Tag: teaching
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“Expect Delays”
Because before I can post notes on the Bible I need to grade assignments and pay bills and cook dinner. And sleep. Just sayin’. (Four more weeks in this session … )
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Students
Every session, as the session proceeds, my level of annoyance with the students – some of the students, at least – rises. “Are we going to need that book?” [About one of two books listed as “required,” two weeks into the course.] “I have been really busy with work, so I couldn’t take the quizzes…
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What I’ve been doing
This is what I’ve been doing for the past three weeks. Just sayin’. The learning curve is steep. Notes on Hosea 11 & 12 are coming. Probably tomorrow. I can’t believe she expects us to do all this reading …
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Self-Discovery
Here’s what I’ve learned in less than three days of teaching a class online: It is abundantly far more difficult to video a deck of slides than I had asked for or imagined. Corollary: twice my usual last minute, so what I thought would be the last couple of minutes, which is twice what I…
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Why Do They … ?
Today in class, which was on Islam, one of my students said I have a question. Why do they always have to have their own stores? … Like, when you are in Meijer, and you see someone who look like Muslims buying lots and lots of soda, are they taking that back to their own…
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The Good Kind of Envy?
Taylor, Barbara Brown. Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. HarperCollins, 2019. [An Installment of the “Read Me” Project.] I read an excerpt from Holy Envy in the Christian Century and thought “I’d like to read that book,” even though I didn’t agree with Barbara Brown Taylor about original sin. A couple of…
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The Inspiration of Operational Definitions
Here’s something I have found inspiring: This is what it means to be “ready for college,” according to the Commonwealth of Kentucky. I got this from the Kentucky Department of Education website.* [In other words, anyone who wants to can get this.] Here’s what strikes me as inspirational about it: It’s eloquent testimony to the…
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What I Like Most is Having Lots of Time
Someone asked me the other day whether I like teaching. I don’t really know how to answer that question. I like students. I like talking to them, I usually like listening to them when I can get them to talk to me, I like thinking about what they are thinking and why they are thinking…
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Noticing Social Constructionism
Social constructionism is on my mind. In part because I’m working on the class that starts in May. I’ve learned from experience that it helps to explain, right from the start, that I come at things from a social constructionist point of view. College freshmen don’t necessarily share that perspective. And because I’ve learned recently…
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First Day of Class
Today is day one of “Introduction to Religion” taught by me. Usually I love to teach this class. Teaching takes a lot of time – at least for me, I don’t know about other people. Every term I say “I will keep up the blog anyway.” We’ll see whether anything changes this time around.
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On Being One of Them
Late last night, I sent the email to the student who had hoped to change the grade in the class that was over in June. No, there is no good way to do this, I finally said. No, I can’t. Which is true. But not simply true. “The faculty member always has some discretion.” That…
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Thoughts on a definition of idolatry
Something caught my attention in Guthrie’s definition of idolatry as “giving absolute loyalty to something that is only a creature rather than the Creator.”1 It occurred to me that the definition provides a good opening for arguing that the practices of Hindu puja, that are so involved with representations of the many, many, many gods…
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Getting Ready for World Religions
The small liberal arts university where I occasionally teach offers courses in “World Religions.” The discipline of Religious Studies questions the “world religions approach” these days, for good reasons, along with the very idea of “religion” as separate from things like “society” or “culture” or “knowledge,” but the courses are staples of the curriculum. So…
Matters of Interpretation 