Been There, Done That

Papers Are Due: Scot McKnight has a nice little post about an interaction with a student the day before a term paper is due. The student's response (“A couple pots of coffee and maybe a Coke or two and I’ll be fine. I’ve got all night") brings up VERY accurate memories of my college days, and in particular the days I was writing my senior honors thesis - I was subsisting on balance bars and Blue Ox energy drink, writing well from 11pm to 2am. Doesn't that sound disgusting? Pretty gross to me. In fact, I'm certain whatever nutritional value I was getting by way of the balance bar was immediately canceled out by the "taurine" in the drink. Ewww.

For the record, the last true all-nighter I pulled was for Dr. Bill Klein's summer intensive course on the Gospels and Acts. I also wrote a very good paper writing in one (very desperate, as I recall - I was negotiating with myself throughout) nine-hour shot in May of 2005. In both cases, such intensive writing was necessitated by other commitments. In the summer of 2003, I was roped into the summer conference program at Regis and was working far many more hours than I was paid for. In May of 2005, I had a very jammed finals week, and so wrote the roots of what would later become my major writing project at the Seminary in nine hours (Kant, Berkeley and Phenomenalism). There is something satisfying about being able to write something well in such a small space. This does not happen often (I can say that my paper on The Kingdom of God for Klein was okay, but my paper on Berkeley and Kant was a labor of love - does that say something about me? Probably just that I was more successful as a PR major than I was as a Biblical Studies student), but when it does, it's the height of intellectual satisfaction.

Speaking of intellectual satisfaction, I taught my last lectures for Spring semester yesterday. As a kind of wrap-up exercise in my Intro course, I asked the students to revisit the worldview diagnosis they did on the first day of class. When I asked them to respond to some of the same questions, there was a lot of chuckling - particularly of the "I had no idea that things would get so complicated" variety. I talked with a couple of my students after class, and one student said that she was initially intimidated by philosophy, but in the end she had no idea she could "be so philosophical." This comment struck me so positively, simply because a student was able to see that philosophy is accessible and might mean something on a level they didn't expect. Her friend - who launched a full scale campaign in favor of Descartes (really? Descartes?) - said that he gained so much satisfaction by seeing the way Descartes' ideas locked together. I told him that there's a lot of intellectual satisfaction to be had in reading and working through a difficult text. He enthusiastically agreed.

There's some controversy in one of the departments I teach at regarding a move to include and emphasize primary sources , as well as a three-period historical requirement in the Intro and Ethics courses. Some of the other part-time professors are frustrated because they find that students have so much difficulty understanding the primary source material that it somehow neutralizes any learning that may go on in the class. While I understand (and am readily on board with) their observations about their students, it occurs to me that teaching philosophy is *really* about teaching people how to read and how to write all over again - using things that many - if not all - of the students have never seen, in a genre of writing that is not as straightforward as the chemistry textbook they're looking at. This problem is compounded by the idea that aside from our own work in reading philosophy and writing analyses on these lines, we've learned essentially "by feel" how to teach it. It's not like there's a student teaching program in philosophy. Anyway, I don't imagine there will be much compromise on this point, and that's fine - either the department tells us what to teach, or the college (who doesn't have the same "on the ground" sensibility as other philosophy professors) will tell us what to teach, and possibly how to teach it.

This summer I'm focusing on exactly how to do this. I'm teaching an intensive 8-week ethics course that will rely mainly on primary sources (although not to the precise specifications and requirements of the department - the new program doesn't launch until Fall 2008, so we've got some time to acquiesce), and my aim and goal is to learn how to teach people to read closely. I can read closely - in fact, about half of what I do for a living involves this - but can I teach people how to do this? That's a project. In addition, I'm working on an independent study in phenomenology. I'm so fascinated by what I've been reading that my professor from the course has graciously agreed to oversee my work in this area. It's very relevant to my overall project w/r/t film and philosophy, but I need to put down some foundation first. I'm also helping to plan my 10 year high school reunion. Plus, I've chosen a new, source-heavy book for two of my intro courses, so I have to figure that out. Some outdoor volleyball marathons will no doubt make their way in as well. There are just a few projects kicking around, but I like my summers busy, I guess.