Manifesto

Time for a new chapter.

Today I got my course evaluations from the term that just ended, and they made plain to me how urgent it is that I charge into battle for the substance and authenticity of what happens in my classroom. I've been a young teacher, trying to figure things out. I’ve been a comfortable teacher with good, developed instincts. I’ve been a popular teacher on a Christian campus with small classes, enjoying positive, light-hearted, friendly relations with my students. None of those teachers are gone; they’re all sedimentary strata in my foundation. But now it’s time for something different, and I plan to pursue it with all the stubborn militancy I can muster.

I do not believe in memorization and will no longer encourage or reward it.

I do not believe in note-taking for note-taking’s sake, and will no longer encourage or reward it.

I do not believe in playing school, and will no longer encourage or reward it.

The overwhelming majority of students here at NCU, and on other campuses across the country, are stubbornly wedged into a set of habits and assumptions that are channeling their time, energy, potential, straight down the drain. I have coexisted with those habits and assumptions for too long. No longer.

To begin with, I, my colleagues, and my students, have to fully grasp that learning is worship.

My students are very committed to the idea that worship has to be authentic, that it cannot consist of going through the motions, but somehow they don’t take that idea with them into the classroom. There’s a widely shared separation of NCU life into the sacred and the profane. The sacred is the ministry work, like staging chapel celebrations, doing community service, or leading small group Bible studies. The profane includes things like jury duty, visits to the doctor, and getting an education. Activities in the second category can be ministry opportunities, as it certainly would be possible to witness to someone in the jury pool, but they aren’t anything anyone would seek out for spiritual development: they’re to be tolerated, not wholeheartedly tackled and experienced.

I’m not convinced that in every case our students choose, consciously, to put getting an education into that second category, but the choice is unmistakable based on their behavior. They pour all their ability and energy into ministry work, but laugh to one another about how often they write papers the night before they’re due, or pull all-night cram sessions just before a test. And, naturally, they rarely take a glance at the graded papers, and take it for granted that material learned for a test is to be forgotten the second the test is over. The notion that the papers might be documents of their intellectual development that need periodic revisits, or that they might retain and make use of the material covered on a test, is entirely foreign.

It’s crazy. They don’t study the Bible that way, but every academic subject gets that arm’s length, dismissive treatment. And what’s crazy about it is that this isn’t a monastery or a convent; it’s a university, and they made the deliberate choice to enroll. The primary purpose of this institution is to offer programs of study that culminate in academic degrees. They came here for the purpose of earning such a degree. Now, I do understand that to a certain extent, people at this stage in life struggle with self-discipline; it’s too tempting to go straight to the enjoyable activities, the socializing, the work that yields instant reward. That’s true on Christian and secular campuses alike. But I’ve also seen impressive, substantive, polished work whenever they make the connection between their efforts and direct service to God. It’s not easy to play a musical instrument, but I’ve heard performances that gave me chills. It’s not effortless to plan a worship event, but I’ve seen worship events that went off like clockwork, with truly thoughtful, thought-provoking elements incorporated seamlessly. The problem is that they don’t see the connection between schoolwork and serving God.

That’s a shame. Christ’s followers certainly did.

Yes, He healed. Yes, He worked miracles. But what He did most of all was teach. He didn’t have a lot of use for people who followed Him around only to see the signs and wonders. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,” He said. And He didn’t just teach them how to interpret scripture, how to pray, how to do things that felt sacred: He taught them what to do with their money, how to handle conflict, how to manage contracts. Paul, His apostle to the Gentiles, would go on to castigate believers who stopped working at their jobs so they could idly await His return, saying “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

Oprah Winfrey, explaining why she builds schools in Africa and not in the United States, said “If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.” We’ve had plenty of visitors to campus who talk about the level of need they’ve seen outside the United States, and our students overflow with compassion for children who are hungry, who are victims of abuse. But I wonder if a single one of them appreciates how appalled those same children would be to see them squander their opportunity to learn? When they work to feed the hungry, I know it moves them to think about how blessed they are to have enough food; for abused children, to think about how blessed they were to grow up safe, protected, among loving family members. But they work to exhaustion in order to provide for children who are hungry for education, for learning, for a chance to take possession of their own lives, and they never see the slap in the face they give those children by making a mockery of their own access to exactly what the children crave.

I genuinely don’t get the reasoning that leads students to enroll at a Christian university, identify as fellow Christians who are giving up their entire lives to service, but then do a marginal, half-hearted job on the meat of that affiliation, the completion of coursework to earn a degree. Why not cut out the middleman and go straight to work at a church? The answer is, because most healthy churches won’t hire them unless they have a college degree, and, in many cases, seminary training to boot. What can we infer from that? Could it be that their elders, their role models, see value in the discipline of undertaking complete preparation, a wall-to-wall education, before embarking on a life of service?

And if schoolwork is profane, then why a Christian college? Daily toothbrushing is a good idea, but I doubt many of our students go out of their way to insist on a Christian toothbrush. Dental hygiene is one of the necessary, unavoidable tasks that are preparatory to active participation in the Kingdom of Heaven for another day, but I can’t think of a Christian way to brush one’s teeth that is distinct from an atheist’s approach. If schoolwork goes in the same category as toothbrushing, then why a Christian college? It seems beyond obvious to me that exploring the order in God’s creation is, itself, a form of worship, and pushing back ignorance and choosing to learn critical thinking skills is an offering to God. So why do so many students bring such a meager, poor, depleted offering?

I’m not just talking about sloppiness, by the way. Plenty of type-A, very hard-working students approach schoolwork in a spirit that is very self-centered and entitled. Just this semester, I’ve had several of my more successful students insist that I should design my classes around memorization and taking notes off Powerpoint, two activities that have only the most remote relationship to learning, and a much closer relationship to going through the motions. Several highly capable students dropped my Introduction to Mass Communication class after they tried to memorize everything covered on the first test, but met with disaster. One in particular told me that her learning style involved memorization, and if I didn’t re-design the class to reward memorization, then I was a bad teacher. I replied that it was far more important to me that they understand the course content, and that things memorized for tests tended to be forgotten almost immediately. I’m sure I’m correct about that, but I made zero headway in getting any agreement from her. In other classes, students complained that I’m no longer using Powerpoint, because they don’t know how to take notes. There’s ample research supporting the notion that Powerpoint deadens understanding and atrophies listening skills, and I explained that every time a student asked me to go back to Powerpoint, but they’ve got their comforting routines of writing down the bullet points, and when I disrupted those routines with the radical notion that they should pay attention and engage the material, they turned sullen and put the blame on me for their struggles.

Finally, I think this culture stays wedged in place because of my own behavior, and the behavior of my colleagues. I’ve said for years that I don’t want my students to like me right now; instead, I want them to look back in twenty years and like what I did, and what effect it had on them. If they like me too much right now, then I’m not challenging them enough. A colleague of mine asked me the question, last Spring, “Do you really believe that a class has to be hard for students to be learning?” I bobbled the question at the time, but it’s stayed on my mind ever since. The answer is yes, in a certain sense, it does. Christ’s followers were disciples because they’d taken on discipline, and we today separate our curriculum into academic disciplines because they should have rigor and challenge, and completing them should require more from students than they arrive able to do. A native speaker of Spanish who’s a published author, poet and playwright in Spanish, should not enroll at an American university to major in Spanish. That person has mastered the language, so completing the program is a waste of time and effort.

And I’m afraid that we’re all creeping closer and closer to expecting nothing from our students. We do Powerpoint slides because they’re easy to develop into routines. We give cursory attention to written work, because it demands less effort from us than digging in and grading it line-by-line. We take our cues from student performance, easing back on the level of difficulty in tests and assignments if the grades go down. In some cases, if students become enough of a hassle, we cut corners and overlook whatever we need to in order to make them go away. None of that is tolerable. All of it sells the students, and the service of teaching, short. And I am as guilty as anyone of practicing it. And I have decided not to anymore.

It is no more acceptable to play school than it is to play church. We offer teaching and learning as a form of worship. And scripture makes it clear that God doesn’t want offerings brought reluctantly, or from mixed motives; if we offer something to God, it needs to be in joyous gratitude for what we’ve been given, and if it’s not the best we have to give, then the joy and the gratitude is awfully hard to take seriously. I have no reasonable expectation that I can bring this off perfectly, but I am determined to double down on an insistence on learning, and a challenging of play-school routines and behaviors. And I think I might get my wish: fewer and fewer students are going to like me right away, but if I do it right, more of them may like what they see a generation from now.