academics at a given college. Its primary focus appears to be business. Only one in 11 of its students are people of color and just over 4 of 10 are female. Only about a third of the student body receives financial aid. It should not be surprising that a predominately privileged white male college would operate out of a lens of entitlement and a demand for academia-lite.
What is troubling, however, is that there seem to be no designated grown-ups on-site. To wit:
The advantage of this kind of teaching is that students learn how to think on their feet, said Patricia King, a professor of education at the University of Michigan. “But it requires hard intellectual work,” she said.
In Maranville’s case, students did not see the value of his approach, the court records suggest. "Some students were quite vocal in their demands that he change his teaching style, which style had already been observed and approved by his peer faculty and administrative superiors,” according to the lawsuit. Students did not want to work in teams and did not want Maranville to ask questions. “They wanted him to lecture.” They also complained, according to the suit, that he did not know how to teach because he is blind.
The department chair – Scott Hammond, who is named in the lawsuit – apparently agreed with how Maranville taught his courses and called him a “master teacher,” according to court documents. Hammond visited his class, and so did an associate dean. But a few months later, during the spring semester, Maranville received a letter from university president saying that his classroom behavior was not suited to his being granted tenure.
In short, being a “master teacher” is now a disadvantage in an academy driven by consumerism and entitlement. What the vast majority of students want today is credit hour facilitators. They do not want to prepare. They do not want to be required to attend class. They do not want to have to participate once there. They do not want to be required to think. G-d forbid they should have to deal with anyone or anything other than their own narrowly defined self-interests. And they are being taught, by example, that they are entitled to all of this and can inflict retribution upon anyone who dares to defy that entitlement. Clearly, there are notable exceptions to this rule without whom many still within academia would have long since departed. But, sadly, they are becoming increasingly anomalous.
Of course, much of this simply speaks to a developmental failure in maturity among our students. Sadly, those of us who work in higher education have increasingly come to expect this declining level of maturity among our students. The level of intellectual curiosity among most of our entering freshmen these days is limited on a good day. And the willingness to engage the process of actual learning has dropped off the charts.
At some level this is expectable after a decade of a failed social experiment called No Child Left Behind. While one out of three children were in fact left behind in this experiment, failing to complete high school, the more serious consequences are only now being realized among those who made it through. We have raised a generation of students who understand education as memorizing information for data dumps on command, who confuse the assemblage of unexamined data for learning, who do not see the point of critical thinking or creative problem solving and who largely are incapable of expressing themselves with much depth or nuance. NCLB lowered our expectations of them to the most basic functions at the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy and they have proven apt pupils.
No doubt this places a great deal of pressure on the operators of institutions of higher learning. They face middle class parents demanding credentials for their children whether or not they actually become educated in the process. They face 1% legislatures more than happy to defund higher education and dictate curricula to insure the ongoing domination of a docile servant class by their corporate overlords. They face increasingly unhappy faculties who see their hard work if not their very intellect devalued. And they face a whole generation of largely underdeveloped children (the days we could say with a straight face that college students are adults and we should treat them as such have long since departed) arriving at their gates with inordinate senses of entitlement and unrealistic expectations.
Of course, this is precisely where real leadership is most desperately needed. We need deans and provosts who can say to parents “Your children will be educated. But they will have to work for it. And if they don’t want to work, they’re not ready to be in college.” We need advisors and orientation leaders who will tell students, “Yes, Dr. X has a reputation for being demanding. S/he is a master teacher. But that’s precisely the course you should take because it will help you grow and become educated.” We need administrators who can find the courage to say to state legislatures, “We don’t need your advice on curricula given that you have no expertise upon which to offer it and if you insist upon diminishing our funding, we will have to respond by a corresponding diminishing of admissions of your constituencies’ children.”
In short, we need someone to step up and be the designated grown-up in a situation where immaturity, self-interest and short-sightedness has come to dominate the operation of higher education. Right now, the inmates are running the asylum.
But, sadly, I do not see even a sliver of hope that this will occur. The mindlessness of discourse about higher education today is staggering. The unquestioning acceptance of policies within the academy which reward entitlement and denigrate master teaching are the norm, not the exception. The disengagement of all the interested parties within and outside the academy is predominant and growing. And, like all malignant family secrets, there is an unspoken conspiracy not to talk about any of this with any seriousness or depth, presuming that the parties still have the capacity to do so.
It is tempting to dismiss the events at Utah Valley as an anomaly, the limitations of a new university with little tradition of actual education as opposed to vocational training. But the reports I am reading at Inside Higher Ed and elsewhere suggest this is not the case, that this is merely a symptom of a much deeper malady infecting all of academia from the Ivy Leagues to the for-profits. Sadly, it is the rule, not the exception.
I fear higher education as we have known it will go the way of the dinosaur not with the roar of the pain of loss but with a whimper of resignation to the seeming inevitability of mediocrity. And that is why yesterday’s obituary coming out of Utah is a grim milestone that those of us who have devoted our lives to education should deeply mourn.
Socrates wept.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Yesterday I read what I fear will prove to be the first obituary for the university as we have known it. In an article entitled “Socratic Backfire?” on the Inside Higher Ed website, Kaustuv Basu reported the following:
Some students didn't take well to Steven Maranville’s teaching style at Utah Valley University. They complained that in the professor’s “capstone” business course, he asked them questions in class even when they didn't raise their hands. They also didn't like it when he made them work in teams.
Those complaints against him led the university denying him tenure – a decision amounting to firing, according to a lawsuit. Maranville filed against the university this month.
Last year, a professor at Louisiana State University was removed from teaching a course after a majority of her students received failing grades, while another professor at Norfolk State University was denied tenure in 2008 for similar reasons.
Granted, Utah Valley may not be the best example of higher education to begin with. It has only been a university since 2008 having outgrown its former vocational school and community college origins. It chooses not to participate in the US New rankings which, as politicized and commercialized as they might be, do provide some basic information about academics at a given college. Its primary focus appears to be business. Only one in 11 of its students are people of color and just over 4 of 10 are female. Only about a third of the student body receives financial aid. It should not be surprising that a predominately privileged white male college would operate out of a lens of entitlement and a demand for academia-lite.
What is troubling, however, is that there seem to be no designated grown-ups on-site. To wit:
The advantage of this kind of teaching is that students learn how to think on their feet, said Patricia King, a professor of education at the University of Michigan. “But it requires hard intellectual work,” she said.
In Maranville’s case, students did not see the value of his approach, the court records suggest. "Some students were quite vocal in their demands that he change his teaching style, which style had already been observed and approved by his peer faculty and administrative superiors,” according to the lawsuit. Students did not want to work in teams and did not want Maranville to ask questions. “They wanted him to lecture.” They also complained, according to the suit, that he did not know how to teach because he is blind.
The department chair – Scott Hammond, who is named in the lawsuit – apparently agreed with how Maranville taught his courses and called him a “master teacher,” according to court documents. Hammond visited his class, and so did an associate dean. But a few months later, during the spring semester, Maranville received a letter from university president saying that his classroom behavior was not suited to his being granted tenure.
In short, being a “master teacher” is now a disadvantage in an academy driven by consumerism and entitlement. What the vast majority of students want today is credit hour facilitators. They do not want to prepare. They do not want to be required to attend class. They do not want to have to participate once there. They do not want to be required to think. G-d forbid they should have to deal with anyone or anything other than their own narrowly defined self-interests. And they are being taught, by example, that they are entitled to all of this and can inflict retribution upon anyone who dares to defy that entitlement. Clearly, there are notable exceptions to this rule without whom many still within academia would have long since departed. But, sadly, they are becoming increasingly anomalous.
Of course, much of this simply speaks to a developmental failure in maturity among our students. Sadly, those of us who work in higher education have increasingly come to expect this declining level of maturity among our students. The level of intellectual curiosity among most of our entering freshmen these days is limited on a good day. And the willingness to engage the process of actual learning has dropped off the charts.
At some level this is expectable after a decade of a failed social experiment called No Child Left Behind. While one out of three children were in fact left behind in this experiment, failing to complete high school, the more serious consequences are only now being realized among those who made it through. We have raised a generation of students who understand education as memorizing information for data dumps on command, who confuse the assemblage of unexamined data for learning, who do not see the point of critical thinking or creative problem solving and who largely are incapable of expressing themselves with much depth or nuance. NCLB lowered our expectations of them to the most basic functions at the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy and they have proven apt pupils.
No doubt this places a great deal of pressure on the operators of institutions of higher learning. They face middle class parents demanding credentials for their children whether or not they actually become educated in the process. They face 1% legislatures more than happy to defund higher education and dictate curricula to insure the ongoing domination of a docile servant class by their corporate overlords. They face increasingly unhappy faculties who see their hard work if not their very intellect devalued. And they face a whole generation of largely underdeveloped children (the days we could say with a straight face that college students are adults and we should treat them as such have long since departed) arriving at their gates with inordinate senses of entitlement and unrealistic expectations.
Of course, this is precisely where real leadership is most desperately needed. We need deans and provosts who can say to parents “Your children will be educated. But they will have to work for it. And if they don’t want to work, they’re not ready to be in college.” We need advisors and orientation leaders who will tell students, “Yes, Dr. X has a reputation for being demanding. S/he is a master teacher. But that’s precisely the course you should take because it will help you grow and become educated.” We need administrators who can find the courage to say to state legislatures, “We don’t need your advice on curricula given that you have no expertise upon which to offer it and if you insist upon diminishing our funding, we will have to respond by a corresponding diminishing of admissions of your constituencies’ children.”
In short, we need someone to step up and be the designated grown-up in a situation where immaturity, self-interest and short-sightedness has come to dominate the operation of higher education. Right now, the inmates are running the asylum.
But, sadly, I do not see even a sliver of hope that this will occur. The mindlessness of discourse about higher education today is staggering. The unquestioning acceptance of policies within the academy which reward entitlement and denigrate master teaching are the norm, not the exception. The disengagement of all the interested parties within and outside the academy is predominant and growing. And, like all malignant family secrets, there is an unspoken conspiracy not to talk about any of this with any seriousness or depth, presuming that the parties still have the capacity to do so.
It is tempting to dismiss the events at Utah Valley as an anomaly, the limitations of a new university with little tradition of actual education as opposed to vocational training. But the reports I am reading at Inside Higher Ed and elsewhere suggest this is not the case, that this is merely a symptom of a much deeper malady infecting all of academia from the Ivy Leagues to the for-profits. Sadly, it is the rule, not the exception.
I fear higher education as we have known it will go the way of the dinosaur not with the roar of the pain of loss but with a whimper of resignation to the seeming inevitability of mediocrity. And that is why yesterday’s obituary coming out of Utah is a grim milestone that those of us who have devoted our lives to education should deeply mourn.
Socrates wept.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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