Other Blog: Evaluations on fairness

I was given the assignment of letting my students evaluate me. I posted the evaluations and wrote a brief response on the blog I keep officially for the Mississippi Teacher Corps.

Other Blog: Hard

I put up a post, “Hard,” on the blog I keep officially for the Mississippi Teacher Corps.

MTC Post

A small part of my work with the Mississippi Teacher Corps takes the form of blogging, but not here. Recently I had a “free-write” assignment, and took the time to bemoan one of the great failures of public school education in Mississippi—a little beast called “homeroom.”

The Calm before the Calm before the Storm

Larissa and I went down to Indianola yesterday and spent the night with a friend in town. She, while working here as an intern for the Teacher Corps, developed an interest in seeing the Sunflower County Freedom Project in action.  They had their annual “Freedom Day” performance, showcasing the work done by first-, second-, and third-year participants (grades 7-9). It was a lot of fun. I might get involved with SCFP during the academic year to work with the older kids.

I also used the trip as an opportunity to take down my full-size dining room table that I got for free from a fellow Johnnie.  It was quite a task to fit it, in pieces, into my Buick Century, and also quite a task to get it out. But I triumphed.  I also got keys to my new house.  So exciting!

It was a nice trip. Low-energy. I met some TFA people along the way who seem like a nice crowd.  Now I just need to pack the rest of my junk and relax.  I will go down this week again for a literacy conference, and then drive up to Kentucky to visit some family.  Only one question remains: Which audio-book shall I listen to?

Summer Gone

I haven’t posted much recently on this blog, but I do intend to use it more frequently once I start teaching for the academic year.  My summer school obligations were very stressful, and I was crushed in more than one way.  But I am ready to go back to the basics of my faith, pray, do some planning, and launch myself into my new career.

My reading plans for the summer didn’t turn out so well.  I was going to read Fear and Trembling quickly, and then move on to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.  Turns out I haven’t finished the former.  Oh well.  I will finish it this week, and likely put the latter on hold indefinitely—unless I can do an insane amount of planning before Day 1 at my high school.

In other news, I started translating Leibniz’s Monadology for fun.  Leibniz is the best of all possible rationalists. I’m not keen on rationalism, to put it gently, but he seems to be a bit more familiar with the Bible than many of the others who worked on the Enlightenment project of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  He may even have had a genuine faith in Christ, though it’s not immediately clear in the works of his with which I’m familiar. All the same, the translation has been fun, and challenging.  I’ll post it once I’m done with the first draft.

New Blog

I have started a blog—marmor infidum—for my work through the Mississippi Teacher Corps (MTC), which will govern large portions of my time for the next two years (that is to say, the work will be time-consuming, not the blog). Occasionally I will direct any readers here to public posts there, and vice versa. I anticipate keeping all my posts there public, but some of them may explore “sensitive content” and be hidden from anyone who has not joined the Vox network and asked to be a part of my “neighborhood.” Needless to say, I won’t refer anyone to those posts.  I will still be posting here with my “non-professional” content, of course, and hopefully more regularly than of late.

A Brief Thought on Expectancy and the Faith of Abraham

One of my bosses gave an introductory speech today in front of the first-year teachers in the Mississippi Teacher Corps, the program through which I am living and working in the Delta for the next two years. He said he disapproves the language “high expectations” and “low expectations.” We should not have any expectations, he advised.

Now, upon reflection, I see that it is impossible not to have expectations. It is even good to have expectations. But what my boss is driving at, if I am to agree with his advice at all, is the question of that about which we have expectations. He was saying, I think, that we should not have high or low expectations about the kids we’ll be teaching, the conditions under which we’ll be teaching, etc.  But I don’t like the language of high and low expectations, nor can I see myself, in any honest way, having no expectations.

So I would like to abandon my boss’s language in an attempt to take in (at least in part) his advice.  I’ll turn instead to Kierkegaard: “He who always hopes for the best grows old and is deceived by life, and he who is always prepared for the worst grows old prematurely” (Fear and Trembling, Eulogy on Abraham).

As I recall my past self to my present self, I see that I have been like the latter kind of man depicted here, like him for a long time, since I was around sixteen. Maybe as a boy I was otherwise, and maybe as a boy I decided to be like this man, always prepared for the worst, grown old in heart so early. This would be like the man who has low expectations, in my boss’s language. This would be someone who had moralized and learned to despise the world in a sophisticated way—a La Rochefoucauld who tries to turn all virtues into vices. He sounds like a wise old man, but is only old (in heart) and not necessarily wise. It is sadly what I became.

The first man, who hopes for the best, would be like the man who has high expectations. This man is doomed to a different kind of failure, a failure to genuinely live and experience and grow, though he grow old in his disappointments.

“But Abraham had faith,” writes Kierkegaard, “and therefore he was young.” The old man and the prematurely old man, then, are the unfaithful. The one unfaithful because he believes according to his own wishes, puts trust in a self-made lie, and the other because he only trusts himself, if even that. Abraham trusted in the promise given by God. In my boss’s language, Abraham had expectations neither high nor low, but he did indeed have some expectancy; he expected exactly what was promised to him, something no one without faith could ever expect. The measures of high and low are within the realm of what is possible. Abraham expected the impossible, for what was promised was impossible when it was fulfilled.

So I must fight against that prematurely old man in me, the one who hopes for worst in order to defend himself against the heartache that comes from infidelity, the pain from disaster, and the wretchedness from failure. I must have faith, joy, be at peace, be young. And I must not let myself become the self-deceived man who refuses to acknowledge heartache, pain, and wretchedness. I must have faith, joy, be at peace, be young. This faith means that I will take heartache, pain, and wretchedness for what it is: there should be no defense against it, and no excuse to brush it aside.

Now my next step is to listen, to hear what God might promise me in Mississippi, so I’ll know exactly where to aim my expectancy—not high, not low, neither to the right nor the left, but right at what has been promised.