Thursday Thread #38
Intro
This is Time's Corner, a weekly newsletter by Christian Leithart. I’m the editor of Good Work magazine and the creator of Psalm Tap, a yearly colloquium for church musicians. By day, I teach, I make the most of summer break, and by night, I edit this newsletter.
Here at Time’s Corner, Thursdays are devoted to your replies. On Monday, I asked:
Has a teacher ever issued a challenge that actually motivated you to work harder?
Before I get to the responses, I wanted to share this story about W. H. Auden that E. J. Hutchinson posted on Twitter. I hate tweet-threads, so I copied the whole thing into a single blog post. The meat of the anecdote is this: For his class’s final exam, Auden required his students to write from memory five cantos (almost 500 lines) of Dante’s Divine Comedy. When the students protested, Auden made them a deal:
[He said,] “I am going to be driving to California over the Christmas vacation. If I find I can’t memorize these five cantos by the time I reach Los Angeles, I’ll phone your representative and cancel the assignment.” It was a deal–rather a reluctant one, on both sides. The phone call never came, so the Dante exam was on.
How’s that for a challenge?
From You
Remy says:
I had a teacher who assigned year-end papers on a Shakespearean play. He was asked about the length and he replied, "no longer than twenty seven pages." When asked about its lower limits, he demurred, saying: "As long as it's good, I don't care." The students whittled it down, trying to find the minimum. At each length offered he shrugged and said, "Sure." Finally someone asked, "Can it be a single sentence?" The teacher's eyebrows went up, "It would have to be a very good sentence." Most students played it safe in three to five pages, but I decided to write something as short as I scholarly could. I ended up with five sentences, but only because I thought a semi-colon was overly cheeky. I wrote my analysis in sonnet form. Later, to that same teacher, I wrote a twenty seven page paper.
Melissa says:
I think the answer is, surprisingly, no. It's surprising not just because it's the sort of answer that you would expect to get a "yes" to from someone who has been through as much classical education as I have. It's surprising for me in particular because I would generally describe myself, using the language of Gretchen Rubin's The Four Tendencies, as an "Obliger" (i.e. one who meets outer expectations but resists inner expectations). I hadn't realized it until this question asked me to reflect, but education is one area where I generally respond to inner expectations as much as I respond to outer expectations. I work as hard on something as *I* want to, and that's not really affected by a teacher issuing a challenge or not. I can absolutely reduce the amount of effort I put in if a teacher makes it clear that less effort is required, but I've also phoned in my work for a teacher who was trying to challenge us but behaved horribly in the classroom and lost my respect (at least for the semester). I should be clear: I've also phoned in work for teachers I loved because I chose to prioritize other classes. The strongest challenge I've risen to has come from fellow students; I remember the paper I was working on when I realized that I couldn't just end it when I had clawed my way up to the page count because my argument wasn't complete yet. I bragged about that moment to a friend because he had been trying to convince me that pages-by-the-deadline was an insufficient standard for a class paper He erred too far in the opposite direction, letting deadlines sail by in order to focus on the perfection of his argument, but having the experience of "I can't turn it in yet, I'm not done saying what needs to be said" was good for me.
Horace says:
I can't remember any time a teacher was able to motivate me by making me feel that what I did in the classroom actually mattered. I'm sure it happened in a rare instance but I think you hit the nail on the head describing that feeling for boys regarding school. Truth be told, I still feel that way about my job sometimes now - that it doesn't really matter. If I stopped doing it and they never replaced me, nothing would be different in my life or the life of my neighbors. I think the motivation for school, and now for work, can come from locating what seems like (or is) a hypothetical, unreal exercise alongside real things. In college we were encouraged to put assignments aside to go and serve in various ways, and then to come back and still get our schoolwork done. Moving from activities that clearly mattered to schoolwork motivated me in my schoolwork in a way that moving between video games and school or even athletics and school did not. I haven't fleshed it out anymore but that's what I've been thinking about since asking your question.
Links
My wife has created a wonderful resource for studying your family tree. It’s called Roots & Stomping Grounds and it’s a workbook/activity guide for a family genealogy project. You can download it for free here.
Upcoming
The second issue of Good Work has been sent to the printer! If you meant to sign up, but you got distracted by a flat tire or poopy diaper, go ahead and fill out the form. I’ll mail you a copy. (Remember that GW is a print-only magazine, which means that if you don’t subscribe, you ain’t gonna read it.)
My church has been doing a series of talks on various fun topics for the past few months. The last one is called “You Should Be Reading Flannery O'Connor” and it’s this Sunday: May 28 at 4pm. Location: here. Price: Free ninety-nine.
Registration for the fourth annual Psalm Tap is open! Catch up on previous Psalm Taps here.
Up To
Reading: Over Sea, Under Stone, by Susan Cooper
Watching: The Killing (1956), one of Kubrick’s early films. Movies that stole from it: Reservoir Dogs, Terminator 2, The Dark Knight.
Listening: This playlist. I hope to write about why soon.
About
I’m Christian Leithart, a writer and teacher living in Birmingham, Alabama. I’m not active on social media, but you can read my blog here. Use the button below to share this issue of Time’s Corner, if you so desire. Thanks much for reading.