English Teacher Weekly for Oct. 31st
English Teacher Weekly for Oct. 31st
Welcome to English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities.
Happy Halloween (and Reformation Day) to all those who observe! Enjoy this week’s edition. I’m stunned that October is already at an end.
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURES
Living on Vibes Alone
Writing teacher Jonathan Malesic has seen firsthand the current rise in reading resistance among college students. Reading takes energy and time, and young people looking forward to a career don’t think it’s worth it, as he says in his recent op-ed for the NYT. The popular vision of a fruitful professional path is weirdly devoid of any work—you don’t see anyone actually exerting any energy, intellectual or otherwise.
It’s tempting to lament the death of a reliable pathway to learning and even pleasure. [i.e. reading] But I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them. In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes.
Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide.
Don’t get me wrong, people. I’m a vibes guy. Always have been. But don’t get it twisted. Vibes must be earned with the sweat of your brow, by summoning the discipline necessary to make imagination reality. Without hard work, all our vibes are but a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
Kendrick Lamar
Here’s a small collection of quotes from Kendrick Lamar’s interview with singer SZA for Harper’s Bazaar. The Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper is only the fifth man to be featured solo on the cover of the iconic magazine. Ignore him at your peril.
“I do believe in love and war, and I believe they both need to exist.”
“Ain’t no cliché. But I literally talk to God. Like, it’s to a point where I’ll be starting to think I’m going crazy. But then He has to remind me, ‘No, this is really me.’”
“But for what I do, there is certainly no growth without vulnerability. If I understood the power of vulnerability earlier, I could have had more depth and more reach to the guys that was around me in the neighborhood coming up.”
“But I’m my ancestors’ wildest dream because I can be a bitch and I’m okay with that. Because my mom wasn’t allowed to be a bitch in her space or in white spaces. And I feel like that’s my duty to literally get in here and be like, ‘I’m gonna do what I want.’”
“Information. I want it all. I want the resources. I wanna meet people smarter than me. I wanna talk to them. I want them to show me things. I just wanna be fulfilled with whatever this world has to offer. That shit hypes me up. Information. I’m a … nerd for it. You is too.”
If you’re interested in a long-form guide to Lamar’s music—especially if you’re like me and didn’t grow up around a lot of hip-hop—I suggest the Dissect podcast from Spotify, where you can find episodes analyzing virtually every song and album he’s released. It’s nothing if not thorough.
Welcome to the Writing Renaissance
believes we’re in a writing renaissance. In so many ways, the climate for diverse, new voices in writing and publishing has never been healthier. For Compact Magazine:
Similar shifts—a massive increase in the volume of output, a proliferation of channels, a weakening of the power of traditional gatekeepers—occurred with the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, with broadsheets in the 18th century and penny presses in the 1830s. In every case, they led to a profound change in the history of journalism and of literature—in the long run, for the better. A parallel change is clearly taking place online—but only for those who are willing to believe in the democratizing potential of the new technology and to follow where it leads. Traditional media, on the other hand, would prefer to close their eyes.
Bill Watterson’s Commencement Address
In 1990, right in the middle of Bill Watterson’s classic ten year run of Calvin and Hobbes comics, he returned to his alma mater Kenyon College to deliver the commencement address. His subject is how imagination and free play can (and should) work in a creative life:
In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book.
Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch.The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry. …
My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year. And that's what I did.Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli-sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.
After many years away from the public eye, Watterson has recently published The Mysteries with collaborator John Kascht. It’s safe to call it a radical departure from his Calvin and Hobbes style. This article from Popverse describing their collaboration on the book mirrors the kind of irreverent play that Watterson celebrates in his commencement speech. And here’s a video that shows some of their “appallingly inefficient and wasteful” approach to creating the book.
What are your sayings?
Nandi Theunissen’s essay “Everything Is Out of Water” for The Point Magazine considers a possibly undervalued question: If you’re a philosopher, shouldn’t you have some sayings?
…on a flight from New York to Los Angeles I was asked, What are your philosophical sayings? … I heard myself explaining to the person next to me that philosophers write journal articles and books and contribute to existing debates. I spoke of training graduate students, and the American Philosophical Association. Eventually I bluntly said that we don’t have sayings anymore. I got the impression he thought I must not be very good; and somehow I did feel a surge of embarrassment, which I buried in a rush to be congenial. When I had a chance to think it over, I wondered if I had felt embarrassed for the guy because he was innocent about professional philosophy or embarrassed for myself because I do something as banal as contribute to existing debates. Had I cringed at a boyish fantasy about academic life? Or was I cringing at myself for devoting my life to something whose ways, whose point, would not reward this or any other fantasy? Maybe I should have some sayings. If my professional self regarded this prospect with bemusement, maybe I had missed something vital about my own undertaking.
Here’s the ETW homework assignment for the week: write down your best sayings. What are your go-to aphorisms that capture the heart of your work and worldview? Don’t stop until you have at least three. Here’s one of mine: Whatever you do, choose to do it.
Of course, by nature, an aphorism is going to have some holes you can poke in it. Here’s Theunissen’s musing upon one of her mentor’s favorite sayings, “Don’t make mistakes.”
The constraints imposed by the discipline provide form for the chaotic deeps. The discipline—think your thoughts, but not like that—is philosophy’s iambic pentameter. The constraints provide a container for something substantial to grow. And when it does, the elements—the hard and the generative—are held together in exquisite tension; it is a sublime art. But disciplinary norms have a function, and they can fail to serve it. Without counterpoint, an instruction like don’t make mistakes leaves divine intelligence with nothing to move through. It produces a field of petty bureaucrats who huff on their whistles to protest imprecisely formulated claims. It makes a roomful of people take note only of what they believe a speaker gets wrong. It is easy for me to see these deficiencies in others. It is harder to see the perennial creep inside. I tell an anthropologist friend that philosophy has been reckoning with its unsociability for the last ten years. She tells me that I have been reckoning with philosophy’s unsociability for the last ten years. The unsociability of philosophy, she says, is probably constitutive.
Teaching in Prison
From
’s Substack: “What Teaching in Prison is Teaching Me About Learning (Part II)”—A powerful collection of thoughts about teaching, presented in a “braided series” of narratives that juxtapose his experience in a traditional classroom with those of his time teaching students who are in prison:My incarcerated students peer review their latest papers. They read aloud to each other to overcome any issues with handwriting. I hear writing in the air, real writing. The students ask questions of each other. They take notes. We talk about writing as a process, how I’m most interested in their work’s growth from first draft to finished product. Show me how far you’ve come. They are excited about this new idea: the writing portfolio, a collection of all their work. We discuss a paragraph written by Kate Chopin and unpack exactly how imagery and metaphor are being used to support the main idea and tone. They marvel at Chopin’s work in these few sentences. A student says, “Ohhhhh, I see. That’s crazy.” I agree. We all nod. When class is over, every student shakes my hand before they leave. I do not know why.
I recommend the whole series.
Gardening and Heroism
For The Lamp’s blog, Jude Russo on gardening:
Gardening is a salutary exercise—not just for the fresh air and mild physical exertion, but because it sets you toe to toe with the conditionality of the earth bringing forth her fruits in due season. Here’s existentialism; life on earth, on this particular piece of it, anyway, may just not happen this year, gentlemen. Farmers and agronomists are the world’s great heroes and wizards, the bringers of consistency in the face of fickle winds and waters. Sophocles names the farmer, along with the sailor, as one of the primeval exemplars of derring-do: “Many terrible things there are, and none is more terrible than man . . . he wears out the most ancient of the gods, the untiring, deathless Earth, the plows running up and down year by year, as he turns her with the breed of horses.”
PODCAST ROUNDUP
Edward Knippers on embodiment in the Christian faith and the calling of the artist:
The story of Sarojini Naidu, poet and activist, in the journey to independence for India:
Former Poet Laureate of Mississippi Beth Ann Fennelly on micro-memoirs:
Is Flannery O’Connor funny? (Yes.)
The intimacy and humor of Emily Dickinson’s letters:
Printmaker Ned Bustard on developing our visual literacy and the workings of Christian symbolism:
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
A 9 minute audio recording of Flannery O’Connor explaining the purpose of the wild, violent, and grotesque in literature from a 1960 appearance at Wesleyan College. It would later be published in her essay collection Mystery and Manners.
“Should Slim Shady be Cancelled?” The NYT reports on Eminem’s enduring appeal upon the release of his 12th album
- ’s review of G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, one of his most famous apologetic works.
A friend sent me this Chesterton quote this week, which I think is from The Everlasting Man: “I am very glad that our fashionable fiction seems to be full of a return to paganism, for it may possibly be the first step of a return to Christianity. Neo-pagans have sometimes forgotten, when they set out to do everything the old pagans did, that the final thing the old pagans did was to get christened.”
From NPR’s My Unsung Hero series, Malcolm Campbell’s tribute to his high school civics teacher, Mr. Lawson: “‘Is this gonna be on the test?’ he recalled asking. ‘And Mr. Lawson looked at me and said, ‘No, man, this is for you.’”
Brad East’s very interesting review of Rod Dreher’s new book, Living in Wonder, for Christianity Today: “If Dreher is indeed a prophet of the Zeitgeist—whether heralding its advance or proclaiming its doom—then a new book from him is worth pausing to consider. And this one happens to be about angels, demons, exorcists, aliens, UFOs, visions, dreams, miracles, witchcraft, and the internet.”
From Helen Shaw’s review in The New Yorker of a new production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town on Broadway, starring Jim Parsons: “Wilder’s masterpiece … is our premier American play, which is another way of saying that it’s performed like clockwork in every high school across the country. You first encounter it when you’re young. The next time, though, might be the moment it wrecks you.”
For The Rabbit Room,
presents a guide to having better conversations: “…I’m convinced something akin to magic takes place between participants engaged in conversation. I believe—within the context of authentic, vulnerable conversation—we are changed in ways too mysterious to quantify.”Poet Dana Gioia’s “little trick for re-entering a creative mindset every night.”
From the BBC: Filming begins on a new adaptation of The Lord of the Flies
“Inside me there are two wolves. The first is super embarrassed to admit that I paid lots of money to an influencer to teach me how to make TikToks this summer. The only thing less cool than putting effort into your social media presence is paying someone to teach you how to put effort into your social media presence.”—Alex Sujong Laughlin on the influence machine for Defector
From the British Film Institute: 10 Great Japanese Ghost Story Films
“Artificial Intelligence and Writing: Four Things I Learned Listening to my High School Students”—An excellent guest post by Brett Vogelsinger at
: “Most exciting, students are talking more about what they value about their own voice because AI exists. They notice the hollow sound of AI-generated text and how unsatisfying it feels to read. They attend more to how enjoyable it is to read something human-crafted, even in a rough, rough draft.”“Do you want to be a vampire?”—David Edmonds for The New Statesman on transformative experiences, those choices in life where the outcomes are completely unknowable until they’ve been personally experienced.
New Bill Waterson??? Oh my goodness, that looks bizarre and so cool. Also the article about learning TikTok is fascinating...