Three Things Thursday: Reading, Writing, and Teaching

It’s the Thursday of Holy Week and for archaic (and not entirely acceptable) reasons we have a long weekend at Easter. If it weren’t such a welcome break from what can be a long winter-to-spring semester, I’d be filled with the kind of luke-warm outrage that comes from a slight (and deliberate) misunderstanding of the relationship between church and state.

In any event, Holy Week feels like as good a time as any to produce another three-things Thursday.  

Thing the First

When I don’t have time or bandwidth to write, I get a bit unpleasant. At some point in my life my identity shifted from being a scholar (and mostly a field guy at that) to being a writer. That said, I never have (and never would) identify as a writer and I certainly don’t share the commitment to craft (per se) as some of my more writerly friends, but writing is so deeply engrained in how I think about myself that when I’m not writing, it’s hard to feel like I’m “working on something.”

It may be, of course, that the tail has come to wag the dog. Maybe having time each semester to allow myself to become preoccupied with teaching, service work, and even reading (see below) breaks the tendency for my desire to write (and perhaps disingenuously to feel like I’m creating or at very least making) something to impinge on my need to actually be experiencing and engaging with my field (including the field), colleagues and students.  

Thing the Second

My reading this year has been sporadic and unsatisfactory. On the one hand, much of my reading has focused on unpublished (or not-yet-published) manuscripts and there’s something deeply gratifying in this work. On the other hand, there’s so much that I want to read and that I should read if I’m going to continue to try to pursue an active research agenda. In fact, I need to balance reading and writing if I want to continue to be a useful and informed reader of manuscripts both for my press and in my capacity as a peer reviewer.

My hope is that I can somehow get back on track this spring and return to my habit of penciling in six or eight hours on the weekend for professional reading. Maybe the holiday weekend will help.

Thing the Third

Then there’s teaching. I am very proud of the fact (in a vaguely random way) that my lecture today is on Byzantine Spirituality. This feels perfect for Holy Week! I wish I had planned my class like this and it wasn’t just luck.

One of the really interesting trends that I have noticed over the course of this semester is that my classes have changed from being centered on lectures to being centered on discussions. I guess when I reorganized my classes to focus on in depth, week-long, discussion of a handful of primary source texts, I hadn’t considered how this would impact the lectures that provided context for these primary sources. The unanticipated result is that lectures now have gone from being central to the learning experience to not-quite optional for most students. The come to class, but rather than frantic note taking or nearly obsessive fixating on details, they now push me to explain more, they want to chat about the past more during lectures, and finally, they are actually more engaged in the classroom. Who knew this would be a knock on?