Fencing Bear at Prayer

A curious thing happens when you announce to the world that you are learning to play a new musical instrument. Nobody (or almost nobody) asks the more practical questions: "Where are you taking lessons? Private or group? Did you have to buy your own instrument, or were you able to rent? What was the first thing you had to learn?  What is it like?  How is it different from other instruments you already play?  Do you have to read music?  What inspired you to want to learn to play?" Rather, almost immediately, family, friends, and acquaintances begin to regale you with one of three things: Tales of their own experience learning (or not learning) to play your musical instrument; Lists of expert musicians who play the instrument you are just starting to learn; Lists of other people whom they know who play the same instrument and whom they expect that you would like to meet. Well-meant as they are, am I the only one who finds these kinds of things hard to hear?*...

Prof. Delbanco is describing the role of grace in the process of education as it was understood by the Puritan founders of our collegiate tradition, particularly as it is (or should be) dedicated to the psychological and ethical growth of students: "More than achieving the competence to solve problems and perform complex tasks, education means attaining and sustaining curiosity and humility.  It means growing out of an embattled sense of self into a more generous view of life as continuous self-reflection in light of new experience, including the witnessed experience of others. "With these ends in view, Puritans spoke almost indistinguishably about teaching and preaching .  Consider John Cotton, arguably the leading minister of New England's first generation...  By his voice and arguments, but most of all by his manifest commitment to the impossible yet imperative task of aligning his own life with models of virtue that he found (mainly) in scripture, he was mentor to...

These are the comments that I have prepared for the roundtable in which I am participating at the International Medieval Congress on Friday.  Come help us talk about teaching Tolkien! The title of the course that I teach is potentially a little misleading.  " Tolkien: Medieval and Modern " would seem to suggest that what I am concerned about is demonstrating Tolkien’s use of his medieval sources.  But although I do have students read occasional selections from the works on which Tolkien based some of his most memorable characters (Turin Turambar, Smaug), this is not really the point.  Rather, my goal is to teach students to see how Tolkien was thinking about history and story-telling as an exercise in sub-creation and, therefore, ultimately, as worship. Two texts are critical to the argument in my course.  The first, which I have students read in class on the first day, is Mythopoeia , the poem that Tolkien wrote for C.S. Lewis in defense of mythology and ...

I should be having the time of my life with this course.  It's one I've wanted to teach for years, it's on questions and sources directly related to my research, it's something I've thought about more than pretty much anything else, ever (okay, other than dieting and fencing).  And yet, I'm scared. Our discussions are going fine, but I leave class feeling wiped in a way that I have not experienced since my very first years of teaching.  I don't think it's the class; they seem attentive and interested.  It's me, I know it's me.  But why? Because I care too much.  Because if I cannot excite them about this topic, then everything I do is a lie.  No, not quite that.  Meaningless.  A charade.  Because, truth to tell, this topic is the only thing that really matters to me, has ever mattered to me, and it is too much to bear if I can't get them to see why. I'm overreacting, I know.  The course is going fine.  Their blog posts ( ...

While talking about Dorothy Sayers' argument in favor of reviving the medieval educational model of the trivium : 1)  She's right.  We should be teaching grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric as the tools of learning, not worrying about false dichotomies between the "sciences" and the "humanities" (both "subjects" in her terms, not "tools"). 2)  We would be much better off thinking of teaching in terms of the medieval scholastic practice of disputatio --defining terms, distinguishing parts of our argument, testing our reasoning on the basis of syllogisms--rather than claiming we are teaching by the "Socratic method," whatever that is.  3)  Thinking about teaching and learning as exercises in developing tools makes it possible to correct our students (and ourselves) without worrying about hurting anybody's feelings because it makes one's corrections concrete ("You need to define your terms," "There is a fa...

It's not about you, it was never about you.  Not anything difficult that you read here about Fencing Bear's frustrations and struggles as she seeks to learn what it means to be wielded by God.  Only the good bits are about you.  You are my most cherished nurslings, the children of my dreams, the hope of our future, and the light of my life.  No, really.  Okay, you and the Dragon Baby, but you know what I think about her. Just so you know.

I have been having a curiously difficult time coming up with questions to put to my class on " Animals in the Middle Ages ," and I am trying to figure out why. Typically, almost all of the courses that I teach depend almost exclusively on discussion. I don't like lecturing at all, unless it is to help students read through a particular text (the actual, medieval meaning of "lecture": to read). My students don't need me to tell them stuff; they can get all the answers they want on Wikipedia. What they do need me to do is teach them how to ask the right questions of the answers. E.g. " 42 ." Fine, but what was the question? Most of the time I am teaching more or less exclusively from primary sources, so the questions are relatively straightforward, even if the answers are not. "What does the text say?" This can be tricky if you don't know why it was written. So, "what does the author of the text say about why he or she was ...

Much as the Eeyore in me hates to admit it, things are actually going fairly well at the moment, so I thought it only fair to give you a full(ish) report. Just so long as you don't, you know, expect me to be cheerful about it. Right? Right. 'Cause us Eeyores get nervous with cheerful. It might look like, I don't know, bragging or some such. 'Cause I'm not. Bragging , that is. Although I would if there were something to brag about, which there isn't. Except that everything is going so well, even if I'm not entirely sure I can take credit for it. But I'm worried that you all are worried about me too much and I don't want you to be. So you need to know that sometimes things look really good, like right now, today, with all this beautiful weather we're having. Plus some other stuff, which I should tell you about. Now. Before I lose my nerve. Perhaps I should do some more yoga first. Deep breath. Okay, here goes. Item, dog training...

4:29 pm "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb." Next major anxiety attack. I'm working on revising the syllabus for one of my autumn courses, and I could really do with a cigarette about now. It's interesting what triggers this urge: sitting and trying to concentrate for too long, particularly while making decisions about things that are going to affect my life intimately in the future but over which otherwise I have complete control now (e.g. how many pages to ask the students and, therefore, myself to read). It should be easier than this nowadays to put together a reading list; after all, there is so much online. So much easier than having to order collected readers or even putting photocopies on e-reserve. But I still have to find those online sources and make sure the translations are good. If I were really diligent, I would reread all of the sources that I want to assign, but ...

Sour : Waking up at 4:38 am with a charley horse in my left calf, possibly from doing the touches on my target at home these past few days without warming up my en garde properly. Sweet : Being awake early enough to review the text for today's discussion, along with revising my discussion notes and PowerPoint slides, all before 9:30am.* Sour : Having no way to take a shower at home, as the workmen are still laying the tile in our bathroom. Plus, we have no faucets yet. Or shower head. Sweet : Being able to wash my hair in the kitchen sink under the new faucet , which is tall enough to enable me to rinse my hair out simply by bending over. (Plus it has a built-in filter for drinking water.) Sour : Having the puppy poop and pee on the floor of my son's bedroom--again. Sweet : Finding her following me down the hall with her "rope" already in her mouth, rather than having to tell her to go get it so that she would stop "herding" my feet. Sour : Having to car...

This is one of those place-holder posts. You know the ones where you really don't have anything to say or are too tired to figure out what it is you want to say, but haven't written anything other than, oh, I don't know, class notes and lectures and letters of reference for days and days and you are feeling the well running dry because you've been neglecting it. Or not. I don't want to complain, there have been some amazing moments this week. Last night, for example, watching my puppy play on the tennis court with the big dogs, one the burly male Cardigan Corgi who inspired me to adopt her in the first place, the other an older female dog pulling a rope with two tennis balls, one on each end, clearly inviting my puppy to play with her by catching hold of one of the balls. And after that, listening to my son playing in his school band concert in the university concert hall and remembering the first concert four years ago when all that he and his fellow 5th-grader...

You have to have a plan, but you cannot expect the plan to go the way you have written it out. You need to know what questions you are going to ask, but you cannot know what order is going to be best in which to ask them. So you read the primary sources and make notes on their structure, but you know that whatever questions you ask, the students will come at you with answers that you do not expect. You need to be able to take their answers (read, actions) and guide them to the answers that you wanted them to give in order to bring out the main points in the argument that you are trying to make. So, feint, ask a question, see how they respond. Oh, they don't see to know this or that fact. Tell them. Ask the question again. Laugh when their answer takes the conversation a whole other way. Nudge the answers back to the question you initially asked, until they are ready to hear what it is that you wanted to say. But don't press it: simply telling them something won't ...

I'm thinking, quit. None of this try, try again nonsense. Try, try again, and again, and again...and then what? Keep trying indefinitely until you're dead. Certainly, if you quit, you'll never know. But neither is there any guarantee that by trying you will succeed. I was, yes, in tears again yesterday morning before my next event, talking with my husband on the phone. You know the conversation, I've had it so many times before: me, in tears, trying to figure out why I keep coming to these events when it is 99% certain that I am going to lose, he trying to figure out something to say that will help me stop crying, all the while (as he has told me before) not really understanding why it is that I feel this need to compete because, well, of course I'm going to lose. I'm not really an athlete. It is all too easy to think of the ways in which I don't really practice as much as I should. I don't do drills; I don't do enough footwork; I don't...

Oh, I'm a bad girl: I'm blogging when I should be doing my homework (read, preparing for class). But I'm so tired of preparing for class. Here it is, sixth week of term, and for the past month I've barely had time to think straight, much less prepare for class in the way that I would prefer. I know, I know, I'm fairly sure that I overprepare, but it rarely feels that way. No matter how many times I've read a text, there is always something new to learn about it. Tomorrow, for example, we are talking about the Carolingian response to the Iconoclast controversy, which required (because otherwise I would not be "keeping up with the research") spending this morning "reading" Thomas F.X. Noble's big new book Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians , just out this past spring--and, no, I haven't had time to read it properly (thus the scare quotes). Remember, over the summer, I was supposed to be doing, ahem, my "own" work (...

I am not getting enough sleep. Sure, it's the second week of term and things have been a bit hectic, what with meeting my new classes and having the usual sleet of committee meetings and student conferences . But it's not that I feel particularly stressed, at least not more than one might expect, nor have I been having any back-to-school anxiety dreams that I am aware of. I'm just not sleeping. Some of it, I know, is the time I am having to spend preparing for class. Even though I have set up both my undergraduate and my graduate courses to be primarily discussion, with the students preparing significant parts of the material to be presented in class, in order to be ready to respond to their presentations and questions, I need to be up on the texts, too. This kind of preparation takes time, even when (as with most of the texts we're discussing) I've read the texts often many times before. And yet, it really shouldn't be taking so much out of me. I'm ...

Things that I had to think about this afternoon in the course of meeting with students: 1. Modern art displayed in spaces formerly used for religious worship; 12th-century Cistercian arguments for and against the use of ornament in devotion; the definition of art; the exhibitions at the newly-restored Collège des Bernardins (beautifully photographed by one of my students) 2. Humbert of Romans and the purpose of preaching; the purpose of reading religious literature and how it differs from the way in which academics tend to read; how to read doctrine from outside the tradition in which it was written 3. The relations between Byzantium and the West in the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries 4. Literature on the medieval engagement with the liturgy and on the concept of conforming oneself to the image of God; unedited treatises on the idea of the soul; devotional miscellanies in the collections at the Regenstein and Newberry libraries 5. Eusebius 6. Haskins' The Renaissance of the Twe...

Check out Conversion Diary for more "quick takes"! 1. It's tournament season which means, yes, I'm upset about my fencing again. I really thought that I was finally getting better , not going to end up in anger and tears, just stay calm and accept that even though my fencing is definitely improving (and it is!), it is never going to make any difference to my rankings or tournament outcomes. As I was driving to practice this evening (in the rain, listening to Teresa of Avila on the Sixth Mansions of the soul), I was congratulating myself on how calm I was feeling, knowing that however things turn out in competition this season, I am a fencer. And then I got to practice and...well, you know the rest. Fencers who haven't been at practice all summer were there and I was just as hopeless against them as I ever was. Plus ça change . 2. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live on something other than an academic calendar. My husband tells me to stop kiddi...

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[ I found this sheet in the folder for the course that I'm teaching this quarter. I have no idea where the quotation comes from and I have no idea whether these were notes to myself or something that I shared with the class. I'd annotate this more, but I'm still not ready yet for class tomorrow! ] Dr. Johnson to Boswell in 1766: “People have nowadays, said he, got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shown. You may teach chemistry by lectures. --You might teach making of shoes by lectures!” Problem in studying history • Learning both a body of facts and a way of thinking about life/the world/human experience • Not really like any other subject in this way: object much bigger than in most humanities courses (e.g. art, literature, language); techniques ...

This is it, the last day of my leave . You'd think I'd be ready for it. After all, I've spent the past couple of weeks reading ahead for the classes I'm teaching, writing assignments and generally getting prepared. But I'm not. Far from it. I've learned so much about myself and my ideals this year, much of it from writing for myself (and you, my dear readers!) on this blog. I'm not sure I can put myself back into the straight jacket of term. Oh, I'd be one of the first ones to argue in favor of structure; I'm all for it! It's one of the reasons I'm so eager to get a dog . When my son went away to camp in July and suddenly I had quite literally no reason to get dressed during the day, I fell into one of the deepest depressions I've experienced since I was growing up. Part of it was where I had gotten to in the argument for my book ; part of it was exhaustion (ironically) after working so hard all year on my research. But part of ...