Sacrifice and Inconvenience

I was down in Cajun country this weekend, catching up with an old college buddy – a Mississippi transplant who’s spent the last six years adjusting to Lafayette, with some limited success. Our conversations wandered across a wide range of topics, but one of the things that we kept coming back to – given the similarity of our vocations (he’s a pastor, which is just another way of saying he’s a glorified teacher who wears a funny collar and doesn’t have to grade papers) – was the idea of “community” and the necessity of sacrifice, especially in education.

I think our modern culture has lost perspective. That’s a truism, I realize, and it’s probably been said by more people, at more distinct periods of history, than just the talking heads we see on the Fox News Channel or on Sunday mornings behind the pulpit. By way of example, though, think about the two words in the post-title up there. When most of us think about sacrifice, we think about depriving ourselves of something. We think about “going without” by giving to others. Especially as our 101 sections approach the service-learning component of the course, it’s going to be easy for us to throw around that word “sacrifice”: “Yeah, I sacrificed some of my time on Saturday afternoon to play with the kids from the Baptist Children’s Village.” And it’s something that your Comp professors – that all professors – are susceptible to, also: we “sacrifice” our efforts, our time, our abilities, and our economic well-being in order to teach.

[Digression: If you haven’t yet noticed, education is not a lucrative career. But honestly, have you ever thought about the fact that just about any of your profs here could be pulling a salary twice as large in the private sector?]

But that’s a misunderstanding, or at least a limited understanding, of what that word “sacrifice” means. You see, based on all those examples in the previous paragraph, we’re not actually “going without,” even though that’s what we mean by “sacrifice.” The student still has some free time on Saturday – presumably she didn’t spend 18 hours with the BCV kids – and even if she doesn't have any free time on Saturday, she'll have some on Sunday, or Monday, or ... And we profs still have our own little private spheres, however tiny they might be, of activity and freedom and intellectual stimulation, and we still get a paycheck, however tiny that might be. Sure, we’ve been deprived, temporarily, of total autonomy – of being able to do what we want with what we have. But that means that we’ve been “inconvenienced”: we may have experienced a hiccup in our normal routine, or a slight depression in terms of our liquid assets, but we have not “sacrificed.”

The biblical paradigm is substantially different. The exemplar is, of course, Christ. But when we think of sacrifice these days, we think in a more Old Testament kind of way: “Okay, I’ll send this heifer over to the altar, but I’m keeping the other fifty-two.” “An offering? Sure. I can manage sacrificing a tenth of my grain harvest.” Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure there was some sort of emotional twang when you saw that bushel of grain being consumed by fire, that finely-ground meal for which you had sweated and labored by (1) tilling the ground; (2) planting the seed; (3) tending the field; (4) harvesting the heads; (5) threshing and culling the grain; and (6) grinding the meal. There’s a lot of time and effort in that, no doubt, so it was a real, tangible loss. But the whole point is that it is a representative portion of your life and livelihood – not the whole thing. Those kinds of “sacrifices” are metaphorical, typological, and symbolic.

But Christ’s example is totalitarian. That’s part of the pathos of the Gospels, if pathos is a word that can be applied to the divine. He didn’t just give one-tenth, not even one-half, of what was asked of him. All. Everything. Entirety. Nothing held back, nothing reserved, nothing to “fall back on.” Some of you will remember Christ's words in John 12, “Unless a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die, it doesn’t bring forth anything; but if it does die, it produces lots” (or something to that effect). Or a couple of chapters over (15), “The greatest love involves laying your life down.” It seems that what Christ’s teachings and example are telling us is that the only way to achieve any lasting, eternal, significant value in life, is to sacrifice. Not inconvenience; not temporary deprivation; not – however willingly – experiencing an annoyance, obstacle, hindrance, or bother in our pursuit of our goals. Rather, abandonment.

And so I’m forced to re-assess my own life, and this grand project of education that we’re all involved in. To what extent do we treat education as an “inconvenience”? As something to be endured for four, twelve, eighteen years, before we can get on with “real life”? As peripheral, something on the side, something that makes our life a “little bit extra,” something that distinguishes us from the uneducated? I don’t want to know your answers; I’m already depressingly aware of my own. Apparently, if we accept the biblical model, our education will produce no lasting effects unless we singularly rethink our approach to it. It will remain just an “optional feature” – something that we can trot out at dinner parties to appear clever or intellectual, or something that enables us to get the job before the next guy – unless we sacrifice ourselves for (or “to”?) it. It will not change us; it will not help us change the world; it will only remain a dust-covered trunk, stuck up in our attic, with all the old notebooks and mementoes from our four years at Mississippi College.

But we’re also neglecting the other part of the biblical paradigm. Namely, that if we do sacrifice, there are results. Always. The kernel of grain that falls to the ground and dies produces a whole field full. [Incidentally, remember the etymology of education? educare? to draw out, to bring forth…the seed metaphor that we talked about?] The one Man who lays down his life for his friends produces a whole new race of sons and daughters of God. I can’t imagine what the corresponding result would be if we sacrificed our lives for education, for knowing the truth (the Truth), not in some intellectual elitist sort of way (“I know more than you do”), but because we realized that without that Truth we will remain bound up in our tiny, separate, ineffectual, temporal, and – dare I say it? – wasted lives.

Go and die, my friends.

But not before you've written your first essay.

Blogs of Note, the second chapter

Check these out for this week:

1. Ethan's post about his educational background and coming to MC
2. TJ on "enforced" chapel

Both of these guys raise some central issues about what we expect from the College, and what it expects from us.

Keep up the blogging, and the interaction with each other (and with Doc Miller's students).

Blogs of Note

Each week, Mr. Howell and I will post a couple of blogs from 101K that we consider to be worth your attention -- either as models of the kind of thing we're after, or else because they raise some questions or issues worth thinking about. This week, you'll want to read the posts by Carter Collins, Lukas Steffens, and Sarah Cole (go ahead and read the previous posts from these three, too...each of them has posted twice so far). Great job, guys. Keep up the thinking, the writing, and the responding. And 101K students, don't forget that you need to be reading and commenting on Dr. Miller's students' blogs, too....

Believe it or not, it really is Relevant

Friday afternoons are fantastic around here. No classes after noon, and most all of my colleagues are off starting their weekends as early as humanly possible -- rightly so, seeing as how most of 'em put in upwards of 40 work-and-prep hours in just the four days from Monday to Thursday. But I, slacker that I am, have to spend my Friday afternoons catching up on things I should have done earlier in the week. There are a couple of ongoing research projects that I piddle around in; I use the time to grade quizzes and read through informal writing assignments; and I generally manage to get a good bit done.

This last Friday, though, I had an intriguing hour-long conversation with a student who wandered into the office to talk about what he perceived as his growing dissatisfaction with his experience at MC. And it wasn't anything as simple as "I don't like my roommate" or "There's nothing to do here on the weekends." Nope. This was fairly deep, striking at the heart of what the Christian liberal arts education is supposed to be -- and, incidentally, dealing with several of the issues we've raised in our classroom discussions in Comp I.

Basically, this student was having a tough time dealing with two issues. First of all, he was trying to discern the extent to which the Christian faith of his professors permeates what (and how) they teach -- it's the "integration" question, for those of you who know the Mission Statement, or who have read your Holmes. That says a lot, if a second-year student is independently asking those kinds of questions. He had come to MC because of her reputation, because of her claim to be a "Christian University," but his experience for this past year-and-a-bit was not fulfilling his expectations.

The second issue he was facing, was that his experience in many of his classes here has been (to paraphrase) elementary and unchallenging. He found some of his classes to be, well, not "ridiculous," and not "a waste of time," but something just short of either of those. Now, the first issue -- the integration question -- is easily lumped under the "Christian" part of "a Christian University," and it deserves some serious thought by each faculty member here. But the second has to do with what a liberal arts education really is (the "University" part of our PR motto), and the expectations that students have as they come to college.

So many of our students, I believe, view the two-and-a-half hours per week that they spend in a class as the upper end of the amount of time that they're willing to devote to their education. Aw, come on now, those out of class assignments? Are you serious? They're just an unreasonable imposition on MY time. What? We have to read in advance? We have homework? And I think that particular mindset, though diluted to a less abrasive extent, was precisely what was troubling my student. Don't get me wrong -- he's a perfectly capable, responsible, and (in many ways) model undergraduate. I would kill to have a whole class full of his ilk. But the idea that "my education is somehow deficient because my classes aren't challenging" ignores the critical issues of independent learning and self-motivation which are the hallmark of the passionate intellect. Remember what Holmes says about the "ethic" involved in the academic process? It's at the bottom of page 17, for those of you who care....

I guess my encouragement to this student was that he's never going to escape those "boring" classes -- not because some professors are inept, but rather because we, as professors and mentors at a liberal arts institution, find ourselves teaching to hordes, masses, flocks, multitudes, and hosts, rather than gearing courses to meet the needs of one particular mind. And any given student's background, preparation, and capacity for learning is going to differ substantially from the student in the next row.

But that doesn't mean you're off the hook, if you find yourself not being challenged by a particular course. It's your moral responsibility to find ways to make it challenging. Supplement what you're getting (or not getting) in class by reading outside the required texts, or by sitting down with your professor outside of class, or by talking with some of your classmates about the issues raised in a lecture. Or -- horror of horrors -- actually do some reading and preparation in advance, and come to class ready to (heh heh heh) "challenge" your prof. In the humble spirit of collegial academic inquiry, of course. But see if you can outthink him. Uncover counterarguments that might give her pause for thought. I guarantee you, you'll be the more well-developed and well-educated because of it, and the class will be more enjoyable both for you and for your classmates.

So, you see, all of these things we're talking about in Comp these first few weeks of the term -- it's not just some high-falutin' academic question for the brainiacs. It actually matters. The way you think about these things is going to have a tremendous impact on the next three or four years of your college experience. How are you going to handle those disappointing classes? What will you do to make sure that you emerge out of the Coliseum, diploma in hand, more developed (intellectually, spiritually, socially, physically, and emotionally) than when you showed up last month?

Responsibility = Pro Sensibility, or Sobriety in Lips (those are anagrams, by the way)

While I’m sure an awful lot of folks’ reflections this week are going to be about the weather – Gustav, tornadoes, and the impending threat of Hanna, Ike, and Josephine – and as apt a metaphor it would be for me to compare the start of classes to a tempest, I’m going to resist that impulse. Instead, I’m going to vent a bit about campus security. And, okay, just a little bit about the weather.

Don’t get me wrong – I get on fine with all the security guys (which can’t be said, I’m afraid, for all of my colleagues). And I realize that they’re a common target among you students, so it’s probably a bit unfair for me to take potshots, too, but I’m going to anyway. There I was yesterday afternoon, plugging away on revising a couple of reading assignments for one of my classes, when the Severe Weather Alerts started flashing up on my e-mail. You know the ones: “TORNADO SPOTTED IN THE AREA PLEASE TAKE COVER IMMEDIATELY” (punctuation, anyone?). I summarily ignored the alert, as I’m sure many of you did, also. It’s not that I don’t value my life, or that I’m a risk taker; rather, I had already checked three different radar sites while at my desk, and I felt reasonably certain that there was no direct threat to the campus.

But, of course, this wasn’t enough. After a few minutes, the warning siren started blaring, off toward the south. Again, checking weather.com, intellicast.com, and tuning the radio to PRM, I found out that the nearest danger was in Bolton. Not exactly in our backyard here at the college, I hope you’ll agree. After a few minutes of syllabus-updating, I heard one of our respectable and vigilant security personnel walking through the hall and reminding everyone to evacuate to the basement due to the threat of severe weather. I finished up what I was working on, and I abandoned my office to join the other disgruntled Jennings-dwellers downstairs.

Now, in terms of my own inconvenience, it’s a minor episode. But what surprised me was the fact that security also barged into one of Dr. Harding’s classes and commanded everyone to evacuate the room and head to the basement. That’s unheard of. In almost 10 years of teaching at the college, I’ve never known security to interrupt a class because of the weather. And it got me thinking. To what extent is this kind of episode a symptom of our society’s increasing reluctance to accept personal responsibility? So many things could be paralleled: the helicopter parents who hover over their 21-year-old, providing for her every need; the “harmful or fatal if swallowed” line on the Magnum 44 permanent marker (honestly, have you ever seen a Magnum 44 permanent marker? it’s the circumference of a cucumber); the ambulance-chasing lawyers promising big bucks to you, because – no matter the actual circumstances – the wreck was not your fault.

I guess it just struck me as odd that the college would see as its responsibility, the necessity of making sure that no-one got hurt in the storms. Sure, in the wake of Katrina and (more recently) the tornadoes up at Union University, all of us find ourselves on pins and needles occasionally, whenever bad weather is on the horizon. But, after all, isn’t this institution all about taking post-pubescent adolescents and transforming them into responsible, acclimated, socially mature adults? To what extent does forcing them to take shelter from a storm contribute to that goal? Of course, I realize that this opens up multiple cans of worms about the academic process – issues like the college-wide attendance policy, the “is-this-going-to-be-on-the-test” mentality among so many of our students, and the corresponding “just-let-me-teach-and-let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may” mentality among so many of our faculty. Ultimately, though, I think all of these issues reflect on our unwillingness to accept the heavy responsibilities that accompany the freedom of education, the freedom of maturity, or the freedom of independence.

And as we talked about in class this week, your time at this college should be something that sets you free, something that liberates you to become that mature, independent, responsible person that the college wants to develop. Thoughts?