theology | Multiple Enthusiasms

No, yesterday’s post wasn’t a joke. Honestly, I’m not into the whole April Fool’s thing; I generally think pranks are annoying at best and infuriating at worst. I don’t like to be fooled. I like honesty.

I’d take a picture of the letter, because I take pictures of just about everything else, lately, but I’m not going to. I think they filled up all their slots already. I hope that’s what happened, because they don’t actually yet have my full application; I don’t take the GRE Lit until next weekend, and I’d thought they were waiting on that score.

Apparently not. Ah, well.

Alma’s comment yesterday, though, brought up a good point that I’ve been thinking about a lot the past couple days (actually, which I’ve been wondering about for a while now); it’s Creative Writing–does one really need a PhD in it? Do I really want to pursue a doctorate in making shit up? I’d had a couple of ideas for what to do for a ‘creative dissertation,’ but I actually have a couple of ideas for real dissertations (in both literature and theology, in fact), and I think that might be more fruitful.

I think I got what I needed from my Master’s degree. I studied with one of the two people who made me want to come to this program, but ultimately I feel I came away with more from other classes. It’s great to be able to say I studied film with the guy who directed The Empire Strikes Back, but both Coleman Hough and Syd Field challenged me in better, different ways, and I learned more from them.

Yesterday, I officially handed in my thesis. I’ve got two more days of class next weekend, and then it’s all in the bag.

I’ve been asked a few times what I’m going to do next. Which surprises me, because everyone already knows:

I’m going to Denver.

I’m not sure why people thought it might be contingent on getting into their program. Coming out to LA wasn’t; I paid for my apartment several weeks before I got word of any decision on anyone’s part. I’d already decided I was going to do it regardless of whether or not I got into USC.

And I did. I would’ve. I didn’t leave myself any other option.

Same here. I’m not staying in LA, and I’m not moving back to Jersey. Denver has felt, for a long time, like the next logical step. There’s something about it that calls to me, which seems kind of a silly thing to say, looking at it, but there it is.

Vonnegut is known for having said that very often it’s best to jump off the cliff and grow your wings on the way down. Somebody (I want to say Emerson or Thoreau) once said that, in seeking new land, one must occasionally force one’s self to lose sight of familiar shore.

I don’t believe anything in life is certain (not even death, mainly because: who knows? I’m smart enough to know that nobody knows what occurs after the body stops breathing, and also enough to know that I am not my body), and so I’m looking forward to this coming summer. I think it’s going to be awesome. I have no idea what’s going to happen, but I’m taking the leap now, and heck, even if I don’t grow my wings on the way down, I’ve never gone wrong by the seat of my pants.

Conferences today (I’m writing this from my office); USC’s Writing Program requires instructors to do one-on-one conferences with each student once per assignment, of which there are 5. I’m basically, then, the one professor my students really connect with to some real degree.

I like that. It opens it all up to remind everyone that my class isn’t about the room it’s in.

It’s hard, some days, to pinpoint what it’s really about; writing is hard to teach. I’m teaching freshman composition/rhetoric, and it’s exciting and challenging, but I also find it extraordinarily difficult to teach because it’s made me realize I haven’t a clue how I learned in the first place. I know I’m pretty good at it (some days better than others), but the how?

I was a sophomore in college when I took a seminar in theology with Robert Kennedy. We mainly watched videos during lectures, but the real meat of the class was our own thought-time; we began the course in Genesis, and each week we tackled something new (following Biblical chronology). I was, by then, already lapsed in both Christianity and Wicca, and just starting to explore Buddhism, which made Kennedy perhaps a perfect teacher at that point in my life; he’s a Jesuit priest ordained in the White Plum lineage of Zen, and he wrote a book called Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit, concerning questions of where the two intersect.

We finished the Bible two weeks into the second semester. We still had four months to go, and so we moved on: Hobbes and Dante and Joyce (oh, my!). Yeah, James Joyce in a theology class.

The real thing I learned most was how connected everything is. We’d watch a lecture, after which I’d go across to the library, max out my library card with five books, read them, and then come up with a compelling argument. He didn’t teach us how to write our papers, how to analyze the texts, how to support our own arguments.

He only listened.

That first semester I pulled a 3.5 after starting with a couple C+s.

The second, I earned a 4. It’s the single college grade of which I’m most proud, because it really did reflect how much I learned.

But how to teach that?

I’m still learning. Some days I struggle with it. I challenge my students to be bold and to really own their own ideas. Some think I’m too harsh a grader, others feel they earned what they get.

The thing is, the writing process is hard to teach. I’ve been writing for fifteen years, and I’m still learning every day. In a goal-oriented society, it’s hard to really convey the idea that some processes won’t end until you’re dead (and then, who the hell knows? There’s probably even more after that fact). Some of my students note that they still have trouble with it, and each time they do so I smile and I say: “Welcome to writing. It doesn’t get easier, but sometimes you do get better.”

Multiple Enthusiasms

Infinite jest. Excellent fancy. Flashes of merriment.

Tag: theology