Tag Archives: writing

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teaching as an act of care

I just reread my post from February in which I promised to post more often, beginning with a version of a conference presentation I gave in January. I’m embarrassed that it’s July and I haven’t shared that post. Instead of rewriting the presentation into an essay, I’ve decided to share an outline of my talking points. I hope you find something relevant in it, regardless of your calling.

The title of the presentation was Love in Action, and its purpose was to remind us (myself and fellow Christian university faculty) of the value of caring work and to identify ways in which teaching is caring work. I began with the following reasons why the topic is important:

1. AI has made “am I talking to a real person?” a crucial question.

    2. Students are intimidated by their professors.

    3. Students who feel safe are more willing to take intellectual risks.

    4. Most importantly, if we take our calling as Christian faculty seriously, our work is a ministry.

    These claims were based mainly on the following sources:

    •Anecdotal evidence based on ten years of teaching online “full-time” (and a lot of course evaluations to back me up!)

    •Books on Christian love in action: Real Love for Real Life by Andi Ashworth and Making Room by Christine Pohl

    •Findings from a doctoral research project by Nat Mercer (my colleague at Grace Christian University)

    This quote from Ashworth was foundational to my thinking on this topic: “Hospitality can also mean sitting with another person over coffee, showing an interest in who they are” (p. 71, emphasis mine). I asked my audience, “Can this happen in a virtual setting as well?”

    The remainder of my presentation was set up as a series of real or perceived contrasts.

    Contrast 1: Important work vs. recognized work: Crucial work can be done in secret, as we see in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. While it is valuable for faculty members to be able to articulate the work we do, not all tasks are easily trackable.

    • Principle: Work doesn’t have to be financially compensated to be important, and there is value in doing work that isn’t formally rewarded.
    • Caveat: This shouldn’t be used as excuse not to fairly compensate people for their work.
    • For example, as an adjunct working on a contract basis, I get paid for teaching my courses. At a bare minimum, that means giving feedback on assignments and recording grades. But is meeting with students who want to talk about their career future also teaching? What about writing recommendation letters? What about reading a book I’ll later recommend to a student? (I think the answer to these questions is “yes”!)

    Contrast 2: Creative work vs. busy work: “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” –David Allen, Getting Things Done

    Allowing space for creativity is related to allowing space for serving others.

    Overcommitted faculty have less capacity to notice others’ needs and create ways to serve them.

    Principle: Caring takes creativity.

    Contrast 3: Students: problems or people?

    I know I need a “heart check” when I start thinking of my students as problems, annoyances, or tasks to deal with.

    Practical ways to remind myself that my students are people: praying for them by name, offering/saying yes to phone/Teams conversations

    Principle: If we want our students to think of us as real people and not just machines that grade their work, we also owe it to them to view them as people.

    Contrast 4: Rigorous vs. relational (which turns out not to be a contrast after all)

    Attachment theory posits that people with “a secure base from which to explore the world” are more willing to take healthy risks.

    Nat’s research on academic rigor and faith integration: “the impact of the expression of grace and mercy by professors and the way students persist as a result of these values”—Nat Mercer, email communication, 1/6/2026

    Principle: Being kind and caring toward our students does not mean compromising academic rigor.

    Contrast 5: Transactional vs. self-giving

    I read the poem “Those Winter Sundays,” by Robert Hayden, which gives a concrete picture of self-giving love. I also cited the research on servant leadership by Robert Greenleaf.

    Biblical servanthood is not reciprocal—Jesus didn’t sit down and ask his followers to wash his feet, nor did he resent them for not doing so. But he did tell them to do the same for each other!

    Principle: Teaching can be incredibly rewarding, but even when it isn’t, God calls us to keep giving.

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    Sunrise over the Sea of Tiberias

    Dear readers,

    I was honored to receive first place in the Fiction Short Story category of this year’s Cascade Writing Contest, sponsored by the Cascade Christian Writers organization. Since the piece is not published anywhere and I entered the contest simply for the fun of participating, I am sharing the story below. For my fellow writers who may be interested in entering next year’s contest or learning more about CCW, here’s their website: https://cascadechristianwriters.org/

    And here’s the story:

    I don’t regret what I said the day Jesus decided to go to Bethany and see about Lazarus. None of us thought he should be going so near Jerusalem. Some of us whispered of conspiracies and the jealousy of the powerful; others outright confronted Jesus and said he was being reckless. But Jesus had made up his mind. We could see it in the set of his jaw, in the determined gleam in his eyes. And I wasn’t going to let him go by himself.

    It was like Peter had said that one time— “Where else would we go?”

    So I figured I was speaking for the whole group when I said, as we set out on the road, “Let’s go then, and die with him.”

    And for some reason, everyone burst out laughing when I said that. I knew they agreed with me, but apparently, I had a tone in my voice. They quoted me in an exaggeratedly morose voice: “Let’s go diieee with him.” I think we were all scared, so the others were compensating by laughing about something that wasn’t funny. I glared at them and marched ahead, and that just made them laugh more.

    Jesus jogged up to me and smiled. “Thanks, Thomas.” He gripped my arm. “I appreciate you.”

    I scowled—there was no point in hiding how I felt. “We don’t think you should be going anywhere near Jerusalem.”

    “I know,” he said.

    “But—” I sighed. “If you’re going, then I’m going with you. We all are, as you can see.” I turned around and gestured at the rest of the disciples, who were still laughing and cutting up.

    Jesus waved at them, then turned back to me and grinned. “I’m very thankful,” he said. “For all of you.”

    Jesus was always saying things like that.

    He turned out to be right about everything, of course. It turned out that Lazarus had already been dead for days when we got to Bethany. You could smell the body through the stone covering the grave. But Jesus just walked up to the tomb and told the man to come out. And he did.

    This offended some powerful people among the religious elite, since only God is supposed to be able to do that sort of thing, and they started plotting to kill Jesus. (So we were also not wrong about the whole Jerusalem thing, I just want to point out.) Jesus slipped off to this little middle-of-nowhere town called Ephraim—with us tagging along, as usual—and evaded his enemies. At least for a while.

    ***

    Trying to stop Jesus from going to Jerusalem was like trying to stop the flow of the Jordan River with your own hands. So we found ourselves back in Jerusalem for Passover. The twelve of us celebrated the feast in an upper room of a stranger’s house, which gave us a bit of privacy even though Jesus was the most famous man in town at this point. That was the night he washed our feet, which is probably the strangest and most meaningful thing that has ever happened to me, including everything that happened afterward.

    Jesus talked a lot that night. For hours after the meal, he talked to us about his Father, about the Helper (a shadowy figure to us at that point), about love, joy, peace, death—everything, it felt like. He kept talking about how he was going to go away. He said he was coming back for us, but I didn’t want to let him out of my sight.

    At one point he said, “You know the way to where I am going.”

    But I just didn’t see how that could be true. So I blurted out, “How can we know the way if we don’t even know where you’re going?”

    Then Jesus looked at me, and there was a smile on his lips but sadness in his eyes. This is what he said: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

    It’s a philosophical marvel, that statement, a brilliant and succinct summary of Jesus’ identity. John showed me later that he’d written it down immediately, word for word, on a little piece of pottery he was carrying around in his pocket.

    But this is what I heard—what I felt Jesus saying to me: “Thomas, I know you want to know all the details. I know you want a map. But I just want you to follow me.”

    And there was nothing I could say to that. Because, of course, Jesus is the map—and the road, and the companion who walks beside you along the road. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

    ***

    Jesus died the next day. And even though he had warned us, done everything he could to prepare us, we were devastated. We all just ran away. What were we supposed to do, without him there to show us?

    I went and stayed with my twin brother for a few days. He thought I was crazy for following Jesus, but he didn’t say that, this time; he just let me be quiet and think.

    Then I went back and found the other disciples. They were all in an uproar, claiming they’d seen Jesus alive. And I don’t know why, if it was my brother’s influence or just because it hurt too much to hope. But I convinced myself that they were making it up. They kept arguing with me, but I wasn’t having it.

    “Fine,” I said. I was mad. “You show him to me. I want to see where they hammered the nails in his hands. I want to stick my finger in the holes. I want to see where they drove the sword in his side.”

    “But Thomas,” Andrew said, “we don’t know where he went.”

    And that struck me right in the chest. Jesus had promised we would know where he was going. He’d said he was going to show us the way. But the map was gone, and I was utterly lost.

    I breathed out and shook my head. “Then I don’t believe you.” And I walked out of the room and slammed the door.

    ***

    I came back, of course. These were my friends. But I didn’t have to participate in their nonsense. I sat in the corner, and I tried to harden my heart.

    We stayed in that house for days, afraid the Sanhedrin were out to get us after what happened with Jesus. People kept trickling in and telling us stories of encounters with Jesus. Cleopas and his wife said they’d walked with Jesus for three hours on the road to their house in Emmaus, sat down and started having dinner with him—all before they realized who it was. Then right after he revealed himself to them, he disappeared.

    I was still angry, but I missed Jesus. I tried to picture him walking into the room, but it was always very clearly just my imagination.

    Until he actually walked into the room. Straight through a locked door, as a matter of fact. But he wasn’t a ghost; he was Jesus, with the scruffy beard and the calloused hands and everything. “Peace be with you,” he said. And then he said my name.

    I stood up, and everybody turned around and stared at me. I felt the way I had on the road to Bethany, like I was the odd one out. Jesus held up his hands. “You said you wanted to see the scars.”

    I didn’t move. “Thomas,” Jesus said. “Stop trying to make yourself doubt.” Then he looked at me the same way he had when he’d said that thing about the map.

    And I couldn’t help it. I believed him. And then I did everything at once—I grabbed his hands. I touched the scars. I cried. I hugged him. I shouted, “My Lord and my God!” I saw him and believed. And although Jesus went off on his own again that night, I would see him one more time before he went back to his Father.

    ***

    The sun was just starting to rise over the Sea of Tiberias. An orange glow crossed by thin dark clouds. The air was still chilly.

    Some of us had gone fishing overnight. It had been Peter’s idea; he’d said he wanted to do something with his hands.

    “But we’re not fishermen anymore,” Andrew had pointed out.

    “What are we, then?” Peter had argued. That had silenced Andrew. “Besides, we’re not going to sell them,” Peter had said. “I just want to do something.”

    Not all of us were trained as fishermen, but those who were gave us things to do, to keep us busy. We sat in the boat all night, quiet in the dark, as if the past week had drained all the stories out of us.

    As the sun began to rise, we headed back to shore. A silhouette of a man was standing there. I shivered. He called out: “I guess you guys didn’t catch any fish?”

    I thought I recognized the man’s voice, but I didn’t want to say it. I glanced at the others.

    “No,” Peter called out. He didn’t sound irritated, just tired.

    The man called back: “Let down your net on the right side of the boat. I think you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

    Someone gasped. I saw John smile and nod. “Do it,” said Peter. And of course, we did. I hadn’t been there three years ago, the first time this had happened, but I’d heard the story dozens of times.

    Immediately, the net was full of fish. This was not a surprise—again we all knew what to expect—but it still took my breath away. I paused to gasp some air into my lungs. “Grab the net!” James hollered. I did. But even with all of us pulling, we couldn’t get the net into the boat.

    “Drag it in,” said Peter. “I’m going to talk to Jesus.” He took off his coat and jumped into the chilly water.

    The orange glow was spreading up from the horizon. James and John got us into the little boat so we could pull the net into shore without having to weigh anchor. My job was to hold onto the net for dear life.

    When we got to shore, there was a small coal fire with bread toasting over it. Just when I realized I was hungry, the man raised his head from the deep consultation he had been in with Peter and smiled. It was unmistakably Jesus. There was a moment when I forgot he had been dead a week before. I remembered when he pushed his hair off his forehead and I saw the ugly scar in his hand. “I’m making breakfast for us,” he said. “Hand me a couple of those fish.”

    I grabbed two of the fish from the teeming pile. They were cold, and a ray of sun shone off their silver scales. I placed them in Jesus’ hands, which were warm from the fire. “Thank you,” he said, looking in my eyes, and it sounded like a blessing. I didn’t know what to say, and Peter looked eager to continue their talk, so I turned back toward the net.

    “We should count these,” I said.

    “Why?” Nathanael frowned. “We’re not going to sell them.”

    “Someone will want to record the number.” I gestured toward the others. At least two of them had been writing down their experiences with Jesus. I was just trying to make sense of it all in my head.

    “Is the number important?” Nathanael looked at the net. It was just a small one, not a big commercial net like I’d seen some of the fancier-looking fleets have. But it was bursting, a multitude of fish now glowing with the fire of the mostly risen sun.

    I shrugged, already spreading out a canvas for them to dry. “Anything might be important.”

    So we counted them. As Peter remained in hushed conversation with Jesus, who listened carefully as he turned the fish over the fire, as James and John mended a net just on the edge of their discussion, as Andrew walked the beach alone, picking up driftwood for the fire, Nathanael helped me count the fish. There were 153.

    The sun had fully risen when Jesus said, “Breakfast is ready.” He broke the bread and passed it around. He winced when he burned his fingers on the fish as he divided it up. The skin of the fish was salty and crispy and the flesh flaky. And I didn’t know if it was because God had cooked this fish or because Jesus of Nazareth just had a lot of practice preparing food in the open air, but it was perhaps the best fish I had ever eaten. The bread, too, was perfect—soft on the inside with a faint char on the outside—and this surprised me not at all.

    Jesus looked out to sea, toward the sun in its strength. Then he looked back to us, casting his gaze around the circle, where we all sat licking our fingers. “Remember,” he said. “You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth. You are the fishers of men.” He smiled. “But you are shepherds now, too. As I just told Peter, I am sending you to feed my sheep.”

    Peter ducked his head and gave a grin that looked uncharacteristically shy. I thought about how Jesus had called himself the good shepherd. Now he was asking us to be the same.

    And then Jesus looked at me. “I’m going to prepare a place for you,” he said.

    I smiled. “I won’t lose the map.”

    “You won’t,” he agreed.

    ***

    Those are just a few examples of the things Jesus said and did—the ones that stuck with me the most. John said that if you tried to write down everything Jesus did, the whole world wouldn’t be able to hold the books, and while I’m not sure how to picture that, practically speaking, I think I understand what he’s getting at.        

    Jesus went back to be with his Father shortly after that morning on the beach, but he’s never left me or forsaken me. And I’m still following the map.

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    coming soon–more posts

    Hi everyone,

    If you’re still here, thanks for being a loyal supporter of my blog. I started it in 2011 (as penelopeclearwater.wordpress.com) as a place to post a couple of book reviews so I could get free copies of the books. Over the years, I’ve written about all manner of topics–most recently, focusing on online teaching and learning–but recently (as you may have noticed) my posting frequency has fizzled out, with 2025 having the dubious distinction of being the blog’s least active year ever.

    There are good reasons why I haven’t been posting as much–life events have led to a great desire for privacy and less time for writing. Simultaneously, though, I’ve been sensing an invitation to get back into some creative activities I’ve enjoyed in past years, as well as trying some new ones. These have included activities from cross-stitch (an old hobby) to crocheting (a new and challenging one) to making Christmas cards (a new and delightful one) to making origami birds (a fun one-off project I enjoyed on one winter evening). I’m also slowly getting back into writing more than just emails and grading feedback. I’ve been writing a haiku prayer every Wednesday for almost a year now, and just this past month I finished and polished up a short story to enter into a contest. And this leads me back to my blog. I want to start posting regularly again, even if “regularly” at first means just quarterly.

    Right now, I’m working on turning a conference presentation I made last month into a post, so you can expect that soon. But for now, I just wanted to say thank you and let you know that I’m still here!

    Sincerely,

    Tess

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    Searching into the Inimitable: A Guide to Research on Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens sometimes referred to himself in correspondence as “The Inimitable,” and while it’s unclear whether this was meant to be straightforwardly hubristic or cheekily self-deprecating (knowing Dickens, it was probably both), the phrase has proven to be prescient. Dickens was an astonishingly prolific writer of journalism, fiction, letters, and plays; a mesmerizing performer of his own work; a passionate social critic, and the creator of some of the most memorable characters in the English language. So perhaps it goes without saying that the field open to the Dickens-focused researcher is deep and broad. Here is a guide to get you started.

    Primary sources: Dickens wrote fourteen full-length novels (plus a good portion of an unfinished fifteenth, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which has spawned a cottage industry of potential endings), five Christmas novellas, many short stories and journalistic pieces (some comical, some melodramatic, some addressing social issues of his day), several theatrical works written for himself and his circle of friends to perform (Dickens was a talented actor who almost pursued a career on stage), and countless letters (including manuscript critiques from his time as a journal editor). Some of Dickens’ working journals, in which he outlined his novels and jotted down queries to ponder, also survive, along with extensive reworkings of his novels and stories that he created for his public readings. To borrow a line from Hamilton, Dickens wrote like he was running out of time. No Dickens researcher should feel obligated to read every word he wrote, but neither should any Dickens researcher attempt to write about him without making acquaintance with his work.

    Other people’s reactions to Dickens are an important category of primary sources as well, including contemporary reviews of his works and accounts of his (literally?) mesmerizing performances at his public readings. You can find many of these quoted in secondary sources, but also check out historical periodicals databases, such as ProQuest’s British Periodicals Collection.

    Contextual sources: Dickens undoubtedly helped to shape the Victorian period (the era spanning Queen Victoria’s reign, 1837-1903), but it also shaped him. Perhaps even more so, Dickens was marked by his childhood in the late Georgian period, which still contained elements of a pre-industrial “old England.” While Dickens’ works and especially his characters are often called “timeless,” he was a man of his time, and no serious Dickens researcher should ignore the historical and cultural contexts of his work. One of the best places on the internet to begin learning about 19th-century England is the Victorian Web (victorianweb.org), a massive, well-maintained site that combines contributions from scholars and readers around the world. (It also contains some articles about the pre-Victorian context of Dickens’ early years.) It’s also a good idea to read writings by and about Dickens’ contemporaries, some of whom were his close comrades and collaborators (Wilkie Collins) and others who were at times closer to frenemies (William Thackeray).

    Scholarly works: Though in his own day, Dickens was sometimes dismissed as merely a popular entertainer, it didn’t take long for scholarly literary criticism to latch onto him. You can find scholarly monographs on Dickens through the lens of crime, the theater, the city of London, and many other topics. There are also many good biographies of Dickens, and while all will give you the same basic facts, each of the best ones has its own angle that makes it worth reading. (As one example, take Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens, which includes a number of interludes that imagine Dickens as a character in his own novels.) Dickens scholarship is regularly published in journals such as Victorian Studies and Dickens Quarterly, the official publication of the Dickens Society.

    Fan productions: Not everyone who is a devoted reader and careful observer of Dickens is a scholar with a PhD and access to channels of peer-reviewed publication, and thus researchers should not ignore the productions of fans. While the word “fan” itself might be anachronistic in the context of Dickens, the phenomenon of fandom is not; Dickens’ serial novels had people lining up outside booksellers eager to get their hands on the next installment, and his public appearances (especially during his 1842 American tour and his famous readings later in life) filled auditoriums with people desperate to get a glimpse of him. Dickens’ fans range from prominent 20th-century writers such as G. K. Chesterton (who also wrote some “legitimate” scholarly work on Dickens) to the contributors on the Charles Dickens thread on fanfiction.net (there are quite a few). While the world of fan-produced writing is a bit of a Wild West, requiring the researcher to apply non-traditional methods of assessing credibility, research in this realm can yield exciting results.

    Adaptations: Dickens may be the most adapted writer of all time. People were adapting his work even before he finished writing his first novel—the loose (indeed, almost non-existent) copyright laws of the time, and the fact that Dickens published his novels in serial, allowed unscrupulous publishers and low-brow theater impresarios (not that Dickens had anything against low-brow theater as such) to come out with speculative endings to his works before Dickens himself had a chance to finish the stories. The tradition of adapting Dickens’ work for the page (see recent novels such as Drood and Death and Mr. Pickwick), the stage, and eventually the screen has continued, and the various interpretations of his characters and stories can provide the researcher with nuanced insights. Besides that, many of them are purely fun to read or watch. Dickens’ works, with their visually abundant settings and the exaggerated mannerisms of many of the characters, lend themselves particularly well to theater and film.

    This brief guide has barely begun to plumb the depths of knowledge available to the Dickens researcher. May it introduce you to a lifelong friend.

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    book recommendation: Mariner

    I’ve just finished what will probably turn out to be my favorite book read in 2024. (I think it’s safe to make that prediction in mid-November.) I chose Malcolm Guite’s Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a possible book club option for the arts-focused life group we’re starting at church. I was excited about both the author and the subject matter. Malcolm Guite is a poet, scholar, rock band member, and Anglican priest. I’ve heard him read his own poetry in person and speak on some podcasts, and I like what he has to say (and his gravelly British voice) a lot. And of course, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the leaders of the English Romantic movement, both a brilliant Christian philosopher and a renowned poet, known especially for the haunting ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

    Guite’s book is both literary criticism and biography–an insightful analysis of the Rime and its famous gloss (explanatory notes Coleridge added later in his life), and a careful demonstration of how the text interweaves with the narrative of Coleridge’s own life, especially his tragic descent into opium addiction and eventual recovery. Even if you aren’t a poetry fan or don’t know anything about the English Romantics, you will enjoy this book if you believe nature speaks to us about God, if you like ghost stories and/or seafaring tales, or if you appreciate a great redemption story. You will be captivated both by Guite’s clear, beautiful prose and by Coleridge’s scintillating verse (quoted amply throughout the book–you don’t need to know it ahead of time) and fascinating letters and journals. It’s rare that I read a nonfiction book that I wished wouldn’t end, but this was one of them.

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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

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    what my online students can expect from me, part 3: constructive challenge

    This is the last post in a series on expectations in online education. You can read the previous post here.

    You can expect me to gently challenge your thinking. I struggled with whether to share this one because it sounds more lofty than it actually is. I am not Mr. Keating from Dead Poet’s Society; I don’t spend much time exhorting students to seize the day and question the conventional assumptions on which they’ve based their lives. But I do often find myself writing comments along the lines of “I encourage you to keep an open mind as you research this topic” (to students who already know what their thesis is going to be before they start their research) or “Maybe challenge yourself by writing in a genre you’re not used to writing in” or simply (to students who make a confident assertion without proof) “I am not sure this is true.” Sometimes it’s hard for me to challenge students’ thinking because I want them to like me, and I’m afraid that if I appear to disagree with them, they won’t listen to anything I have to say. But most of the time, if I receive feedback from students who have gotten these kinds of comments from me, they are appreciative.

    “Critical thinking” is one of those things we all know we’re supposed to integrate into our teaching, but I would venture to say that many of us don’t have a clear idea of what this would actually look like in our own disciplines. I don’t think teaching students to think critically means we have to wield like weapons the Latin names of all the classical logical fallacies. Maybe it just means asking good questions and encouraging students to think about why they’re making the choices they’re making. And sometimes, I find out that what I thought was an error was actually a deliberate choice on a student’s part, and I was the one misunderstanding their meaning. So this is an expectation that can work both ways!

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    what my online students can expect from me, part 2: appropriate grading feedback

    This is the latest post in a series about expectations in online education. You can read the previous post here.

    You can expect me to give you grading feedback in an amount and kind appropriate to the assignment. I use the word “appropriate” instead of “substantial,” a term greatly emphasized at one of my institutions in relation to grading feedback, because I don’t think all assignments require substantial feedback. For example, when I am grading students’ participation in a peer review discussion, it’s probably enough for me to say, “Thank you for your participation.” When I’m grading a topic proposal, I might record a three-minute video giving the student guidance on narrowing down the topic and starting to look for sources, but I probably won’t launch into a nitpicky critique of their APA format. However, when I’m grading a final/summative paper, I will give feedback on all areas of the assignment–content, organization, research, mechanics, and documentation–and my comments will likely consist of several sentences each. But still, there will be issues I overlook (intentionally or not), because my goal is to give students useful suggestions for improving their writing, not to discourage them by making the paper illegible with overlapping marginal comments on every sentence (the digital equivalent of a paper bled through with a red pen). I know from personal experience how discouraging this can be!

    I hasten to admit that I’m not perfect at this. I often worry about whether I’m giving enough grading feedback, whether my comments make sense, and whether I got the tone right. And there are definitely times, usually when I’m on vacation or just really not feeling like grading, when I give a completion grade on an assignment that I probably should have taken the time to carefully assess using the rubric. But I think I largely succeed at my goal of making the overall message of my grading not “Here’s what you did wrong” (though I realize some students will still read it that way) but “Here are some things you can consider doing differently next time.”

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    what my online students can expect from me, part 1: collegial communication

    Last week, I wrote about the top three expectations I have for my online students. Now, I’m going to write a few posts focused on things my students can expect from me. I’m choosing to write these posts exclusively in the first person because I think it’s more difficult to make safe generalizations in this area as compared to the area of my last post. But I’d love to hear from other online faculty members–are your expectations similar?

    You can expect me to reply to your communication and not be annoyed about it. First, I want to clarify what this does not mean. It does not mean I’ll reply to your emails, text messages, or voicemails (I do sometimes get those!) immediately. I go to bed pretty early, and I put my phone in sleep mode when I do. Another rather countercultural practice I have, which I believe has done wonders for my mental health, is that I do not receive email notifications on my phone. I sit down to check email, usually on my computer, at designated times when I’m ready to focus on email. So this may mean that, especially on weekends, a student may go 24 hours, or slightly more, without receiving a reply from me. But here’s what this expectation does mean: When I respond to your message, I’m going to read it carefully and give you a substantial answer. (And yes, I may occasionally say, “Go look at p. 24 in the APA guide” or something similar, but I won’t be snarky about it.) I’m not going to be annoyed at you because, as I explained in my post last week, email and other personal communication forums are where I do some of my best work. In fact, right now I have a student who’s been sending me some fairly lengthy emails a couple times a week–sometimes to ask questions, other times to say she appreciated something I said in a video, etc.–but I’m not irritated at her, because our email exchange is allowing us to build a collegial relationship. Also, it helps that when she doesn’t expect a reply to one of her messages, she will actually say that in the subject line.

    I’m always baffled when students are profusely grateful that I responded to their emails, when to me this seems like a bare minimum expectation. Apparently, some professors aren’t doing this, or they’re giving their students the impression they’d rather not. I’m thankful for this simple practice that allows me to tailor my instruction to individual students, build relationships, and get good course evaluations in the process. 😉