Humility in the Academy

September 2, 2011 in Teach, Theology with 0 Comments

A couple of gems to encourage you to read the rest of the article:

My first minor setback occurred during my freshman year, when the morons on Princeton’s English faculty inexplicably failed to be dazzled by my freshman essay. (“You show a hint of promise, but you need to work much harder on your writing.”) …

Until that point, I had never really appreciated what a liberal education is all about. An essayist inThe Chronicle has put it this way: “A liberal-arts education … is about the recognition, ultimately, of how little one really knows, or can know. A liberal-arts education, most of all, fights unmerited pride by asking students to recognize the smallness of their ambitions in the context of human history ….”

Head over to the Chronicle of Higher Education to read this wonderful piece about the need for humility in the Academy.

Also, shout out to liberal-arts education.

Systematizing the Old Testament Narrative?

August 26, 2011 in Theology with 0 Comments

From A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament:

The medieval church, and in large measure the later Reformation churches, preserved the canon of the Old Testament but largely subsumed its theological voice to categories taken from systematic or dogmatic theology. The result was, in considerable measure, a monochromatic view of the canonical witness. The polyphonic voices of the Old Testament with their unsettled diversity of witness were often pressed into artificial unity through systematic categories brought from outside the text itself. Attempts to describe the Old Testament’s theological witness often used the categories common to systematic theology. Elements deemed inconsistent with church doctrine were ignored or treated as marginal to the theological understanding of the Old Testament.

Did the reformation overly systematize the Old Testament narrative?

Narcissism and Education

August 18, 2011 in Teach with 0 Comments

My wife an I are slowly working our way through The Narcissism Epidemic by Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell. It has been an interesting read, one that we both highly recommend for teachers, students, parents, humans and some intelligent canines. I recently came across an article with a similar argument:

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment study for 2009 revealed that, in a group of 34 developed countries, American students ranked 17th in science knowledge and ability and 25th in math, although—and let’s have a big cheer here—14th in reading. But they waved the big foam-hand finger at No. 1 in self-confidence. For professors, of course, this is old news. I doubt there’s a single one of us who has not encountered, and continues to encounter with depressing frequency and volume, students who perform below college standards yet confront us with anger or tears or both and the claim that they “always” get A’s, that we are being unreasonable at best, and at worst that the low grades they are earning are vindictive because we don’t like them. That we can and do provide them with evidence that they have earned these low grades too often means nothing to them because they know they’re better than the evidence shows.

Read the rest of the article here, from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Grab a copy of The Narcissism Epidemic here.

Good Read: The World Without Scholars

August 17, 2011 in Teach, Theology with 0 Comments

Michah Gottlieb, assistant professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at NYU, writes a brief, creative and though-provoking fable about a world without the humanities. Excerpt below, click through for the rest.

With family income shrinking, and tax revenues dwindling, choices had to be made. One of the first places looked at was those costly ivory-tower humanities scholars. How could one justify paying salaries to people who spent years studying minutiae but not producing anything of measurable economic value?

Research in computer science, engineering, finance, and hard sciences that led to technological and medical discoveries was preserved. Humanities research in fields such as history, religion, philosophy, and literature was cut. Eventually humanities research slowed to a trickle. Departments shrank and then collapsed. The university became a technology lab and trade school.

Read the rest from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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