Monthly Archives: July 2024

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a poem to share

Last week I received a beautiful, thick volume of Victorian poetry, published as a textbook in the 1960s, with excellent editorial notes and a fantastic breadth of coverage. My only complaint about the book is that it inexplicably omits one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I’ve always been under the impression that this was one of his best-known poems, so all I can guess is that either its omission was a mistake or the editor was tired of hearing it. I’m not tired of hearing it, so I’m going to share it with you here. This poem is in the public domain, and I obtained this text from the ever-helpful poets.org. (The accented syllables are meant to receive emphasis. Try reading this poem aloud; it’s even better that way!)

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;	
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells	
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's	
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;	
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:	        
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;	
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,	
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.	
 
Í say móre: the just man justices;	
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;	        
Acts in God's eye what in God’s eye he is—	
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,	
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his	
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
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work/life rhythm and the weirdness of online education

I just wrote an email to my graduate students that turned out to be more eloquent than I had originally intended, and since it deals with topics I write about frequently on this blog, I thought I’d share it here, with a few adjustments for confidentiality. As you might be able to tell, this course is at a Christian college.

Dear students, 

I normally like to make weekly videos for my [this course] students, but here we are, almost halfway into the course, and I haven’t shared one since my introductory video. I won’t be making one this week because my husband and I are on vacation at a family cabin in the woods of western Maryland. There’s no Wi-Fi here, and while my iPhone hotspot worked well enough for me to grade your Module 2 assignments this afternoon, I don’t think I’m going to try uploading a video. So you can picture me sitting at the table in our outdoor kitchen area, with my husband across the table playing a solo board game and the surrounding tall oak and locust trees sighing in the wind. I’m about to close up my laptop and spend the rest of the afternoon reading a good book.

I’m sharing this with you because I want to remind you that I’m a real person, not just a machine who grades your work, and you are too. Online education is weird because we don’t have a designated time and place in which to do it. We take it with us. Perhaps you’ve written a discussion post on your phone while you were in a waiting room. Perhaps, like me, you’ve fit in a bit of schoolwork while enjoying God’s creation in a beautiful place away from where you normally live.

Of course, this is a blessing and a curse. The other side of the coin of flexibility is the absence of any clear boundaries between our schoolwork and the rest of our lives. That’s not necessarily bad if it means that we’re learning to think biblically and intellectually about everything that crosses our paths. Our scholarly pursuits should affect our lives by shaping how we think. But our scholarly pursuits should not dominate our lives, leaving no room for family, community, or rest. So right now, as you start your graduate career, start thinking about how you will create boundaries–or rhythms, if that makes more sense to you–of work and rest, knowing that your classes constitute only one of your responsibilities and only a small part of who you are in God’s eyes.

If my iPhone hotspot holds up, I’ll pop into the discussions later this week. Thank you both for your thought-provoking responses to the prompts and for carrying on the conversation in this tiny class. If there’s anything I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask. I am praying for you!

Sincerely,

Dr. Tess