The Garden Revisited

The Garden Revisited

G-d came walking again in the Garden this morning. 10:01 AM, just like every morning. Just like Immanuel Kant and his famous evening strolls by which his fellow Königsberg residents were able to set their clocks. “Heh heh, he was one of my better creations,” G-d chuckled to the birds lighting on G-d’s fingers. “A little anal retentive, way too stuck in his head, but definitely one of my better creations.”

“Adam, humanity! Hawwah, mother of all life! Where are you?” G-d called. This was one of G_d’s favorite games. Of course, G_d knew where they were. G-d always knows where all of us are. Our brother, Jesus, taught us a long time ago that not a single sparrow falls from the sky that its Creator is not aware of it.

Even so, G_d loved this game. And so they played it, every morning.

But today, Adam and Hawwah weren’t answering. They were trying to hide for real. Of course, they knew it was pointless. They knew that G-d loved hide and seek even though G-d always won. But today, they weren’t playing.

G-d stood on the wooden footbridge over the little meandering creek looking down at the many beautiful fish scooting by in the current, just down the path from where the two human creatures huddled behind an enormous baobab tree. Some called the baobab The Tree of Life and they said it connected heaven with its uppermost branches and earth with its deeply plunging roots.

A frown crossed G_d’s face. “Why are you hiding from me?” G-d asked.

Silence.

“OK, I know you’re hiding over there behind that baobab tree I created. Come on out. Let’s talk. Tell me what’s going on.”

Adam and Hawwah slowly stepped from behind the tree and onto the path. Adam’s hands covered his genitalia and Hawwah tried to cover both her breasts and her genitalia.

“Uh-oh. Adam, Hawwah, you ate from that Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, didn’t you?”

Silence. Downcast eyes.

Adam looked up and pitifully started to ramble, “It was her fault, she…”

G_d cut him off mid-sentence. “Oh, please, Adam, spare me the blame game. You are adults now. That’s what the tree was about. Knowing good from evil means making moral choices and being responsible for those choices. It’s what we expect from adults. The tree and the serpent were all a part of the plan. It was time for you to grow up. There’s no room for blaming here.”

Hawwah now spoke, “But if I had only not listened to that damned snake…”

Again, G-d cut her off mid-sentence. “Now, Hawwah, don’t be ugly. That ‘damned snake’ is also one of my creations. Remember, what the writer I inspired to write Genesis told you: It’s all very good. Including you. Besides, the snake was doing its job, just like I told it to.”

Adam persisted: “But Augustine said everything you create is perfect and that the only way to ever account for evil and wrong-doing is to blame it on us humans. He said we’re responsible for something called “The Fall” and the whole Creation getting messed up because of us. He said you’re going to kick us out of this Garden and that every child who comes after us will begin life with something he called “original sin.” And he said that if they don’t choose the right belief system (meaning Augustine’s, of course), you’ll send them to a fiery place called Hell to be punished eternally.”

Adam bit his lip and continued, “G-d we’re really sorry about the fruit and all.….but don’t you think that’s a bit harsh?”

“Aha! I see the effects of the Tree are beginning to kick in already,” G-d said with a smile.

Then G-d sighed deeply.

“Poor Augustine. He was also one of my better creations. Smart, earnest, loyal to the end. But Augie got a little lost along the way. He was dealing with a lot, you know, what with his obsessions over sex not to mention the invading hordes pounding at his city gates. For some reason, he felt he had to defend my honor like the Roman imperial rulers he admired so much. And he somehow felt compelled to explain how evil things could occur in a divinely created world thus tainting the Creator’s reputation.

“So he started with some Greek philosophy. (How about that Plato fellow! Sharp cookie, no? I was on a roll the day I created him!) He sautéed it with a little Manichaean dualism, added a dash of Neoplatonist philosophy of the One, brought it to a boil and then stirred in bits of Hebrew Scripture, apocryphal Jewish writing and a badly translated chapter from Paul’s epistles. (I think Augie should have spent a little more time on his Greek and less on working out his issues in the Confessions.)

“What he ended up with was a rather grim, convoluted account which ended up blaming my human creations for everything wrong with the planet. Poor Adam, you became Augustine’s fall guy and Hawwah, not surprisingly, when the good ole boys adopted his work as their textbook, they ended up shifting all the blame to the woman. As Augustine told the story, after the little incident with the tree and the snake my human creations were left corrupted and powerless, particularly when it came to sex, requiring constant supervision. (No small amount of projection going on there, no?) And as if things weren’t bad enough, he named this craziness after me, The City of God.

“The worst part of all this is that he said that my forgiveness was somehow contingent upon the brutal murder of one of My beloved children, Jesus, to satisfy my need for retribution and to restore my honor. Otherwise, I’d be unable or unwilling to forgive everyone of this invention of his called original sin. And, as you said, they’d all end up in Hell.

What was he thinking? I’ve been forgiving all levels of beings for all kinds of things since the dawn of time. What would make him think I ever required a human sacrifice to do that?

“Somehow Augie failed to realize that I expected my human animals to grow out of that sacrifice bit as quickly as possible along with their other tribal understandings that illnesses and natural disasters were somehow my abusive parental way of punishing disobedient children. Why on earth he thought I would actually require Jesus to be slaughtered as a condition of forgiving people of their sins, I have no clue.

“Poor twisted soul. He never did come to grips with all his personal demons.”

Hawwah now stepped in: “So, wait a minute. You mean women are not the cause of all that is evil in this world? You mean all our granddaughters don’t have to start out life with two strikes against them because of me? You mean they won’t have to live into demands that they make an impossible choice between Mary the perpetual virgin or me as the whore? You mean I’m not responsible for everyone having to constantly be in fear of death, worrying about whether you’ll forgive us for everything we think, say and do that is wrong (especially those sexual fantasies)?”

A lump came to G_d's throat. “Oh, Hawwah, my daughter,” G-d began. “I am truly sorry these destructive theologies have been developed in my name. Watching you standing there shivering in my presence breaks my heart. I loved you at your Creation and I love you no less now. So let me lay out a few things for you right here.

“First, the potential to do evil has always been a part of the creation. What you call sin is simply the violation of relationships; relationships between you and the depths of your own soul where my love for all creation is written; relationships between you and my other creations - your fellow human animals, the non-human animals, the beautiful plants I have given you to feed yourselves. The beauty of all of these created beings alone should remind you of my love for my own Creation. Even the good Earth itself was created for relationship with its inhabitants.

“You were created for relationship. And when you forget that, you are prone to sin.

“Clearly, sin is not a trivial thing. It’s a major impediment to relationship. And it has the potential to do great harm to the good Creation and its inhabitants. But the fruit you’ve just eaten today already is telling you something important. If you are capable of making decisions which result in evil, you are equally capable of recognizing your mistake, changing your minds and making decisions that result in good. That change of mind, change of heart and thus change of interactions with others is what repentance actually means. In many cases those changes have the power to heal damaged relationships with our inner selves, our fellow human animals and the rest of Creation.

“Most of all, it is always my joy to see you turn from ways of thinking, speaking and acting which harm yourselves and the Creation around you. The Creation is always a better place when you do. But you should never, ever, think even for one second, that anything you do can rupture your relationship with me, your Creator. You came from me and when you die, you return to me. And in between, you are always connected to me. Your very being is grounded in me, even when you choose to ignore that.

“But, Augustine said…” Adam interjected.

“Oh, I know. Augustine told you that eating from this tree resulted in an eternal, essential change in human nature and the Creation. He said you were fallen and you couldn’t get up. (Sorry, guys, just a little consumerist advertising humor there. I couldn’t help myself! That ad is so funny!)

“Of course, Augustine gave human agency way too much credit. Think of how ridiculous his argument is that a human decision, made before the humans even knew the difference between right and wrong somehow had the power to change the very nature of My very good Creation.

In what universe?

“Poor Augustine. He really tried, which is more than I can say for a lot of the folks that came after him (like those tormented souls of the Reformation era who tried to out-Augustine Augustine). Thank Me that there really is rest and peace in the afterlife for those who suffer from acute existential anxieties during this life and manage to impose that suffering on everyone around them as a result.”

Adam lit up. “So you’re not going to kick us out of the Garden, then? Can I make reservations for three at the Tree of Life Terrace for sunset? They have the best Mai-Tais!”

“Not so fast, Adam. I told you that you were now grown up. But there’s some bad news in all this as well. Now that your have finally evolved into homo sapiens, capable of knowing, remembering and predicting, you also have become aware of a part of Creation that was always there but which, as children, you simply didn’t know about.

“All created beings are finite. They have a life span. They are born, they grow and mature, they age and then they die. All of it is a part of the design of living beings and has been from the beginning. The only difference is, where before you were oblivious to this reality, now you know that your lives are finite. I’m sorry to have to give you that news. But I suspect you will learn to deal with it in an appropriate way. You’re quite creative and ingenuous. I should know. I created you bearing My image and the potential to grow increasingly into My likeness.

“Now about the Garden. With the knowledge of good and evil, you have matured to adulthood as a species. You must now make moral decisions that arise from living in community with your fellow human animals. You are no longer the hunter-gatherer homo habilis free to roam a fertile garden with all you needed to survive with no effort on your part. You have evolved into the thinking, social animals, homo sapiens. You now have responsibilities to yourselves and to others. And you must use your ability to think, remember and predict to create and maintain a healthy social world for yourselves.

“So, you can’t stay in this Garden. It’s time to take up the work you were created to do. Try not to forget the rest of Creation in that work. That you have the power and the ingenuity to use the Creation to your own benefit does not mean you should necessarily do so in any fashion you choose and particularly not in a way that does not respect its dignity. You have obligations to the rest of Creation not the least of which is to always remember that while you are an important part of the good Creation, you are ultimately just one part.

“Try not to forget that whatever else you do, you remain connected to and grounded in Me. I am as close as the breath you breathe, the breath that means the very difference between life and death. I am the wind whispering in the trees, the water that washes your hands, I am the soil under your feet and the sun that warms your face. Mine are the last hands to touch you before you enter this world and mine are the loving arms that embrace you when you return home to Me.

“Your brother, Jesus, was right: I really am with you always even unto the end of the age. And I like your company. You should pray once in awhile or at least text me occasionally."

And then G-d smiled. “You’re welcome.”

With that G-d turned and walked down the path, over the bridge, disappearing around a bend into the greenery of the Garden. Suddenly Adam and Hawwah found themselves outside the Garden, wearing Nikes, khaki Dockers and polo shirts with corporate logos, smartphone in hand, looking backing at a gateway into the Garden they had never previously known existed.

 

For a second they looked longingly at the gate and the Garden beyond it. An angel stood in front of the padlocked gate, light saber in hand, and said, “Uh, uh, uh, folks. You can’t go back now. It’s time to go to work.”

They looked at each other and Adam said to Hawwah, “So, what do we do now?”  

The angel just grinned at them.

The Beginning.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, M.Div., J.D., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Associate Lecturer: Religion and Cultural Studies, Humanities, Philosophy of Law

Osceola Regional Campus, Kissimmee

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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A Tired Instructor’s Midnight Confession

Yet Another Round of Debates….

Debate is raging once again on the Higher Education Teaching and Learning site on Linked.in regarding the question “Do student evaluations measure teaching effectiveness?” This time it was posed by a professor in management information systems at a university in Puerto Rico.

The question has drawn the usual technocrats and consumerist advocates who seek to prove the validity of these practices, in some cases offering studies to demonstrate their validity. Most of the studies are based on the same premises of the evaluations themselves – that undergraduate students are somehow competent to assess the pedagogy of graduate educated instructors, that their responses to largely consumerist ratings systems indicate what kind of job their instructor has done and thus whether learning has occurred.

These are incredibly flawed and largely unsupported presumptions. Studies which begin with them offer nothing worth serious consideration by instructors.  But this is the essence of a consumerist university – truisms asserted as indisputable fact, presumptions accepted without proof, discussions beginning on that basis.

Hence, the context in which the following comments arise. They come at the end of a long day which required me to drive to South Florida, make a presentation on religious intolerance for the Florida Humanities Council and then turn around and return to Orlando to begin a rather demanding week. Clearly the fatigue of a long day is apparent in my comments. But there is also a level of growing impatience with the inanity if not the intellectual dishonesty that inevitably surrounds discussions of student ratings.  

Here follows my midnight confession (with apologies to The Grass Roots):

Questioning the Presumptions

OK, indulge me in a little cynicism here. In truth, I'm not usually cynical by nature. And I'm hardly closed-minded.

But, seriously. Does anyone really buy the argument that these ratings are actually designed to improve teaching? Really? Might we ask ourselves why we would presume that college instructors will not care about the quality of their classes unless they are coerced into doing so through ratings like this? Might we question the apparent presumption that instructors can't figure out how to improve their courses without feedback from people who've never taught a day in their lives?

Finally, do we really think that student ratings are even likely to actually improve teaching? And if so, how and is this necessarily the only or even the best way to do that?

Sure, we all endure this rating inanity. Most of us have no choice. And perhaps some of us have become aware of some blind spots in our teaching as a result though more likely by well considered comments than acontextual numerical ratings designed to keep technocrats happy. Others of us have just learned how to game the system. 

That’s Not My Job, Man……

But, truth be told, I simply don't care if a student thinks they have to read too much in my classes. I don't care that students don't like to be made to choose between attending classes (or coming to the course website) and participating in class activities or facing a lower grade. I don't care what students think about the work load in my classes. When it actually approaches, much less exceeds, the Carnegie Unit, I'll take their complaints a bit more seriously. And finally, I am really not that concerned that students are occasionally forced out of their comfort zones in my classes by the readings, the written assignments or the class discussions. I'm not terribly concerned that my prodding them to think critically about their presumptions and their values may on occasion produce a little cognitive dissonance for them. That's actually called the teachable moment.

Frankly, this is what good instructors *should* do in my view. And the fact that students make these same complaints every term does not for one second mean I am not a good instructor, that I am not doing a good job or that I should change my teaching. The often repeated but mindless mantra that "a pattern ought to tell you something" is ultimately just as meaningless and lacking in utility as the responses from students.

These student complaints target practices that reflect deliberate pedagogical and academic content choices made over decades of teaching, interacting with students and colleagues and even more decades of learning. They are neither ill-considered nor are they the result of snap judgments. Moreover, they are the result of constant refining in the fires of the latest research and constant critical reflection.

I am not in the classroom – either in person or virtually - to make students comfortable or to meet their demands. While I do not wish students to be uncomfortable nor do I presume it to be necessary for learning to occur, those are simply not my ultimate concerns as an instructor. And the fact that my university insists upon giving students the opportunity to complain about their comfort level thereby encouraging them to see themselves as consumers rather than students does not somehow mean that the results of that inane process produces much worth knowing. It also fails to create an imperative that I as a serious instructor should take the results of that process seriously.

OK. Thanks for indulging me. Here ends the rant.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Associate Lecturer: Religion and Cultural Studies, Humanities, Philosophy of Law

Osceola Regional Campus, University of Central Florida,  Kissimmee, FL

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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Cognitive Dissonance, Jesus and the Teachable Moment

I came across this quote from Fritz Fanon today that has been circulating lately on Facebook. It prompted me to think about the course I am teaching on Christianity this semester and the gale of resistance it has generated from some of my students.

In many ways, Fanon understood implicitly what Jesus spoke of in his rhetoric about the Kingdom of G_d. Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth was devoted to the peoples of an occupied Northern Africa struggling to develop a sense of their own dignity and ultimately to be free of their European occupiers. Jesus lived in a similar context, a Roman occupied Galilee where his assertion “Blessed are the poor” stood in stark contradiction to the Roman system of extraction which enriched the 1% of their day while impoverishing the 99% who produced that luxury.

Trying to get students to actually look at the Jesus of 1^st CE Roman Palestine is difficult on a good day. They either don’t want to hear about Jesus – or any other aspect of religion - at all or they come with inherited and thus largely unexamined religious constructs already firmly in place. Rudimentary, undeveloped understandings of the Christ of faith routinely provide little room for a Jesus whom our textbook readily recognizes as a rebel, a subverter of the status quo and ultimately an enemy of the state.

The imperatives of existential security cannot be underestimated. If one’s religious construct is a means of reassuring oneself of an ongoing life after death marked by comfort and ease, however contrived that might ultimately be, shining too much light on said constructs can easily make one a lightning rod. Jesus certainly knew that. Indeed, his unwillingness to back away from that endeavor ultimately cost him his life.

Still, it is the role of a true teacher to prompt his students to think, even when it’s painful to do so. Perhaps especially when it’s painful to do so. I sent out Fanon’s quote with the following announcement to my class yesterday. My guess is that a good number of the students won’t read it. Even so, if even one or two brave souls and open minds consider it, perhaps it will be worth the trouble.

March 16, 2014

Announcements

Stoning the Prophet

I found this quote from North African philosopher Fritz Fanon today. It strikes me that a number of you might resonate with the phenomenon this describes. As Lent builds toward Holy Week and the remembrance of the execution of Jesus on Good Friday, consider how his message and his actions may well have prompted cognitive dissonance in his hearers, a painful state that people will seek to avoid if possible and end as soon as possible if encountered.

A common way to end cognitive dissonance is to shoot the messenger. Hebrew culture called it stoning the prophet. I sometimes refer to it as putting them out of our misery.

Now consider Jesus' entry into Jerusalem that causes a major uproar at the beginning of the Passover feast. Hebrew legend has it that if the Messiah is going to return, he'll come during Passover. Christians commemorate this event as Palm Sunday: "Hosanna to the King!"
Jesus then proceeds to go to the Second Temple in the heart of Jerusalem, the nerve center for religion, business and Roman rule. He disrupts business. The Sadducee temple cult is out of business for the day, unable to make their sacrifices because the money cannot be changed (profane Roman coinage is not permitted in the Temple to pay for the animals for sacrifice). The herders and traders are out of business as well. And the Romans, ever vigilant for any sign of disturbance, realize they've got a major problem on their hands.

Little wonder that within days Jesus will be taken by the Romans after being made aware of his whereabouts by their Temple cult collaborators and publicly executed.

The Teachable Moment

However, cognitive dissonance, while painful, is not necessarily bad. Cognitive dissonance signals that a person has encountered a divergence between their understanding of reality and the reality they encounter. That gap provides space to grow, to learn, to develop. Educators call it the teachable moment. Many of Jesus' disciples understood this implicitly. In response to the cognitive dissonance Jesus prompted with his teachings that reversed the world order they knew (Blessed are the poor?), they had chosen to grow, to become, to develop. As a result their lives changed dramatically. Greeks called this process metanoia.

Cognitive dissonance is unavoidable for the true student in an actual learning situation. A good teacher will always present students with ideas and understandings that do not simply affirm the foregone conclusions of their students. Good teachers always challenge the understandings that students brought with them often provoking painful cognitive dissonance. As former California governor, movie star and weight lifting champion Arnold Schwarzenegger puts it, "No pain, no gain."

That presents the student with a choice. They can rationalize, ignore or deny the new ideas and understandings. They can even choose to shoot the messenger - sometimes quite literally -  to put the messenger out of their misery. Or, they can choose to bear with the pain of cognitive dissonance, to expand the envelop of their understanding, to grow, develop and to become a slightly larger person than before.

Original Sin?

M. Scott Peck in his masterful book The Road Less Traveled observes that human beings always have the potential to grow, to become and to develop their highest potentials as individuals and members of communities. So why don't we? 

He observes that there are three reasons: human beings tend to avoid pain (e.g., cognitive dissonance), we find ourselves incapable of delaying gratification and we tend to avoid any kind of exertion requiring effort and energy on our part. Clearly, we are well trained consumers, addicted to convenience and presuming ourselves entitled to constant comfort. But Peck has a different description of this avoidance of the road less traveled to growth and development. He calls it original sin.

Perhaps some food for thought this second week of Lent.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, M.Div. 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Adventures in Edu-Cyberland V - Choose Your Own Adventure

It is the consistent confrontation by unsupported, dogmatic assertions which tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) require unquestioning buy-in to even begin talking about online education that marks my own experience of Edu-Cyberland. As a student of religions, I recognize dogma when I hear it and I know true believers when I encounter them.

Nowhere was that clearer than in the third workshop I attended at the Sloan Conference. Entitled “Choose Your Own Adventure: Millenials and the Post-Traditional Credit Hour.” It was an hour long paean to the consumer-student and the university as providers of goods and services. And, in the usual pattern of hubristic hype, it was offered as the way of the future in education.

In Praise of Millennials

The session began in a promising fashion with presenter Sean Traigle laying out the differences between the traditional student (18 year old freshman, needing more structure) and the post-traditional student (older, needing flexible structures). Traigle then began painting a somewhat questionable picture of millennial students:

They expect to be engaged in learning, they don’t do well as passive learners, they won’t stick around if there’s no technology utilized, self-assured, confident,  civic-minded, compelled to make the world a better place.

From my observations, there is some truth in this description if primarily in the thus far unrealized potential of this generation if not its actualization. As with online education, there has been far more hype than substance thus far.

Traigle asserted that 90% of the millenials are in college primarily for career reasons – to advance, start or change careers. This is certainly true of my observations. The vast majority of my students are strategic learners driven by extrinsic motivations. Of course, at some level, they are a reflection of the culture which bred them, a culture which Richard Hofstadter observed to be anti-intellectual 50 years ago and which today clearly values education largely – perhaps solely - in instrumentalist terms.

Whether these students “don’t do well as passive learners” is somewhat debatable. In truth, few real students do well taking passive approaches to learning. One of the great gifts to pedagogy is Paolo Freire’s critique of the banking concept in which experts pour information into the heads of passive learners who must then disgorge such information upon cue. Such approaches produce little retention of its content or critical comprehension, much less its connection to the lives of those learning it.

But Millennials are the products of standardized test driven pedagogies. Their primary question is inevitably “Will this be on the test?” In my experience they do not regularly come to class prepared for discussion (i.e., reading prior to class) and often whine about any kind of engagement demanded beyond the data dump high-stakes testing for which they are so well trained, particularly if it requires even a modicum of critical thinking. Strategic learners are motivated by extrinsic rewards – grades, degrees, accolades. The notion that they would be particularly engaged in learning at any depth is probably not a reasonable expectation.

Traigle also heralded Millenials as keenly aware of the differential between their own “comfort level of technology” and that of their instructors, a phenomenon easily observable today. Yet, as a group they also exhibit a profound inability to judge context in the appropriate use of technology, a failure of judgment that is not only rude but can get you killed in movie theaters in Florida these days. They also display major difficulties in remaining attentive to any given task at hand due to well-developed patterns of constant self-distraction with their technological toys.

While their technical skills are clearly well honed, their contextual awareness and critical judgment about the proper time and place to use those skills are limited if not impaired. Indeed, a number of studies are now suggesting it’s precisely the persistent interaction with technology rather than people that results in such impaired judgment and the decline of interpersonal communication skills as well. 

They are well-trained consumers, indeed.

Creedal Assertions

About halfway through the presentation, the creedal assertions of Edu-Cyberland appeared. Traigle works for an online technology company called Straighterline.  The company describes its services as “providing high quality courses that are guaranteed to fit into your degree program.” Clearly, as with any consumerist enterprise, it is, at least on the surface, all about you.

The site continues

With StraighterLine you earn your college degree from the top career-focused universities, in the field and ultimately in the career of your choice - in less time, with less stress and with $15,000 less in student debt.

Traigle then launched into a diatribe on “being tied to a seat” and being required to regularly study with any level of intensity. Traigle described these behaviors as tied to a traditional system of education whose time has passed, a system which must be replaced by learning with flexible start/end dates, outcomes-based personal learning and accomplished primarily through technology.  In the revealed truth of Edu-Cyberland, the ultimate heresy is always to be seen as “old school.”

The dogmatic presumptions of this approach and their religious implications are pretty clear:

·         Education is strictly about careers (confessional statement)

·         Investment of money, time, presence, intensity and energy in this process are negative values to be avoided at all cost (sin)

·        The consumer is always the best judge of all aspects of the process, at least the limited array presented him/her by the provider of goods and services (personal salvation schema)

·         Learning cannot occur without technology (liturgical ritual) and the terms of its usage must be unconditional (orthopraxis)

This makes for an interesting religion but it is an impoverished view of education if it can truly be called that at all. There are a number of problems with these presumptions beginning with the fact that, like all dogmatic assertions purporting to define revealed truth, they must be accepted without question as a condition of even discussing online education.

The minimalism and reductionism in these presumptions are staggering.  But the most troubling aspect is the understanding implicitly revealed in the requirement that one avoid any kind of investment in the process that education itself is somehow a negative experience to be engaged in only the most expeditious and painless manner as possible.

Why in the world would that be?

Less Hype, More Critical Reflection

If online education is to have a prayer of success in actually creating an educated public, it is going to have to become MUCH more critically conscious of and willing to discuss its dogmatic presumptions and the values they reflect. The how of online education is much less important in the long run as the why.

• We need to question whether careers are the only or even the primary reason people should attend college. 

• We need to question consumerist presumptions of convenience and comfort as the primary values in our approaches to education. 

• We need to ask ourselves why we see education in such negative terms generally and what such attitudes say about us as a people. 

• And we need to critically confront the way we use our technologies generally but particularly in the context of education.

My observation is that higher education needs a lot less hype, a lot less dogma and a lot more critical self-reflection.  Perhaps it is only when our hype implodes and our failures confront us - as San Jose State discovered to its great chagrin last year in the meltdown of its MOOC Great Leap Forward – that we will be forced to do the hard work of thoughtfully considering the questions of why we do what we do and how it impacts those we would ostensibly serve. 

Not surprisingly, false gods inevitably give their challengers plenty of evidence of their emptiness to work with. This one is no exception.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div. Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Lecturer: Religion and Cultural Studies

Osceola Regional Campus, University of Central Florida, Kissimmee

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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Adventures in Edu-Cyberland IV – Revealed Truth

I ran across an article last weekend that stopped me in my tracks. Entitled “2013- the year of ups and downs for the MOOCs,” at the website Changing Higher Education, the unnamed author made a number of observations that were breathtaking in their candidness and their humility, qualities that are rarely observable in Edu-Cyberland.

To wit:

Many of the problems now being faced by the MOOCs are simply a natural consequence of the tremendous hype and enthusiasm that accompanied and drove their growth - reality eventually must come in. However, a large part of the problem, in my opinion, is that the MOOCs have in general been created with little or no attention to extensive research on pedagogy in general, and online pedagogy in particular.

This has certainly been my observation. Online technologies generally have been

heralded as the messianic answer to all the problems besetting education from kindergarten to doctoral studies. Seized upon almost instantly by the primary beneficiaries of this technology – the computer industries, the corporations who stand to gain from their use, the technocratic management of colleges and universities and the politicians looking for an easy out in their duties to public education (not to mention their ability to provide yet another sweet deal for their corporate pimps) – there has been a rush to put everything from law school to speech classes to physical education online.

As the critique rightly observes, much of the rush to cyberspace has been driven more by hype than concern for pedagogical soundness, much less for actual learning. For the techies, it’s an opportunity to have their cherished technology utilized - if not worshiped - by the wider public. For the business boys, there’s gold in them thar hills. For the ever growing technocracies on college campuses, it’s a means of managing their over-enrolled campuses which can no longer physically seat their all cash cows in classrooms. It’s also a way to continue steady cuts in education budgets by politicians now beholden to those same corporations.

It’s a win-win from the perspective of power and money. But from the perspective of the student who has no choice but to take courses online to graduate (and pay extra “technology fees” for them) and the contingent faculty who increasingly must teach online as the alternative to not working, it’s a Hobson choice.

While the website’s critique rightly points out the superficiality of the hype surrounding online education of all stripes and resulting stampede to embrace the same, it only raises one important question: how we do this v. what we’re doing. Far more important questions go unraised here: Why we do this in the first place, what we are assuming about these endeavors and what impacts they might have (and have proven to have) on all the parties to public education.

I was particularly taken by this comment:

This confusion of show business and education will not move the learning process forward any more than does the confusion of technology and education. It is all about using the appropriate, research supported instructional techniques.

This was a response to comments by the CEO of EdX, Anat Agarwal at the Sloan Conference, who suggested that MOOCs might become more effective (translated: popular) if they employed actors to give the lectures. "From what I hear, really good actors can actually teach really well…”  – not to mention they can probably insure higher profits, right? After all, what’s really the difference between being entertained at the movies or taking a college course on a MOOC, right?

Bear in mind, this is the same speaker who candidly admitted in his address to the Sloan Conference that MOOCs are not working and that hybrid use of online technologies (part face-to-face, part online) is the best and highest use of the technologies.

However, this is a good example of the superficiality of much of the online educational world. The focus here is on how things are done, the bells and whistles, the presentation, not what is being done, why it’s being done this way and how it impacts both teachers and learners. Ins short, it’s the difference between a college course taught online, as I always label my own courses, and an online class.

The focus of the first is the content, the pedagogical method and the endeavor to insure learning despite the physical absence of the student and instructor. It is a substantive approach focused more on content than appearance. It requires engagement if it is to work.

The focus of the second is the technology employed to which all other considerations are subject and secondary. It is marked by a focus on process rather than substance, appearance and experience rather than content. It is driven by consumerist considerations of comfort and convenience which often result in minimalism in course requirements and effort demanded as well as reductionism in thinking.

Ding Dong, Delivery Man

But it was this comment that brought me up short:

Research over the years has shown, however, that technology delivers instruction, but the quality of the learning depends on the quality of the instruction rather than the delivery vehicle.

One of the things that is often striking in any conversation about online teaching and learning is its highly dogmatic nature. Much like the great church councils of the late Roman Empire, there are certain truths that are regularly asserted in this discourse which must simply be accepted as unquestionably true. One of them is stated above – that instruction is somehow “delivered. “

The term deliver is problematic on a good day. Here, the usage is connected to a limited endeavor – instruction – but the more general usage of that term among the purveyors of online education is frequently connected to classes. I heard this the first day of my training to teach online (which, ironically, occurred in a face-to-face class rather than online) – you’re going to deliver your class….

Seriously. How can a class - or even instruction - be delivered? Deliveries are the realm of UPS and FedEx agents in smart uniforms who bring packages to your door awaiting your signing for them, opening them and consuming their contents. No real engagement is required in these transactions (so long as the payment has cleared). 

The problems with using such a description for what is ostensibly an educational experience should be obvious. One doesn’t learn simply by paying for a delivery. If learning is to occur, it always requires engagement. What is “delivered” in online courses is a compact, somewhat minimalized opportunity for a student to engage the course material and the other members of the learning community. What happens beyond that initial opportunity lies in the hands of the participants.

One of the key problems with online classes of any kind but particularly of the first wave of MOOCs is that students simply are not engaging them. The correlation between onsite presence and performance is well documented. And the drop out rates, which are several times those of their face-to-face counterparts, are much higher. 

Ironically, it is the educational approach which requires the most investment from the student that appear to be most destined for completion of courses if not success in them, a dynamic completely counter-intuitive to the consumerist mantras of convenience and comfort as the only guiding values. Indeed, might not the very terms we use here – the delivery of instruction – signal to the consumer that their obligations to the process are limited at most? 

Might we be setting students up for failure?

This article reminded me that I had not written my final installment regarding my visit to Edu-Cyberland’s Sloan Conference last month. That follows. 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div. Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Lecturer: Religion and Cultural Studies

Osceola Regional Campus, University of Central Florida, Kissimmee

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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A time to every purpose under heaven

One of the great voices of my youth has fallen silent this day. Pete Singer was the voice of the folk music movement of the early 1960s. His haunting lyrics and melodious songs called Americans whose sons and daughters were being shipped in mass to Southeast Asia to ask themselves, “Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to graveyards every one. When will they ever learn?”  It would become the anthem of an anti-war movement which would galvanize America against the war in Southeast Asia over the next bloody seven years of that conflict.

Seeger led crowds across our nation fighting for civil rights - a fight that continues today for immigrants, LBGT people, working class people and the disabled – in an anthem which promised that someday, “We shall overcome.” Seeger called us to use the hammer of justice to build a new America, to ring the bell of freedom to pierce the din of discrimination and always to keep singing the songs “about love between my brothers and my sisters…all over this land.”

I did not know until this morning that Seeger was the author of what is probably my favorite song of all times. Recorded by The Byrds in 1965, “Turn, Turn, Turn”  took the words of the Hebrew Scriptures found in Ecclesiastes and set them to music. Seeger had crafted them in the late 1950s but The Byrds took the song to the top of the charts.

Simultaneously mindful of our mortality and calling us to be fully present for each day, Seeger reminded us that there is “a time to every purpose under heaven; a time to be born and a time to die.” And, most characteristically, Seeger’s song ended with the exhortation, “A time for peace…I swear it’s not too late.”

I long ago decided that whatever else is sung at my memorial service, I want that service to include “Turn, Turn, Turn.” But for today, it is Pete Seeger’s time to die and I join a generation in grieving his passing and in expressing gratitude for his life, his work and the way it has shaped our own.

Rest in peace, brother. You will be sorely missed.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div. Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Instructor: Religion and Cultural Studies

Osceola Regional Campus University of Central Florida, Kissimmee

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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Semblances of sanity returning to my life

After a fall semester so overloaded that I cannot even remember all of it (I call it the Big Blur), life this spring has mercifully slowed to a moderate trot. I am teaching fully online this semester for the university which means I do not have to descend into the maelstrom of campus life three times a week. My only face-to-face interactions with students is at the state college at Osceola, the regional campus where I am now assigned and hold university office hours each week.

The result is decidedly a more sane existence.

Of course, online courses have challenges of their own. Two of the classes I am teaching are first time being taught online. Three of the four classes have enrollments of 50 or larger.  I haven’t taught the Contemporary Humanities class in six years and the last time it was F2F. It’s been a challenge adapting that class to online format. It’s hard to know if the students are getting into the material since I only hear from them via their Discussion posts.

The Christianity class is brand new for me and somewhat new for the department, having more recently been taught as Christian thought and history.  Of course, I love the subject material even as I find myself wishing we could be talking to each other in person about these various points.

Three weeks into the term, I’m already a bit behind on grading because I’m spending a lot of time developing these new courses. Fortunately, the two Humanistic traditions classes could simply be rolled over from previous semesters online and after about a full day and a half worth of labor in resetting links on my Schedule, dates for quizzes and discussions, they’re set for the rest of the semester.

In the meantime, the distance – both physical and emotional -  I have gained this semester from the often toxic culture of a state university slowly squeezing the life out of its liberal arts is proving essential to my ongoing employment there (with retirement and health care my primary motivations for remaining these days) not to mention my own mental health. The detox process has been slow but steady. Landing the regional campus job was one of the best pieces of good fortune I’ve had in a long while.

Semblances of Sanity

In previous entries here I have laid out my lamentations over life in the pressure cooker of main campus with little relief in sight. I began this post on a Sunday morning, having just returned from the 8 AM Holy Eucharist (Rite I, no less!), a word which literally means thanksgiving, mindful of the many ameliorative changes that have come to my life over the past month for which I decidedly am grateful. I wish to be intentional about my gratitude for these changes. I see them as semblances of sanity slowly returning to my life.

Among them….

•  I finally found the time last week to match up all the loose socks which had been sitting on the top of my dresser inviting cats to scatter them all over the bedroom. They’d been there since I took them out of the dryer the first of December just as end of term and exams demanded my every waking moment.

•  I sat up until midnight (!) last Thursday watching late night TV and going through a couple of years’ worth of magazines, recycling those I no longer wanted, stacking those I decided to keep into wicker bins beside the couch. It’s amazing! I can actually stay up that late now that I don’t have to be at the bus stop by 9:30. To my surprise, there was actually a beautiful hardwood floor under all those magazines! 

•   I have finally gotten all the baby agaves planted in the trays I bought for them when the Mother of all Agaves finally gave up the ghost on its bloom spike and fell into the street around Thanksgiving. Some of them had actually rotted in the bottom of the tray by the time I got to them but most of them survived to be planted, awaiting transplant into someone’s yard once they’re a bit bigger. (Anyone interested in a variegated agave?) 

•  Last Friday I sorted through the entire month of December and first two weeks of January’s mail, recycling the vast majority of it and giving thanks that no overdue bills were among its contents. The mail basket suddenly looks very lonely. 

• I am beginning to get through all the email that accumulated over the last couple of months of the fall term which I simply had no time to even look at. Apparently I missed a few important emails during the Big Blur but overall, most ended up being deleted. 

•   I find myself actually sleeping at least eight hours every night. Every night! I was not even aware that was even possible. The dark circles under bloodshot eyes are slowly disappearing. 

      

• I have actually been able to walk the 1.75 mile path around Lake Underhill down the street from my home almost daily. It allows me to stretch out my gimpy left knee and to get some sunshine back in my pallid face. I've forgotten how wonderful it is to spend 45 minutes with the birds, the otters, the trees, the clouds skittering across the sky and the sun glittering off the lake surface. It's enough to make this Franciscan heart sing. 

These may seem like little, even insignificant things. And, in themselves, they probably are. But when taken as a whole, they point toward a much healthier state than the one  I have inhabited the past couple of years. I think I’m beginning to actually work to live, not vice-versa. And  I am hopeful these are semblances of the return of a life whose sanity has been most notable for its impaired state if not its elusiveness for far too long

A possible task…

I had all of my four online classes up and running by the midnight deadline for the new term. Two of them are now completely set and the other two have a syllabus, schedule and the first five weeks of assignments up. It’s a nice feeling of accomplishment after last semester’s shot from the cannon beginning and a whole term of constantly being under the gun, a week ahead of the students if lucky, until nearly Thanksgiving.

I actually have the luxury of feeling a bit  relaxed about these classes since I know I will not be spending six hours a week on the bus, five hours a week in office hours and another six hours a week in the classroom (and that was just for the two classes on main campus last semester). I should be able to get the rest done without being constantly on edge about what I need to get done next.

It dawned on me last week that this is actually a possible task I face this term. It’s been so long since that was the case that I almost don’t know how to respond to that.

… and an old, familiar feeling

I also find myself smiling, experiencing an old, familiar feeling as I teach my only face-to-face class in the Ethics and Critical Thinking I teach for Valencia. Standing in front of my weekly night class I remember why I once actually loved teaching. Even in my poor health, struggling to recover from the flu (complete with laryngitis) the first night, it was a great evening. These folks are going to give me a run for my money. I can’t wait!

This group is a miniature United Nations in a classroom – Pakistani, Lebanese, Venezuelan, Puerto Rican, Haitian and the indigenous Osceola County redneck and African-American students. What a rich diversity within which to discuss ethics! Every class I see an ocean of hands in the air, my students anxious to offer their responses to the questions I toss out in my Socratic style discussions.

It is always a challenge to make sure everyone has a chance to speak, a major change from my group quiet, frightened young women nursing students in the same class last semester. In my current class, we laugh together and wrestle with hard questions together. The students are energetic and several students stay after each class to continue talking about the topics we’d discussed.  

Indeed, I continue to be immensely grateful for my reconnection to the Osceola campus of Valencia two years ago. It’s a whole different world from the Factory. I still sometimes find myself shaking my head when employees of the college ask me what they can do to be of help. After so many years at a hypercompetitive, status conscious, zero sum games-playing Factory (whose operating mantra is essentially “F**k you, you’re on your own”), it’s sometimes a little disorienting to encounter this atmosphere of cooperation and teamwork.

Last class when my webcourse site would not come up, I quickly ran next door to the learning lab and asked the young man behind the counter if he was having the same trouble. He stopped everything he was doing, checked the computer and told me that the problem was the Google Chrome browser I was using, try switching to Firefox. Voila!  That simply would not have happened at the Factory.

It’s even more disorienting to encounter the unabashed devotion to teaching and learning that I encounter at Valencia. That begins with large classes being capped at 27, still small enough to actually teach. But don’t get me wrong. I am absolutely grateful for this blessed disorientation.

At the same time, I must confess that I miss some of my students and colleagues in the department much more than I thought I would. Several of my students have sent me notes telling me they miss seeing me and some invite me to lunch, coffee or dinner. I miss them. A lot. And while it’s nice to be missed, there is a sadness in recognizing that my days of close, mentoring relationships with prize students and interactions with valued colleagues on the main campus are probably over. Even so, it’s a nice feeling to find myself actually looking forward to my occasional trips to that campus to see old friends and check in with students, even as it costs me $5 a pop to park there.

“I like the changes…”

Last weekend Andy and I went down to visit two friends from Chicago who make a week long snow bird escape to Florida every year after Christmas. We met them in Lakeland at a restaurant where we could sit outside and enjoy the last warm weather we would have before the current prolonged cool spell. (NOTE: This is not whining! I never complain about any break from the heat we get unless it gets down to freezing and damages my jungle) One of my friends, who has been my bosom buddy since our time together in Brasil on our Fulbright trip four years ago, observed “You seem like you are in a much better place than you were last year.” Her friend added, “Yeah, last year it seemed like it was about all over for you in teaching.”

I asked Andy on the way home if that was true. He readily agreed, reeling off a list of changes in our life together starting with the fact we actually had time to get away for that day trip. “Last semester this time, you were pretty much chained to the computer when you weren’t at school. The only reason I was able to tolerate you was because I knew it was going to change. I like the changes.”

I don’t know that teaching online is the long term answer for me. I continue my ongoing process of discerning the best means of investing my remaining time and energies to hopefully make a difference in the world before I actually depart it. But for the time being, this seems to be the place I need to be. I am finally catching my breath after far too many semesters being on a dead run capped by the mother of all terms, the Big Blur,  last fall. And I am starting to enjoy my work once again after a long drought marked by survival mentality. I do not take lightly the semblances of sanity that have begun to return to my life.

For all of this, I am deeply grateful.  Deo Gratias.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Lecturer: Religion and Cultural Studies

University of Central Florida Regional Campus

Osceola Branch Valencia College, Kissimmee

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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++