Sometimes I am seriously scared about what my students don’t know. ACT’s and GPA’s are on the rise, but intelligence doesn’t really seem to be. Now it’s one thing if we’re trying to analyze a poem and a student throws out a dumb comment. That’s how you learn. Conversing, trying to understand something that stretches your mind. That’s not what I’m talking about.
Let’s take some examples from this semester. When talking about Donne’s Sonnet XIV yesterday, my students were stumped by the language: usurped, chaste, ravish, enthrall. They didn’t know what those words meant. Nobody in the class knew what they meant. Finally, someone piped up and said seriously, “Chaste is when someone’s after you.” I, of course, took a deep breath and taught them some new words, but I was stunned.
Later in that class period, another student asked, “Why does he have to beat around the bush? Why can’t he just say what he means?” My colleague Megan had a great answer: “Because he’s not a rapper.” Sadly, this is what students in a state college are like. Rap and hip-hop are the dominant musical genres on our campus. Another colleague, an Auburn PhD, once made the comment that our upper-level and graduate students are top-notch. They can hang with students at major research universities. But our incoming first-year students are at a much lower level than at other universities. On the one hand, it’s great experience. On another hand, it’s just…sad.
Rachel and Kyrie are reading a Spanish book in the other room, and I heard Rachel just say, “Let’s go learn some Spanish, so you can talk to your grandpa.” That cracks me up even though it’s the truth. Kyrie is looking at Rachel likes she’s crazy and like she’s speaking gibberish.
I really like Amy Lee’s voice, and I liked Evanescence. I was kind of annoyed a few years ago when Lorelei made a crack about them on Gilmore Girls. It still bothers me.
In my persuasive writing course, I let my students pick a few projects for writing assignments. For one of the projects, we’ll be watching Loose Change, a 9/11 conspiracy film. It will be interesting to see if they can understand the depth of argument in that film and come up with arguments against it. Without any leading, I expect two reactions: 1) acceptance 2) dislike without any true rebuttal.
Over the past several years, I’ve had many students who have served in the Middle East. In addition, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many men serving in the reserves. Never have I had a soldier who was against the war in Iraq. All think that Americans don’t understand what they’re doing over there. They’ve learned to control their anger when people lash out at the President and the troops. I find it crazy that they can control their tempers when people are making disparaging comments about what they do with their lives. They have incredible self-control.
During the State of the Union address, I was really disappointed with the way the Democrats acted so mechanically. They stood many times, just to keep themselves from looking bad. They sat on their hands whenever Bush said something they didn’t like, but if he tagged something like “support our troops” onto the end of his sentence, they stood to applaud. It was very fake.
I think I’ll be voting for Barack Obama in the primaries this year (not that it matters here). Even though he’s a social liberal, I at least sense that he’s an honest politician. That probably has something to do with the fact that he hasn’t been a politician very long.
I find it funny. David was playing the hero by marrying Bathsheba. When he acted as a kinsman-redeemer, he was coming off as a great guy. That had to make him feel even worse when Nathan said, “Thou art the man.”
Mime is used as a form of prophecy in the Old Testament. It’s used in Tabernacle worship. Paul uses the mime motif in Corinthians. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote mime plays. High church Christians use liturgical gestures from medieval mime. Try getting your priest to use mime in your worship. 
There’s good precedence for Congregational, troupe, and soloist dances in Ps. 149-150, Ex. 15, and 2 Sam. 6:14-16 respectively. Try to get your priest to agree to that too while you’re at it.
There’s a biblical artistic hierarchy of Bezalel’s, Oholiabs, wise ones, and willing hearted ones. We need to bring this to the church.
The Bible is filled with vulgarity, obscenity, profanity, nudity, bad language, fornication, and adultery. But it’s always used for uplift.
Evangelicals tend to think of themselves as Bible-believing Christians while thinking of liturgical Christians as those that don’t care about the Bible. But how much time is devoted to prayer and Scripture reading during worship in each of these church traditions. Go to one church of each kind, and bring a stopwatch. It’s pretty incredible to see how much more devoted to the Word liturgical churches are.
