Class Notes

Notable moments in the classroom:
 
Early in the semester, my students had many insightful and challenging questions about the Pilgrims, Puritans, and colonial America. They wanted to talk about the colonists' impacts on the Native Americans and on the ecosystem, wanted to know all about their religious beliefs, and about the financial and legal contexts of colonization. In the midst of all this sophisticated conversation, I showed them a map and pointed out the locations of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. One student then asked, "And where is this 'Virginia'?" I had to take a step back and remember that the geography of the eastern seaboard is not burned into their memories, as it is mine. As I explained that Virginia was much further south, I enjoyed the reminder that we are not all approaching the subject matter from the same backgrounds.
 
Similarly, after working through a few sections of Jonathan Edwards's sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" with a student in my office, she said it was starting to make more sense to her. She said she'd go home and re-read it, and was confident that she'd then have a better understanding of it, "Inshallah" (which loosely translates to "If Allah wills it.") I couldn't help but wonder whether Allah would indeed want her to make sense of the Calvinist fire and brimstone, and what Jonathan Edwards would think if he'd heard our conversation!
 
Most recently, I astutely observed in my 3pm class that the lights always go out for about a minute while I'm taking attendance. The students very patiently explained to me that the power goes off in the city every day from 3 to 6pm, and that it just takes a minute for the University's generators to kick in. They told me that the whole country has regular outages, but not all at the same time. It sounded like all of Beirut was without power from 3 to 6 (as well as a period in the morning), but the times may differ by neighborhood, I'm not sure. In any case, I'm certainly learning new lessons every day--ones that probably seem incredibly basic to my students.