You can paste the following into an Excel spreadsheet to make the conversions indicated. However, you’ll have to fix the quotation marks to make them straight instead of curly and remove the extra line breaks.

To convert a four-point grade to a letter grade, without rounding off to the nearest grade (a number like 3.17 will yield “B??”):
=CONCATENATE(CHAR(69+1/3-Jfour-point),IF(INT(Jfour-point)<>
Jfour-point,IF(INT(Jfour-point*3)=Jfour-point*3,
CHAR((Jfour-point-INT(Jfour-point))*6+41),”??”),”"))

To convert a four-point grade with rounding:
=CONCATENATE(CHAR(69-ROUND(Jfour-point,0)),
IF(ABS(Jfour-point-ROUND(Jfour-point,0))<0.17,"",
IF(ROUND(Jfour-point-INT(Jfour-point),1)=0.5,"-/"
&CHAR(70-ROUND(Jfour-point,0))&"+",
CHAR(41+2*(ROUND((Jfour-point-INT(Jfour-point))*3,0))))))

To convert a percentage into a four-point scale (e.g., 85% becomes 3.0, or B)
=(((Jpercent*0.3)-16)+(IF((Jpercent*0.3)-16=14,-1,0)+
(IF((Jpercent*0.3)-16>11,-1,0))))/3

To convert a letter into a four-point scale (e.g., B- becomes 2.67):
=69-CODE(LEFT(Jletterl,1))+IF(LEN(Jletterl)>1,
(44-CODE(RIGHT(Jletterl,1)))/3,0)

To convert a letter grade that may incorporate a slash (like B/B+ for example) or may not into a four-point scale:
=AVERAGE(69-CODE(LEFT(IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("/",Jslash)),
LEFT(Jslash,SEARCH("/",Jslash)-1),Jslash),1))+
IF(LEN(IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("/",Jslash)),
LEFT(Jslash,SEARCH("/",Jslash)-1),Jslash))>1,
(44-CODE(RIGHT(IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("/",Jslash)),
LEFT(Jslash,SEARCH("/",Jslash)-1),Jslash),1)))/3,0),
69-CODE(LEFT(IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("/",Jslash)),
RIGHT(Jslash,LEN(Jslash)-SEARCH("/",Jslash)),Jslash),1))+
IF(LEN(IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("/",Jslash)),
RIGHT(Jslash,LEN(Jslash)-SEARCH("/",Jslash)),Jslash))>1,
(44-CODE(RIGHT(IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("/",Jslash)),
RIGHT(Jslash,LEN(Jslash)-SEARCH("/",Jslash)),Jslash),1)))/3,0))

Lousy classes Monday, after considerable prep; good classes (sort of) today after minimal prep. Instead of really prepping for the classroom, I worked on develping writing assignments. I think these probably helped me think through what I wanted my students to be thinking about. I intend to continue working on these tomorrow and develop formal or quasi-formal grading rubrics to hand out to them before they begin work on the papers.

The Reformation class continues to go pretty well. Most striking is the way in which the students dive right into a collaborative examination of the material. At first I try to restrain myself and — today I managed to limit myself to supplying necessary background information for about the first half of the class period. It’s kind of amazing to watch them work together. They’re really into it. We spent most of today looking at the 95 Theses, without (unfortunately) getting into Luther’s letter to the Archbishop of Mainz. I also feel that we negelected the Theses on Scholasticism, which I think is a really key text. Something to come back to. I kind of feel like I’m already allowing the class to fall behind, though, in the sense that I am not insisting on sticking rigorously to a schedule and covering everything (as if that were actually possible).

For the two World Religions sections, I had given the two classes quite different things to think about. I asked the morning section to consider the idea of “diaspora Christianity” as it relates to Lamott’s book. For the afternoon section, I asked them to think about the idea of grace, particularly as described by the textbook wth regard to St. Augustine’s life. The morning section had a livelier and more productive discussion, I thought, with a broader range of contributions from more different students (i.e. students I wouldn’t necessarily anticipate to be active discussion participants). Also, I think there was a better overall vibe in the classroom; the students seemed to be listening and responding to one another in a genuine way. No one seemed bothered when I cold-called them. For the final fifteen or twenty minutes of the class period, I had them respond to Ronald Reagan’s 1983 proclamation of the “Year of the Bible.” (Here is the proclamation text; here is a related speech to the National Association of Religious Broadcasters.) There was some discussion as to whether the Reagan speech represents an Augustinian or a Constantinian view of church-state relations (or, perhaps better, church-world relations). (The right answer is Augustinian.) (I suppose this distinction constitutes a concrete, measurable learning objective that actually matters. Hooray! This means they learned something. Some of them anyhow.) It felt great walking out of the classroom, like there’d been some genuine thought going on and people had been really involved, enjoying themselves. Lamott surprised a lot of the students, I think.

The afternoon class was tougher. Part of the issue may well be the time of day; right after lunch is a hard time for such a big class (about twenty-five). There are always a few people who look like they’re falling asleep. This class focused on the idea of grace, and on getting out on the table basic reactions to the text. It’s one a.m. and I should have been in bed three hours ago … which may account for the fact that I can’t really remember any specifics to speak of about how the discussion went. The main thing was a sort of annoyed, impatient vibe I sensed among the students. One, T., and another, A., have surprised me with their consistent level of participation, and in general people did talk willingly and interestingly. However, the overall sense was a lot more sluggish than the morning section had been.

What else? First, most worrisome, is that it’s obvious that some students are just not getting through the reading as scheduled on the syllabus. There were plenty of books whose first fifty pages or so appeared well-thumbed, but they were supposed to be almost two hundred pages in by now. And the thing that bugs me is that they were still able to participate in the discussion. This means that on some level I have not made it really necessary to keep up with the readings in order to participate and be involved; otherwise students would be doing it (or would be skipping … which was also true in my morning class; attendance sucked; but it is the time of year when almost everyone seems to be getting sick). This means, well, several things: (1) I need to rethink why I’m actually assigning these readings, maybe I should change the way I assign work; (2) maybe I should institute some kind of check on whether people are doing the work or not, though I am reluctant to do this simply for the sake of forcing them to do the work (if they’re not getting anything out of it). Maybe I should be assigning more writing instead of more reading.

The other thing to think about is more a self-reflective concern. I notice that when i talk about how my classes went and try to break down my sense of how “good” or how “bad” they were, my reaction is less about content and coverage and more about process, and particularly about my reaction, on a gut level, to the feel of the classroom on a particular day. This isn’t a conscious choice of mine, but it makes me realize that I am more interested in creating a particular kind of environment in my teaching, an environment where I believe learning can happen, than I am interested in “teaching” in any traditional sense. I don’t really care what we talk about as long as it’s interesting and, as my colleague put it, “thinking is happening.” But is that O.K.? I think I should be continually fine-tuning my ideas about what concrete results I am aiming at.

OK, bedtime.

Introduction to Rubrics is actually a quite promising (and slim) volume purporting to be a practical guide to constructing your own grading rubrics. I’m reading it as fast as I can, as I hope to have two writing assignments thrown together before I leave to get my son from daycare. Levi and Stevens also have a site of their own, an apparently unused weblog, and a collection of resources (like sample rubrics) at their publisher’s website as well.

Several of my better students have told me privately that they personally are non-religious. Since we are beginning with a discussion of Christianity, which the majority of the class has some level of personal experience with, they feel at a vast disadvantage. Yesterday as I mentioned one student raised a question about the textbook’s implied definition of “grace.” After class, I heard at second hand that D. found the entire discussion completely baffling (and hence quite frustrating), since she herself brought to the table no conception of what “grace” might mean. Other students have hinted at the same thing. I try to tell them that (1) they should pipe up with whatever questions they have, and that those questions are in fact welcome, and also — more importantly, actually — (2a) they probably know more than they think about Christianity just from picking it up from the culture at large and (2b) they bring a valuable perspective, and may even have an advantage over the others, for being able to view the tradition “from the outside” as it were. But they don’t buy it. They continue to feel anxious because their classmates have some kind of head start due to their “twelve years in Catholic school” or whatever.

What’s interesting about this is that this is a pretty consistent phenomenon and it tends to affect my better students. I suspect this is because they tend to be the ones who are willing to confront their own feelings of ignorance and be bothered by it. But how do I convince them (and the others) that the course is not really about simply acquiring factual knowledge of the respective traditions but about cultivating a particular form of critical thinking as is appropriate to an academic discipline and tradition?

The two sections went in totally different directions today. The first one basically followed the outline I came up with in the previous post, though of course I didn’t get very far (I think I got through the second point, the idea of kerygma). It was something of a zoo, since a number of prospective students were on campus and at least seven or eight of them decided to sit in on my class. But I continued to hammer home the point about the non-naturalness of assuming that “belief” is always central to any understanding of religion, and that Christianity is more or less unique on this. I kept asking them why they thought it would be so important whether one believes, for example, that the Holy Spirit is homoousios or homoiousios with the Father, or why it would be justifiable to anathematize someone for technical deviations from the Chalcedonian synthesis (“two natures in one person, without mixture or confusion”). They wriggled around it, some of them, for quite a while, but ultimately I think they were able to appreciate the genuine strangeness of this element of the Christian tradition. Two of my better students, Kl. and Ca., plus another serious and engaged young man who has worked with me in the past, E., and a couple of promising newcomers, are all in this course.

In the afternoon section, I had asked students to come with questions they’d had about the textbook material, and they did. The questions were on the following topics, more or less:

1. the idea of “grace”
2. the notion of a Christian “myth,” i.e. the story of Jesus, a term the textbook uses frequently and which is troubling to some students;
3. the concept of “justification by faith”; and
4. (this one is kind of random) the significance of Kierkegaard. I didn’t even remember that the textbook mentioned the great Dane.

Probably 90% of the class period ended up being spent on the first point. Err, wait, actually we never got to points two through four. I spent pretty much the entire class pushing them to look at a single paragraph in the textbook (page fifty-nine, if I remember right) that gives a quick account of Augustine’s conversion experience. He was “seduced in the bedroom of his soul.” The students were grappling with the notion of agency or helplessness, and I tried to guide them towards a more intuitive grasp of the existential position of the Christian subject according to Augustine’s view: powerless, driven by desires he or she cannot control, continually beset by both passion and wonderment… I guess I didn’t get quite so carried away.

In neither class did I give them an assignment to think about for Monday. That’s when we start Traveling Mercies.

Today we’re supposed to be wrapping up the textbook reading and getting ready to move on to Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. It seems to me that we’ve spent the last two class sessions talking about the basic premise that the textbook author, who I think is John Esposito, uses to describe contemporary Christianity: the conflict between modernism (not the same thing as modernity) and fundamentalism (an unsatisfying term because of its strongly negative connotations, but none of us could think of anything better).

What we haven’t done is spent much time on Christianity itself (though of course you could make a good argument for discarding that kind of essentialist terminology). Here is my thought: basically lecture today, and isolate three points in the development of Christianity that I want to talk about. We could talk about the meaning(s) of Jesus, the development of the Augustinian and Constantinian models of Christendom, and the Reformation and the emergence of modernity.

Something that’s been sticking in my craw since Wednesday: the Muslim student I mentioned (in the afternoon section) raised the question — completely non-confrontationally — about the relationship of the idea of “modernity” as discussed by the textbook to the non-Christian world religions. He wanted to know whether there was another, different definition of modernity that was more appropriate to Islam and other traditions. I was kind of thrown by this. If you were to buttonhole the textbook’s authors and challenge them to answer, I suspect they would say that “modernity” as they are using the concept has to do with globalism, i.e. it’s a global phenomenon, and therefore not distinctive to any tradition, but that it is inextricably intertwined with the expansion of Western societies geographically into the non-European world — and thus every society, via colonialism, has had to come to terms with Christianity in one way or another. But still, that seems like a remarkably and naively ethnocentric way of thinking about this very complicated idea.

Anyhow, I think I’m going to go with something like the following:

1. Ways of thinking about Jesus
2. Notion of kerygma
3. Importance of belief; e.g. trinitarianism, Chalcedon
4. Growth of Augustinian synthesis
5. Collapse of medieval synthesis with Reformation & coming of modernity
6. Fundamentalism-vs.-modernism debate as the result

The dominant impression from today’s classes was that everyone was groggy and out of it. The weather was miserable: muggy, wet, and way hotter than necessary. Once again, my first World Religions class went unspectacularly (I’m starting to really think that the windowless basement room — originally a computer lab — where we’ve been having class is at least partially to blame for the general low energy level); this time, though, the second one didn’t go all that much better. Low energy, poor focus (on my part, and the students’), lack of planning and preparation, — and not quite enough enthusiasm to make up for those shortfalls. For me, at least, the second class (i.e. the afternoon one) was more interesting mainly because some genuine discussion developed, even though it was not discussion on anything I had planned on spending time on. One student, who has previously (and without any noticeable awkwardness) identified himself to me and to the class as a Muslim, asked, apropos of nothing, basically how the hell Christians could call themselves monotheists while also believing in the Trinity. I made a few comments, but the main (and most interesting) result was that four or five other students (one of whom, incidentally, basically never talks) raised their hands and tried to tackle the question. No real controversy developed, which was O.K. by me, though I think the potential was there.
(more…)

What I asked them to think about for next class: how are fundamentalists “modern”?

This meeting went a lot better. I began by asking people for general thoughts and reactions about Endo, specifically to say what characters they found most interesting and why. Everyone agreed: Otsu and Mitsuko. I spent some time talking about how I understood those characters and the dilemmas they raised. There was quite a bit of interested discussion, and I eventually had to cut it short and move on to talking about the textbook.

Discussion of the textbook readings began with some spirited critique of the book itself and its structure. Several people seemed to feel that the overly historical focus was (1) boring and (2) ineffective for conveying the right kind of “sensibility.” They wanted to know what the religion was like as a way of being, not as “something that happened” (as D. brilliantly put it). Other people leapt to the book’s defense. It was pretty interesting for me to hear what they all had to say.

Ultimately we moved on to what I consider the most important point in these opening sections of the chapter: namely, the concepts of fundamentalism and modernism. I spent some time getting them to lay out their ideas of what fundamentalism and modernism are, and I addressed those, then left them the final question as above.

Just walked out of my World Religions class a few minutes ago, and am preparing for my next one. The first one didn’t go so well, I’m afraid. I didn’t feel adequately prepared. I also had asked students to pick up where we left off Friday and to spend a little time reflecting on some of the issues that were raised by Deep River, but I didn’t have a clear idea of how that ought to happen, so the discussion kind of fell flat. In general I felt my students were suffering from a kind of Monday morning slackness, but it seemed pretty late in the morning (11 a.m.) for that to happen. A lot of non-participants in discussion.

Anyhow … I guess I am going to have to rethink what I’m doing in the afternoon section. I’ve got forty-five minutes to make up my mind how to run that one. I realize in retrospect that one thing that’s very important for me is for students to think through the modernist/fundamentalist distinction as a basic category for the rest of the course. I asked them to think about this for the next class. Better not forget that.