As someone who teaches on a weekly basis and who has been through a lot of classes, I can resonate and learn from this list. From the Chronicle of Higher Education blog “Brainstorm”:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/5-more-things-your-students-think-you-need-to-know

5 More Things Your Students Think You Need to Know

Gina Barreca

Today’s points comes from a former student (UConn, ’09) who wishes to remain anonymous. Now a teaching at a middle-school in Chicago, she asked me to let CHE readers know that she is attempting to follow her own advice.

Dear Professor:

1. You might not realize it, but we notice when you’re angry, distracted, annoyed, exhausted, frustrated, nervous, and/or feeling too lazy to bother paying attention. We think that you should be able to put those emotions aside for the fairly brief time we have you as our instructor in the classroom. You don’t allow us to sleep or cry during class, so why should you be allowed to rant about subjects that have nothing to do with the course? If it’s an amusing anecdote, that’s something we’ll welcome, but if you’re tempted to tell us on a regular basis how miserable your life is, how corrupt the administration is, how misguided the government is, or how disappointing we are, then we’d be happier if you would resist the temptation.

2. You might not believe it, but most of the time we don’t think you are funny and we don’t even understand most of the references you make in terms of your attempts at humor. Only a few people still watch Monty Python and we’re not going to start just so we can understand what you mean by “silly walks” and we don’t know all the Simpsons episodes as well as you do. Please don’t get us started on Seinfeld. Our parents think that’s funny. We don’t. We laugh when you pause because you clearly expect it and we want to make you happy and/or get a good grade by getting into your good graces.

3. You might not want to hear this (again, since others have mentioned it) but we spend all our time looking at you and therefore wish you would take even more time to groom yourselves. If you are teaching with coffee stains on your tie, we’ll notice them and then spend time inventing stories about what happened to cause the stains. Did you have a tiff with your partner that morning? Did you hear something shocking on the way to work and spill your coffee in the car? Is this a tie you wore last week and are these the same stains? Please check your fly and your bra strap before standing in front of the class because we don’t know whether what you’re doing is deliberate or not.

4. You might be surprised, but you make a lot of mistakes. Your hand-outs have errors and your power-point presentations, when you can get them to work, often contain mistakes. You omit words, spell terms incorrectly, or supply conflicting pieces of information. Please make it clear to us whether or not you would prefer to hear about these missteps. We hope you do want your mistakes corrected because you spend a lot of time noticing ours.

5. You might be puzzled, but yeah, we talk about you because we see you several times a week. We tell our friends whether or not you are a good teacher and we tell our parents and their friends the same. You are a big part of our lives and so if you see yourself mentioned on those teaching sites or Facebook or wherever, you should not assume we are weird. It would be strange if we didn’t discuss you. This loops back to the first point in this note, which is that we notice whether you give a damn about your teaching and about your students. You can make us feel like we have a chance at grasping a subject or understanding an idea or else make us feel like we’re as ridiculous, pathetic, and useless as we’ve always suspected we might be. It’s easy to make us feel bad and we talk highly of those professors who don’t take the easy way out.

* Bonus note: You probably don’t think it matters, but smiling when you first arrive in the classroom everyday is great.

The article below is not stating anything new.  Anyone who has taken psychology in high school or college knows the classic defence mechanisms of denial and self-justification.  Well, I’ve always thought that the rational notion that education or knowledge will cause us to agree and live in harmony is naive.  It doesn’t take into account the reasons for why we disagree or don’t understand things.  In either case, the study reported below is a reminder that we how we present truth is significant to people.  I think this is because of the connection of truth and beauty.  If we can’t see the beauty of truth, we won’t believe it.

Motivation strikes again…

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

How facts backfire

Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
By Joe Keohane | July 11, 2010

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.

“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”

On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.

New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.”

It would be reassuring to think that political scientists and psychologists have come up with a way to counter this problem, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The persistence of political misperceptions remains a young field of inquiry. “It’s very much up in the air,” says Nyhan.

But researchers are working on it. One avenue may involve self-esteem. Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski’s welfare study suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them “between the eyes” with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend. Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1 percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the correct fact.

Kuklinski’s study, however, involved people getting information directly from researchers in a highly interactive way. When Nyhan attempted to deliver the correction in a more real-world fashion, via a news article, it backfired. Even if people do accept the new information, it might not stick over the long term, or it may just have no effect on their opinions. In 2007 John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California at Berkeley studied whether providing misled people with correct information about the proportion of immigrants in the US population would affect their views on immigration. It did not.

And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”

In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance, monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.

Nyhan ultimately recommends a supply-side approach. Instead of focusing on citizens and consumers of misinformation, he suggests looking at the sources. If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. “So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”

Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is sensible. Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery. Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States — that’s easy. Getting him to register shame? That isn’t.

Joe Keohane is a writer in New York

Autonomy: People want to have control over their work.
Mastery: People want to get better at what they do.
Purpose: People want to be part of something that is bigger than they are.

Below is a 20 minute summary of the book that he presented at TED in 2009. Although not without its flaws, I found his argument helpful in thinking through the whole subject of motivation.

Hat tip to a reviewer of the book on Amazon for pointing out this talk.

Link to Dan’s site: http://www.danpink.com/

Link for TED: http://www.ted.com/

Link for video: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Americans may debate about religion all of the time, but it only portrays our ignorance.  The White Horse Inn has been saying for years that Evangelicals don’t understand the basic tenets of Christianity.  But we are not the only ones in the religious landscape that don’t understand the basics of our faith.  This is to be expected because “pew-sitters” really don’t care.  They just want to feel good about themselves and not work hard to get there, by-and-large.  And we are not requiring education of the world religions or philosophy in public schools.  They are not even required in most colleges, but are mere electives.  So what else do we expect…

Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/us/28religion.html

Pew Survey: http://www.pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx

September 28, 2010

Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.

“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

Among the topics covered in the survey were: Where was Jesus born? What is Ramadan? Whose writings inspired the Protestant Reformation? Which Biblical figure led the exodus from Egypt? What religion is the Dalai Lama? Joseph Smith? Mother Theresa? In most cases, the format was multiple choice.

The researchers said that the questionnaire was designed to represent a breadth of knowledge about religion, but was not intended to be regarded as a list of the most essential facts about the subject. Most of the questions were easy, but a few were difficult enough to discern which respondents were highly knowledgeable.

On questions about the Bible and Christianity, the groups that answered the most right were Mormons and white evangelical Protestants.

On questions about world religions, like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, the groups that did the best were atheists, agnostics and Jews.

One finding that may grab the attention of policy makers is that most Americans wrongly believe that anything having to do with religion is prohibited in public schools.

An overwhelming 89 percent of respondents, asked whether public school teachers are permitted to lead a class in prayer, correctly answered no.

But fewer than one of four knew that a public school teacher is permitted “to read from the Bible as an example of literature.” And only about one third knew that a public school teacher is permitted to offer a class comparing the world’s religions.

The survey’s authors concluded that there was “widespread confusion” about “the line between teaching and preaching.”

Mr. Smith said the survey appeared to be the first comprehensive effort at assessing the basic religious knowledge of Americans, so it is impossible to tell whether they are more or less informed than in the past.

The phone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish in May and June. There were not enough Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu respondents to say how those groups ranked.

Clergy members who are concerned that their congregants know little about the essentials of their own faith will no doubt be appalled by some of these findings:

¶ Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation.

¶ Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.

¶ Forty-three percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the foremost rabbinical authorities and philosophers, was Jewish.

The question about Maimonides was the one that the fewest people answered correctly. But 51 percent knew that Joseph Smith was Mormon, and 82 percent knew that Mother Teresa was Roman Catholic.

WARNING: This is heavy stuff.

Below is the chilling story about Mitchell Heisman of Somerville who committed suicide on the steps of the Memorial Church in the yard of Havard University on Saturday, September 18.  As if that were not enough of a story, it is the 1900-page suicide note, yeah, manifesto, which took him over 5 years to write that is the jaw-dropper.  According to his book, entitled “Suicide Note”, he began to contemplate the meaninglessness of life when he was 12 years old, after the death of his father.  He steeped himself in the works of Nietzsche among other works of nihilism, and resolved early on that he would end his life upon articulating his rationale in tome form.  It is a sorrowful irony to say, “Life is meaningless, let me tell you why…”.  It seems like he devoted his life to helping others understand what he thought was the meaning of his death.

Here is the article: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/09/27/book_details_motives_for_suicide_at_harvard/
Here is the note/book: http://www.scribd.com/doc/38104189/Mitchell-Heisman-Suicide-Note

What he left behind: A 1,905-page suicide note

Author described nihilistic outlook

By David Abel, Globe Staff  |  September 27, 2010

In the end, no one really knows what led Mitchell Heisman, an erudite, wry, handsome 35-year-old, to walk into Harvard Yard on the holiest day in his faith and fire one shot from a silver revolver into his right temple, on the top step of Memorial Church, where hundreds gathered to observe the Jewish Day of Atonement.

But if the 1,905-page suicide note he left is to be believed — a work he spent five years honing and that his family and others received in a posthumous e-mail after his suicide last Saturday morning on Yom Kippur — Heisman took his life as part of a philosophical exploration he called “an experiment in nihilism.’’

At the end of his note, a dense, scholarly work with 1,433 footnotes, a 20-page bibliography, and more than 1,700 references to God and 200 references to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Heisman sums up his experiment:

“Every word, every thought, and every emotion come back to one core problem: life is meaningless,’’ he wrote. “The experiment in nihilism is to seek out and expose every illusion and every myth, wherever it may lead, no matter what, even if it kills us.’’

Over the years, as he became more immersed in his work, often laboring over it 12 hours a day, Heisman shared bits with friends and family but never elaborated on the extent of his nihilism — his hardened view that life is vapid and nonsensical, that values are pretense, that the “unreasoned conviction in the rightness of life over death is like a god or a mass delusion.’’

He told them he was working on a history of the Norman conquest of England, cloistered in a cramped apartment he shared in Somerville. They knew the clean-shaven young man from suburban New Jersey, who always called his elderly godmother on her birthday and once donated $200 to Harvard Hillel for sponsoring services at Memorial Church, to be intensely committed to his work.

Neither his mother, sister, nor the roommates from whom he sought forgiveness in the hours before he died had any idea he was about to kill himself. They and others have been groping for answers to why he did it and in such a public way, on such a holy day.

“He was very cordial, very charming, you would never know that something was wrong,’’ said Lonni Heisman, his mother. He frequently told her he loved her, and had recently visited to help her prepare for a move. “I’m still in shock and I can’t understand how he could have hid this,’’ she said. “He had everything going for him. He was in perfect health. He was handsome, smart, a good person. I’ll never understand it.’’

She said he was a gregarious child who grew introverted after his father, an engineer, died of a heart attack when Mitchell was 12 years old. As he got older, he became increasingly bookish and went on to study psychology at the University at Albany in New York, where he seemed shy to friends and spent much of his time reading.

After college, Heisman worked at bookstores, including the Strand in Manhattan, enabling him to amass a library of thousands of books. About five years ago, he moved to Somerville to focus on writing and be near major university libraries.

He led a Spartan existence, subsisting on microwave meals, chicken wings, and energy bars, and surviving mainly on money left to him after his father’s death. He was tall, with dark eyes, and dated when he needed a break from his solitude, rarely having trouble attracting women. But he broke off the relationships quickly, saying he was too busy writing a book.

To help him concentrate, Heisman often listened to a constant loop of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,’’ which he felt synthesized the mind’s competing strains of emotion and reason, went to a gym daily, and took Ritalin, which his mother thinks may have induced depression and led to his suicide.

One of his longtime roommates, David Barnes, described Heisman as quiet and considerate, never angry. He engaged in conversation by asking questions; when he spoke he often gave deliberate, lengthy responses. “He could get intense talking about his book,’’ Barnes said. “There was definitely a lot of emotion pent up in this project.’’

Barnes and relatives said Heisman bought the gun, a .38-caliber pistol, three years ago, though they don’t know where, and they believe he had only one purpose for it: to commit suicide when he finished his book.

“He wasn’t going anywhere dangerous; he wasn’t paranoid; he wasn’t worried about anyone hurting him or breaking in,’’ Barnes said. “I couldn’t imagine him buying a gun for any other reason.’’

A month ago, as he began wrapping up his writing, he asked Barnes if he would be a witness to the signing of his will. Barnes thought it was because he cared so much about his book and wanted to ensure it would be taken care of in case something happened.

Two days before his suicide, Heisman seemed elated. He told his roommates he had finished the book. He spent the next day at the post office, buying stamps and preparing packages for friends and family, with the book on CDs.

On the morning of Yom Kippur, Heisman showered, shaved, and ate a breakfast of chicken fingers and lentils, some of which he left on the kitchen counter, something he rarely did. He put on a white tuxedo, with white shoes, a white tie, and white socks, and donned a ill-fitting trench coat, perhaps to hide the gun.

At about 10 a.m., a half-hour or so before he would commit suicide in front of a group touring Harvard, Heisman walked into Barnes’s room. He told him the white clothing was a Jewish tradition, even though he rarely practiced his religion and had given up on the concept of God. Appearing to be in a buoyant mood, he explained the significance of Yom Kippur.

“He said he wanted me to know that if he ever did anything to offend me, he apologized and hoped that I would forgive him,’’ Barnes said.

In his book, which he titled “Suicide Note’’ and scheduled to send to hundreds of people as an e-mail attachment about five hours after his death, Heisman produced an extraordinarily lengthy treatise on why life was not worth living.

With chapter titles such as “Philosophy, Cosmology, Singularity, New Jersey’’ and “How to Breed a God,’’ and citing more than a hundred authors from futurist Ray Kurzweil to the biologist E.O. Wilson, Heisman explains how his views took shape.

“The death of my father marked the beginning, or perhaps the acceleration, of a kind of moral collapse, because the total materialization of the world from matter to humans to literal subjective experience went hand in hand with a nihilistic inability to believe in the worth of any goal,’’ he wrote.

He saw his emotions as nothing more than a product of biology, as soulless as the workings of a machine, making them in essence an illusion.

“If life is truly meaningless and there is no rational basis for choosing among fundamental alternatives, then all choices are equal and there is no fundamental ground for choosing life over death,’’ he concluded.

The darkness of his views has been too much for his friends and family, many of whom have yet to read his suicide note.

“It makes me sad and angry that he didn’t care for any facet of life other than the book,’’ Barnes said.

As his sister, Laurel Heisman, spent last week sifting through what remains of his things — a poster in German, a well-made bed, piles of books in a small room shrouded with a dark curtain — she said she received a separate, posthumous note from him asking that she preserve a website he created to publish his book, a burden she has agreed to bear.

“I love you,’’ he wrote to her.

She wishes she could have made him see more of the beauty of life, and how we create our own value and give our own meaning to life. She might have taken him up a mountain or held him more closely.

“He just told us the safe things, because he knew we would have tried to stop him,’’ she said. “It’s really hard. It’s not like someone who was really depressed because they lost a lover. His whole ideology was wrapped in this concept of nihilism. I wish we could have made him see things differently.’’

Mark Bauerlein wrote a summary in The Chronicle of Higher Education of Ed Hirsch and Robert Pondiscio’s perceptive article in The American Prospect, “There’s No Such Thing as a Reading Test“.  The title of Mark’s review is “Reading is Not a Skill“. As someone who cares about interpretation, I don’t think that title is complete (probably just designed to be controversial) because that is not what the article is about.  As Mark agrees with Hirsh and Pondiscio, their contention is that reading tests in schools are inadequate because the students don’t have knowledge of the reading samples they are being tested on.  If students simply had a familiarity with the subject matter of the samples, their results would improve.  Let me complete Mark’s sentence: “Reading is Not a Skill That is Being Tested Well”.  I think by “reading” we really mean “interpretation”.  The bigger issue is that people don’t know how to engage grammar so as to ascertain meaning from written texts.  That is what is really being tested in “Reading” tests.  Thus, I will continue to beat the drum for the study of Discourse Analysis…

Reading Is Not a Skill

By Mark Bauerlein

Over the years, I’ve spent some time reviewing items on reading-comprehension tests, evaluating the passages selected as texts and checking the following eight or ten questions for accuracy, validity, etc. It can be a draining activity, scanning rather dry and often remote informational text, then spotting ambiguities or confusions in the questions that must be corrected.

One thing, I’ve found, lightens the load: a little knowledge about the passage material. Just a little bit helps a lot. Indeed, the difference between no knowledge and a little knowledge means much more than the difference between a little knowledge and abundant knowledge.

That’s my experience, and it corresponds with long-time arguments made by E. D. Hirsch and others about the importance of “domain knowledge” to reading comprehension. A recent essay in The American Prospect (magazine motto: “Liberal Intelligence”) argues just that. It is by Hirsch and Robert Pondiscio, and it bears the blunt title “There’s No Such Thing as a Reading Test.”

Hirsch and Pondiscio lay out the conventional understanding of reading.

“The culture of testing treats reading ability as a broad, generalized skill that is easily measured and assessed. We judge our schools and increasingly individual teachers based on their ability to improve the reading skills of our children. When you think about your ability to read—if you think about it at all—the chances are good that you perceive it as not just a skill but a readily transferable skill. Once you learn how to read you can competently read a novel, a newspaper article, or the latest memo from corporate headquarters. Reading is reading is reading.”

That outlook sounds common-sensical, Hirsch and Pondiscio admit, and they grant it partial accuracy. “The ability to translate written symbols into sounds, commonly called ‘decoding,’ is indeed a skill that can be taught and mastered,” they write.  One can “read” words that have no meaning (“rigfap,” “churbit”), and one can sound out words in a sentence filled with allusions to something one doesn’t understand (say, a 10-year-old reading a paragraph on the Thirty Years War).

“But,” the authors insist, “clearly there’s more to reading than making sounds. To be fully literate is to have the communicative power of language at your command—to read, write, listen, and speak with understanding. As nearly any elementary schoolteacher can attest, it is possible to decode skillfully yet struggle with comprehension. And reading comprehension, the ability to extract meaning from text, is not transferable.”

Why? Because texts contain embedded assumptions, things the writer assumes the reader will know. Their example: “A-Rod hit into a 6-4-3 double play to end the game.” Think of the implied meanings. One, it’s the ninth inning. Two, a man on first and one out. Three, the Yankees are behind. Etc. If you don’t have the domain knowledge, you’re not a bad reader. “You merely lack the domain-specific knowledge of baseball to fill in the gaps.”

This is why reading is not an abstract transferable skill (except at the most basic levels of literacy). Hirsch and Pondiscio note that “poor readers” do well when faced with a passage whose subject matter is familiar to them, “outperforming even ‘good readers’ who lack relevant background knowledge.” The problem is that knowledge in one area usually doesn’t help you to comprehend a text covering a different area.

The authors quote Dan Willingham on the national implications of the knowledge factor:

“The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies, and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country,” Daniel T. Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, recently wrote in The Washington Post. “Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge base problem must be solved.”

You see the problem, though. If reading is not an abstract, transferable skill, if reading comprehension relies upon sufficiently broad knowledge of important cultural, political, scientific, historical, and artistic materials, then we run squarely into delicate Culture War questions of curriculum. The inevitable question arises, “Who’s to say which traditions and histories and literature and philosophies should be required in the classroom?”

I’ll take Hirsch/Pondiscio’s advice: “Rather than idle away precious hours on trivial stories or randomly chosen nonfiction, reading, writing, and listening instruction would be built into the study of ancient civilizations in first grade, for example, Greek mythology in second, or the human body in third. . . . Let’s say a state’s fourth-grade science standards include the circulatory system, atoms and molecules, electricity, and Earth’s geologic layers and weather; and social-studies standards include world geography, Europe in the Middle Ages, the American Revolution, and the U.S. Constitution, among other domains. The state’s reading tests should include not just fiction and poetry but nonfiction readings on those topics and others culled from those specific curriculum standards.”

“The Best Magazine Articles Ever” – Sure the list is subjective. It’s all in English, and heavily slanted toward male writers. But you can’t quibble with this. This curated collection features pieces by some of the finest American writers of the past generation. We’ve highlighted 10 notables ones from a much longer list available here.

1. John Updike, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” The New Yorker, October 22, 1960.

2. Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” Esquire, November 1960.

3. Tom Wolfe, ”The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!” Esquire, March 1965.

4. Hunter Thompson, ”The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970.

5. Stewart Brand, “Space War: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Dearth Among Computer Bums. Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972.

6. David Foster Wallace, “The String Theory.” Esquire, July 1996.

7. Jon Krakauer, “Into Thin Air.” Outside Magazine, September 1996.

8. Susan Orlean, “Orchid Fever.” The New Yorker, January 23, 1995.

9. Malcolm Gladwell, “The Pitchman.” The New Yorker, October 30, 2000. (Yup, he’s Canadian, I know.)

10. Katie Hafner, “The Epic Saga of The Well.” Wired, May 1997.

via @caitlinroper

I must say that I am entirely impressed with the New York Times coverage of the oil leak in the Gulf.  It is updated constantly, tracking the presence of the surface oil slick, the coastal impact, the environmental impact, and the clean up efforts.  It is a combination of great information that is easily organized and uses available tools to communicate.  The short (less than 2 minute) video on the blowout of the pump is super helpful.  If you want a primer, a refresher, or one new source to track the spill, I would encourage you to bookmark this page:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/01/us/20100501-oil-spill-tracker.html

Be sure to click through each tab:

Where Oil Is in the Gulf
Where Oil Has Made Landfall
Efforts to Stop the Leak
Effects on Wildlife
Investigating the Blowout
Live Video of the Leak

Amazon has announced that for the first time, their e-book sales have surpassed print book sales.  This is important.  After Gutenberg invented the printing press, there were still those people who preferred scrolls for a time.  Now that computers have been invented, paving the way for “sit-down” reading devices to be created, the shift is happening before our very eyes.  The clock is ticking on the extinction of print media in the developed world.  All it takes is one generation…

E-Books Top Hardcovers at Amazon

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

For sure, the trend of the last 20 years has been to have children and then think about marriage in the future. With the divorce rate what it is, it’s no wonder. This is a good profile piece on the issue. At the end of the day, to me it seems like marriage is becoming like circumcision – a covenantal idea of the past that people have a hard time justifying for the future. Here is the link: http://www.wbur.org/npr/128265730

All Things Considered

Kids First, Marriage Later — If Ever

This is an interesting little article from JET Magazine back on June 21, 1999 (pages 20-22).  I have seen the statistics from this article mis-cited as though it were from a USA Today poll in a number of places.  As the article points out, the source is a Lutheran Brotherhood survey.  It’s been over 10 years since the article, and I’m curious if the answers would still be the same.

Here are links to article:
At Google Books
At FindArticles.com

If we were granted the opportunity to come face-to-face with God and could find out the answer to anything, many of us would probably have a plethora of questions to ask.

Still, aside from the many questions that would fill our heads if we could get a direct and immediate answer from God or a supreme being concerning any issue, there is one question that ranks tops for a great majority of people, according to a nationwide Lutheran Brotherhood survey.

Many adults would ask God, “What’s my purpose here?” reported the poll, which was conducted by Yankelovich Partners. Of those surveyed, 34 percent would like to find out the answer to this.

While most Americans (76 percent), the survey reported, believe that a higher being created them for a specific purpose and almost half (45 percent) of them say they understand their purpose very well, many would like to confirm it with God about their purpose on Earth.

The survey found that many people pray about achieving their life’s purpose. Of the Americans who believe they have a special purpose, it was learned that most (89 percent) of them pray for guidance to fulfill that purpose.

People who earn less than $35,000 per year, the survey revealed, are more likely to believe God created them for a reason, compared to people with higher incomes. The more education people have, the less likely they are to believe they have a specific purpose.

In addition to those with low incomes, senior citizens and weekly churchgoers also were more inclined to say they understand their purpose the best, the poll found.

“It’s inspirational to learn that so many people believe they were created to carry out something special and that they know what it is,” says Louise Thoreson, Lutheran Brotherhood’s vice president of fraternal. “Meaning and direction in life are often rooted in people’s spiritual beliefs.”

The second question adults would ask God or their supreme being most if they could get a direct and immediate answer would be, “Will I have life after death?” Nineteen percent of those polled want to know what lies ahead in regards to this question.

Generation Xers, according to the survey, are more likely than older adults to wonder about life after death.

“Why do bad things happen?” is the third most-asked question that adults would want to find out from God; 16 percent of those surveyed want to ask this question.

Surprisingly, 12 percent of those polled weren’t sure what they would ask God if they could get a direct and immediate answer.

Seven percent of those who partook in the survey would like to ask God or their supreme being if they could get a direct or immediate answer, “Is there intelligent life elsewhere?”

The survey found that men are twice as likely as women to say they would ask God about life on other planets (10 percent vs. 5 percent).

Only six percent of those surveyed would like to ask God, “How long will I live?”, while another six percent would ask a variety of other questions.

Yankelovich Partners conducted the survey by telephone among 1,006 randomly selected adult Americans.

“Lutheran Brotherhood Reports” is a comprehensive survey on attitude and issues that face American families.

Big downer in our community.  Below are the details.  Here is the link: http://www.salemnews.com/local/x1617554686/2-under-arrest-in-Beverly-homicide.

June 18, 2010

2 under arrest in Beverly homicide

Homeless-on-homeless crime suspected, DA’s office says

By Bruno Matarazzo Jr. Staff Writer

BEVERLY — Two homeless men will be arraigned today on murder charges following the death of another homeless man at a shuttered rooming house near the post office downtown.

The 52-year-old man died at Beverly Hospital around 6 p.m., the Essex County district attorney’s office said. The victim was found by police and EMTs, who performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Eric Roberts, 33, and Michael Bryson, 49, were arrested shortly after police received the report. They will be arraigned today in Salem District Court.

No word on a possible motive or what led police to the two men.

Police learned of the crime when a friend of the victim went to the police station at 5:40 p.m. to report a possible homicide at the closed rooming house at 45 Broadway, said Stephen O’Connell, spokesman for the district attorney’s office.

Neighbors said the rooming house, which has 16 units, closed within the past month.

Access to the former dwelling was blocked by police tape as state police investigators waited outside for a warrant in order to begin processing the evidence.

Earlier in the evening, police and investigators began their operations around a public park directly across the street from the post office. None would speak about the investigation or the incident that prompted it.

Questions about what happened in the area were on the minds of many people last night, especially commuters getting off the commuter rail.

Taxi driver Ollie Marley said people had been asking him for hours what happened.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Marley would tell them.

Alexander Sharrett, 26, who lives near the crime scene, said he was walking home from work when he saw two men sitting on the bench that police investigators were so interested in last night.

Hours later when he came from the grocery store, the entire park was cordoned off with police tape.

“I didn’t think anything of it because I see the people sitting there all day,” Sharrett said.

Neighbors who knew the victim would always see him around the park area pushing a shopping carriage and collecting cans.

“He was harmless,” Sharrett said.

Here is a Morning Edition piece on NPR on how college grads are coming out of school unprepared for professional life.  I think that what made a difference for me in college was a work-study position that I had my sophomore year.  I new what to expect when I entered a cubicle farm.

Here is the site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/

Here is the transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/etc/script.html

Here is the introduction:

In Sick Around the World, FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies — the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland — deliver health care, and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures.

Reid’s first stop is the U.K., where the government-run National Health Service (NHS) is funded through taxes. “Every single person who’s born in the U.K. will use the NHS,” says Whittington Hospital CEO David Sloman, “and none of them will be presented a bill at any point during that time.” Often dismissed in America as “socialized medicine,” the NHS is now trying some free-market tactics like “pay-for-performance,” where doctors are paid more if they get good results controlling chronic diseases like diabetes. And now patients can choose where they go for medical procedures, forcing hospitals to compete head to head.

While such initiatives have helped reduce waiting times for elective surgeries, Times of London health editor Nigel Hawkes thinks the NHS hasn’t made enough progress. “We’re now in a world in which people are much more demanding, and I think that the NHS is not very effective at delivering in that modern, market-orientated world.”

Reid reports next from Japan, which boasts the second largest economy and the best health statistics in the world. The Japanese go to the doctor three times as often as Americans, have more than twice as many MRI scans, use more drugs, and spend more days in the hospital. Yet Japan spends about half as much on health care per capita as the United States.

One secret to Japan’s success? By law, everyone must buy health insurance — either through an employer or a community plan — and, unlike in the U.S., insurers cannot turn down a patient for a pre-existing illness, nor are they allowed to make a profit.

Reid’s journey then takes him to Germany, the country that invented the concept of a national health care system. For its 80 million people, Germany offers universal health care, including medical, dental, mental health, homeopathy and spa treatment. Professor Karl Lauterbach, a member of the German parliament, describes it as “a system where the rich pay for the poor and where the ill are covered by the healthy.” As they do in Japan, medical providers must charge standard prices. This keeps costs down, but it also means physicians in Germany earn between half and two-thirds as much as their U.S. counterparts.

In the 1990s, Taiwan researched many health care systems before settling on one where the government collects the money and pays providers. But the delivery of health care is left to the market. Every person in Taiwan has a “smart card” containing all of his or her relevant health information, and bills are paid automatically. But the Taiwanese are spending too little to sustain their health care system, according to Princeton’s Tsung-mei Cheng, who advised the Taiwanese government. “As we speak, the government is borrowing from banks to pay what there isn’t enough to pay the providers,” she told FRONTLINE.

Reid’s last stop is Switzerland, a country which, like Taiwan, set out to reform a system that did not cover all its citizens. In 1994, a national referendum approved a law called LAMal (“the sickness”), which set up a universal health care system that, among other things, restricted insurance companies from making a profit on basic medical care. The Swiss example shows health care reform is possible, even in a highly capitalist country with powerful insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Today, Swiss politicians from the right and left enthusiastically support universal health care. “Everybody has a right to health care,” says Pascal Couchepin, the current president of Switzerland. “It is a profound need for people to be sure that if they are struck by destiny … they can have a good health system.”

Just got finished watching a fascinating NOVA program entitled, “Ghost in Your Genes” which was about epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of genetic modifiers called “epigenomes” that are instrumental in turning on and off the varied features of any given genome. The Human Genome Project of the early 90′s was monumental as it mainly purposed to identify all of the genomes or “genes” in the DNA make-up of humans. In 2000 they reported that they had found 22,000-23,000 genomes, which was surprisingly less than they had anticipated. That’s roughly the same that can be found in worms, rats, and frogs. Since it has been thought that humans are more genetically complex, it left many questions about what causes some genes to appear and others not to appear. The salient example of this question is how identical twins which have the exact same DNA structure can develop differently. The answer that has been found in the past few years is the discovery of “epigenomes” which can attach themselves to certain genes or gene sequences and turn them on or off depending on the circumstances. Moreover, they are finding that epigenomes can be influenced early in development, showing that although we inherit genes and epigenomes naturally through our parents, it is how we are nurtured that can determine which traits develop in us. That is certainly a simplification of very complex research, but nonetheless very compelling. They have now launched the Human Epigenome Project to try to identify what could be millions of epigenomes influencing genetic development. This is very exciting, and they have already benefited from this kind of research in cancer treatment.

Here is the TV Program Description
Here is the Program Manuscript
Here is the Program Preview
Here are some links and resources
Here is the Wikipedia entry for Epigenetics

http://mhadigital.org/index.php?post_category=podcasts

The following was written by Scott Hafemann for students at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in his class Interpreting the New Testament. It is included in the famed “Beale Packet” which began as a series of handouts that Greg Beale used to give out to students in this class when he was a professor at GCTS. It is now available at Roy Ciampa‘s New Testament Resources site and is a required manual for most students who now take this class at GCTS. In the following, Hafemann assumes his students will be familiar with a method of close reading called “discourse analysis” that helps follow the flow of thought in a given text by tracing the connection of each proposition.

Once we have mastered the various logical relationships that can exist between propositions, we will be able to discover and determine which relationships actually do exist as the author’s argument unfolds. Therefore, our first task in exegesis will be to analyze the discourse by tracing the flow of the argument. Specifically, we will:

• Translate the passage from Greek into a literal English rendering.
• Go through the passage isolating the individual propositions. Remember that each proposition must contain both a subject and a predicate. If you deem it necessary to make a participial or prepositional phrase into a separate proposition, you must either convert the participle into a finite verb or supply one for the prepositional phrase.
• Next, attempt to relate each proposition to what precedes. Indicate your understanding of the argument by selecting a connecting word or phrase, which makes each relationship explicit. Whenever an author supplies such a connecting link (conjunction or phrase), remain faithful to it unless it seems absolutely impossible to do so!
• Finally, outline the argument in the margin by using the bracket method illustrated in class. When you are finished, you should be able to state the main point of the text and all of its supporting points.

But having paraphrased the text, we may be tricked into thinking that we understand what an author is up to (for after all, just to get this far is a major accomplishment!). Actually, we have just begun. We now have something to work with beyond just a vague feeling about the “meaning” of the passage. We now know what our author says, but if this is where we stop, all we have exercised is our memory and a few analytic skills. For in talking about the difference between memory and enlightenment, M.J. Adler writes:

To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case,what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is different, and so forth. This distinction is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it. Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says you know what he means and why he says it. (How to Read a Book, 1972 ed., p.11)

How then do we move from memory to understanding or enlightenment? The answer is simple: ASKING QUESTIONS IS THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING! This does not mean that the exegete has not already asked many, many questions in the process of analyzing the text. Discourse analysis demands that one ask questions of every individual proposition (See the separate hand-out, “Questions to ask yourself in the attempt to determine the logical relationship between propositions”). In the course of discourse analysis, perhaps six of the seven key observational questions will already have been asked (who?, what?, where?, when?, and why?). But even more specifically, all of the questions needed to come to grips with the argument will have been explored.

But now it is time to ask those questions that flow out of the seventh general category, “What is going on here?” In asking, “what is going on here” kinds of questions, we are not concerned with questions of significance (remember the key distinction between the “meaning” and “significance” of a text!). That will come last. At this point we are still working at the exegetical level. All of the questions we must now ask are questions that spring from the text and are to be answered from the same source.

And in asking and answering these questions, never go to a commentator until you have first allowed yourself the privilege of going to the author! And do not listen to gossip without a very suspecting ear. You will be able to tell if your questions and answers come from the text by whether or not they are phrased with and supported by ideas that have concrete expression in the text itself, the relevant historical background, or theological presuppositions used by the author (be careful with this last one, however, that what you think is presupposed is actually there).

“What is going on here” questions are questions that come about because one now understands what the author is saying, but what the author is saying seems to raise problems with what the author is saying! For as Dr. Daniel Fuller has rightly observed:

Whenever someone is imparting understanding, or insight, or a new way of looking at things, he will always say things which seem strange and, at the outset, incoherent with other things that he is saying.

Thus, for example, after analyzing Jesus’ words in Luke 12:1-7 one is troubled by the observation that Jesus commands his disciples to fear and not to fear God at the same time! How is it that Jesus can warn and comfort his “friends” at the same time? And how do Jesus’ words of comfort based on the comparison to the value of the birds hold up in view of the fact that God also throws people into hell? These are questions that flow out of the text and whose answers are essential to really understanding what is going on here! When we are done with our discourse analysis, it will be these “strange…incoherent…things” which will force us to think and understand our author.

Perhaps you are beginning to see how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess. (M.J. Adler, How to Read a Book, p.123)

These are profound words and they are certainly true of the book of books as well! When we come to the Bible, our goal is not to read our old, worn ideas back into the text, but to be brought along to new and deeper understandings of the inspired words of the biblical authors, This means that we will never be happy until we read the Scripture carefully enough to be troubled by what we read and then take the time to formulate our problems into questions to ponder and ultimately solve.

Reading = asking questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading! Here are some general guidelines concerning formulating good questions that I have again taken with his permission from the unpublished work of Dr. Daniel P. Fuller, this time from a paper he wrote in 1977:

• Questions should evince troubledness. Ask questions which show, by the way they are stated and by their nature, that they arose from your being troubled by what you observed in the text as you analyzed its discourse. Experience proves that only when we are faced by a sharply focused question will our answers represent the sort of thinking that is worthy of studying the Holy Scriptures.
• Avoid asking a question whose answer is quite obvious or which makes others feel it is being asked primarily to provide an occasion for bringing out some insight that one thinks a verse or passage contains.
• Avoid vague, strange or abstract language in posing your question. When this kind of language is used, it constitutes evidence that the trouble or uneasiness one feels has not become sufficiently clarified. Remember, you are trying to pinpoint your problem with a question. Work for precision.
• Substantiate your troubledness where necessary, from inferences drawn from the text, not your own theological convictions or Christian experience. Primarily, we want to understand the biblical author better, not each other. Besides, you want everyone to feel your problem; otherwise no one will care about the answer. One of the best ways to both pinpoint a problem and evince to all your feeling of troubledness is to pose a question by asking which of two alternatives (both of which have some plausibility) is true.
• Avoid asking a question that involves some curiosity arising from something incidental to what is said in the text. If you have a hunch that others might think your question is trivial, when in fact it is vital for the way you see the authorÂ’s line of thought, then point out why it is indeed a vital question.

There are also good and bad ways to formulate your answers, either in papers or in the pulpit, or in your own quiet time when asking questions and answering is very important. Here are some criteria to keep in mind for having good answers:

• One part of the answer should be a direct affirmation answering the question. This often should be your first statement.
• Support your answer persuasively by arguments based on the data of the text, and/or some pertinent historical background information, and/or some axiom. Avoid arguing for answers by mere speculation. If we are going to persuade people, then we must base arguments logically on facts, and avoid so-called arguments that consist of speculative plausibility.
• Avoid verbosity in your question and answer. Confine your answer to the conclusion which answers the question and the arguments which support and lead to your conclusion. Many teachers and preachers loose their audience because they cannot keep to the point.

The Question of Significance

Of course, the final step in any exegesis done with an eye toward the Church is to ask “so what?” At this point we are now ready to span the centuries, with some help along the way (do not neglect the great theologians, commentators, and preachers through the ages!), by building the ties between the Bible and us.

Remember that here the key work is “correspondence”! Our significance will only be as good as the meaning upon which it is built and the analogies that bind our two times and problems together. But if we err, we usually do so at the exegetical end! Mining the meaning of the Bible is hard work. As Francis Bacon once said, “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” There is no doubt which category the Scriptures fall into, or that they are worth our effort.

Let us set ourselves to the task with dedication and anticipation. We have much to learn and the Church has much to gain from it.

For reading is learning from one who is absent. If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself when you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking and analysis yourself. (Adler, How to Read a Book, p.15)

1. Define exactly what it is you want to know. This involves categorizing all the concepts in your head. Once you have the concept you are unsure of clearly in your head, then you can begin. Don’t ask a question just for the sake of it.
2. Never ask a question in an aggressive manner that indicates you are only asking the question to prove to the other person that you are right and they are wrong, unless they are wrong and refuse to admit it. Ask because you are genuinely interested.
3. Start off with something simple that lets them know that you are about to state your opinion, but realise it is not complete and you are hoping they can fill in some gaps.
4. Lay your concepts/ideas and assumptions on the table taking care to make sure that the other person is fully aware of exactly what your current thinking is, and why you think it.
5. Pleasantly ask for the gap in your knowledge to be filled, and if appropriate, ask them how they know this and what the general trend is that would short cut path to that knowledge. i.e. no use in asking “is that alive? is that alive?” to everything you see, when the general trend is “if it grows and/or moves independently, then it is. otherwise, you can take it as a given that it is not.”
6. Thank the person. Try and return the favor sometime.

Tips:

• Example: “well, up to now, i’ve always thought that classical music was awful music and not worth listening to. Maybe it’s because all my friends hated it. But if musicians and educated men and women enjoy it, there must be something to it. I know you like it, so can you tell me what there is to appreciate?”
• Incorporate the audience into the question. Invite them in with phrases such as- “did you think about..” or “Have you considered this question…”
• Try and read more so you have substance to what you are actually saying.
• Don’t use huge words. They’ll make you sound pretentious. Just tap into your intellectual but friendly side, and don’t worry too much about coming off as brilliant.

Warning:

Watch out for getting aggressive at the response you get if you don’t like the answers you get. If you’re not willing to receive any and all answers, don’t ask the question. Sometimes a person can answer aggressively to your innocent query. Don’t fret. They just think the question was beneath them, and that you are stupid to ask it. You’re not. They are just bitter and have forgotten what it’s like to search for answers. Basically they think they know everything. You know you don’t. You’re the tortoise. They are the hare.

Joseph Williams’s excellent handbook, Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, rests on two principles: “it is good to write clearly, and anyone can.” He seeks to address these questions:

• What is it in a sentence that makes readers judge it as they do?
• How can we diagnose our own prose to anticipate their judgments?
• How can we revise a sentence so that readers will think better of it?

I’ve reproduced below the main principles found in the book. Of course, you’ll have to get the book itself to see these explained and illustrated.

Ten Principles for Writing Clearly

1. Distinguish real grammatical rules from folklore.
2. Use subjects to name the characters in your story.
3. Use verbs to name their important actions.
4. Open your sentences with familiar units of information.
5. Begin sentences constituting a passage with consistent topic/subjects.
6. Get to the main verb quickly.

• Avoid long introductory phrases and clauses.
• Avoid long abstract subjects.
• Avoid interrupting the subject-verb connection.

7. Push new, complex units of information to the end of the sentence.
8. Be concise:

• Cut meaningless and repeated words and obvious implications.
• Put the meaning of phrases into one or two words.
• Prefer affirmative sentences to negative ones.

9. Control sprawl.

• Don’t tack more than one subordinate clause onto another.
• Extend a sentence with resumptive, summative, and free modifiers.
• Extend a sentence with coordinate structures after verbs.

10. Above all, write to others as you would have others write to you.

Ten Principles for Writing Coherently

1. In your introduction, motivate readers with a problem they care about.
2. Make your point clearly, usually at the end of that introduction.
3. In that point, introduce the important concepts in what follows.
4. Make everything that follows relevant to your point.
5. Make it clear where each part/section begins and ends.
6. Open each part/section with a short introductory segment.
7. Put the point of each part/section at the end of that opening segment.
8. Order parts in a way that makes clear and visible sense to your readers.
9. Begin sentences constituting a passage with consistent topic/subjects.
10. Create cohesive old-new links between sentences.