During the surprisingly painless Sunday school lesson on the Family Proclamation a couple months ago, someone in my ward mentioned a class the Logan Institute of Religion had done for LGBTQ+ allies, and said they were going to do it again. So I sought it out and signed up. It's not a standard class, but rather a seminar that started partway through the semester and is held once a week. It's had three meetings so far. They're an hour and a half each, but unfortunately I can only stay for about fifty minutes because of a time conflict. They're led by Brother Diamond, who's also in my stake presidency, and I've heard him talk about LGBTQ+ things before when he taught a class about all the controversial things. I didn't know what to expect from this seminar but just knowing that it exists with the institute's approval gave me hope for a better future. As it turns out, Brother Diamond does very little, which is great. He opens by showing a music video - so far we've gotten two selections from Zach Williams and one from the Bonner Family - and then reiterates this quote from M. Russell Ballard: "We need to listen to and understand what our LGBT brothers and sisters are feeling and experiencing. Certainly, we must do better than we have done in the past so that all members feel they have a spiritual home where their brothers and sisters love them and where they have a place to worship and serve the Lord." That's essentially the course objective. Then he turns the time over to an LGBTQ+ Latter-day Saint attending USU who shares their story for thirty or forty minutes. Then everyone breaks into little groups and discusses what they've heard for a few minutes, and then the LGBTQ+ person takes questions. (Brother Diamond told everyone the first time to stay respectful during this portion, and he said he feels protective of these people and he's from England so he knows how to be rude.) Notably missing from this format is the teacher feeling a need to constantly remind us of church teachings on marriage and gender as if we're somehow at risk of forgetting about them. It's all about listening, learning, and loving. I'm very happy that the LGBTQ+ people get to speak for themselves and be as real and honest as they want. Their faith strengthens mine, though of course I never want to fall into the lazy self-serving "Look, here are some LGBTQ+ people who haven't left the Church, so everything is fine" trap. First SpeakerSo in the first meeting, this guy with an interesting hairstyle got up to speak and I thought, "He must be gay." He turned out instead to be asexual. I couldn't believe they started off the seminar with an asexual person. It was only the second time in a church setting - the first one being the aforementioned Sunday school lesson a couple months ago - that I heard anyone acknowledge the existence of asexual people, and the first time I heard the term used. I could imagine people seeing this as a copout, since he doesn't have any real desire to get married and he can just not get married and not deal with as much heartache as someone who does want to get married but is told their otions are to marry nobody or to marry somebody they're not attracted to. For me, though, it was kind of incredible to hear him speak. I'm vaguely aware that I fall under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, but I don't give that fact much thought. It causes me some angst because I do experience some romantic attraction and some desire for companionship and some awful cognitive dissonance about whether or not I want to get married, but that decision has been made for me and I don't feel like it affects my life much at this time. I 100% came to this seminar as an ally, not as an LGBTQ+ person seeking something for myself. But I got something anyway. He talked about how he came out to his mission president, and his mission president totally dismissed his concerns and said he was too young to know this about himself and insisted that he will be attracted to his wife, and insisted on meeting with him every transfer, which was very embarrassing. Then a recent gay convert knew exactly what to say to cheer him up. I could relate a little. When I've told peers in the Church about being asexual, typically they didn't know what that was but could understand and accept it as soon as I explained. It's not complicated. If some people's hormones make them want to have sex with boys and some people's hormones make them want to have sex with girls and some people's hormones do both of those things, it's really just common sense that some people's hormones can't be bothered to do either of those things. And because I know what the Greek prefix "a-" means, I started identifying as asexual long before I knew others were doing the same. But my parents refused to accept it. My dad yelled once, "You're not 'asexual'! Maybe that's the buzzword..." When I asked, then, what terminology he thought I should use to indicate the fact that I've never had the slightest urge or desire to have sex at any point in my life, he said "Chaste, or celibate." Of course neither of those words is adequate because they describe behavior, or more accurately a lack thereof, and say nothing about the underlying cause that differentiates me from most people. I just loved that this guy didn't hold back on sharing his experience with his mission president and how negative it was. During the Q&A session, someone asked if it had damaged his testimony that the mission president was called by God. He said it had made him angry at the time, but maybe the mission president needed that experience and maybe someday he'll remember it and be better for it. He said that church leaders have made plenty of mistakes, that church leaders are just like us, that the only difference is they have more authority. I just loved that kind of real talk. He was in my discussion group, but I didn't say anything because all I could think of was how much his experience resonated with mine, and I didn't want to make it about me. Then I left early. He probably thought I was offended. Second SpeakerThe next week, we got a speaker who was asexual and genderfluid. Though biologically female (at least on the surface - other things may not line up, but it would be kind of gross for me to speculate on the inner workings of a stranger's body, so I won't, but I just want to be clear that I'm not oversimplifying biological sex or its connections to gender dysphoria), often they feel more male and sometimes they don't. I really wish I could understand what that feels like. I only know what it feels like to be one person - me. I don't have any point of reference to know what it's supposed to feel like to be a man or what it's supposed to feel like to be a woman. If I did feel like a woman, how would I even know? I guess a big part of it is just feeling like you're in the wrong body, but I don't even know what that feels like. The important thing, then, is for me to recognize that just because I haven't shared and can't personally relate to an experience doesn't make it less real or valid for someone else. They related this experience to Romans 8:16-18: "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us." Before I had to leave, I was able to ask if they've had any struggles with the temple or other highly gender-segregated aspects of the Church. They said yes, some, but they feel so good at the temple that those struggles are minimized. In response to someone else's point-blank question, they acknowledged that they believe some things in the Family Proclamation are wrong, reiterated that church leaders receive revelation through their biases just like we do, and said that some things probably aren't going to change as long as certain people are around. I am so grateful to the institute for providing this safe space for them and others to be honest about beliefs that the institute would not likely share or endorse. We simply cannot "listen to and understand what our LGBT brothers and sisters are feeling and experiencing" if we pressure them to self-censor and only say what they think we want to hear. In any case, church members of all stripes should all be able to accept that more light and knowledge on God's transgender children will be forthcoming. Dallin H. Oaks said in 2015, "I think we need to acknowledge that while we have been acquainted with lesbians and homosexuals for some time, being acquainted with the unique problems of a transgender situation is something we have not had so much experience with, and we have some unfinished business in teaching on that." Third SpeakerThe third week we heard from a gay woman. (She preferred to identify as "gay" rather than "lesbian", but in this context it's the same thing.) Growing up, she realized that she liked girls and that other girls didn't like girls, and she tried to get over that by looking at boys and thinking "If I liked this boy, what would I like about him?" and acting more boy-crazy than any of her friends. She said a lot of gay people do this kind of masking, so if they come out later in life, it's not helpful to say "But you weren't like that before!" I could relate a little to this experience too. I've never been gay, but being called "faggot" five times a day on the school bus made me a little defensive regardless. I made a big screaming deal out of all my crushes until people got really annoyed at me. "Look," I tried to say, "I like girls, I like girls so much. Just girls and that's all."
Growing up in the Church, she heard the teaching that "the attraction isn't a sin but acting on it is," and thought that meant she wasn't supposed to think about it, talk about it, or read about it. She wouldn't even acknowledge it to God. A Young Women leader told her class that same-sex attraction wouldn't exist in the next life, and she interpreted that to mean that God wanted her to kill herself so she could be fixed. Fortunately she didn't go through with it like many others have. As she pointed out, an LGBTQ+ youth aged 13-24 attempts suicide every 45 seconds in the United States. Again, I loved this kind of real talk - not that I loved what she said, of course, but I loved that she didn't sugarcoat it to make straight people more comfortable. And then, like so many others, she believed that her same-sex attraction would go away if she served a mission. Fortunately that wasn't her only reason for serving a mission, and she said she loved everything about it. Afterward, when she found that she was still gay, she finally opened up to God about it and got into a healthier place. She acknowledged that the lifestyle options left open to her by church teachings aren't thrilling, but she was hopeful and faithful. I don't remember more specifics about that and I missed some stuff because she talked for a long time and I had to leave before we even got to the group discussions. None of the speakers had quick and easy answers for how to make their lives in the Church easier. If quick and easy answers existed, this seminar wouldn't need to. But I think they taught us how to create a healthier and more inclusive and accepting community. Again, this works in large part because Brother Diamond recognizes that it isn't his job or our job to be obsessed with whether LGBTQ+ people are "acting on it". Adding a caveat to every expression of love is not loving at all. They know the Church's teachings, and they are following the Church's teachings, but if they ever change their minds about that, it's between them and God and doesn't absolve any Latter-day Saint of the commandment to love them, mourn with them, and comfort them. This seminar is exceeding my expectations.
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I was very proud of my first Fiction Workshop story. It was about a world of robots who start contracting a highly contagious computer virus, so they have to stop interfacing digitally and communicate face-to-face. Get it? It's funny because it's like Covid, but the opposite. Very subtle, sophisticated humor there. Charles and classmates loved it too. But one classmate, in his written feedback, dinged me with a PLAGIARISM WARNING! because a character in the story said the words "Life finds a way." This was, of course, an allusion to Jurassic Park that I expected almost everyone to pick up on. I wasn't trying to pass off anyone else's work as my own, and even if I had, I think this phrase is too brief and generic to legitimately claim as one's exclusive intellectual property. So I thought that was funny and I made sure that in my second story a character said the words "Clever girl." That was the high point of my second story. I'm not as proud of it. Actually, it makes me cringe and I want to burn it. In it I sort of tried to emulate what I perceived as the style of Catch-22 - a relatively flat protagonist with a simple goal just moves along from one absurd situation to the next until the story ends. And Charles said it felt like Catch-22 without being anything like Catch-22, so mission accomplished. But I wish I had finished it sooner and left myself with more time to revise it into something adequate for public consumption. During the break I wheeled my desk, which is attached to the chair, which has wheels, over to Kylie to discuss rescheduling our viewing of Return of the Jedi that she bailed on to fill out another MFA application at the last minute. And then she invited Mia or Mia invited herself, I don't remember, and that was nice since it permitted us to use Mia's TV instead of Kylie's laptop. I said she could invite the whole class for all I cared, so she did. The missionaries came over on Wednesday and roleplayed teaching me a lesson about prayer. I could have given them a real hard time, but I decided to play nice. I only asked "What if I pray and nothing happens?" and if they couldn't come up with a half-decent answer to that question, they would've had no business being missionaries. I could have hit them with some harder stuff. "This all seems like a bunch of confirmation bias to me. If you pray and get the desired outcome, that means God is real and loves you. If you pray and don't get the desired outcome, that means God is real but has a better plan because he loves you. If you feel good feelings, that's his presence; if you feel nothing, you need to be patient and keep trying. He's set up to be unfalsifiable, don't you think? And speaking of prayer, look at these Brigham Young quotes about black people." I understand B.H. Roberts played a similar trick on greenies when he was a mission president. The meeting lasted about ten minutes, and they asked if I had any less-active or non-member friends they could talk to. No, I didn't, because most of my graduate school friends have already been members. Greyson still is one, so while I wasn't as close with her as some of the others, I recognized that I could talk to her about a few things that I wouldn't talk to the others about, spiritual things that might just sound crazy to someone who doesn't believe in them even if that person is determined to be respectful. We had lunch on Thursday. I wanted to buy for both of us to thank her for her time, but she wouldn't let me. She's too nice. Last semester she borrowed my copy of Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, and Other Forms of Visible Gender because she'd left hers in Georgia, and when she returned it I found among its pages a little handwritten thank-you card in a little envelope. Who does that? But we had lunch and talked about things and after I got off on a tangent about my distaste for the post-World War II gender roles that past church leaders taught as eternal truths and current church leaders quietly downplay, she invited me to her institute class because she had a cool teacher who said that women can decide for themselves whether or not to work outside the home. We went to the class, and a slideshow was up with the title "The Role of Intimacy in Marriage". Greyson apologized and said I didn't have to stay. I did anyway because I'll never grow if I always try to avoid discomfort. Fun fact, one of my former students was there. Greyson had never seen any Star Wars, which was even less Star Wars than Kylie had seen. I invited her to watch Return of the Jedi with us, and since I knew she was just being excessively nice in not wanting to be an imposition, I had to push a little and then backtrack from my pushiness, and she was over an hour late but she did come for the social aspect. Mia referred to it as a "watch party" and I had no idea how seriously she took that appellation until I saw the three boxes of pizza, breadsticks, Cheetos, potato chips, Pita bread, and carrot sticks she had provided for the four of us who showed up (me, Kylie, Greyson, and the guy who gave me a plagiarism warning). Greyson asked a lot of questions and Kylie answered a lot of questions like she was a lifelong fan and didn't just learn most of that stuff from me the week before. I was very impressed. And then after the movie she was like, "Wait, so who's the actual Chosen One? Is it Rey? She's not even one of the original characters. That's lame." Yes, Kylie, it really is. She made us watch the SNL Kylo Ren Undercover Bosses sketch again, so I made us watch the seagull song. I did an endowment session at the temple for an actual family name, not from my family as far as I know, but one I brought to help out a friend who doesn't have as easy access to temples. It made the experience a little more meaningful, I think. I got a really good feeling throughout and felt really affirmed in the state of mind I've chosen in response to my current trial. And maybe now this guy on the other side of the veil, Christian Friedrich Grimm, will help me with my German studies. No, of course he doesn't owe me anything for providing him with an essential ordinance to enter God's presence. It's just a funny thought I had.
P.S. Feliz Geburtstag to an estranged friend who probably isn't reading this. In the last couple weeks I've watched three Halloween movies with my neighbors. The first was that old standard, Hocus Pocus. Neighbor Mikki hadn't seen it for a while and kept asking questions that would have been answered if she just kept watching. As I've said before, I can suspend my disbelief for all its absurdities except for the straight teenage boy running away from Sarah Jessica Parker. Someone asked how old the movie was, and I said "Thirty years, almost," and then I remembered that I was born the same year it came out and I got kind of depressed. We also went to the North Logan Pumpkin Walk that night or the following night; I've already forgotten. Later, at my insistence, we watched Little Shop of Horrors. I only watched it once when I was fourteen but I've listened to both the film and Broadway cast recording soundtracks many, many times. My parents had the former on a cassette tape and I can even remember what it sounded like when I sped it up to make the voices funny. Alas, at my current age I've acquired a neurotic level of empathy for fictional characters and an unshakable insecurity about all the suffering and cruelty and injustice in the world, and I don't find Steve Martin's sadistic dentist as funny as I used to. The scene with Bill Murray as his masochistic patient is still golden though. Neighbor Sadie walked in on that scene and asked what the heck we were watching and I explained that it was a musical about a talking plant that eats people and not, as it appeared at the moment, a weird dental porno. Also at my insistence, we watched Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost, a blast from the past. Since my neighbors talked nonstop through the first twenty minutes, they didn't anticipate the plot twist that anyone over the age of eight should be able to anticipate, so that was cool. When the Hex Girls showed up, Mikki said "That's Chris's kind of woman" and it was so random because I don't know how she correctly guessed that they turned me on as a kid. When Emron and I sang along to their signature hit, Mikki decided that we should dress up as them, and Max, who'd never seen Scooby-Doo until now, should too because obviously we'd need a third one. That would have been really cool and made for some great pictures to share here, but I wasn't about to shell out for a costume.
My neighbors played cards after the movie, but I ran off to the institute dance, correctly anticipating that it would have candy and a movie playing. So I ate candy and watched The Nightmare Before Christmas, which I'd never seen before, and it was cool and visually interesting but I don't really think it's worth watching more than once so I'm not sure why it's such a classic. It wasn't very humorous and most of the songs weren't very memorable. Some girl sat by me and talked to me a little bit and it was weird but I missed her when she left. She thought the movie was creepy so it's just as well she didn't stick around for the climax. Last night I went to ex-neighbor Hailey's Dia de los Muertos party (because she has to be pretentious and do things in Spanish to show off that she knows Spanish) and ducked out early to go to graduate instructor colleague Kylie's smaller party because I've got to be loyal to my graduate instructor colleagues. We played Quiplash, which had nothing to do with Halloween, and I didn't dominate like usual because I had worthy opponents. Then we played three variations on Mafia/Werewolf - first with BYU students getting killed off by DezNats, then with villagers getting killed off by werewolves, then with colonists en route to Alpha Centauri getting killed off by native Alpha Centaurians trying to protect their race from being overrun and slaughtered. On that last occasion, the colonists scored a swift victory with only one fatality, so that was bittersweet for those socially conscious graduate students. I don't anticipate doing any more Halloween stuff today, on Halloween, since I just want to relax and do the homework that I should have done in the last few days but didn't because I'm bad at structuring time on my own. Today is, appropriately, the anniversary of my most popular blog post last year. The bar for that is pretty low, but it still made me happy. So here it is again: Newly Discovered Ancient Document Sheds Light on the Origin of Our Species I hadn't been to Institute for two semesters because although the organization was taking appropriate health precautions, I knew for a fact that most of my potential fellow students were out having large social gatherings with no masks on a regular basis. Now I'm vaccinated so it's fine. I even had prolonged exposure to a Covid-positive neighbor a week before my vaccination reached full efficacy and nothing happened, so after all this time I can finally relax and stop thinking about the potential life-ruining long-term side effects that an infection might have on my brain. I missed the first couple weeks of "Jesus Christ and the Everlasting Gospel" due to my visiting family. I've taken this class twice, as I've taken every class that interests me at all, but I still have great need to increase my relationship with and faith in Jesus Christ. It was a powerful experience the first two times but it wore off after a while. I'd never even seen Rand Curtis before and didn't know what to expect. When I came in and saw on the screen "Lesson 4: The Creation", I got a bit queasy as I flashed back to past experiences with this topic in Institute classes. Listening to teachers who know nothing about evolution mock evolution while I sit there with the expertise to know it's real as surely as I know the sun shines has never been a pleasant experience. The last time was a few years ago, and the Institute faculty may have caught up with the last century of scientific discovery by now, but I just didn't know what to expect and it was kind of tense. So he kind of started off with a painting of a primordial-looking Earth with Jesus flying above it looking pretty epic with his hands and feet angled toward it as if to say, "KAZAM!" He made us talk to our classmates and discuss what we think the creation of the Earth may have looked like. I told my partner that I accept the scientific account of the creation of the Earth, so I think it took a really long time and if you floated there and watched you wouldn't notice anything happening. (Granted, if you timed your observation just right you might see the hypothesized planet Theia crash into it and knock off the big chunk of debris that later became our moon, which would be almost but not quite as epic as Jesus saying "KAZAM!") I phrased my opinion as inoffensively as possible, as if accepting science were only one of many possible options. My partner kind of nodded and accepted that. Brother Curtis then had a slide that showed a diagram of the Earth with its layers, and a timeline of its scientifically established history starting at the north pole and going around its circumference. I wondered, did he put that up there just to dispute it? But he reassured me very quickly. "Was the Earth created in six days?" he asked the class. I kind of went "Eh" as if to say "I don't believe so, but you can believe what you want." But he answered his own question like, "No! But a thousand years are as one day to God, so was the Earth created in six thousand years?" And I kind of went "Eh" again. But he answered his own question like, "No!" And he had a spiel about the ultimate compatibility of scientific and religious truth, and he spoke against checking your brain at the door of a religious classroom and suppressing secular knowledge or the questions it raises. Stuff I've read and written ad nauseam, but a welcome surprise anyway. He basically straight-up said that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. That was more than I could have hoped for. I get so tired of people pretending that if the Church doesn't have a position on something, any view on the subject is equally valid regardless of basic facts and common sense. Granted, I had another teacher, Kurt Reese, who said that the Earth isn't 6,000 years old and then said "If anyone here believes the Earth is 6,000 years old, I'm sorry... that you're bad at science." I guess that counts. But he wasn't teaching about the Creation per se - it was a church history class and we were talking about Joseph Fielding Smith's ridiculously fundamentalist readings of scripture, and he liked to joke around and tease like that in general. He would tease you for being from Colorado or being a Democrat even though one of the points he tried to hammer home is that you can, in fact, be a Democrat and still be worthy. He went so far as to imply that it's okay if you observe rampant poverty on your mission and come home feeling "pretty disgusted with capitalism". And he's a Republican himself, but not the evil kind. Where was I going with this? Anyway, his discussion of the age of the Earth was cool and all but not quite as impactful in that context. Maybe I was just desensitized to his heretical teachings by that point in the course. Brother Curtis pointed out that on this little Earth history timeline, dinosaurs don't seem so ancient anymore, and human history was too brief to even show up. And then he said three incredible words - "Fifty million years." Not phrased as a question. Oh boy. The Earth itself is one thing, but this strikes at the very heart of some people's spiritual identity. Of course, it's the sort of perceived chronological discrepancy that some Latter-day Saints think they can just handwave away with suggestions like "wE dOn'T kNoW hOw LoNg AdAm AnD eVe WeRe In ThE gArDeN." Yeah, whatever. They're the only two people in the world, they can't have sex, literally nothing has been invented yet, and I'm supposed to seriously consider for one moment the possibility that they just chill in the Garden for, say, the entire time that dinosaurs are roaming around elsewhere? Nuh-uh. I give them three months before they eat the forbidden fruit as an attempt at suicide. His next slide showed a bunch of skulls of our ancient evolutionary cousins and ancestors - either that, or just skulls of people who think Derek Chauvin should have been acquitted. He asked if we have room for these people in our view of the gospel. I discussed with my partner. Yes, we both did. Cool. But Brother Curtis overheard someone say "It doesn't matter how we got here, just that we're here" and called him out on it because that kind of intellectual apathy "won't make us like our heavenly parents." Brother Curtis was very big on intellect. Most religious teachers are in theory, but it's another thing to actually be so in practice and not the type of person who starts sentences with "I love science, but..." He did say he wasn't going to get into all the details of how he worked out science and religion together, which is fair, but I wish he hadn't just said "I find no physical evidence for a flood covering the entire planet a few thousand years ago. None" and left that for us to grapple with. I think the story of Noah is much easier to reconcile than most people give it credit for. I don't know why so many are locked into this false dichotomy that either the flood covered the entire planet or it never happened. Speaking of heavenly parents, that was a big thing with him. He always said "heavenly parents" where most Saints would just say "Heavenly Father". I don't think he said "Heavenly Father" one time. In fact, in one of his slides he had written "Heavenly Father" and read it as "heavenly parents", which suggested to me that perhaps he, too, just recently had a feminist awakening. These small and simple vocabulary replacements are a huge step toward promoting true gender equality in the Church, showing women that they, too, have a significant eternal destiny and role model, and really leveraging one of the greatest doctrines that separates us from the mainstream Christian world and by all rights should be shouted from the rooftops, not treated as an open secret. Since this was a ninety-minute night class, we then had another lesson, which was about commandments and stuff and not nearly as interesting because science, but still good. Yes, commandments can change; no, Jesus did not drink grape juice. Brother Curtis remained an engaging and effective teacher but tried a little too hard to relate. He shared that he still hasn't mastered the don't-looketh-upon-a-woman-to-lust-after-her thing. He said, "I'm old, but I'm not that old." TMI, my dude. But I'll let that slide. His whole perspective on things was such a breath of fresh air as I've grown so disillusioned with the rampant stupidity and willful ignorance that sometimes make me very embarrassed to be a believer. It's above and beyond what I've come to expect from an Institute class. He even expressed his gratitude for the LGBTQ community. The experience had me looking at him like I hope my classmates don't complain and get him fired. A couple of videos he shared which I'd seen before but were worth rewatching because space: I was glad to teach at the college level because I thought I could never teach kids. Now I realize I basically did teach kids. So young, so naïve, so many dumb mistakes that made me think "What part of this is complicated? Oh wait, I've done worse." I must try to keep my patience and compassion with me as I grow older and more jaded and they stay the same age.
On my second day of teaching I felt like I needed to fake my own death so I could quit. Two semesters later, has it gotten better? Yeah. It's been all right. I don't know what else to say. Not amazing, not terrible, probably the best job I've ever had. I didn't discover a secret passion for this line of work that I never would have considered if God hadn't told me to, but I turned out to be better at it than one would expect. I had virtually no experience (though at least, unlike some of my colleagues, I had a bachelor's degree in the subject I would teach). Then they gave me a week of training and a frightening amount of autonomy, assured me that they knew it would be really hard, and set me loose. Of course I had a practicum the first semester and plenty of more experienced people to help out. One of them said at one point, "If a week of training doesn't feel like enough, that's because it's not. Ideally you would've had a full semester." To most of the students, though, I was just another professor even though I wasn't a professor. My position framed me as an "adult" and an authority figure even though I'm less than a decade older than most of them. I think it made my nervousness and incompetence less obvious. Such blind faith they placed in me! At the same time, some of them were chummier with me because of the age gap. One in particular liked to talk to me about Star Wars as if I were just one of his buddies. I had no problem with that. I tried to relate to them, too, by bringing up my own school experience past and present. I warned them against my mistakes. I said I couldn't tell them not to procrastinate because I'd be a hypocrite, but be careful about it. While making them write research papers, I told them about my own research paper on Legos and gender for Folk Art and Material Culture. I know some of them with Republican parents rolled their eyes at me behind their deactivated cameras, but this is academia and they'd better get used to it. I felt really bad for them getting screwed out of their freshman year, so I tried to give them opportunities to talk to each other, and I told them someday they can tell their kids they lived through this. Filling fifty minutes could be a challenge sometimes. I had sometimes just a sentence or two telling me what to teach, and I could teach it in five minutes and then what? I had to think of discussion questions and videos and activities and whatever to fill the time. Typically I went in with a paragraph or so of notes and tried to generate a lot of discussion and go along organically with whatever my students said or asked. It was interesting this semester to compare and contrast my first and second classes. Typically the second one went smoother because I'd already had a practice run. I learned this principle in large part from taking Scott Irwin's Institute of Religion course on marriage three times. I saw how he kind of followed a script but could still improvise and always feel spontaneous. All three times, he went off on a tangent telling stories about his grandfather until the class was roaring with laughter, and then he waited for them to calm down, got a confused look on his face, and said "Was there a point to all this?" That set everyone off again. You had to be there. But I didn't want useless filler or busywork. Maybe now that I've gained in confidence I'll start introducing additional material altogether. One of my colleagues straight-up ditched the ethos pathos logos stuff, considering it a waste of time. I'm not brave enough to do that. I tried to emphasize skills and principles that will benefit them no matter what they do in the future. I don't think I've had a single English major in my classes yet. I tried to teach them to think, to overcome their own biases and blind spots and respectfully engage with other points of view. If I succeeded, I made them smarter than most Americans and they may save our civilization someday. Though I kept my personal views to myself for the most part, I frequently used American politics as an example of how not to do constructive discourse. Next semester I will replace the Zoom broadcasts with in-person meetings but keep the online content, because I like it. Teaching in person frightens me but I think it will make discussions easier and smoother, and it will be nice to know what all of my students look like. I'll miss the chat and screen sharing features, though. Also, it will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays now, so ninety minutes instead of fifty, and still two classes back-to-back. For now I'm on vacation and trying not to think about the scary future too much even though it will be here before I know it. Granted, it might not even happen because I might get fired. A couple weeks ago I said something rude to a racist maggot on Facebook and he claimed to have screenshotted it and sent it to "your boss." I'm sure he wouldn't lie about something like that and I'm sure my boss just hasn't gotten around to doing anything about it yet. I'm not sure who my boss even is, though. There are like five people in various positions who could be considered my boss, but none of them tell me what to do very much. I'm not sure the best person to reach out to if you want to get me fired in a hurry. I'm impressed that the maggot figured it out so fast. I also got this cool certificate earlier this week - it doesn't confer any rights or privileges on me, but it gives me a warm feeling. |
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- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
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