Back in the Saddle Again

It was August the last time I posted here. The sky was clear and it was about 50 degrees warmer than it is now. But once school started, it was hard to find the time and energy to stop and reflect on my return to the classroom after all these years. Besides, I was waiting to see how things came out. (I don't have my course evals back yet so I won't write on the quantitative stuff.)

This is the night before I jump back in with a three week social problems class. Social problems can be depressing enough over the course of a semester but we're doing it in 14 three-hour class sessions. That's all. One course. Problem after problem after problem. But somehow I want this experience to be hopeful -- to focus more on what we might do together and avoid the fatalism that comes from wallowing in what's wrong (you can tell I've been feeding my politics addiction, can't you? Welcome to primary season.).

This fall I taught three classes: 1) Criminological Theory, 2) The Christian in Contemporary Society (CORE), SAU's senior capstone class, and 3) Spirituality, Faith, and Justice (SFJ), a capstone for sociology and social work majors. Each of the classes was different due to complexity of content, abstractions involved, or connection to personal experience. Each required something different from me. I'll say more about that in a bit.

Here are my takeaways:

1. I have really missed students!   I enjoyed my years working with faculty and cabinet members, but there's something intrinsically rewarding about spending time with students, exploring ideas together, taking risks, constructing sociological jigsaw puzzles. I had forgotten the wonderful sense of trust that relationship engenders (the opposite of administrative work). In a mid-course review, I accused my criminology class of just being exceptionally polite because they felt sorry for me, but I came to see that we really were working collaboratively in exploring theoretical material. Even the students in the Core class who said "you know, this isn't my favorite class" were acting out of a place of safety. That made me happy. A bonus to this point -- along the course of the summer and fall, I've regained contact with a number of former students from decades back. Somehow the continuity between their warmth and what we did in class became very clear.

2. I fight my control issues now more than ever. I've long struggled with issues of control: commencements, meetings, vacations, kids. I think I should be able to manage things. One of the big lessons I learned this semester was the need to abandon control. That doesn't mean that I didn't prepare for class. But when the discussion in SFJ was really engaging, it was clear that I needed to get out of the way. What I had prepared to present or the discussion outlined on the next PowerPoint slide just really wasn't that important in the long run. I've really enjoyed the freedom to change my plans when the situation called for it.

3. Stream of Consciousness can make life very interesting. The first day of the semester in my very first class, I followed my train of thought into a cogent argument on why gay marriage wasn't deviant in New York state. That was nowhere in my notes! Over the course of the semester, I advocated bike theft, said "drugs are good", and suggested that parts of the Old Testament were ethnocentric anthropological stories. But because all the discussion except the first happened in terms of the trust relationship I mentioned earlier, they were sources of bonding not inflammation.

4. Students can tackle big issues. In an earlier post, I mentioned Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do. One of the principles in that book is that students are capable of meeting high standards in they are provided support and encouragement to get there. In two of my classes, students had to write a personal paper outlining what they'd take away from SAU (CORE) or how they made sense of Justice and action (SFJ). Individual students in both classes wrote me notes saying it was the most difficult paper they'd had to write. They weren't all excellent but even the B papers really tried to push themselves. In the SJF class, they were reading Michael Sandel's Justice and a book on Reinhold Niebuhr. They were required to post their reflections each week and comment on two other students' posts. From the beginning, I was struck with how deeply they engaged. Our class discussions reflected that as well. In my first years of teaching, I would have felt obligated to "teach the books". I'm glad I didn't.

5. Abandoning Control leaves you vulnerable but that can pay dividends. About three weeks before Thanksgiving, I hit a particularly frustrating period. Classes were going okay, but I didn't feel like we were were we should be. I was talking too much, my timing was off (usually cramming too much into the time), and I didn't feel like I was communicating. In my earlier days, I would have doubled down and tried harder. I would have spent hours more looking for just the right hook. But this time I didn't. Somehow, I decided to relax and do less. It relates to the idea of "flow" my friend Lou Foltz introduced me to in Oregon. Those last few weeks really came together. I decided that what they were doing was more important than what I was doing, which of course was always true.

5. Teaching changes ME. Lou Foltz used to have this wonderful speech he'd give at a prospective student session. He'd tell a student named Jeff that he might be taking four courses in a semester but that he was really taking four versions of a course in "Jeff". I used Lou's approach often at such events (and credited him most of the time!). In the same way, I learned that my three classes were all about things I was putting together. We ended the CORE class looking at Gandhi and MLK. The close of the Criminology course was on how we could effectively respond to crime without destroying communities. We ended the SFL class with my personal statement on Justice (and a great children's book). There were four students who had me for two of the classes (different combinations) and in talking  to them I realized how much the three classes converged in my thinking. My own ideas about justice, community, crime, response, arrogance, sin, and grace all took on a renewed sense of reality. And for that I'm grateful and humbled. And can't wait to get at it again tomorrow.