Too Fond

Philosophy books to grade

It has been a long, long time since I was in Kindergarten, putting a big, red F on a quiz I had made for my grandmother.  Back then, I thought that was what teaching was all about, but then I grew up.  Now, grading is one of my least favorite parts of my job as a teacher, as it is for many if not most teachers.  I do not enjoy the tedium of it, but there is another reason grading is a particular challenge for me.  It takes too long.  Now, you may be thinking, "Just assign less work, smart guy, or create assignments that are easier to grade."  That solution, however, misses the root cause of my problem.  Grading takes a long time for me because I am too fond.

A King and His Priest

In the 1964 film Becket, an adaptation of the 1959 Jean Anouillh play Becket or the Honour of God, King Henry II (Peter O'Toole) falls out with his onetime friend Thomas Becket (Richard Burton), whom he had helped make the Archbishop of Canterbury.  In one of the most famous, although undoubtedly not the first, instances of plausible deniability, Henry muses among his noblemen, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"  The nobles take this as a command from their sovereign and head out to murder Becket in the cathedral.  Yet it is what Henry says immediately after his provocative query that has always struck me as the heart of this story.  Listen closely in the following clip.

Henry is torn between his need to establish his authority and his deep feeling of friendship with Becket.  In his words, he is too fond.  What on earth could be the comparison between this sort of anguish and the challenge to a teacher grading an assignment?  It is just this.  Like Henry, I am torn by the need to do something, namely, to assign a grade, and the feelings of admiration and inspiration that threaten to overwhelm me as I read what students have written.  I am too fond. 

Student Philosophers

In a recent post I wrote of a project that involved my Latin III students.  They had read selections from the writings of the Stoic philosopher Seneca, and upon completion they had to take their reading a step further.  Seneca had written his philosophy in the form of letters to a friend, and these students were asked to write a philosophical epistle of their own.  Additionally, they had to reflect on which of Seneca's epistles had meant the most to them, which had caused them to look at something in a new way or even for the first time, and which contained ideas they were likely to apply in their own lives.  Everything that follows is student authored.  Take the time to read what they wrote, even the longer passages, and as you do, pause to admire what teenaged students can do.  Oh, and have a kind thought for me.  I must do the mundane work of entering grades for their work, but I would far rather sit in fondest wonder as I ponder their words, or better yet, run through the streets, shouting, "Look at these students!  Aren't they amazing?"  

Philosophia Mea

The following are excerpts from what these students wrote, in imitation of Seneca, in the form of a philosophical epistle.

A lot of times you go through life thinking you need someone's permission to do something so simple.  You might think you need permission from yourself.  You probably think that you need to have your life all sorted out or have everything marked off your to-do list before you do something you want.  But go ahead and give yourself the grace to enjoy life a little bit.

To My Dearest (Future!) Daughter,

          Being a girl isn't easy.  Women are so quick to judge other women, just based on what they see externally.  I want you to know that you are perfect just the way you are.  The only opinion about you that matters is your own.  There will be times where you doubt yourself, where you lack self-confidence, where you may have a poor body-image, or where you make mistakes.  But these adversities are all just a part of life that everyone faces at least once.  I myself have struggled with all of these.  My sweet daughter, always remember that "You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think."  Just being you is more than enough, and I will always love and be proud of you!

          With Endless Love,

                                   Mom

Do not live an outward life.  I urge you, my friend, to build a life that can be self-contained.  Do not depend on other people or things, which pass or change with time, but create a place within your soul where you may retreat to find peace and contentment.  I do not say that you must withdraw from the world; on the contrary, you must find joy in as many things as possible.  Suffering, it seems, waits for us everywhere.  Indeed, it is impossible to live a fully joyful life; there is no one, I tell you, who can be joyful in every moment, but you must strive to do so.  The man who ceases in his walking to listen more closely to a bird or look more closely at a flower is a man who lives a full life.  You must be predisposed to contentment.  The man who relies on other people or remarkable events for his daily happiness is like the man who walks out to an island at low tide and does not know how to swim.  He is at the mercy of the tides and can never be certain of his safety or free to travel where he wishes.  Therefore, dearest friend, carry your joy with you everywhere you go, and do not leave it at the mercy of the world.

Be wary of jealousy.  To combat this you must strive for the virtue of gratitude.  But how do you do this?  Aristotle taught virtue is the mean between two vices, so gratitude is the mean between jealousy, which is wanting someone's good thing or fortune for your own, and anhedonia, not wanting good for yourself.  A great way to counter jealousy is to break yourself of your attachments to possessions since they will never truly bring you happiness; human relationship brings true happiness.

I advise you not to allow life's potential stresses to tear you down.  Parcel the tasks so you can better manage them, and you will find that they truly weren't as stressful as you thought them to be.  If you claim not to have time for breaks, know that you are responsible for your own time management, and you should not allow others to take your time away with things that will not allow you to grow your mind.

The Most Meaningful of Seneca's Epistles

Epistle 20 was especially interesting.  One particularly meaningful sentence was, "I advise you this:  that you not be miserable before the time, since those things at which you paled in fear (as if about to happen), perhaps may never come, for they certainly have not come yet."  This was extremely eye-opening, since I often will stress about things that are completely out of my control.  Worrying is just making my life harder and causing me extra harm.

I found epistle thirty-eight very meaningful since in it, Seneca states to use effective words rather than many words.  I found this statement inspiring since I am a pretty introverted person and sometimes get annoyed with myself or others get annoyed with me for not talking a lot when in a social setting.  I think it is very important to state that which has value and meaning rather than just a bund of meaningless words.

I found epistle eighty-eight very meaningful due to Seneca's emphasis on the idea that titles and degrees and other things which are considered "important" in our modern society are not really that important.  What is important is that you are a good person.  I found this epistle especially touching since I am not really wanting to go to college and so many people have told me that I am ruining my life by doing that and am not being smart.

Epistle LII was meaningful to me because as a teenager, I try to look for someone to be an example.  It can be discouraging when it seems like you an't find anyone, but this epistle reminded me that my options aren't limited to those that I know personally.  Ones that came before me can be examples too.

Epistle 38 was meaningful to me because I find myself rambling a lot and many of the words I say are unnecessary.  Seneca says to use few words with greater meaning and this is something I need to work on.

Which Epistle Prompted You To Consider Something New?

In Epistle 44, Seneca talks about how philosophy is above no one.  This is an idea that I have never thought about before.  I have always been intimidated by the idea of philosophical thinking, because I work better in more black-and-white ways of thinking.  I enjoyed the part where Seneca said that philosophy did not receive Plato as a noble man, but Plato was made noble through philosophy.

The idea in epistle 2 about retaining something from what you read to protect the plagues of life is a new concept to me.  I have always know that readings is supposed to teach you a lesson that you can use in your life but I had never thought about it as building a defense against plagues of evil. This concept makes me want to read more so that I can have the best defenses possible.

I believe that Seneca's thoughts on teaching and learning helped me to see those things in a new light.  Seneca talks about really digesting material and truly understanding it as well as focusing on the actual useful and practical things that can help me to be a better person as well as bettering others.

The idea that made me think in a different way was the idea that you lose credibility if you are not willing to act on your words.  I am now going to think my words through and try to back them up with my actions.

Which Piece of Seneca's Advice Might You Apply In Your Life?

The idea that time is the one thing that we are truly in control of is one thing that was discussed in Epistle 1.  He talked about how time is extremely "slippery," as well as how easy it is for us to let other people take our valuable time away from us.  Personally, I have always prided myself on being decent at time management with my school work; however, I have always put that above everything else in my life.  While this has benefited me from an academic standpoint, life is more than school.

One idea I would likely put into practice is the idea discussed in epistle XXVIII, where Seneca suggests that a person should not change their 'climate,' but they should change their spirit.  An example of this is that sometimes I do not want to do my homework.  Even though I know I must do it in order to get good grades, I sometimes feel like giving up on it.  However, instead of thinking about how boring the homework itself is, I like to think about how I will feel once I am done and have gotten a good grade.  This is an example of a person changing their spirit.

One idea that I would put into practice is the idea, in letter seventy-six, of always learning.  Seneca says that learning must go on as long as you do not know something or as long as you live.  I think this one is important to practice in my life because people need to keep learning and growing as much as they can.

An idea I am most likely to put into practice is from epistle 71.  In this epistle Seneca states that you must plan for your whole life rather than just parts of your life.  we must think more of the end goal rather than just one step at a time.  I think about where I am considering going to college.  I must also consider what I will do after college and where it will take me.  What career will I choose?  I must think more of the future rather than just tomorrow.

I would put into practice the ideas of epistle 33.  I have consistently memorized content for tests throughout middle and high school, and forgot all information directly after it is over.  Sometimes, I don't even know or understand the content, rather I memorize the fact for rehearsal on the test.  I need to start fully understanding the content and truly putting it in memory before I have the ability to rehearse it.

Imagination, Education, and Faith

Corpus Hypercubus, Salvador Dali, 1954

Imagine a square on a piece of paper.  Now, imagine stretching that square upward from the surface of the paper.  You would have a cube, right?  Try, if you can, to imagine expanding that cube into four spatial dimensions.  You can't really do it, because we our brains only think in three spatial dimensions (length, width, height), but if you could, you would be imagining a tesseract or a hypercube.  Dali painted one of his crucifixion works showing Christ on a hypercube.  Pretty imaginative, huh?

The Wonder of Imagination

In an age in which I can pull from my pocket a device that allows me both to see and hear a friend halfway around the world as we converse in real time, we may be losing our sense of amazement at imagination itself.  What was, not too many years ago, the province of science fiction is now mundane science.  We can certainly imagine amazing things, and we do on a regular basis, both in the design of products and in our entertainment, but then again, it is not that hard to do so.  We have split the atom and walked on the moon.  We have taken images of far-flung space and helped a 3,000 -year-old mummy speak.  Should it be surprising that we have imagined the Marvel universe onto the silver screen?  To see how amazing human imagination truly is, consider some of what we imagined when we didn't have technological marvels on every corner.

In Book IV of his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid told the story of Venus and Mars.  It was an adulterous affair between the goddess of love and the god of war, and to get revenge, Vulcan, the husband of Venus and blacksmith of the gods, crafted a net of bronze in which to trap them.  Ovid wrote that the strands of the net lumina fallere possent.  They could deceive the human eye.  The net was so finely woven that it would move with the slightest touch and was unlike anything that a weaver or even a spider could spin.  Ovid, writing at the beginning of the first century A.D., imagined this adulterer's trap at a time when it could not have been produced in reality.  There were many excellent craftsman of that day, to be sure, but none that could have crafted what Ovid conceived in his mind.

Or take Lucian of Samosata, the second century A.D. satirist who wrote what some consider the first science fiction novel, A True Story, with its wild plot describing travel to the moon and interstellar war.  Lucian died sometime around 180 A.D., which is a long time before Neil Armstrong or Star Wars.  Such a tale from a time when there was no electricity or telescopes is, well, quite imaginative, and knowing the circumstances in which it was written, we likely experience a little wonder, if not jaw-dropping amazement, at the very act of Lucian's imagination.

The Necessity of Imagination

Imagination is a critical and foundational component of literacy, something I was discussing recently with a former student now at a major university preparing to become an English teacher.  As our Zoom conversation wound its way through many ideas, I recalled the story of one my of homeroom students years ago as he took our statewide assessment.  One part of the test asked the students to write to a prompt that said something like, "You and your class went on trip to a dairy farm.  Write about what happened on that trip."  This young man raised his hand, and when I went to his desk, quietly said, "I didn't go on that trip."  I replied that this was pretend, that he should imagine what it would have been like and to write about that.  He accepted the advice, and as I walked away, I noticed the ankle bracelet that this sophomore was required to wear while on house arrest.

Since he was in my homeroom, which only met once a week, I did not know him well, and I never learned all of his circumstances, but I was shaken deeply that day, and the ripples of that interaction are with me still.  I did not know what had warranted his house arrest, but I did know that he lacked a skill necessary for learning, imagination.  Whether that had anything to do with his legal trouble, I could not say, but it was heartbreaking to think that a high school sophomore did not recognize an imaginative assignment for what it was or, worse still, lacked the capacity to fulfill it.

The Treachery of Images, René Magritte, 1929

Imagination is at the heart of metaphor, and it is possible to see all language as metaphoric.  When I look at an object sitting on my desk and tell a friend, "That is my stapler," I have made a comparison, a reference.  I have uttered the two syllable word "stapler," perhaps even written its five consonants and two vowels on a piece of paper, and have asked my friend to connect those sounds and letters with the object on my desk and think of them as the same.  It is, when you think about it, an extraordinary act of imagination to think that seven distinct shapes on a piece of paper are the same as a metal and plastic, rectangular device capable of puncturing an object with a slender bit of metal and then bending that metal so that what has been punctured by it cannot readily escape from it.  It takes even greater imagination to suppose that an act of exhalation and vocal cord-vibration is equivalent to that metal and plastic, rectangular device.  If such imagination is required for the identification of a simple office item, how much do we need to understand math or physics or poetry?

Imagination's Raw Materials

Much goes into the making of imagination, both in terms of the material by which imagination works and the working of that material into what we call imagination.  In a similar way, a painting is the product both of physical elements such as paint, brushes, and canvas, along with the training and practice and work of the painter.  What, then, are the materials and the working that go into the formation of imagination?  The answers, of course, far exceed what can be explored here, but there are some basics that can be considered.

Experience, along with the realization that things can be other than they are, is one of the key elements of imagination.  When once I have experienced a coffee cup and have come to understand that its shaped may be varied, I can imagine a cup that will ride without spilling in my car, and so is born the travel mug.  One of the best ways for me to expand rapidly my experience of the world is through reading.  My grandmother used to say that she could go anywhere in a book, and she was right.  Faster than in a Star Trek transporter, I can be whisked by a book to any place in the universe and at any point in history, and this is one of the reasons why reading is crucial, especially in early childhood.  Maryanne Wolf, whose background is in neuroscience and psycholinguistics, has written much about this, and the point is quite simple.  Children need to be read to when they are young and need as much experience with reading as they can get once they are able to read for themselves.  I will never forget when one of my students asked if I had read Seamus Heaney's then new translation of Beowulf.  When I said that I had not, he offered to bring it to me when his dad had finished reading it.  As excited as I was to see the new Beowulf, I was more struck by the comment about his father's reading habits.  Reading was clearly a part of this family's life, not only engaged in with and for the children, but by the adults as well, thus modeling the look of literacy for the younger members.

If reading is a source of experience, one of the necessary ingredients for imagination, how is that experience kneaded and worked into imagination itself?  In no small part this happens through imaginative play among children.  When my son was little, we ran around the backyard in endless re-enactments of the Trojan War.  He was always the victorious Achilles, and I the doomed Hector, and there can be no doubt that the imaginative play of his youth, which included adventures with toy knights and kingdoms built of Legos, shaped the imagination that he now uses as an industrial design major.  Whether it is retelling a story through a classroom play complete with cardboard props and costumes cobbled together from the rummage sale to drawing pictures of a favorite story in a notebook, this sort of creative and recreative work is essential for developing the skill of imagining.

Imagining God

St. Anselm (1033-1109) is famous for putting forth his ontological proof for the existence of God.  In Proslogion 2 he says that God is aliquid quo maius nihil cogitari potest, that than which no greater can be imagined.  He is the very limit of our imagination because He is the source of our imagination, and it certainly takes imagination on our part even to attempt to get our minds around how John described the Incarnation in his gospel when he wrote that the Word was God and the Word became flesh and lived among us.  Our word "imagination" is derived from the Latin word imago, which we find in Colossians 1:15 where Jesus is described as the imago Dei, the image of God.  Just a few lines later in verse 19 we read that all the fullness of God dwelled in Him.  Once again, Jesus, Who is God, is the very limit of our imagination.  He is the fullness of God.  He is that than which no greater can be imagined.

Imagination is necessary not only for attempting to grasp theological concepts, but for the living out of our faith as well.  We live in the world of already-but-not-yet.  Christ is already victorious over all things, and yet we await His return and the renewal of all things.  This is why His description in Revelation 4:8 as the One Who was, Who is, and Who is to come, while seemingly illogical, makes sense, but it does take a stretching of our imagination to get there.  What does it mean, then, to live in such a reality?  We are everyday imagining new ways of doing just that.

Why We Read

Much more can be and has been written about imagination, but I want to close by revisiting the idea of reading.  Not only do books quickly broaden our experiences, the raw material of our imagination, but they allow us to see how others imagine.  For most of human history, people have learned skills through apprenticing, by seeing how others have done something, and this applies well to developing our imagination.  When we see how master authors, both of fiction and nonfiction, have imagined the tale they have to tell, we see yet another way for us to imagine our own tale, a way that we can follow or that will inspire us to imagine something new yet again.

Leadership Lessons

Title Page of Samuel Clarke's Latin Iliad (published 1729)

What does it say about an organization or business, a school or a church, a team or a group, when its best people start leaving?  

My second-year Latin students have been reading selections from Samuel Clarke's 1720 Latin translation of the Iliad.  They had previously learned some of the rudiments of Greek and had just finished reading parts of Julius Caesar's account of his war in Gaul.  By diving into a Latin translation of the Iliad, a war poem originally written in Greek, they were able to bring both of those strands together.  Among the many themes and ideas that can be drawn from this roaring adventure story are lessons in leadership.  In fact, the entire epic could be read as a case study in leadership styles, but one key thing leapt out recently as we discussed the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles in Book 1.

Upon learning that the plague in the Greek camp outside Troy had been caused by Agamemnon's capture of a Trojan girl who was the daughter of a priest of Apollo, Agamemnon was persuaded to return her to her father.  He demanded, however, that one of the other Greek soldiers replace his lost war prize with one of their own captured Trojan women.  Achilles found this intolerable, arguing that each warrior had won his spoils of war fairly and should not be forced to give up anything.  Set aside for a moment the moral issue of taking human slaves as war prizes and notice what happened next.  When Agamemnon retaliated against Achilles and his defense of the soldiers' spoils by threatening to taking Achilles's own slave woman, Achilles replied,

νῦν δ᾽ εἶμι Φθίην δ᾽, ἐπεὶ ἦ πολὺ φέρτερόν ἐστιν

οἴκαδ᾽ ἴμεν σὺν νηυσὶ κορωνίσιν....

Nunc itaque abeo in Phthiam: quoniam multo melius est,

Domum ire cum navibus rostratis....

Now, therefore, I leave for Phthia, since it is much better

To go home with my beaked ships....

Achilles was far and away the greatest of the Greek warriors in the Trojan War.  No warrior worthy of the name would leave the fight, but here was Achilles himself willing to pack up and head for home.  It was a question Agamemnon would have to deal with over the course of the Iliad, but it brings up a point that my students and I discussed.  When good, qualified people start to leave, leadership needs to start asking the hard questions of itself.

The most recent in an endless series of articles about teachers leaving education is one in The Wall Street Journal, which talks about companies that are snatching up educators who are, like Achilles, leaving the fight.  Unfortunately, the article makes only one brief reference to "dealing with challenging...administrators" as a cause for the teacher exodus, yet I would argue that it is one of the primary reasons for it.  Several years ago I wrote a piece titled "Bad Administrators Are Killing Education," and little has changed.

To give you an idea of how the leaders of an organization set the tone and influence their employees, consider the following email from my current principal to his staff regarding the cancellation of school for inclement weather.  After laying out the details and discussing what we needed to do with our students, he concluded, "Last, but not least, enjoy your time at home.  God must have thought we needed a break."

You do not need to be a person of any faith at all to recognize the generous humanity in his comment.  And what did that inspire in me?  It made me want to share that generosity of spirit with my students, so when I messaged them about assignments to be completed during our time away from school, I added, "Most importantly, call to mind these words from Roman poet Horace in Ode I.9.1-6.

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum

Soracte nec iam sustineant onus

silvae laborantes geluque

flumina constiterint acuto?

Dissolve frigus ligna super foco

large reponens...

Do you see how Mt. Soracte stands gleaming

With deep snow and the struggling forests

Do not sustain their burden and

The rivers are frozen with sharp ice?

Melt the cold as you place upon the hearth

A large stack of wood...

As I work on other school matters during this snow day and drink a cup of Earl Grey, I cannot help but think that if Agamemnon had been more like my principal, Achilles would have stayed.  I am quite certain that if more building and district level leaders in education followed his model, we would not be facing quite so sharp a crisis in education.

Jesus and Seneca

 

Several years ago, the fifth-year Latin students at the school where I was teaching wanted to read some Roman philosophy, so I suggested Seneca, the 1st century A.D. Stoic.  After they had read some of his works, they insisted that I include him in one of my classes.  They thought his ideas and advice were sound and would be particularly well suited to teenagers.  Since they were teens themselves, I took their word on this last point, pulled together selections from Seneca's 124 philosophical epistles, and put them together in a small volume that would allow students to read some of his best works, record their translations on the pages with the Latin text, and have space to write their own philosophical musings.

My current Latin III students at Guerin Catholic High School have recently been reading and discussing Seneca, and one of them made an interesting connection with something Jesus had said.

Guerin Latin students discussing their translations of Seneca

We also have a Verse of the Week, a Latin verse from the Bible, that we read and discuss each week, and the verse for this particular week was Matthew 6:34, "Nolite ergo solliciti esse in crastinum.  Crastinus enim dies sollicitus erit sibi ipsi:  sufficit diei malitia sua."  "So don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries.  Today's trouble is enough for today."  I commented that this seemed like the kind of thing Seneca would say, and Erin immediately replied, "It's like what he said in Epistle 13 about not worrying because things may not actually happen."  She was referring to the passage in which Seneca had written, "Illud tibi praecipio, ne sis miser ante tempus, cum illa quae velut imminentia expavisti fortasse numquam ventura sint, certe non venerint."  "I advise you this, that you not be miserable before the time, since those things at which you paled in fear as if imminent perhaps may never come, for they certainly have not come yet."

I wish I could write that I expounded upon this meaningfully, that I drew forth from this student's observation further profound insight, but I didn't.  I fumbled some sort of affirming comment and moved on because her keen insight had simply blown me away.  This high school student had made a connection between something Jesus had said and something Seneca had written as effortlessly as other people cite sports statistics or quote song lyrics.  Do not let anyone tell you that young minds are incapable of some of the sharpest and deepest thought.  Do not let anyone say that we must come down to some imagined inferior level when working with them.  That is nonsense.  High school students are more than capable of rich, meaningful engagement with the greatest art, music, poetry, philosophy, and science that we have created.  We do them and the world a disservice, whether by pandering to them with silliness or by burdening them with great quantities of work in misguided attempts to instill rigor into the curriculum.  What is needed is straightforward, deep, and deeply human interaction with the discoveries and achievements of the past as we guide our children to the fullest use of their gifts.