What do I want for my students?

I teach theology to undergraduates. That means, on one hand, that I’m not teaching them a skill. Many professors pass on a set of concrete skills meant for a job or some other professional activity: how to interview a client; how to detect a speech impediment; how to parse a verb; how to mix solutions. Not me. That’s not what theology is about.

On the other hand, I’m not teaching my students a discrete collection of facts, such that they might memorize them and, having done so, be assessed for their (or my) success. To be sure, theology contains facts—the date of the seventh ecumenical council, the name of the angelic doctor, the location of the crucifixion—but these are not the point of theology; they are necessary but relatively unimportant elements along the way.

Moreover, nine out of ten students register for a class with me because it is part of a menu of courses they are required to take. In other words, they’re with me because they have to be, not (necessarily) because they want to be. I cannot assume either prior knowledge or present interest.

Finally, professors should be honest with themselves. Whatever a student learns from me, she will almost certainly forget within five to fifteen years. No student is going to see me at a restaurant in 2035 and say, “Dr. East! Chalcedon! Theotokos! St. Cyril and the Tome of St. Leo!” Even if they did, they wouldn’t remember what those words meant. It would be an impressive student who did.

I imagine it’s hard for some teachers to accept this. Why teach if they’re going to forget it all?

Well, to contradict myself for a moment: I remember verbatim a line from a professor in a course on teaching my senior year of college. He said: Learning is what you remember when you’ve forgotten everything you were taught. (Or something like that.) That is, you do take something with you, even if you forget all the facts and figures. So what is that something?

The answer will vary based on the teacher and the topic. Here’s mine.

My principal task as a teacher of theology is the act of exposure. I want to expose my students, usually for the first time, to the Christian theological tradition. I want to show them that it exists, that it makes a claim on their lives, that it is of crucial importance to understanding God, and that it is supremely intellectually interesting. If I do nothing else whatsoever, and students walk out of my classroom having imbibed those lessons, I will have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

Put from a different angle, and more simply, my goal is for students to understand—or at least to see a visceral instance of someone who believes—that God matters. There is nothing more important than God, nothing more interesting, nothing more vital, nothing more imperiously imposing, nothing more existentially significant.

Further, I want my students to see that the person in front of them not only believes this to be true but has staked his life on it. More, that this person is morally and intellectually serious and—for this very reason, not in spite of it—believes it to his core. In other words, having taken me, no student will be able to say, for the rest of his or her life, that he or she never met an educated, intelligent, committed Christian adult. I’ve got all the credentials. I’ve got the knowledge. In worldly terms, I’ve got the goods. Not the goods that matter, mind you—like the fruit of the Holy Spirit or the cardinal virtues or any meaningful sign of holiness—but the goods that the world cares about. The Ivy PhD, the books and articles, the whatever other superficial symptoms of success that are meant to impress on social media and dust jackets.

If the students listen to my teaching, then they will know that the point about the gospel is that these things don’t matter. They are means to other ends, often little more than filthy lucre and in any case full of temptations—not least to seek after prestige or to be impressed with one’s own resume. Nevertheless, one thing they communicate is that the person bearing them cannot be dismissed as a country bumpkin or a dime-a-dozen fundie. Even if I’m wrong, it’s not because (as they say) I haven’t done the reading. No student finishes a semester with me and thinks I haven’t done my homework. That’s the one thing I make sure to rule out.

In that sense, then, I use what’s to hand as a tool for amplifying what I’ve judged to be most important for them to hear. For the most part, they won’t remember the grammar of orthodoxy as I’ve tried to spell it out for them. What they’ll remember is that there is such a thing as orthodoxy. And whether or not they were raised on it in their home church, now they can’t claim ignorance: it exists, it’s grand, it’s rich and wide and deep—the sort of thing one might give one’s life to, as their (somewhat excitable and quite strange) professor seems to have done and (even stranger) seems to think they should, too.

My courses, in a word, remove plausible deniability. They can’t say they weren’t told. Through sheer relentless heartfelt passion, energy, and love, I give all that I have and use all that I know to show forth the truths of the gospel of God. The assignments aren’t onerous, but the reading is. I want to saturate them in the wisdom and beauty of the doctors and saints and martyrs of the church. (I want them, secondarily, to imagine that reading might be a habit worth acquiring.) I want them to see themselves in the writings of the tradition, by which I mean, I want them to see the Christ they already know in the words of ancient and unknown forebears. They knew Christ, too! Perhaps, as a result, they might have something to teach us of Christ in the here and now.

More than anything, I want my students to see in the sacred tradition of the church what Rilke saw in the torso of Apollo: A peremptory and inescapable word from beyond, addressing them by name: You must change your life.

That’s what I want for my students. I want them to know Christ, and to keep on knowing him for the rest of their lives. They can do that while eventually, or even quickly, forgetting all I ever said. And that would be just fine with me.

Deconstruction

My post on Thursday generated a lot of responses, many of which were positive. One mostly mild but nevertheless negative reaction was a defense of the concept of deconstruction, seeing in my post an unfair diminishment of what for many has proven to be both a necessary and a healthy process of growth in faith and repudiation of false or destructing teaching.

That’s fair. The piece I wrote was a blog post, shot off on little more than a whim. The point of it was less why deconstruction is bad, more why my friends and colleagues who presuppose that my main task in the classroom is deconstructing my students’ beliefs are dead wrong. I didn’t intend the post as an entry in the Deconstruction Wars—God forbid—which I find to be simultaneously vicious, vacuous, and largely pertaining to highly specific sub-cultures in American evangelicalism. The soldiers in these wars seem insistent on refusing to listen or understand one another. And since I’m not enlisted in either this or any intra-evangelical war, I don’t think of what I write as ever anything more than observations from a friendly outsider who lives in, if not enemy territory, than a sort of foreign land.

Having said that, in the hopes of clarifying where I was coming from in my post and offering some of those observations, here’s my two cents on that ill-famed and contested word, “deconstruction.”

*

Deconstruction is just a word. It’s not a technical term. Like every ordinary word, you know its meaning by the way people use it. To be sure, people don’t use it in identical ways, but those ways are nonetheless quite similar, and one or two primary meanings rise to the top of common usage.

By way of comparison, consider transubstantiation. That is a technical word. It has a prescriptive meaning however you or anyone else uses it correctly. Why? Because it was a term of art invented for a purpose: to give a name to whatever it is the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church believes (which is to say, teaches) occurs in the eucharistic rite, following the fourth Lateran Council and as developed by St. Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent.

Deconstruction is not like that. Unless you’re exegeting Derrida—and here’s the part where I remind you that exegeting Derrida gives you quite a bit of (shall we say) hermeneutical latitude—deconstruction is not a piece of jargon, a technical word, or a term of art. Its meaning is not determined by any magisteria of which I am aware, and that includes Christian Twitter. What it means is how it means in the natural discourse of those who deploy it. Which means, in turn, that to say, “D doesn’t mean X, D means Y,” is only a rather implausibly dogmatic way of saying, “I use D differently than you do,” which is itself just a way of saying, “I would prefer to restrict the use of D to mean Y instead of X.” The first phrasing sounds like a statement of grammatical fact, and thus a sort of rebuke; the second is mere description of difference of usage; the third is a normative claim, supportable by argument if one is in a mood to supply it.

It is perfectly defensible to opt for the third phrasing. That’s part of how the meaning of contested terminology gets sorted out. The second phrasing is a way of making disagreement intelligible, though it doesn’t move the needle of the conversation one way or the other. The thing to avoid is the first phrasing. There is no eternal dictionary definition on hand to which one may refer in parsing and correcting others’ usage of deconstruction. So it’s not only silly to bang one’s fist on the digital disk, insisting, flush-faced, that the word doesn’t mean X because it only means Y. It’s false.

The good news is, when faced with a novel word trailing behind it a range of possible meanings, we can hash out together how we think we ought to use the word, and why. That’s worth doing in this case, since deconstruction is very much a feature of The Discourse today. Even if we only establish distinct meanings that different people use in various contexts for diverse purposes, we might understand one another better, which is a worthy goal in itself.

*

I’m not going to try to settle what we all ought to understand by deconstruction. That’s a fool’s errand in any case. I do want to make a few remarks on the wider cultural trend the term names and why I said about it what I did in my original post.

Lest I be at all unclear, there are many, many people for whom deconstruction describes a crucial part of their spiritual formation in which they divested themselves of wicked or false beliefs or practices and learned to amend or replace those beliefs or practices with true or life-giving ones. To the precise extent that that experience is what is meant in general by deconstruction, then it is obvious to me that deconstruction is both necessary and good, a work of the Holy Spirit worth celebrating and commending. And I personally know folks, both college students and friends in mid-life, who fit this description and who unquestionably needed such an experience—if, that is, they or their faith were going to survive.

At the same time, I do not think this is the only experience named by deconstruction. And if I’m honest, I do not think it is the primary one, common though it may be.

The primary one is what I named in my post on (re)construction:

The form is the thing: deconstruction is a style. Deconstruction is a mode of being, a moral, social, and spiritual habitation in which to dwell, for a time or indefinitely. Deconstruction says: I’m unlearning all that I ever thought I knew—usually about the Bible, Christian teaching, Jesus, faith, or some charged element therein. Deconstruction in the imperative says: You must unlearn what you have learned. And what you have learned, you learned from an authority in your life, namely a parent, a pastor, a church, a school, a mentor, a sibling, an aunt, a grandmother, a coach, a friend. Which means, at least as the message is received, that you must unbind yourself from the wisdom of such authorities; you must accept me, your teacher, as an authority above your inherited authorities, and defer to my learning over theirs.

This, as I hope is evident, is foolish, self-serving, and manipulative pedagogy. But it is the regnant pedagogical mode not only for professors but for every would-be influencer, life coach, self-help writer, and podcaster on the market, doubly so if they purport to be an expert on matters spiritual. And the content (i.e., the catechesis) matches the form (i.e., the pedagogy): nothing concrete whatsoever. Generic therapeutic self-affirmation clothed in whatever the latest HR-approved, capital-appropriated progressive cause happens to be. Goop gone wild; woke goop. De-toxined crystals against toxic positivity, VR social justice in the metaverse, and oh by the way click here for your subscription to the weekly newsletter from Deconstruction, Inc, it’s only $39.99/month.

Granted that I allow myself to get carried away there a bit (though forever and always you must credit me, I demand it, for “woke goop”), the basic point stands. Deconstruction today has become a sort of brand with which a certain class of evangelicals and exvangelicals would like to be identified. It has been transformed into a commodity that confers upon the person a particular social status, a status apt to those who have passed an invisible threshold of salary, graduate degrees, and political opinions. That status we may call “not disreputable.” To be disreputable is to be associated with the wrong people, in this case the people who raised you or the people you worship with, people who lack in the extreme the right status and the right opinions. Deconstruction™ provides permission structures for you either to hold such people at arm’s length or to renounce all their ways and works. You need not be associated with them, because (you now realize) you are unlike them. And the prompt for such realization is deconstruction.

At this point I will repeat: Is this all that deconstruction is, for anyone and everyone? No! I just said above that it is altogether something different for plenty of folks. But is it also this, namely the influencer-mediated mass phenomenon of Insta-trademarked social and spiritual status marked above all by the public signaling of newly disavowed disreputable and offensive beliefs and associations (or, as it happens, newly acquired reputable and inoffensive beliefs and associations)? Yes, it is. And I don’t know that I could believe you were being honest if you denied it.

*

There’s a third style of deconstruction worth mentioning, and its complexity is found in its unstable placement between the two I’ve already described. It’s this one that I was largely after in my original post, because it’s the one I see my students most susceptible to at this stage in their lives. Recall: I’m not a pastor. I’m a professor. My responsibility is the classroom, not the sanctuary. But because I teach at a Christian university and I have students of every major in my classes, it is part of my charge to teach on this or that aspect of Christian faith and theology in such a way that I am forming my students in the truth of the gospel as an outworking of the academic task.

Among the ways by which one can approach that charge, I identified two. One is deconstruction, the other is (re)construction. Deconstruction as a pedagogical mode treats students as ill-formed fundies in need of a sort of intellectual transfusion: my wisdom replacing their corrupted upbringing. I cannot put into words my contempt for this style of teaching. It is self-aggrandizing nonsense. It spits on students’ families and communities of origin. It presumes to know in advance that they come from ignorance and stupidity, whereas I represent knowledge and enlightenment.

This is an abject and risible failure of the high calling of teacher.

When I say I don’t deconstruct in the classroom, this is what I mean. I don’t set myself in opposition to all that my students have ever known or trusted, asking them to place their faith in me instead. That doesn’t mean I abjure my authority or expertise. It just means teaching does not have to be contrastive to be successful. It doesn’t have to involve evacuation of the contents of students’ minds before learning can begin. It certainly does not require covertly incepting students such that they learn from the professor that, to be an educated person, they must actively distrust the very source of their life: their parents, their churches, their neighbors and coaches and mentors—in short, everyone they’ve ever loved.

Let me give a concrete example. I am explicit in my classroom that I hope to make an anti-Marcionite of every one of my students. I suppose I could do that by telling them, in so many words, that their churches are just the very worst for instilling in them, intentionally or not, a tacit skepticism of Israel, Israel’s scriptures, and Israel’s God. Why, though? Why must I engage in “them bad, me good” to make my point? Instead, among other things, what I say is: Think through the logic of your commitments, which are by and large the commitments of your churches and families. Do they believe the Bible is the word of God? Is the Old Testament in the Bible? Do they believe the God and Father of Jesus Christ is the God of Abraham who created the world? So on and so forth. It’s not hard at all for them to see, and quickly, that they and their communities are already committed to not being Marcionite. The subtle question then becomes, Where and how and why did they imbibe the assumption, however deep-seated, that the Old Testament is a second-class citizen in Holy Scripture? And that’s when we get cooking.

Do you see? You could describe what I’m doing there as deconstructing my students’ Marcionite beliefs. Is that really necessary though? Because you could equally describe it as building up (and grounding) my students’ antecedent but largely implicit beliefs about the unity of God, God’s people, and God’s word. And if what I’m after here is a choice between alternative pedagogies, then the latter is not only a superior description of what is happening. It is a guide to the “how,” the style and sensibility, of my teaching. It shapes my approach and governs my words. It reminds me, constantly, that I’m in the business of building, not tearing down—all the while allowing that building sometimes involves rebuilding, or removing this slat for that one, or securing walls or foundations in a more reliable way, and so on. The end is the edifice, which is why St. Paul calls for edification. That end has an aim or goal, then. It also implies a terminus, a destination, a point of completion. Ultimately that completion is in God’s hands, in God’s time, and arrives only after death. Keeping the end in mind, though, helps the teacher, or at any rate this teacher, from supposing that the construction project is aimless or without guidance, a wholly human endeavor in the philosophically constructivist sense: something we do, on our own for our own purposes, since of all things the measure is man.

In the world of education, especially academia, it can be tempting to believe that Protagoras is right. But he’s not. And my worst fear for my students is that they will be seduced by the most childish of all the deconstructions on offer, namely, that there are no answers, only questions, that deconstruction is a journey without a destination, that faith is only faith so long as you don’t believe in anything in particular, that what the gospel is good for is reinforcing what makes me comfortable and never demanding of me risk or loss, suffering or sacrifice, or (horror of horrors) disreputability.

I want my students to know Christ, the living Christ who is both more beautiful and more terrible than they’ve ever imagined. That means training them to ask good questions, and it certainly means crucifying their (and my) expectations of what may be true of God, what may be true of us, and what the true God may truly ask of each of us. If the result for my students is deconstruction in the good and proper sense, then so be it: you’ll get no protest or complaint from me. But if the result is the loss of Christ, if the result is an endless voyage away from God into the false self fashioned for them by the postmodern merchants of identity (whose god is their stomach, which is to say, Mammon), and if they call that deconstruction—then I don’t want anything to do with it. Such deconstruction will find no ready welcome in my classroom, only hostility and refusal.

Like everything that can be used well or poorly, then, deconstruction may be judged by its fruits. If it gives us Christ, we ought to welcome it. If it does not, we ought to turn it away. If sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, then we ought to judge case by case. At the very least, we should know in advance the good it is capable of doing and judge it accordingly. If by and large it fails to do that good, doing it only on rare occasions, then we are justified in viewing deconstruction as a general cultural trend to be something worth lamenting and resisting. And if I’m wrong, if the bad sorts of deconstruction outlined above are the exception to the rule, then God be praised: he’ll have proven me a fool again, and not for the last time.

(Re)construction

There’s a lot of talk these days about deconstruction. I’m often asked how I approach deconstructing my students’ beliefs in the classroom; it’s typically a given not only that I do it but that I ought to do it, that it’s part of my job description.

I do not deconstruct what my students come into my class believing. I don’t as a point of fact and I don’t on principle. Why?

Not because my students lack beliefs worth giving up (which, by the way, we all do, all the time). I’ve written elsewhere about what I call theological demons that demand exorcising in this generation of Bible-belt students. So it’s true in one sense that I identify and criticize particular beliefs that (I am explicit) I want my students to reject.

But that isn’t what people mean by deconstruction, either in form or in content. The form is the thing: deconstruction is a style. Deconstruction is a mode of being, a moral, social, and spiritual habitation in which to dwell, for a time or indefinitely. Deconstruction says: I’m unlearning all that I ever thought I knew—usually about the Bible, Christian teaching, Jesus, faith, or some charged element therein. Deconstruction in the imperative says: You must unlearn what you have learned. And what you have learned, you learned from an authority in your life, namely a parent, a pastor, a church, a school, a mentor, a sibling, an aunt, a grandmother, a coach, a friend. Which means, at least as the message is received, that you must unbind yourself from the wisdom of such authorities; you must accept me, your teacher, as an authority above your inherited authorities, and defer to my learning over theirs.

This, as I hope is evident, is foolish, self-serving, and manipulative pedagogy. But it is the regnant pedagogical mode not only for professors but for every would-be influencer, life coach, self-help writer, and podcaster on the market, doubly so if they purport to be an expert on matters spiritual. And the content (i.e., the catechesis) matches the form (i.e., the pedagogy): nothing concrete whatsoever. Generic therapeutic self-affirmation clothed in whatever the latest HR-approved, capital-appropriated progressive cause happens to be. Goop gone wild; woke goop. De-toxined crystals against toxic positivity, VR social justice in the metaverse, and oh by the way click here for your subscription to the weekly newsletter from Deconstruction, Inc, it’s only $39.99/month.

So no. As far as I can help it I don’t add my voice to the deconstruction chorus. What do I do instead then?

I build. Which is to say, I construct, or reconstruct. It’s all foundations, floor plans, building permits, and fashioning of pillars in my classroom. We don’t tear down an inch, not if I can help it.

The reason is simple. My students don’t have anything to deconstruct. Deconstruction implies the razing of a building, the demolition of a house. But for the most part, my students don’t walk into my classes with mental palaces furnished in gold, granite, and crystal. All too often, their faith is a house of cards. One gust of wind, one gentle puff of air will knock it down. I’m not interested in that. Not only am I not teaching at a state school in a religion department. I’m a Christian theologian, a teacher in and for the church. It’s my business to fortify, to strengthen, to secure, and to ground their faith—not to tear it down. Deconstruction is a razing, as I said, but I’m in the business of raising homes to live in. I want sturdy foundations and load-bearing walls. I want to build houses on the rock.

Because the storm is coming. It’s already here. I’m given students who for the most part believe already, or want to believe. What I do is say: Guess what? It’s true. All of it. You can trust what you’ve been taught, though you may not have been given the resources to explore the how or the why or the what-for. But Jesus really is God’s Son; he really did rise from the dead; he really is the Lord and savior of the cosmos. And from there it’s off to the races: church history, sacred tradition, ecumenical councils, creedal formulas, saints and doctors, mystics and martyrs, doctrines and dogmas and the rest.

Not one word is meant to undermine the faith they brought with them to the course. It’s meant to bolster and stabilize it. The unmaskers and destabilizers, the Deconstructors™ with all their pomp will be knocking on the doors of their hearts soon enough. I’m doing what I can in the time that I have to reinforce and buttress their defenses, so that when the time comes they are ready. Not because I want them to live free from risk; not because I want them to avoid hard questions. On the contrary. I’m usually the first to raise some of those hard questions on their behalf. But I don’t pretend that it’s better to leave questions untouched than to seek truth by answering them; I don’t model for them the faux profundity of the hip philosopher who hides his actual convictions while interrogating everyone else’s unfashionable ones.

On that day, fast approaching, when my students find themselves facing an unexpected question or challenge to their faith, instead of thinking, “My deconstructing professor was right: this Christian thing is a sham,” they might think instead, “I’m not sure what the answer is here, but the way my theology professor acted, I bet the church has thought about this before; I should look into it.” I want my students to learn the reflex, at the gut level, that there’s a there there, i.e., there’s something to be looked into—not merely something to be walked away from.

That’s why I don’t deconstruct. My classroom is a construction site. Day and night, we’re building, building, building, world without end, amen.

Experiments in Luddite pedagogy: dropping the LMS

This semester I wanted to experiment with teaching my courses without the use of an LMS. For those unfamiliar with the term, LMS stands for "learning management system," i.e., an online program for turning in assignments, communicating with students, updating the syllabus, inputting grades, etc. Some of us used Blackboard back in the day. My campus uses Canvas.

Now, Canvas is without question the best LMS I have ever encountered: intuitive, adaptable, not prone to random glitches and failures, useful for any number of pedagogical and technological ideas and goals. So far as I can see, after 15 years or so, the technology has finally caught on to the vision of using the internet well for teaching purposes, a vision ahead of its time one to two decades ago, and which probably, as a result, led to a lot of wasted time and self-defeating habits.

But, you might be wondering, if Canvas is a good LMS, why did I want to experiment with not using one? Here's why.

1. I want to be intentional in my use of technology, in my life and in the classroom. My campus is an LMS-supporting and Canvas-deploying atmosphere. I've never heard of anyone even broaching the topic of not using it, or even of using it as minimally as possible. The presumption is not that one ought to decide whether to use an LMS but how. I wanted to test that presumption.

2. I have many colleagues who are not only tech-savvy but pedagogically creative, even brilliant, in the ways they put Canvas to use in their courses and in their classrooms. I am not among them. Partly for philosophical reasons, partly for pragmatic reasons, I simply do not put Canvas to maximal use. Indeed, in most of my courses I put it to minimal use: sometimes exclusively as an online home for the syllabus and for students' grades. Which raises the practical question: If that's all I'm using it for, why use it at all?

3. My diagnosis of students—a diagnosis I share with them, since the diagnosis applies to our culture more broadly, and since some of my classes try to tackle the problem head-on—is that they are overly reliant upon, even addicted to, screens: above all their smartphones. Part of my move toward (so-called) Luddite pedagogy is that I don't want to contribute to that addiction if (a) there are alternatives and/or (b) that contribution would not justify the additional screen time it would require. In other words, if I'm going to ask, encourage, or (Lord help me) mandate that my students be on their devices more than they already are, then I had better have a very good reason for it. Do I? Do we?

4. The three greatest "needs" addressed by an LMS are communication, syllabus, and grades. All other uses, so far as I can see, are optional: each professor is (or should be) free to employ it—or not—to whatever further pedagogical ends she has for her course. But those differ per the nature of the class, the character of the instructor, the style of assignments, and so on. What then of those necessities?

5. Communication is most simply dealt with: I communicate with my students face to face, in class, or via email. Communication via LMS has only ever seemed to me like one more thing to add to all the other modes of digital communication in one's life (text messages, Google Chat, Slack, Facebook messaging, Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, on and on). I only know if someone has messaged me on Canvas if Canvas alerts me by email. Why not just cut out the middle man?

6. I understand the desire for an online syllabus. I prefer not to have one, but for those who do, I would go one of two ways. Either Google Doc—which is simple, accessible, and revisable—or a one-page blog post, preferably on one's own domain (examples: Alan Jacobs; Jeffrey Bilbro). Moreover, I discovered that my students were (a) ignoring my verbal instructions about assignments and scheduling in favor of what Canvas told them and (b) ignoring the syllabus PDF on Canvas in favor of what Canvas's schedule of upcoming assignments told them. It turns out that form isn't content-neutral and the medium is the message (ever and ever, amen): students have been trained by LMS programs since middle and high school not to read or even to listen and instead to consult their online home page for course guidance. If the home page says jump, they jump. If it says nothing, they know there's nothing to do—even if the professor or the written syllabus says otherwise. So this semester one of my experiments was the lack of a Canvas home page "consultation" device: they had to read the paper syllabus I handed out to them as well as pay attention to what I said in class. A novel concept, no?

7. Immediate and ever-ready access to grades is both the greatest expressed desire on the part of students and that which has caused me the most worry about presumptive usage of LMS in higher education. Students and professors talk as if the absence of such access is a cause for anxiety in an already anxiety-ridden generation. My observation has been the opposite. From what I can tell, immediate and ever-ready access to grades does not alleviate but rather generates and increases student anxiety. Students' default settings on Canvas—which they have not only on their tablets and laptops but, naturally, on their smartphones—sign them up for email alerts and push notifications for any and all changes to the grade sheet, including changes to other students' grades. For though they can't see others' grades, they can see the average grade for an assignment, which changes as others' grades are entered or modified. Now, students, like the rest of us, are already addicted to their phones. Add to that the ever-present possibility that grades might be entered, or start being entered. Add to that receiving push notification after push notification updating the average grade for a course assignment, prior to receiving one's own grade. It's a recipe for stress. And even if, on the instructor side, you do your part to minimize all those alerts, students can still go online and check their grades at any moment, calculating their (incomplete and rarely predictive) average and comparing their individual grades to how their peers did (on average). I am flat unpersuaded that this is a good thing.

So I opted for my little experiment (with support from my chair). What have I done, and how has it gone so far?

1. Each student receives a printed copy of the syllabus the first week of class along with detailed verbal commentary by me. I also email a PDF to everyone in the class. I'm not a "revise as we go" teacher, so any changes are minor (e.g., no class on X day because my kid is sick, etc.).

2. I communicate in class or via email (or one-on-one in office hours)—full stop.

3. All assignments are completed or submitted by hand or in person: quizzes are taken in class without the use of laptops or phones; papers are printed out and turned in during class; there are no online class discussions; etc. Reasonable exceptions are permitted due to ability, availability, emergencies, and so on, but these are the norms.

4. One of my courses uses a bunch of scanned PDFs of chapters and essays. I simply uploaded all of them into a university Google Drive and shared it with the students in the course.

5. As for grades: This proved the biggest experiment of all, though it's merely a throwback to the way professors did things for decades before the advent of LMS. I keep a spreadsheet for each class where I input grades, absences, etc. The students' names are in a random order, and each student has a (privately assigned) number. At the end of each week, I print out the spreadsheet, minus their names, and post it outside my office. (This is the FERPA-approved method.) Students know their grades are updated weekly, and can come by anytime. They received their confidential identifying number by individual email early in the semester, and their grades remain anonymous that way. For my smaller courses (seminar-like in numbers), I bring the spreadsheet to class when I return major assignments like papers.

6. Why this route for grades? First, to undercut the anxiety of alerts and notifications. Second, to remove one more digital temptation for perpetual checking and refreshing: "I wonder if he'll update them online now? I wonder if he already has? I'll go ahead and check." Third, to motivate me to grade in a timely fashion. Fourth, to encourage students to come by my office and, if they have questions about grades, to ask me questions then and there rather than via email the moment grades are posted online. Fifth, to routinize the giving and posting of grading so that it's not a pall hovering over my head at all times, but has a structure and rhythm within the work week.

7. So: How have students responded? Without a single complaint. Not one problem. Now, we're in week 10 of 15. Perhaps there will be some students who organize mass protests at the end of the semester for one reason or another. I solicit anonymous feedback mid-semester, and that is where I got the idea to bring the grade sheet to my smaller classes when papers are handed back. But otherwise it's been smooth sailing on the student side: no missed assignments, no botched communication, no "but Canvas said!" I'm honestly still a bit shocked that there haven't been a few more complaints or requests for online grades: I told them up front that it was an experiment, and that I was open to revision or reversion if it didn't go well. But I've seen no resistance on their side whatsoever.

8. And on my side, it's been one long victory march. I've deleted my Facebook account, I've reduced Twitter to ~30 minutes on Saturdays, I severely limit my time on email, and now I'm not spending hours on Canvas when I could be doing something more productive with my time. Again, the point isn't that any and all LMS usage is evil or time poorly spent; it's that such usage ought to be intentional and purposeful. For me, it had become one more digital box to check, not a positive contributor to my pedagogical goals or my students' well-being. I have colleagues who use it well and I have other classes in which I too use it (hopefully well enough). But as for this semester, the net benefits have been manifold. Less time on the laptop, less time online, more time for other work tasks, and more timely and efficient grading. Win, win, win, win.

9. The question now is next semester. This semester I have all upperclassmen in elective courses. Next semester I'm teaching a one-week intensive in January, another elective for upperclassmen, but also a freshman survey class that is lecture-based. The intensive course relies on Canvas both before and after we meet, so I will probably keep it (though I suppose I could drop it if I solved the problem of how to give them their grades apart from the LMS grade sheet). But I'm disinclined to nix the LMS for the freshmen, for two reasons. First, they're coming from high schools where they relied on an LMS, especially for grades, and at this stage the lack of one might freak them out. Second, I have productively used online discussion posts for an assignment in this particular course, and unless I think of an alternative, I'm loath to drop it. But since I'm new to this experiment, and since it has gone so well (even better than I imagined, if I'm honest), I might keep trying to think creatively about what it would mean to go LMS-free across all my classes.

We shall see. More reports to come from my haphazard attempts Luddite pedagogy. Until then.

Principles of Luddite pedagogy

My classes begin in this way: With phone in hand, I say, "Please put your phones and devices away," and thereupon put my own in my bag out of sight. I then say, "The Lord be with you." (And also with you.) "Let us pray." I then offer a prayer, usually the Collect for the day from the Book of Common Prayer. After the prayer, we get started. And for the next 80 minutes (or longer, if it is a grad seminar or intensive course), there is not a laptop, tablet, or smart phone in sight. If I catch a student on her phone, and Lord knows college students are not subtle, she is counted tardy for the day and docked points on her participation grade. Only after I dismiss class do the addicts—sorry, my students—satiate their gnawing hunger for a screen, and get their fix.

For larger lecture courses (40-60 students) with lots of information to communicate, I use PowerPoint slides. But for smaller numbers and especially for seminars, neither a computer nor the internet nor a screen of any kind is employed during class time. I further require my students to submit their papers (however short or long, however rarely or commonly due) in the form of a printed copy brought to class or dropped off at my office. And for weekly (or random) reading quizzes, students must come prepared with pencil and Scantron; we begin the quiz promptly at the beginning of class, with the questions coming sequentially in large print on the PowerPoint slides. I give them plenty of time for each question, but I do not go back to previous questions. If you arrive late and miss questions or the whole thing, so be it.

I rarely reply immediately to emails, and may not reply at all if the question's answer is specified in the syllabus. I will reply within 24 hours, but I will not reply (unless it is an emergency) after hours, while at home; some days I may not even check my work email between 5:00pm and 6:00am the following morning.

I have a strict attendance policy: I count both tardies and absences; three of the former count as one of the latter; and beginning with three unexcused absences (for a twice-weekly course), I deduct four percentage points from a student's final grade. So, e.g., a student with four unexcused absences and three tardies would go from a 91 to a 79. More than six unexcused absences means an automatic failing grade.

Students behave exactly as you suppose they would. They come to class, they show up on time, they do the reading, and they take hand-written notes. The only distraction they fight is drowsiness (I will not say whether I contribute to that perennial pedagogical opponent). And for two 80-minute blocks of time per week, these students who were in second grade when the first iPhone came out have neither a device in their hands nor a screen before their eyes nor buds in their ears.

It turns out I am a Luddite, at least pedagogically speaking. On the questions raised by this set of issues, my sense is that my colleagues, not just at my university but in the academy generally, are divided into three campus. There are those like me. There are those who find us and our pedagogy desirable, but for reasons intrinsic or extrinsic to themselves they cannot or will not join us and fashion their classrooms accordingly. And then there are those who, on principle, oppose Luddite pedagogy.

This last group, broadly speaking, views screens, phones, tablets, laptops, the internet, etc., as positive supplements or complements to the traditional teaching setting, and want as far as possible to incorporate student use of them in the classroom. This view extends beyond the classroom to, e.g., learning management systems and e-books, videos and podcasts, etc., etc. The scope of the classroom expands to include the digital architecture of LMS: a "space" online where discussion, assignments, interaction, learning, video, editing, grading feedback, and so on are consolidated and intertwined.

What rationale underwrites this perspective? Perhaps it is simply "where we are today," or "what we have to do" in the 21st century, working with digital-native millennials; or perhaps it is neither superior nor inferior to traditional classroom learning, but simply a different mode of teaching altogether, with its own strengths and weaknesses; or perhaps it is not sufficient but certainly necessary alongside the classroom, given its many ostensible benefits; or perhaps it is both necessary and sufficient, superior to because an improvement upon the now defunct pedagogical elements of old: a room, some desks, a teacher and students, some books, a board, paper and pencil.

I'm not going to make an argument against these folks. I think they're wrong, but that's for another day. Rather, I want to think about the basic principles underlying my own not-always-theorized pedagogical Ludditism—a stance I did not plan to take but found myself taking with ever greater commitment, confidence, and articulateness. What might those principles be?

Here's a first stab.

1. I want, insofar as possible, to interrupt and de-normalize the omnipresence of screens in my students' lives.

2. I want, insofar as possible, to get my students off the internet.

3. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to hold physical books in their hands, to turn pages, to read words off a page, to annotate what they read with pen or pencil.

4. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to put pen or pencil to paper, to write out their thoughts, reflections, answers, and arguments in longhand.

5. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to develop habits of silent, contemplative thought: the passive activity of the mind, lacking external stimulation, lost in a world known only to themselves—though by definition intrinsically communicable to others—chasing down stray thoughts and memories down back alleys in the brain.

6. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to practice talking out loud to their neighbors, friends, and strangers about matters of great import, sustained for minutes or even hours at a time, without the interposition or upward-facing promise of the smart phone's rectangle of light; to learn and develop habits of sustained discourse, even and especially to the point of disagreement, offering and asking for reasons that support one or another position or perspective, without recourse to some less demanding activity, much less to the reflexive conversation-stopper of personal offense.

7. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to see that the world to which they have grown accustomed, whose habits and assumptions they have imbibed and intuited without critique, consent, or forethought, is contingent: it is neither necessary nor necessarily good; that even in this world, resistance is possible; indeed, that the very intellectual habits on display in the classroom are themselves a form of and a pathway to a lifetime of such resistance.

8. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to experience, in their gut, as a kind of assault on their unspoken assumptions, that the life of the mind is at once more interesting than they imagined, more demanding than a simple passing grade (not to mention a swipe to the left or the right), and more rewarding than the endless mindless numbing pursuits of their screens.

9. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to realize that they are not the center of the universe, and certainly not my universe; that I am not waiting on them hand and foot, their digital butler, ready to reply to the most inconsequential of emails at a moment's notice; that such a way of living, with the notifications on red alert at all times of the day, even through the night, is categorically unhealthy, even insane.

In sum, I want the pedagogy that informs my classroom to be a sustained embodiment of Philip's response to Nathaniel's challenge in the Gospel of John. Can anything good come from a classroom without devices, from teaching and learning freed from technology's imperious determination?

Come and see.