An Inappropriate and Slightly Disjointed Rant

Generally Christianity gets in our way—especially in the classroom at Indiana University East. But it pops its dogmatic little head up plenty at Mimi University. Now I’m not going to make some sweeping, uncomplicated claim that America’s most popular religion is nothing more than an archaic obstacle that needs to be overcome. The Christian narrative is powerful and beautifully complex; I love it. I mean, some of my best friends are Christians. (It’s an odd feeling to use that line and have it actually be true). My issue with Christianity, at least as a college English instructor, is what it does to conversations in the classroom that threaten to complicate, to really muck up, whatever topic is at hand. These conversations have nothing to do with me—that much I’m sure of. What’ll happen (and this will probably sound familiar) is a couple of students will discover they actually believe what their saying in class. Suddenly, for them, the performance that we call ‘talking in class’ lessens and they find themselves committed to their particular point of view. Then, on really good days, the fun starts. Someone in the room challenges what was just said by the student still surprised by their sudden passion. And regardless if that challenge was mere performance, the air in the room moves a bit differently. I usually try to find a way to get to a desk if I’m not already in one—then I wait. Often I wait for nothing, and am forced to ask a question or rephrase a comment in a way that gets us all back to our prescribed roles so we can carry on with the production that is a class discussion. I’ve an obvious hunch that the real conversations (and thus learning) always take place “in the dorms,” apart from class. Sometimes, however, if I did my job accidentally perfectly and if the gods are on my side, the discussion happens right in the classroom, ignoring, maybe forgetting where it is.

The real satisfaction of a good class discussions is that there’s too many ideas swirling around, too many ideologies that need defending, too many feelings that get hurt, too many ‘sides’ that get named, too much to sum up, too much to talk about. It just keeps unfolding into more and more uncertainty. We, as a class, can’t get to a conclusive answer, but, and this is the best part, we aren’t willing to let everybody be right—no one is going to “agree to disagree,” not during a good class discussion.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of a few of these both as student and on the other side of the room. What I can’t pin-down is a pattern or a particular move that gets these kinds of discussions going. I have learned what kills them though, and sadly it’s the thing that probably should complicate them: Christianity. For all the strange and intriguing contractions which fill the pages of the Christian scriptures, one could make the argument (in fact I do) that it’s a tradition that should support what I believe is a good class discussion. But it doesn’t, at least it hasn’t. And having spent a couple years in my early twenties trying like mad to belong to fundamentalist Christianity, I think I get it—I think. This is a tradition that manifests in the classroom in the form of a monster that arrests and fixes the fluctuating and irregular nature of narrative. It’s got answers before the question gets a chance to breathe. Consequently, a discussion in an already structured (fixed) environment, like a classroom, is a cozy couch for the cranky side of Christianity. Instead of engaging, even entertaining, the demanding ideas that surface in a classroom discussion, I watch student after student pause, roll whatever notion was just put forth around in their head for a second, then condemn it as something that doesn’t fit into what they believe—it’s not binary enough, it lacks an clear right and wrong. We’re all guilty of this in one form or another, of course. But too often inside our class at Indiana University East, the fervor for the right answer, the comfortable all-encompassing truth drowns everything. The unsure won’t speak. It’s not my job to push my own ideology or value system on students, and I don’t. But I worry when discomfort and mystery are not only barred from leaving the room, they’re forced to become the kind of comprehendible flesh that my students can drive a nail through.