Medicine of Immortality "It's a cold, and it's a broken, 'Hallelujah!'"

Back to schoolPosted by Rick on August 19th, 2007

Tomorrow, I begin my seventh year of teaching in the college classroom. Seven years. Here goes nothing. (I mean that, literally.)

The weekend…Posted by Rick on April 24th, 2007

So as you know, we went to Little Rock for the weekend. We went for the Arkansas Literary Festival, where the special guest was Nikki Giovanni, a reknowned poet and an English professor at Virginia Tech.

Giovanni had been a teacher of the VT shooter and had sent him to a colleague for private sessions. Small world, huh?

The literary festival happened to be right next to the Earth Day celebration.

We wandered over there and really enjoyed the festivities. We are now armed with BreastMilk frisbees, pencils, and pens too.

Later on that evening, we finally met Courtney, my friend Nathan’s fiancee.

We talked til late, and she passed all the tests, so it’s all good to go.

On Sunday, we had another wonderful worship service at St. Andrew’s. It’s always a blessing to go there. We had lunch with the Mattson’s before driving home. When we got home we, of course, had to have a night cap with the Amoses, so we broke open a bottle of mead. Not a bad weekend.

The Peabody…Posted by Rick on April 21st, 2007

So I’m in Little Rock with a group of students for the Arkansas Literary Festival. We’re staying in a penthouse room at The Peabody, and Rachel is staying in bed as she gets served food on silver platters. Corny, huh?

If it weren’t for our desire to take Kyrie downstairs for the Duck March through the lobby, I think she’d stay in the room all day! We’re hoping to get some cute pictures with the ducks.

My students are still asleep though the festival starts in 40 minutes. I think they might end up skipping part of it. They may have gone out last night. When we arrived in last night at 12:30 am, there were hundreds of people in the lobby area, walking out to some big music festival a few blocks down. I guess this place has a bigger night life than I expected.

My only complaint is the other side of the hotel has a MUCH better view of the river.

Handout for tomorrow’s classPosted by Rick on March 29th, 2007

_ I am a thief and a liar. I took part or all of my paper from the Internet. I thought you were stupid. I see the error of my ways. With all my heart, I repent of my actions. Since you are merciful to those who show up for class, I implore you to give me a second chance.

_ Despite of all the bad things I have done in my life, I strive to be a basically good person. I did not steal from another person, and I did not lie to you. Since you believe in giving rewards to the faithful, I ask that you give me a reward. If I am lying to you yet again, I will settle for a zero, which will make me fail this class.

A Great IronyPosted by Rick on March 19th, 2007

As I was walking to my office this morning, something hit me. It’s a crying shame that we don’t have any politically correct names for stupid people. I mean, it used to be that you could call them an idiot, as in the other half of “idiot savant.” But we can’t even say they are “mentally challenged” because of that term now referring to those who are mentally retarded. Moron? No way!

It is a great irony that the more perverse a culture becomes, the more politically correct they become…the more perverse they become, the more they care about being careful with their words. What’s up with that? Maybe it’s just that vocabulary degenerates to the point where each word can have only one meaning…as if it’s easier that way.

I’ve been disillusioned by the fact that my students have been scoring higher ACT scores and getting dumber each year. It used to be that about half my students could spell well. Now it’s very rare to see even my brightest students go through a paper without a spelling error. sigh

Now, spelling is one thing. There may even be something genetic going on with poor spelling. But there are people who can’t spell who can still communicate clearly, effectively, and beautifully in their writing. They can get their ideas across. Those are few and far between in the college students that I see. I often have trouble understanding how a student’s writing got to the point it is at. How can these students write sentences that make no sense whatsoever? It’s incredible.

How do you go through 13 years of schooling and not know how to communicate clearly through words? More importantly for myself, how do you undo 13 years of ineffective or poor teaching? It’s really easy to give up and just pass them like all their other teachers did. But that can’t be done. Be real hard on them? No, then the administration gets on to you for retention issues. The best answer I’ve found is to have them write recursively. But even then, it’s a matter of getting them to want to work, to want to better themselves. And even that is getting more difficult. Each year, students want to work less. How did our culture get to this point? Where will it be in five years? ten? one hundred?

I often think there was something to the movie Idiocracy. I often feel like I live in that film. My students do things that could have been in that film, and it would look outrageous and even funny on the screen. But when it’s really real, it’s not so funny.

Woe is me. Wah. Wah. Cry. Cry.

Global Warming and ArmageddonPosted by Rick on February 5th, 2007

So I’ve enjoyed using a new book in my Persuasive Writing class this semester. The book stresses the importance of “They Say, I Say” arguments. As a springboard for a discussion of Aristotelian and Cicerian forms of rhetoric, we watched the film “An Inconvenient Truth” as an example of how to build an argument (Gore generally accepts an Aristotelian repudiation of gesture; I am borderline histrionic).

Anyway, of five or so essays that I’ve reviewed today, the They Say, I Say template has looked something like this:

Gore says global warming is going to kill us all.
I say these are just signs of the tribulation, and Jesus will rapture all the good Christians.

I just about gave a couple of students new sphincters for their irresponsible responses to Gore’s thesis (Okay, I wasn’t that mean; I just pointed out their hypocrisy when it comes to biblical ethics). Now, whether or not you agree with Gore is not the problem. But to say “I agree with Gore that global warming is eating our world, but I am not going to polish the brass of a sinking ship” is infuriating. Has the church truly become this ridiculous? Where do I live?

I’ve seen this attitude (sinking ship attitude) in eschatological debates with pre-trib premils like Dave Hunt and Tim LaHaye, but to see it so pervasive in college students just rips my knickers.

Random thoughts #62,324 (no one will read it; it’s too long)Posted by Rick on January 24th, 2007

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.

Sickness, sleep, and avocados (or Random thoughts 9,163)Posted by Rick on December 17th, 2006

So, as Rachel mentioned a few days ago, we were struck by the plague. I was bowing my knees a few days ago, a couple days after Rachel was sick. Everyone else was sick yesterday, and we’re all starting to feel better now. I think the sickness has mostly passed, but we’re all weak, and I think my digestive system is still out of whack because food just feels like it sits in my stomach forever.

I think my digestive system is always out of whack when we come up here anyway. When we’re at home, we eat mostly vegetables and whole grains. We don’t eat a lot of white flour carbs (any really) and we’ve cut most of the meat out of our diets. Black bean tacos became a favorite in the fall, and I mentioned them to Rachel before I fell asleep last night, which made her mad at me, because then she started craving them. I was craving a avocado, tomato, and swiss sandwich from Sparky’s. (Speaking of Sparky’s, I’ll get a free sandwich after I buy two more. Yessss.)

I’m also in the mood for some wild berry sparkling cider.

Kyrie drank her wine today at church before I noticed she hadn’t eaten her bread. Today was the first day back in Salem’s sanctuary since the fire 11 months ago. Kyrie was delighted with the stained glass and banners.

I was exhausted after church (eventhough we were in bed by 11:30), and then we went to Red Robin for lunch (which sealed the deal), and Kyrie and I both went down for two hour naps.

It’s kinda jolting to go from 60-70 hour work weeks to a really long vacation. Despite my sickness, I was still able to polish off three books this week. Yet, I’m still too lazy to update my sidebar book widget. The only real benefit to that widget is that it adds color to the blog.

StuffPosted by Rick on December 1st, 2006

Last day of the semester. Papers are more than half graded.

Car is in the shop…again. I think I need a new Mass Air Flow Sensor. Hopefully, that will fix my acceleration problem, and we’ll have no problems on the way to Tulsa. We’re hoping to drive to Tulsa this Sunday. Snow needs to melt off the roads. If we get to Tulsa, everything will be fine.

Our car has been faithful, but we’ve had to make repairs over the last month that have been way too much. We’re hoping to wait it out until spring before we get a new vehicle. Fortunately, we have about $1,000 more left in our bank account than we normally do after paying all our bills…and it’s December, so I’ll be getting $4,000 or so after taxes in the next two weeks after being paid yesterday. The university needs to get a more normal pay schedule.

I met an actor, Ed Nelson, on Wednesday. He lives around here. Why would anyone want to live around here? He’s done way too much stuff.

I’ve forgotten way too many quatoable things this week.

Faculty Christmas party is this weekend. I hope they have some good wine, so I can be a slosh (that one’s for you, Rachel W.). And while, I am mentioning you, I should tell you that you need to cut your post length in half because I always save long posts for later, so I’m about 27 posts behind now.

We have way too much food at our house to eat before we leave. Most of it is meat, so I guess that’s okay.

It’s World AIDS day again.

Take a moment to pray for those suffering from AIDS, and especially pray for the church in the world, especially in Africa, as it ministers to those who suffer from AIDS.

I’ve been censored…Posted by Rick on November 8th, 2006

Okay, so I wrote an article several months ago, and I saw the print version for the first time today. In the article, I wrote, “Y is a goddess.” It was changed to “Y is fantastic.” This just makes me so mad. Not to mention, it was a direct quote that they changed.

What I thought was a comma splice ended up just being a matter of the subordinator being on the other side of a picture. But now I notice that all my verbs were changed from the historical present tense to the past tense. GRRRR.