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April 24, 2007
Standard finals week prayer request
Pray for me.
Pray for my students.
Pray for everybody who is dealing with unacceptable, unexplainable loss - and for the next two weeks, is getting on with academic work anyway.
And pray for those people even if they aren't at Virginia Tech.
Posted by Chuck at 06:11 PM | TrackBack
April 18, 2007
One Virginia Tech question
There's one thing that stands out in all of the profiles of Cho Seung Hui - the fact that this was a student who was miserable, disturbed, and within himself. His writings for classes were clear hints of the damage he could do, and how little he would care about those he hurt. The faculty who taught him were quite aware that something was deeply wrong, but those who were able to muster up the sense/courage to talk to him and offer help were systematically shunned.
What the heck do you do if you're Nikki Giovanni?
Cho (whose full name is pronounced joh sung-wee) appears first to have alarmed the noted Virginia Tech poet Nikki Giovanni in a creative writing class in fall 2005, Giovanni said.
Cho took pictures of fellow students during class and wrote about death, she said in an interview. "Kids write about murder and suicide all the time. But there was something that made all of us pay attention closely. None of us were comfortable with that," she said.
The students once recited their poems in class. "It was like, 'What are you trying to say here?' It was more sinister," she said.
Days later, seven of Giovanni's 70 or so students showed up for a class. She asked them why the others didn't show up and was told that they were afraid of Cho.
"Once I realized my class was scared, I knew I had to do something," she said.
She approached Cho and told him that he needed to change the type of poems he was writing or drop her class. Giovanni said Cho declined to leave and said, "You can't make me."
What do you do if you're Lucinda Roy?
Giovanni said she appealed to Roy, who then taught Cho one-on-one. Roy, 51, said in a telephone interview that she also urged Cho to seek counseling and told him that she would walk to the counseling center with him. He said he would think about it.
Roy said she warned school officials. "I was determined that people were going to take notice," Roy said. "I felt I'd said to so many people, 'Please, will you look at this young man?' "
Roy, now the alumni distinguished professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program, said university officials were responsive and sympathetic to her warnings but indicated that because Cho had made no direct threats, there was little they could do.
"I don't want to be accusatory or blaming other people," Roy said. "I do just want to say, though, it's such a shame if people don't listen very carefully and if the law constricts them so that they can't do what is best for the student."
What do you do if you're a professor, you genuinely care, you want to see your student get to a healthy place in life, and you're shut off at every turn?
Of course, it's still early days, and there's still a lot of journalism yet to be done and a lot of story yet to be told. But I can't help but feel like Virginia Tech comes off looking very good here. Giovanni and Roy come off as caring, compassionate professors that you wouldn't expect to find at a larger school. There are others who have been written about who don't come off quite so well in the stories, but only under the influence of Cho's strange (and, in most cases, belligerent) behavior.
He simply didn't want to be helped. What do you do? What can you do?
This is going to be the reason another generation of kids are watched and forced into counseling or suspended from school simply for WRITING about killing or about suicide. I'm not saying that's right. I'm saying that good people who are at wit's end over this - and about the epidemic of senseless violence we've fallen into - are going to be desperate to do something.
I have no answers, only the rant.
(It occurs me that I've just taken a nice swath of time that was otherwise going to be used for not sounding like an idiot in class and spent it pounding out notes on the keyboard - and that has been happening more than a bit lately, first harvesting old stuff I've written, and now writing new stuff. I'm afraid something significant has been going on here, and - monkeys who own me aside - the theme of the writing on the front page of this blog speaks to what I've seen going on around me lately, and how much it concerns me.)
(UPDATE: Heh. Eric Burns was thinking a lot of the same things last night.)
Posted by Chuck at 05:56 AM | TrackBack
April 16, 2007
Pray for Virginia Tech
Self-explanatory.
Dean Dad has already weighed in, and his take is worthwhile.
(UPDATE: When good work is done in bad times, it's worth pointing it out. Virginia Tech's student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, got quality stuff for their edition today; the obvious interest overwhelmed the paper's website, so trying to hit up the newspaper site bounces to collegemedia.com, which is the parent publishing company for a host of campus newspapers. Check out the front page of their paper today - it's IMPRESSIVE layout.
But the winner for a painful, brutal synopsis of the day and our feelings comes from Mike Harden, who writes for the Columbus Dispatch:
We are a bilingual people. We speak English and violence.
It's true. It's true.)
Posted by Chuck at 03:30 PM | TrackBack
April 15, 2007
You can't touch my monkey (well, okay, EllaMinnow can)
Brant Hansen posts, and I quote directly:
It's not every day I get to personally beat you at something.You know, I must confess, it IS a great deal of fun.
In bygone days, travel money and logistics would be involved. I'd have to physically come to your hometown -- which reeks, by the way -- in order to garner the inevitable total victory over you, your family, and all that you hold dear.
But these are heady days, thanks to technology. Just click on this link, and get outkicked by my monkey.
That's right. My monkey will own you.
Such is your destiny, now writ: You will be owned, and - oh yes! -- you will be owned by an animated monkey.
It's not a glamorous destiny, but at least has the charm of being yours.
(HT to the now vanquished monkey of J-Caparoon.)
It's fun, plus, it's FREE for Kamp Krusty readers!
Especially now that our man Brant's monkey has now, himself, been vanquished.
To quote the great Ariel Mazzarelli: Bite me, envious ones.
(UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long - Brant has vanquished me right back, as his link clearly shows. There will be monkey smackdown now. I guarantee it.)
(UPDATE UPDATE: Well, there's monkey smackdown, but not by me. If you dare, check out the standard that some poster on Brant's blog by the name of EllaMinnow has set. It is, truly, impressive. If you desire a more reasonable standard, however, here's the current DrChuck personal best.)
Posted by Chuck at 01:09 AM | TrackBack
April 10, 2007
"If only love is done, it is enough"
Text of Shorter College chapel message from April 10th. Many, many thanks to David Roland and Andy McKenzie for support, pre-reading, and sounding-board type takes. All bible quotations are NIV.
There's a lot of topics that ran through my head as I was dealing with the prospect of giving a message here. What has sat front and center for the past couple of weeks has been some kind of take on being a Christian and doing science, since there's a little bit of uniqueness I have to offer there. And there's a lot I could say about the craft of teaching in the context of Christianity as well.
One of the things that I keep in my teaching portfolio is a philosophy of Christian education that I wrote when I was first considering applying for a position at Shorter, and I was trying to figure out why in the world I might want a job at a Christian college in the first place. For whatever reason, I made the decision to build the statement around Matthew 22:37-40, which is Jesus' familiar statement of the Law. You know it well: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” My argument went something like this: Those of us in academia who claim the name of Jesus Christ need to be more diligent in loving God with our minds, because whatever gifts we have received to understand humanity and understand nature come from God. And, whatever we might decide "Christian education" is, Christian education must somehow involve demonstrating love to the students who come to learn from us. They must, in some fashion, become our neighbors.
I've been going back over that statement, thinking that, in all honesty, it's a bit lame, and I could probably do a bit better with it, and dig a bit deeper theologically. I don't know if all of my faculty peers are like that, but I am.
Over the end of the last week, though, this message wrote itself.
The text of Scripture that I've come back to, both in my quiet times (as rare as they've been lately) and in my preparation for today, has been 1 John 3:11-23, which contains so many of the themes of John's teaching during the later stages of his life. John writes:
This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother's were righteous. Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.
Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.
Now, hold on to that text for a moment while I go over my Good Friday.
My pastor at Chapel Hill United Methodist keeps a blog. (He dubs himself Chill Pastor. It's a long story.) He keeps it pretty well tied in to what he's talking about in church, with a few pop culture observations as well; he loves to tie in pop songs, and music videos in particular, to his teaching. (After all, we are the MTV generation.) And his wife and daughter have started up their own blogs as well, to put down random thoughts here and there. I've dubbed them BlogFamily.
On Friday, while I was trying to get some odd work done in what should have been the peace of no-students-around-day, I came across this post from Bryan's wife Paige. It started like this:
"Destiny, a friend of my daughter, Laine, committed suicide last night..."
I can't get used to reading words like that. I just can't. There's no way. Ever since I was old enough to realize what suicide was I haven't been able to understand what exactly puts somebody in a place where they are so desperate to just check out of life and shatter everybody around them.
Reading the words of Paige's post, and Laine's after that, didn't get any easier. They were laden in grief, and they were angry. They were tales of rumors, of taunts, of "good kids" showing aggression towards somebody who wasn't like them - pretty much every horror story I've ever imagined about girls in middle school and high school. And that haunts me more than a little bit.
But something else haunts me as well. With graduation around the corner, it's coming up on one year since we learned that Shadow Robinson had taken her own life. That was the first time a student of mine had committed suicide, and given Shadow's outgoing personality, bright face and marvelous laugh, I never saw it coming. Perhaps I should have learned to see deeper than the surface with her, or perhaps if I had tried I wouldn't have been allowed in. I'll never know.
All I know is, when Shadow committed suicide, those nice, trite words about demonstrating love to my students and not treating them as soulless automatons that sit in my teaching philosophy rang very hollow. I can't imagine how many people who had responsibility for Destiny's education are dealing with the same kinds of feelings of guilt and question of "what if...?" right now.
So John's challenge hits hard. Verses 14 and 15 "We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him." When we get around to thinking that the New Testament is full of grace, that the New Testament lets us off the hook if we'll just try to live a half-decent life and Jesus is just some band-aid to patch together our brokenness, we come across writing like that and we're reminded that Jesus' message is hard. John had no understanding for somebody who demonstrated hate, even someone who saw themselves as a "good person." The challenge is to demonstrate that we are worthy of Christ's example, by giving of ourselves completely to our neighbors - to the point where we "lay down our lives for our brothers."
And we do that because Christ laid down his life for us - and if we truly believe that the resurrection really happened, then there's all kinds of power that God has made evident to us. Surely he'd lend us a little bit of that power for us to be able to overcome the human pettiness we have and be able to take this moment and love our neighbors in it, wouldn't he?
If this is true, then why do I have so much trouble showing that kind of love? "Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything."
Is my conscience bothering me? I need to love more. And I don't need to just run my mouth about loving more. I don't need to tell somebody that I love them and then go on as if nothing is different. I need to change. I need to give up of my time. I need to shut down my concern with my position, my income, my reputation, and give that time to my neighbor.
It's pointless to dwell on what has happened in the past, and why it happened, because we have one another now, and the single best weapon we have against our consciences flaring up on us is to take advantage of this time and love now. Can I say I've loved the people around me on this campus in a way to shut down my conscience, and to rest in confidence that God is pleased with how I've treated others? Not really. Lord, PLEASE forgive me. I repent. But what does it mean to repent? It means I'm living different now - it means I have to live different now. I move forward and I love now.
I wrote four years ago, somewhat absent-mindedly, this for that philosophy of education I was talking about earlier: "Christian education, however we define it, must be terribly incomplete without demonstrating love to the students who come to learn from us. We avoid lording our academic position over our students and making unreasonable demands or unfair assessments of them. We treat our students not as soulless automatons whose worth is determined by how well they do or don't complete their work, but as people starting a path that we completed not so long ago, who are struggling with many of the same things we struggled with as students."
And if you are one of my students, to be true to my obligations that I've made to God, I really owe you nothing less than that.
Well, maybe it wasn't so lame.
"Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us."
The ancient writer Jerome tells a story about John, towards the end of his life. John was frail enough that he had helpers to carry him into the synagogues, where believers were gathering to hear this teaching of one of the patriarchs. And all the teaching John would do would be this: "Love one another. Love one another. Love one another." And a few people would get annoyed at this - and I can imagine I would too. After all, this guy was one of the twelve who spent his time with Jesus, and here he is, old and senile, just muttering "Love one another." But when John was challenged on this - "Teacher, don't you have anything else for us?" - John had only this to say:
"What else is there? If only love is done, it is enough."
Posted by Chuck at 01:41 PM | TrackBack
April 06, 2007
So many people don't know what to say
Originally a Xanga post from May 7, 2006. Reposted because we're coming up on a year since, and we can't allow ourselves to forget. Also reposted because...well, when history repeats itself, it's hard to take.
So many people don't know what to say.
And how can you, really?
Look, Shadow Robinson is a name I automatically associate with a bright, shining face, and a gloriously loud voice (and if you know me, you know how much I appreciate loud voices!), and the type of personality that puts a smile on your face regardless. She was almost the definition of an extrovert. The one thing she was not was lifeless.
But she is lifeless now.
And every sign points to suicide.
And "suicide" is a word that we all automatically associate with a person who is desperate and lonely and fearful. We can cuss and swear and moan about how selfish an act it is. We can lash out in anger, and wonder what in the world was so awful in her life that she couldn't talk to somebody. We wonder what it was we said, what it was we did, what she really thought of us behind that mask of brightness. We can say "if only she had talked to us."
But more than anything, we can't figure out how to put the person who we knew and loved with the act that we can't possibly understand.
---
Now, I'm speculating. And I'm speculating in the desperate, irrational hope that I'm completely wrong and somebody is going to discover that this really wasn't a suicide and that we will have a nice, neat description that this will fit into. I want to be wrong about what I'm proposing here.
But I know all too well how much of a front a person can put on to hide the pain that's going on underneath. Dare I say that I'm experienced in it.
When your mind goes to these dark places that make you contemplate what it would be like to end everything, you find nothing but absolute, overwhelming emotion. It's so unfair to say that "suicide is a selfish act" because it presumes that you're able to think about what somebody else would think or feel about what you're going through. What little experience I have with that territory, I can speak with absolute certainty that other people's thoughts or feelings weren't even there - they had been pushed out with the absolute intensity of the emotions I was having myself.
If you have to deal with real life, to go out and see people and be engaged in the world, what you're doing and saying and acting becomes completely disconnected with what is going on in your head. If you're skilled at pulling on that mask, you can make people believe there's nothing really wrong, even when everything is wrong. You hear so much of the time in these circumstances how important it is to remember that we're not to blame, it really isn't our fault, and that's part of the reason why - it is so difficult to really know what's wrong.
But that also speaks to why it's so important to take care of one another. Because - and this truth also comes from my own experience - the more you know another person, the more you dig into that person's life, the harder it becomes for that person to keep the mask on, and the more you get to see what it is that really makes that person tick.
Here's what's even harder: College is when that taking care of one another is easy. So many of us go to college in part to break the chains of how we were seen as we were growing up, to "find ourselves" and to experience life apart from the chains of childhood. But when we pass outside of those gates, into the "real world", we find that there aren't too many people there who are really interested in us "finding ourselves." They're far more interested in what they can take from us, in what of our talents and skills they can use for their profit or their own ends.
So, especially for those who did receive that precious piece of paper yesterday, when I type "take care of one another," it takes on a special importance for you - because this is where taking care of one another becomes a true challenge.
---
Shadow, you were loved more deeply than you ever knew.
---
If you're reading this, let us make a vow to one another - or let us renew that vow - that we always make sure we're taken care of, each one of us.
---
"If you're a depressed individual...
...if the light has gone out long ago...
...and you can't find the switch...
...for God's sake...
...and your own...
...share the burden...
...tell a friend..."
- Bill Mallonee
Posted by Chuck at 03:33 PM | TrackBack
April 02, 2007
Generic "I haven't done this for a while" entry
And not only have I not done this for a while, I'm not even doing this now. This was originally a LiveJournal post from May 25, 2002. Certain links have been updated or removed to avoid broken-link disease.
Nancy told me a while back I ought to just get on this thing more often and bang out whatever I'm feeling at the moment, and that I ought to stop planning long, drawn-out entries about whatever. I hate doing that. Part of the way that I write is that I have to have a reason for writing, and a thing that I want to communicate.
But right now, my reason for writing is that my head is about to explode with all the various stuff that I don't feel like I can write about in a public forum. So I've got to rant about something or other. And so all kinds of random stuff is going to come out. So, for once, Nancy, this is for you. Appreciate, dang it. :)
My music-of-choice lately is The Juliana Theory. My beloved wife hates 'em - she finds them annoying as all get-out, and they give her a headache. (I think I have to have at least one band-of-the-moment that does that to her.) Every song from Emotion is Dead is simply awesome, both musically and lyrically - hit their lyrics page and just click on random lyrics. On second thought, go to one lyric first - "Don't Push Love Away". "Here's a thought if you're willing to listen. I only tell the truth of the feelings I'm given. Can you hear me now? Listen. Whispers in the rain? Listen. Don't push love away; you know you do. It's all we have..." Grab ye some mp3's while you're there, too.
"It's a chore, holding on to a vision..." I'm banging this out on campus. I came here because I've been utterly preoccupied with any number of things that directly or indirectly have to do with work. (Those who've talked to me over the past couple of weeks know some of those things, for better or for worse; if you're curious, e-mail.) Unfortunately, there's a limit to what I can talk about up here because one doesn't want to betray confidences and topics of private conversations, particularly when those conversations are with people who I work for and stuff. Suffice it to say that I've laid quite low on this campus for the past couple of years, and I fear I'm not going to get that privilege anymore, one way or another.
And what worries me about that is my tendency to wear my heart firmly on my sleeve, and not to hold anything back in terms of my emotions. I fear that the end of me laying low is going to be the end of getting along well with everybody, because taking a stand on thing one or thing two usually ends up pissing people off. I want to be principled and want to be clear about what I'm for and against, but I want everybody to like me too - and if not like me, at least understand and respect me.
And people in hell want ice water, too. "We knew you'd hate this before we wrote it; so listen up, we're telling you before you tell us. We're not misinformed or misdirected..."
The thing that bothers me the most is that being so passionate and preoccupied about one thing or another is that it's not the best way to be a good husband or father. It has to drive Kristin nuts to see my eyes in this faraway place when I've got some process working in the background and it's taking up more and more of the system's resources. (Okay, that was an utterly horrific geek metaphor. I apologize profusely.) In part, I moved away from my postdoc because I was afraid that, to be a good research scientist, I was going to wind up working 80-100 hour weeks. Only I come here to be a professor (and not a research professor chasing after hundreds of thousands of dollars of grant money, but a teaching professor - something, as I said before, I think I'm already pretty decent at) and I wind up throwing myself into about that many hours, if not actually on campus, in my preoccupations. I never thought of myself as a workaholic, and I really don't feel like a workaholic, honestly; but I have to fight myself to remind myself that I do have a wife and children, and that they are really dang awesome and I do enjoy spending time with them. And I do; but it's not natural. Coming in to my campus office and thinking through a chemistry homework set or through some grand five-year plan for my career (or any other number of things) is very natural.
I have no answer here, just the rant.
One other tidbit, for those who haven't heard otherwise: I cut my hair. I mean, all of my hair. I mean, the shaggy bearded guy in the infamous mouse-pic is no more; in his place is a clean-shaven guy with an almost military-looking flattop. There's no real reason for the haircut except that I got utterly tired of dealing with hair everywhere, and if I'm going to do something, I don't do it by halves. The universe is screaming "GIF! GIF!", and I'll probably have to appease at some point; but until then, let your imagination run wild. :D
...and, in a memo from the present, you guys don't know how tempted I was to cut off all my hair for April Fools'.