A response to defenses of evangelicalism

This post was inspired by a discussion that was generated from Cameron MacAllister’s note “Why I don’t call myself an Evangelical.”  Cameron is a good friend, and in response to his note, Carson Clark, another friend, and a tenacious debater, launched into a thorough defense of evangelicalism as a social and historical movement in America.  I thought the discussion needed to be moved elsewhere and  broadened a touch, so I decided to expound a tad on some of the thoughts I have had on the subject since being thrust forth from the birth canal of the academic world and into the “real world.”

What struck me this morning about the “debate” between Carson and myself was that it was mostly a discussion of words, context, and meaning.  It was, and is, an ongoing discussion of ideas.  Using words and ideas, Carson is, and has been, defending systems.  And therein lies the problem I have with the 21st century academic: words, ideas, and systems.  To a majority of Americans, and I would even venture to say, to a vast majority of humanity, the world of words, ideas, and systems falls second fiddle to the world of tangibility, perception, aesthetics, and of the senses.  We are thinking people, but we are a sensory people as well.  We construct the world in the mind, but also through our vision, our hearing, our smelling, and our physical feeling.

Only connect: the poetry and the prose, the man of action with the man of thought.  God bless you E.M Forster.  Call the ‘poetry’ the man of thought, the defender of the world of ideas.  Call the ‘prose’ the man of action, who deals in tangibility.  The two must be married.  When our debates and arguments never join with the world around us, what are they?  Mere and meaningless intellectual debate.  That said, if the aesthetic world never joins with the world of ideas, what do we have?  Hedonism?

I have no interest in defending evangelicalism.  Like Cameron, I do not consider myself an evangelical.  As I have said on more than one occasion, to me it seems that the term evangelical is not worth saving.  It is a term and, contextually as well as colloquially, in America it is a pejorative term.  Christian, too, is often a pejorative in America and in many parts of the world.  For lack of a better or broader term, I consider myself a Christian, and therefore, I have a bit of an obligation to defend it.  Applying my critique of the evangelical debate, how does one move beyond a defense of Christianity that only takes place in the world of words, ideas, and systems?  Connect it to the aesthetic world.

Peter, the retired gentlemen who I have started playing chess with down at the local coffee shop, is not interested in an intellectual debate or defense of Christianity, or any other system for that matter.  He wants to see that it works.  He wants to feel its positive effect on his life.  It is time for evangelicals and Christians to drop the intellectual debate and start living and breathing their faith.  The same is true for any follower of any movement, but all the more so for the followers of a pejorative movement like Christianity.  I could run you through the ringer with debate or “apologetics” but unless you see it and experience it my arguments will not move you. In contrast, my actions should speak for themselves.

I say this, and I think I mean it: there is no place for the pure intellectual.  Get out from behind that book, get out from the classroom, and learn from the man on the street.  I’ve learned more in the last year from Larry McCoy than I have from any preacher behind his pulpit.

dealing with aggression

Working at ROOTS Academy with hurting and underserved inner city youth, I am the brunt of a lot of aggression.  Stopping to think, it seems to me that a lot of the anger that is directed toward me and other staff members is misdirected anger coming from, as I said, hurting young people.  Our students may be mad at a teacher, but I think they are, generally, expressing their hurts and emulating the aggressive, abusive, and violent behavior that they have experienced and have had directed towards them.  They are broken people expressing their brokenness the only way they know how.

I was sitting in my classroom this morning, getting ready for class, as I do most days.  I like to be the first one at school and spend some time preparing for the day.  This week I’ve been getting to school, organizing my classroom, and chilling out to Belle and Sebastian’s The Life Pursuit (such a catchy album).  Today I was looking back over the last few years and tried to recollect all the aggressive (both physical and verbal) confrontations I’ve had.  Here are a few:

• Eighth Grade: School teacher accusing me of ‘karate kicking a girl across  the hall and into a set of lockers’ (an absolute falsity)
• High School: being accused of “rummaging through the principle’s filing cabinet and stealing his possessions”
• College: School administration calling me “a moral relativist” and suggesting I was on  a “dark path toward relativism”
• College: my anatomy and physiology teacher yelling at me and calling me a liar, in the middle of class, because I mis-heard him and read the wrong assignment
• Confrontations with older brother, usually my fault and over dumb stuff
• Angry parents in the Linmar Terraces in Aliquippa
• Being mugged in Toccoa, GA
• Angry soccer moms chewing me out over coffee while working as a barista at Starbucks
• Being hit in the head with a marker my first week as a teacher
• Having paint-water thrown in my face in art class
• Having a door slammed on me while I was standing in the doorway of my classroom (three times)
• Having my notebooks, pens, and classroom materials thrown around my classroom (at least twice a week)

No matter where we are, what we are doing, who we are dealing with, it seems that this kind of aggressive confrontation is built into life.  I guess it is human nature.  I doubt it is an exclusively American phenomenon, it is certainly not an exclusively urban issue.  I think I am getting better and better at dealing with it.  Looking back, I guess I am thankful for the crazy things I have gone through prior to working here, I think they have helped me to keep my cool here at work.  Every time I am confronted, I get better at dealing with confrontation.

Proverbs 15:1  “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”  I remember getting in a fight with my brother when we were kids.  As punishment, my mom, or maybe my dad, made me write that verse out, something like 25 times.  Funny, I just remembered that.  Anyway, it seems I have had that verse memorized and ingrained into my mind since then, and I always recall it in the face of confrontation.

Be nice to a stranger today.

 

no smoke november, the second attempt

We are now, it being November the first,  5/6 of the way through 2009.  This morning while I sat at Panera waiting for my friends to arrive, waiting, I might add, because I forgot to change my clock and arrived an hour early, I took a trip back through 2009 via my blog posts for the year.  I began the year, perhaps appropriately, with politics on my mind.  Obama was just taking office.  Israel was bombing the hell into the Gaza strip without being held accountable.  All that rot.  Then came lent, where i quit caffeine and (oops) nicotine.  Then the summer came, the Census Bureau, Aliquippa Impact, (the end of an era at Starbucks), and finally I was hurdled through time and space into a teaching job at ROOTS Academy.  Been quite a year already.  I don’t have a lot of time to just sit and reflect these days, my job keeps my busy or exhausted.  I’ve really been missing my alone time, all that time I complained about back in January.  It has been a bit since I just sat down and did some writing, even longer since I finished a book, sadly.  This morning I forgot to change my clock, so I ended up having an extra hour of consciousness.  Panera wasn’t open when I got here, so I went for a walk.  Walking is good for the heart and the mind.

Last year about this time I decided to quit smoking for the month of November.  Oops, for those of you who didn’t know, I have become a bit of a smoker since leaving college.  I hope that doesn’t burst your bubbles too much.  (sorry mother).  Anyway, I’m bringing “No Smoke November” back.  Usually that would mean I would just replace one addiction with another (i.e. drink more coffee), but I am also trying to cut back a tad on caffeine.  Quitting coffee is not realistic right now, but I can cut back to one cup a day for a bit.  I’m not so much worried about that though.  The whole reason I began smoking, I think, was because it was a great filler for those awkward periods of time when you have 10-15 minutes to kill and don’t want to start anything big.  I’m going to have to find better things to do in those periods of time.  Here are some ideas, feel free to add to them (this list is more an attempt to convince myself than a real useful list):

• wash some dishes (ugh…where is my lighter?)
• Draw a picture
• Organize my desk
• Go through the pile of papers sitting on my desk and throw old ones away
• read a book or a poem

Two more months left this year.  If you feel like you’ve wasted another one, there is just enough time to really do some damage before 2010.  Might as well get a head start on the new year’s resolutions (or revolutions, take your pick).

a girl i met

Welcome to Center Township.  Welcome to Oswego, Cato, New York.  Welcome to Aliquippa, PA, population 400.  Welcome to humanity, to brotherhood.  Welcome to earth.

 

Tonight there is a girl.  She is someone’s daughter (four, twelve, forty years, it doesn’t matter).

 

A man puts his cigarette out in her face.  A crowd laughs.  Tomorrow it will be a dirty diaper smeared upon her forehead, her pants stained with sweat and urine.

 

She knocks on your door, asking to use your washer and dryer, maybe just for some money for the bus.

 

She’s looking for a hit.  She’ll give you anything you want for it, let you do anything to her for it.  Yes, sexually.  Fulfill your fantasies.

 

Degrade her, beat her.  Just ignore the man who does.  It makes no difference.

 

Homo homini lupus.  Man, to man, is a wolf.

 

The crowd looks on and laughs.

 

They’ve strung it to a fishing line and are charging free admission to the show.  She chases it through the crowd while they laugh and cheer.  It’s the coliseum out here. When is the Steelers game?

 

Her father watches as she chases her next hit.  He watches the crowd treat her worse than an animal and he does nothing.

 

He does nothing.  I do nothing.  He does nothing.  God, I’ve decided, is a joke sometimes.

 

Now they are lighting a fire.  It is her freshly chopped hair.  Scalped, she smells like human waste as the fire burns.  The crowd looks on and laughs.

 

I am not an ounce better.  While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

 

Go Penguins?

time

someTIMEs I feel like I am hitting my head against a wall here at ROOTS.  I’m sure most new teachers, regardless of the school, get these feelings: that you aren’t teaching your students anything, that you are wasting your TIME, that you don’t have a clue what you are doing, that it is just a big improv show and you are failing.  Well, feelings come and go, and each day I suppose you’ve got to just try again.  Cognitively, I know my students are learning something, too, that I can do a better job.  I’m constantly on the prowl looking for better ways to educate my students, and, especially, to engage them creatively.  Yesterday I found a couple of really cool websites.

AccessArt has launched a program aimed at introducing the use of sketchbooks in schools as a means of engaging students creatively across the whole curriculum.  I’m thinking of introducing it to my students for a little bit as an experiment.  We took a Multiple Intelligences inventory yesterday, and surprise, surprise, most of our students scored high in the Visual/Spatial intelligence category.  Maybe sketchbooks in English class will be helpful in engaging more students?  I’m still working out the kinks of how they might work with reading/writing exercises.  We’ll see what happens.

While I was exploring some of the sketchbook pages on that site, I came across Art House Co-op.  They are launching a massive sketchbook project that anyone can sign up for (for a paltry sum of $18).  Basically you pay, they send you a moleskin sketchbook and a theme, you fill it out, send it back, and your work is included in a massive exhibition including sketchbooks from artists all over the place.  Pretty great idea for collective art I think.  So I signed up this morning and my theme is “time”.  Again, we’ll see what happens with that.  I think it will be a good exercise in creativity.

Was thinking about where I am at, and where I would like to be, and what is keeping me from the latter.  It all boils down to self-discipline I think.  Or lack there of in my case.  I suck at self-discipline.  Gotta fix that.

What I want is illusory

Thanks Ethan, for putting me onto Stuart’s journal.  Tonight this entry hit me where I needed it.  I suppose we all struggle with what we want to do and what we need to do, and the often vast chasm between the two.

What you want to do is an illusion. What you have to do is heavenly. Heavenly purpose, and therefore blessed.

I want to run away, live carefree, run through fields of…something.  I’m not altogether sure what really.  Any type of field will do.  Preferably it would be over rolling hills with big fluffy cumulus clouds.

What I need to do is go home and go to bed.  Tomorrow I have school bright and early.  One more day until the weekend.  School was what I need to do right now at this juncture in life.  Aliquippa is, for better or worse, where I need to be right now.

Recalling his time alone at sea, Joshua Slocum writes:

In a bleak land is not the place to enjoy solitude.

How true my friend.  And what bleak land I find myself in these days.  Aliquippa is a hard place in which to live alone.  Yet, live here I must.  I also need to learn how to let people in.  So there it is.

Modern art, yes it is.

To people who say things like this: “I love art…but some of the modern stuff just aint.”

I say: Yes it is.

Maybe it is the analytic in me, but I think we get a lot further in our discussions when we shift the focus from “what is or isn’t art?” to, “is piece a work of quality?” or is this piece “good?”  Not only does this approach avoid a bunch of unnecessary political arguing, it provides us with a critical approach we can apply to every facet  of life instead of just “art.”  By calling everything art, we open up everything to critique.

Quit it people.  It is art.  Your’e just mad you didn’t get paid an inordinate amount of money for it.

Three Weeks

Time is such a relative human experience.  It is perpetually difficult for me to understand how quickly it can disappear when you keep yourself occupied.  The last time I posted about school was after my very first day.  I have now completed three weeks of the marathon school year.  If I learned a lot my first day, the same is true of the thirteen that have followed .  In order for readers to understand what I mean, I think I need to set the stage for where I teach.

ROOTS Academy is no ordinary school.  Our students are no ordinary students.  Our city is no ordinary city.  On Thursday afternoon, as I drove home from work, I followed two police cars and one police motorcycle up the hill to my house in the Plan 12 community in Aliquippa.  I knew something was up.  I knew it wasn’t good.  I read about it in the paper the next morning. An 18 year old was shot in the head.  Miraculously, he is expected to survive.  He was a student at our school two years ago.  Four of our students were around the incident when, or immediately after, it happened.  One of our students was with Shawn when he was fired at.  He had the premonition to run, but saw his friend shot in the head, lying on the ground.  At least two of our students saw Shawn lying on the ground.  “I saw him trying to stand up,” a male student said Friday in our group therapy session.  “He kept trying to stand up but he couldn’t.  And I saw him lying there.”

Thursday afternoon was not an uncommon experience for the students who attend ROOTS Academy.  In fact, if you heard them speak about the situations they go through, you’d hear them speak about them as if they were normal experiences that everyone goes through: cousins, uncles, friends shot down in homicides, drug and alcohol addiction, violence as a means of conflict management, being arrested, locked up, gun shots, early sexual experience/abuse, teenage pregnancy, never meeting their fathers.  I am their teacher, but I have no idea what they have gone through.  I cannot empathize, it is difficult even to sympathize.

Having to deal with all of this on a regular basis, you can imagine the behavior and psychological issues that our students bring into school with them.  As one students put it, “When you have all of this shit going on outside of school, you can’t just turn it off and be ‘good’ when you walk in the door.”  She is admittedly scared to walk outside of her house for fear of being hit by a stray bullet.

This year I am teaching art, english, and graphic design.  Our students are broken up into three groups of three-to-five students each.  Having a small class size definitely has its advantages (hard to imagine having all 12-15 students at once!), but even with a small class size, our teaching situation is incredibly difficult.  In each group I have at least one student with a learning disability.  I am constantly juggling behavior management, academics, and tutoring students with learning disabilities.

In many ways, I thought art and graphic design would be easy to teach.  Who doesn’t like to draw?  Isn’t creative activity innate to human nature?  For the most part, I don’t have much trouble with students in art class, but there are the few who hate to do their art work.  I emphasize over and over that they are not graded on their ability, but on their participation and their effort.  Sometimes it is pulling teeth to convince students to even try.  It seems that they have such low self-esteem that they are convinced that they cannot draw.  For someone, like myself, who believes that anyone can learn to draw, I find this incredibly frustrating.  I’m trying to work on creating an atmosphere where it is OK to experiment and to fail.

I was hit in the head by a marker on my second day of art class.  It came flying at me from an angry student who didn’t like that I corrected his use of obscene language.  Of course I wasn’t injured, but it was enough to land him in in-school-suspension for the next day.  You aren’t really allowed to ‘cus out’ teachers or assault them with classroom materials at our school.  I’m just glad it wasn’t scissors.  I was trying not to laugh though, as the student was escorted out of the classroom by our behavior support staff.  This kid was acting like a little child throwing a temper tantrum.  I wish he could have seen how absurd he looks when he allows such a little situation to escalate.  When you think, however, that this is the same type of behavior that leads someone to fire five bullets into a crowd of people, it loses its humor a bit.  Endemic to human nature is an inability to deal effectively with conflict.  Something is wrong here.  We’ve got to do something.  Something has to change.

I try to keep small victories in the forefront of my mind when I think about school.  In English class this week, for instance, I think some good work got started.  Our only senior this year, a male, seventeen, had a baby boy born to him this summer.  He has mentioned more than once that having a child has begun changing the way he looks at the world.  He is, as I said, a senior, and about ready to graduate, but he has a learning disability and can write about as well as a third grader.  He was frustrated at the material I had been giving him to work on because he felt like it was not at his level.  In spite of that, after expressing his frustration to me in a few choice words, we began working on a college application essay together.  I am walking him through, step by step, and though it is slow going, he is working hard and wants to succeed.  The topic he chose to write about was the birth of his child, and how it has changed him as a person.  It takes him a whole class period to write a paragraph but it is a joy to see him working hard, and really thinking about how is life has changed and needs to change.  “I didn’t used to care about whether or not I got shot before.  Now I do, for my son,” he says.

Friday in English class I gave my students an opportunity to write in their journals about the shooting the day before.  I wanted to give them the opportunity to get out some frustration, fear, anger, etc., and I also had to give them some work, despite the fact that they were all pretty shook up.  One of our most difficult students, a girl, fourteen, wrote two whole pages in her journal.  Students NEVER voluntarily write that much.  She has about as bad a situation as any of our students.  She’s been neglected by her mother.  She saw three family members die this year in homicides.  So far this year, art class is the only class that she has not been kicked out of yet (knock on wood!).  In art class I see this girl transform into a completely different young lady.  She is quiet, concentrating on her work.  She asks for help and encourages other students.  She volunteered to take work HOME with her over the weekend (How often, at ANY school, does a student volunteer to do homework, and on a WEEKEND?!).  I’m excited about working with her on her artwork.  I think it could be a good escape for her.  I think, too, that she has a ton of potential (something I have definitely been sure to tell her).  She could, if she chose to, use art to get herself out of her situation.  I’m talking about art school.  She has so much working against her though…

Three weeks into school, I needed to get some thoughts out.  There is a lot more where this came from.  I think I NEED to write to get some of this stuff out, to process it, to deal with it.  I welcome advice on teaching, if anyone has any experiences they want to share, things I can do better.  I want to post more frequently about some of this.

The road to athens was made for conversation.

Coffee for Four

Slocum, Hopkins and Dillard
Joined me at the table
Where we sat in conversation
As long as I was able.

Slocum spoke about the sea
Of tribes and torrents far away,
Of solitude and dangers
As he sailed upon the Spray.

Miss Dillard’s vice is novels,
Books read throughout the years.
We laughed and talked of living
By the fiction of her peers.

Then as our coffee cooled
And the conversation slowed
Hopkins read his poetry
The finest that I know.

In my dreams I dally:
These authors are my rest.
And though I’ve never met them,
I love their friendships best.

The first day of school

Today was my much anticipated first-day of school as a high-school teacher.  Overall, I’d say the day went pretty well. At the end of the day, I know now what I would have done differently from class to class.  I guess that means I learned something.  Today itself was, as I have said, really not all that bad.  It was yesterday that left much to be desired.  I was out buying school supplies and decorations for my classroom when stuff started to go awry.  The sky grew incredibly dark and it began to rain pretty good.  I joked with someone about how portentious the rain appeared to me on the day before school.  The omens were just beginning.  Then my car broke down.  My trusty-dusty Suburu Impreza, affectionately named Beatrix, picked yesterday to quit starting.  When you are already hard on cash, because of your ex-girlfriend SallieMae, and your mind is occupied by the day to come, your car should know better than to break down.  As a consequence, I made her spend the night alone in the parking lot of Cogos BP in Monaca.  That’ll teach her.

So I traded Beatrix for my 1990 Schwinn 594 today, and with it, discovered another pothole on Kennedy Boulavard.  I thought I had found all of them, but this one was hiding pretty good.  I was making a right hand turn hire a man to town my car when I must have clipped my pedal on part of the pothole.  I guess I made the turn too sharp?  I’m not sure, I was turning one second, then I was lying in the middle of the intersection the next.  Bruised my hands pretty good but managed to avoid getting run over.  I guess that would have made for a short teaching career.

As far as classes actually go, today was a good first day for English.  Tomorrow, barring any injuries or incidents, I will introduce my students to my first solo art class.  Fingers crossed.  Fate has it out for me?