Wedding Pictures

I hope you've all gone to see David's gorgeous pictures on flickr here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10511435@N05/sets/72157614448853870/show/

But if you haven't, here are a few of my absolute favorites.

Things I Probably Won’t Ever Have the Chance to Teach at Youth Group

Part I: CAREer

by Elanor

A couple weeks ago, Mr. Fu, one of the youth counselors, gave a message on finding your career from God’s point of view. He gave a great presentation of the reality of things: of how you don’t have to be so stressed out over finding the “right” career, because, unlike the educational system likes to brainwash students into believing, if you realize you’re doing the wrong thing, you can go do something else. It just takes trust in God’s provision and the willingness to admit you were wrong.

But the best part of his presentation was inadvertent. During his introductory game, Mr. Fu put the word career on the overhead as I have reproduced it in the title. Seeing the mixture of capital and lowercase letters made me immediately think of a brilliantly cheesy lesson about finding your career that no one would ever be able to forget:

Don’t try to find a career. Become a CAREer.

After everyone is done groaning and rolling their eyes (me absolutely included if I were a member of the audience), I would hopefully be able to explain the transformative nature of this idea.

God is passionate about people. He cares about knowing them, about making them the best they can be, and about bringing them into a relationship with Him so that they can become the best they can be. When we go out and try to find a career, we use these questions to figure out what we should do: What do I like doing? What am I good at? What will give me financial security? Where can I make a name for myself?

All of these questions focus the issue on the action I will be performing as my job: building circuit boards, conveying information to high school students, screwing toothpaste caps on toothpaste tubes. The people involved in your occupation are seen only as part of the job atmosphere.

But what if, instead of finding a career I can live with, I try to use my life to become something: I try to become someone who cares. The focus of my job entirely changes. The people become central, instead of the action. In the past six months, I’ve met a couple young women who decided to become nurses, and I think they exemplify this new focus extremely well. The action of changing bandages and cleaning bedpans is not at all appealing—it is basically janitorial work. But they do their jobs in order to care for the people who are sick and need their help.

This is not to say we should all become nurses or teachers. I believe that, no matter what occupation we decide to pursue, there is a chance for us to focus, not on the action of our jobs, but the people we interact with. God wants to change us so that we care about the same things as He does, about the eternal things. My daily exchanges with cashiers, flight attendants, and random people on the street are more eternally significant than performing at my job: my job lasts only as long as I live; the irritable lady in the airport checking in my luggage is everlasting.

Learning vs. Grading

As a first-time graduate student instructor (GSI), I have to take a seminar course on teaching pedagogy. Today's topic of discussion was grading.

I had some serious thoughts about the stuff brought up in class...
1) Asset vs. Holistic Approach to Grades
2) Grade Fixation
3) Idealism vs. Pragmatism

Asset vs. Holistic
This refers to how people conceptualize their grades in their minds. An asset based view is one that believes you earn your grades; in other words, the grade you "get" is earned through the quality of work that you put forth. The holistic view, however, takes the approach that you start off at 100% and work your way down from there. If I haven't revealed it already, I believe in the former and am pretty opposed to the latter.

There's a great article in the NY Times about how today's students are expecting that as long as they do the work, they should get an A, instead of the grade evaluating the actual quality of their work. This is totally ridiculous. I can honestly say that I have never complained about a grade or asked a professor/teacher to move up my grade because I thought I worked hard and deserved it. Now this is of course different from asking why I received a particular grade and understanding how I can improve.

Grade Fixation
This somewhat leads into another discussion about grade fixation. The majority of the students today (me included) are completely fixated on the grades that they receive in class. This has lots to do with the system of education and academia we live in. An A means you can get into a top 20 school, a B means top 100, and a C means local colleges and things not on any list (besides maybe a list of the top party schools in America). It's sad that the education system (as with most things in the human world) is based completely on hierarchy. Students are under so much pressure from parents, worldly fears, and social norms that the grade means everything and education (read: learning) means nothing.

I would have never categorized myself as one who is grade fixated. After all, I never asked to bump up any of my grades, and even committed myself to not doing so when I was dissatisfied with the grade, believing that the class was about more than that. But it was not until I entered a phd program that I realized how subtly grade fixation can creep in. In my sociology phd program, grades mean nothing. One of my professors went so far as to say that in the decades of his academic career, he literally had to show his phd program gpa once. Furthermore, my dean of graduate studies states openly that grading is a formality, and you're essentially assured some kind of A unless you really just don't try at all.

With the pressures of grades completely alleviated in my current situation, I suddenly become far more aware of how everyone (absolutely everyone) is somewhat/somehow grade fixated. We simply can't help it. Just by the very existence of an evaluation (especially in the form of a hierarchial, standardized, and comparison-based system), we are distracted and concerned about it. Learning may not take a fully backseat role to the grade, but certainly we can't ignore the elephant in the room.

And studying with an elephant in the room, is probably not the best learning environment.

Idealism vs. Pragmatism
So if the system is such that grade fixation is rather inevitable (and as much as I hate that word, see Dublin in '92, I would certainly describe the current state of the educational system as deterministically fostering grade fixation), what do we do?

In my pedagogy seminar, the professor discussed how grading everything can often encourage and increase grade fixation and although we should keep a record of the things that will eventually receive a grade (e.g. how often someone participates for a discussion section grade), we should not necessarily divulge this information to the students.

The problem is, this view point goes against what I have so far been doing in my discussion classes. I have pretty much graded everything in the class and have revealed the grades to my students. I have even give out participation grades (with numbers out of 10) to let my students know how they are doing so far. I think my line of logic was that when I was a student, I loved having a clear picture of what grade to expect in my classes and hated getting the "surprise" grade where at the end of the semester, I could get anywhere between a C and an A+! In other words, I liked knowing where I stood.

And herein lies the conflict between idealism and pragmatism. I can empathize with the students. I completely understand their grade fixation. But now, looking back, I can see how grades don't at all (despite popular belief) encourage actual learning. Case in point: my learning habits in graduate school really aren't any different/worse despite not having any grades to worry about.

So the idealistic side of me says that I can attempt to shoo the elephant out of the room by posting grades less and at least try to keep my students focused on learning as opposed to grading. But my pragmatic side says 1) my students are going to be grade fixated regardless, 2) being transparent about their grades enables (some of) them to concentrate more on the material, and 3) I empathize with my students and hate those classes where the grade is always a mystery.

The more I think about it, however, the more I realize that reason 1 doesn't justify encouraging grade fixation. It does, however, mean I shouldn't just completely ignore the elephant in the room. Reason 2 is probably describing a tiny minority of students, and reason 3 is primarily emotive and can be avoided any way through a balance of grading some and not grading others.

So for now, I've decided to stop grading absolutely everything. My students already have an idea of what it takes to do well in the class. They should know my expectations for all their assignments and I'll still be available to talk to them about their grades in office hours. We'll see how the rest of the semester goes...

Lord, let me see the beauty in burnt eggs

broken dishes and unmopped floors

teach me to take pride in B papers

stammered speeches and flubbed arpeggios

when I miss my exit

when my poetry sounds square when nothing

but disapproval meets my eyes

remind me that Perfection

lies at the heart of things,

and let me then rejoice for I am Yours.

- Elanor

Sin and Love

by Elanor

I've been listening to some old hymns redone by Jars of Clay and one in particular struck me as being a perfect encapsulation of the message of the Old Testament. Speaking of Jesus' death it says,

O Love of God, O Sin of man,
In this dread act your strength is tried,
And victory remains with love:
Jesus our Lord is crucified.

As I've been reading through Genesis again, the thing that keeps jumping out at me is the interplay between God and humanity. The pattern goes like this: man sins, God blesses man, man sins, God shows mercy, man sins, God relentlessly keeps on loving and pursuing man.

This pattern helps make so much sense of a lot of the moral ambiguity that I used to believe was in the Bible. I remember at Ravencrest having a debate during class over whether or not God approved of what Jacob did when he deceived his father and stole his older brother's blessing. We know from elsewhere in the Bible that God does not approve of lying. In fact, He counts lying as a sin. But are there extenuating circumstances?

Directly after the account of Jacob lying to his father, he is sent from his home and God appears to him in a dream. Not only does Jacob remain unreprimanded for his deception, God says this: "I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie, I will give it to you and to your descendants. Your descendants will also be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and in you and in your descendants shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you" (Gen. 28:13-15).

I have heard it said that God overlooked Jacob's lie because Jacob wanted to be part of God's plan, whereas Esau didn't really care. (A similar thing is said of Rahab, who lies to protect the Israelite spies in Jericho: she did it for God, so that made it ok.) But what if God does not "overlook" the lie in that He says it's not morally wrong this time, what if God deliberately reacts to Jacob's overt sin, not with judgment, but with blessing?

I said in the previous post that God’s covenant with Noah after the flood was the first of a long series of incidences where God counters man’s evil with mercy. That is the pattern that I see throughout the book of Genesis, and throughout the entire Old Testament. I suppose that is the pattern I will be tracing with these posts. My dad wrote recently on his xanga that we are all part of an unseen battle between good and evil; I want to say that it is a battle between God’s love and our sin.

Usually in a battle, you have two opposing sides using the same kind of weaponry: swords, cannons, nuclear bombs, etc. The thing about this battle is that the two sides have completely opposite modes of assault: sin breaks relationships and drives people apart, whereas love creates relationships and brings people together. Throughout all of history, people have been trying, unknowingly perhaps, to push God away. They want nothing to do with Him, they want to govern their own lives without His interference. They ignore His laws, tear down His temples, and spit in His face so that perhaps He might eventually leave Him alone. But God was not to be deterred; He pursued even to the point of death, and, dying, won: even death could not separate Him from the ones He loves.

When I was in Sunday School, we were taught to see the Bible as a morality lesson, full of godly men whom we were supposed to emulate in obedience and piety. As I read the Bible now, I see that it does not talk about godly men. It tells stories of sinners, and the only godly one is God Himself, as he “turns the other cheek” over and over again, trying to win the battle against humanity so that He can win us back to Himself.

Purpose

By Edwin

I have been thinking lately a lot about purpose. Not only has it been the subject of the last two weeks of sermons, but also because I'm hitting an important stage in my "career path".

This semester, I'm taking three sociology classes, one teaching pedagogy seminar, GSIing (teaching) a world history course, and planning on finishing my MA (masters) thesis. It's... well, a lot to tackle in one semester. So whenever I find myself more or less moving from one thing to the next (being uber busy), I do a quick check to see if my priorities are in line and to make sure that everything I'm doing has meaning. After all, if time becomes a scarce resource, I better be using it efficiently =P.

But this time around, reflecting on purpose in the things I'm doing has been rather complicated. I think one of the main complications I am running into is that being a graduate student is like dating: you're not just friends, and you're not married yet either; you're "in process." Graduate students aren't really just students, but we're not employed to be students either. It's a weird medium that is truly throwing me off here.

As a student, I know that the purpose of my classes is to prepare me for the future. But a PhD program isn't really quite like a regular student program. For starters, I'm expected to be trained to become a professor/academic. This means the system tends to push you towards a specific career goal, which entails lots of publishing, reading, and networking for the sake of your future job. Also, the classes are structured so that you hold yourself responsible for completing the readings, assignments, and essays; you pretty much can't get lower than an A- in any class unless you really just don't try. So you truly make the program whatever you want it to be. You can take lots of classes, or the bare minimum. You can work a lot as a graduate student assistant, as a researcher, as a teacher, or not at all. You can aim to publish a lot, or literally not at all. But despite all this supposed freedom, the system, and all the people in it, are moving in one direction: to train you to become a stellar, publishing, research-based professor.

As an employee, I know that the purpose of my work is to provide for my family and to fulfill my calling/passion (to "rule" over my work and reflect God in what He has entrusted me with). Although this is definitely true in my GSIing (teaching), it gets complicated if applied to my status as a graduate student (which I am arguably being paid to be through fellowship money from the university). My "job" is to learn, and because the system is geared for a particular type of training, my "work" then is to become what the system wants to make of me... and that certainly doesn't sit well with me.

Although I haven't quite decided yet whether or not I'll finish my program and whether or not I want to be a full-fledged academic professor, I have decided that I'm not interested in knowledge for knowledge sake. A big part of academia is building upon previous knowledge, theories, and findings. In my time here at Berkeley, I've realized that the simple progression of knowledge is of absolutely no interest to me.

Instead, I am here because I want to make a difference in the lives of real people. For me, that is what it's always been about from the beginning, and this past week, I was reminded of that. Whether it is through teaching college students, mentoring youth, publishing important action-changing findings, or writing my thoughts out for others to read, it has always been about learning what I can do to help others... learning what I can do to love others.

Through talking with Elanor and a few others, it's slowly becoming clear that I shouldn't just follow the ways of the system, even if I am sort of paid to be a student, that doesn't mean that I work for the system and that certainly doesn't mean that I should become a product of it either. Instead, as I spend the next year or so tracing out my career path, I'll focus not on being a student or an employee, but just being a person, or more specifically, a follower of Christ. And as a follower, I know exactly what my purpose is...