Testing, Teaching and "Negative Capability"

Teaching for the test

I believe in testing.  Some years back, I was even certified as a Government of Canada Language Tester.  On the other hand, my experience as both teacher and tester confirmed my (and everyone else’s) misgivings about standardized testing.  The problems emerge when “the test” becomes the objective rather than one of the means at an educator’s disposal.  Nothing undermines the educational process more thoroughly and renders what is being taught more meaningless than when teachers are forced to teach for “the test.”

To Teach is to connect the unknown to the known

“To teach,” “to educate,” means to connect something new and meaningful to what students already know.  Meaning is context.  To learn something means that you are able to understand what it means or at least give that thing a meaning, which in turn means that you are able to place that thing in a context, to connect it to something that you already know.  That’s what good teachers do. They help students connect something new with what the students already know.  

The Opposite of teaching/learning

If you don’t believe me, consider the opposite of what I am describing.  You are sitting in a classroom, a “teacher” enters and begins talking in a language you don’t know and can’t identify.  The “teacher” continues for an hour and then leaves.  What have you learned?

"Negative capability"

The connection of new and old knowledge which defines teaching and learning rarely happens immediately and doesn’t come easily, which is why in the first class of my first-year undergraduate course I always introduced my students to the concept that the poet John Keats called “negative capability.”  “Negative capability,” which Keats described as the ability that all great poets have and I describe as what students need to have, is the capacity and willingness to hold onto information even when those facts and data may not immediately or completely make sense.  Students need to have confidence in the knowledge and ability of their teachers.  Students need to know and feel that their teachers will eventually help them make sense of what they have learned, help them connect the dots, but also connect all those dots to something that the student already knows about, giving them a fuller context and a meaning.  Teaching for the test means that what is being taught is likely to remain meaningless, to be un-connected from any meaningful context.  

But it gets worse.  

The Wire

If you haven’t had the experience (as I have), consider season four of my favourite television series, The Wire.  Yes, it’s fiction, but it does a good job of demonstrating what can and does happen when funding and teachers’ jobs are tied to students’ performance on a standardized test.  Schools (in this case a school in an underprivileged neighbourhood of Baltimore) will abandon their students’ interests and, by my definition, their education to a total focus on preparing for the test.

 

The Polarization of testing

Testing has become a polarized issue.  Macro-educators (specialists, administrators, institutions, ministries and governments) give too much importance to standardized testing, and micro-educators ( teachers, especially university teachers) abjure anything that comes close to a sit-down exam.

Traditionally a "discipline" means "an examination is possible"

I was involved in a protracted debate at my university about PhD Comprehensive Exams.  I was in favour of a traditional, three-or-four-hour sit-down exam.  The majority of my colleagues and the students preferred a take-home style of exam.  The single most compelling argument I could offer in favour of the traditional style of exam was that it would require that students study.  In the course of the debate, it came to me that the concept of “studying” had all but disappeared from the field in which I taught.

The Definition of "a test"

My definition of “a test” is that it is something that students have to study for.  A test should be based on what is taught, not the other way around, and not on something else--you’d be surprised how many teachers test something they haven’t really taught (or maybe you wouldn’t).  In addition to causing a student to study (by which I mean to review and reflected upon the course material), the test gives feedback to both the teacher and the student about what has been learned and what hasn’t.  

A Test requires attendance

That’s what I believe, but the truth is the original reason I adopted the habit of testing my undergraduates on a regular basis was to be sure they showed up.  I’ve seen other professors’ syllabi in which they specify that a student who misses two classes would have to drop the course.  This always sounded like a bluff to me, and if it wasn’t it would require taking attendance in every single class.  Not only does that seem un-university-like to me, but do you know how much time you would waste every single class taking the attendance of 60 students?  I wanted my students to show up because my lectures were so brilliant and stimulating that they wouldn’t want to miss one.  On the other hand, I remembered all the really good reasons I came up with for missing classes when I was an undergrad. So I started giving my classes little quizzes every two or three weeks or so.  Students who missed the class would, of course, miss the quiz, and if they missed the class after the quiz they wouldn’t be there to pick up the corrected copy.  This was my original intention, but something strange happened and I never did use the quizzes to check attendance.

Students want to be tested

As it turned out, attendance never proved to be a big enough issue to disturb me.  Students who didn’t show up usually failed or did poorly, and if a student was brilliant enough to do well without attending regularly, more power to her.  Even in a class of 60, I gave 5% of the mark for participation which, of course, required that I be able to identify every student in the room by the end of the semester--not as hard as it sounds.  The strange thing about the quizzes is, as I came to discover, that students really liked them.  

Students like being tested

I remember turning up at the classroom one day around 20 minutes before class (which was my habit) and being surprised to discover that most of the students were already there.  One of the students came up to me to announce that they were studying, had even formed study groups and mine was “the only course that people had to study for.”  At first I thought she was complaining, but she seemed so cheerful about it that I took her announcement as a compliment.  As I got to know the students better, especially those that had more than one class with me, I suggested that we could drop the quizzes, but the students wanted to keep them.  I started analyzing my evaluation process and informed students that overall their marks were lower on the quizzes than on the other forms of evaluation--the essay outline, the essay and exams.  Still students asked to maintain the quizzes.  

Testing is teaching

The quizzes were painless little things, multiple choice, circle the correct answer which could be done in less than ten minutes at the beginning of the class.  (There is a sample at the end of this post.) They were closely tied to the lectures and to notes that I put up on the course web site.  I understood that students appreciated and even enjoyed being tested, and the tests gave me the chance to go over the material a second time (or more) that a number of students hadn’t gotten the first time.  It was also a source of endless curiosity for me why students found some questions easy and others hard.  In fact, the quizzes confirmed the theories of teaching and learning that I’ve been talking about in this post.  

Students learn what connects to what they already know and think about

Let me explain.  When I taught American Literature, I always had a few quiz questions on Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.  It didn’t surprise me that students always got the answer right to the question:  “Why was Blanche Dubois fired from her job as a high-school teacher?”  The answer “that she had had an affair with one of her students” was bound to have caught the attention of students not that far out of high school themselves--not to mention that anything sexual or scandalous is libel to stick in the mind.  Still it surprised me that students always seemed to know that the hotel where Blanche went with various men was called “the Flamingo,”  until one day I was driving down Main Street passed the pub which I knew to be the favourite hang out of students from the university and I noticed for the first time that the run-down hotel next door was called “the Flamingo.”  It is so obvious.  Students hold onto information that they can connect to, that has meaning/context for them, that’s what learning is.

The Evils of standardized testing

I believe that testing can facilitate the learning process, but it can also have the opposite effect.  The motivation/inspiration for this posting was the photograph (below) that one of my former students who now has school-age children shared on Facebook.  

The woman who took this photograph of her daughter in tears as she tried to correct her homework wrote a short piece explaining the image and telling the horror story of her daughter’s struggle to complete a standardized test that American schools are now imposing.  I have never read so many heartfelt responses to a single posting.  Even for someone like me, a career educator with a super bright child, I can remember how turning my kid over to the educational system felt like surrendering him to kidnappers.  If I made one false move the system could punish my child in retaliation.

This photograph of a little girl in tears is a perfect icon of an educational system gone terribly wrong.  One not governed by teachers and parents but by a Wall-Street mentality that sees pain and suffering as evidence of austerity, productivity and good business.  This image made me think about how that terrible, moving photograph of a Vietnamese girl running down the road naked and burned after a napalm attack helped to turn the hearts and minds of Americans against the Vietnam War.  It also made me think about another famous photograph of a young Black man being attacked by a German Shepard, which Malcolm Gladwell (in David and Goliath) describes as provoking a turning point in the civil rights movement in the States.  I’d like to think that this image of a little girl’s sadness could provoke some positive change.

In Quebec we talk a lot about “values” these days.  Any society which would wittingly put pressure on and cause stress for five-year-olds for motives as feeble as standardized testing and statistics gathering has a serious problem with its values.

PS:  Here’s an example of a literature quiz for first-year students:

First Quiz   
Instructions:  Circle the letter of the best answer or completion to each of the following questions or statements.

1.  The word “quaint” in the phrase “your quaint honour” in the poem “To His Coy Mistress” is  . . . 

a.  a synonym for “great.”

b.  a metaphor for “cute” or “old fashioned.”

c.  a metonym for virginity.

d.  a pun on the word “queynte.”

e.  a hyperbole.

2.  The Latin expression “carpe diem” means . . .

a.  “god is dead.”

b.  “broken by the gods.”

c.  “I think therefore I am.”

d.  “buyer beware.”

e.  “seize the day.”

3.  The relationship between a sign and its referent can be . . . 

a.  discursive, non-discursive or logical.

b.  iconic, motivated or arbitrary.

c.  cultural, natural or ecological.

d.  physical, biological or neurological.

e.  phonetic, syntactic or grammatical.

4. The idea that words get their meanings from referents; that is, from things in the world is called . .

a.  constructionism.

b.  anthropologism.

c.  semiotics.

d.  linguistics.

e.  essentialism.

5.  How did the people of the Country of the Blind explain Nunez?

a.  He came from a strange and mystical place called Bogota.

b.  He came from rocks and was still unformed.

c.  He was a messenger from God.

d.  He was an alien from another world.

e.  He was a mountain climber who had fallen in an avalanche.

6.  Three traditional forms of irony are . . . 

a.  non-discursive, non-referential and aesthetic.

b.  poetry, prose and drama.

c.  verbal, situational and dramatic.

d.  Greek, Latin and Christian.

e.  textual, sociological and psychological.              

7.  Jacques Derrida defined “deconstruction” as . . .

a.  recognizing literature as the best writing that a society has produced.

b.  being true to one’s principles, beliefs and convictions.

c.  being conscious of the historical sedimentation of language.

d.  acknowledging that truth is beauty and beauty truth.

e.  the analysis of tropes and figures of speech in a literary text.

8.  “Vegetable love” is an example of . . .

a.  an oxymoron

b.  personification.

c.  a simile.

d.  an allusion.

e.  hyperbole.

9.  A “feminist” reading of “To His Coy Mistress” would be  . . .

a.  a sociological and resistant reading.

b.  a psychological and psychoanalytic reading.

c.  a formal and textual reading.

d.  a literal and historical reading.

e.  a reading of the poem as being ironic.

10.  How did the short story “The Country of the Blind” end? 

a.  Nunez returned to Bogota.

b.  Nunez and Medina-Saroté were married

c.  Nunez was accepted as the one-eyed King 

d.  Nunez lay down in the mountains, staring at the stars.

e.  Nunez was locked up because he was insane.

Best News Ever for Teachers: Everything Works!

The most brilliant statement I’ve ever heard about teaching and learning was “Everything works!”  Early in my career I taught basic-level ESL to new recruits at a military base. As my buddy Bob used to say, if you can teach a language, you can teach anything.  Your baseline assumption in teaching a language is that your students don’t understand what you are saying--a good assumption to consider no matter what you are teaching.  You’d be amazed how slow some teachers are in catching on to this idea, and resolve that talking faster and louder is the best possible response to students’ looks of incomprehension.  Figuring out what your students already know, what they are capable of doing and understanding, and adding something new to that mix is what I mean by the word “teaching.”  The questions is:  “How?”  And the answer is, guess what:  “Everything works!”

I was having lunch at the officers mess with Gustine Schuster when Dave Eliot joined us and began bubbling enthusiastically (Dave was a chronic enthusiast) about a new method he was trying out and that “It actually works!”  Gustine responded coolly (which was odd because Gustine was typically the epitome of personal warmth), “Everything works!”  Dave hardly missed a beat as he tried to continue his success story.  “Dave!” Gustine had to finally call him up short,  “everything works!”  In the history of teaching and learning languages, as Gustine explained, every numbskull, irrational, idiotic method of teaching can claim some degree of success.  In fact, some methods have succeeded quite well even though logic dictates that they shouldn’t have. People, especially children, are programmed to learn, especially languages, and they will manage to learn something, no matter how flawed the methods used in teaching them.  People who think they have taught children to talk are like those people who think they have taught a cat to use the litter box.  (Duhh, that’s what cats do!)  The truly amazing fact is that so many people have studied a language in school for 7, 8 or 9 years and still can’t speak it.  If the people in charge of those language courses were cat owners, there would be feces everywhere!

“Everything works!” is an important idea for teachers because it is the antidote to the tyranny and dogmatism of obsessions with methodology.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that teaching should be method-less.  On the contrary, I think every teacher should have control of the theory and practice of a dozen different methodologies, and have another half dozen in mind that haven’t been fully developed.  The sad truth is that if you asked the average university teacher what his methodology is, he wouldn’t understand the question.  (Is “standing at the front of the room and talking” a method?  Oh, wait a minute, last week I used a power-point presentation.  Is that a method?)  And tenured university professors are supposed to be at the pinnacle of the pedagogical pyramid--they are certainly the most privileged and best paid. 

The media, administrators, institutions and specialists love to announce that a new methodology is going to solve all of education’s problems, including ones that have yet to be encountered.  My former boss, who was a pretty good ESL teacher in his day, used to describe the meetings he attended in Ottawa (where all the “big” decisions about language teaching across Canada were made) sardonically.  As he recounted,  everyone was looking for the next “silver bullet” solution--a methodology that everyone would use and would solve every problem,  the ultimate panacea, the single medicine that everyone would use to cure every disease. 

The problems with this administrative daydreaming are multiple, but at the top of the list is the fact that this obsession with methodology seems to invariably lead to a neutralizing and nullifying of the effect of good teachers.  Any science experiment is designed to eliminate variables, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that pedagogues looking at a learning situation from a distance are always trying to find a way to eliminate the teacher variable.   The 60 Minute expose on the Khan Academy is a pretty good example of what I am talking about. 

The Khan Academy began with Salman Khan trying to help out his cousin by given her some extra online instruction.  In simple terms, a good teacher (Khan has all the markers: hard working, knowledgable of his field, unassuming, generous, straightforward and enthusiastic) making good use of the technology for a motivated student, but big money (aka Bill Gates) and big institutions with encouragement from the media are transforming his work into a methodology which they are calling “flipping the classroom.”  To Khan’s credit, in the interview I saw, he did his best to shy away from the “silver bullet,” methodological claims.  “Flipping the classroom” implies that students do the “learning” at home on a computer and come to school to do the “homework,” solving the problems and completing exercises.  In this new scenario teachers become a custodial presence, hovering in the background--the least essential cog in a technologically advanced wheel--while their students work by themselves on computers.

Am I saying the Khan Academy doesn’t work?  No, I’m saying everything works! The technology, resources and knowledge base that the Khan Academy provides can be valuable tools for skilled teachers to use.  It should not be used to undermine the effectiveness, influence and individuality of classroom teachers.

How did I become so jaundiced about methodology?  I’m not, but my first six weeks as an ESL teacher for the Department of National Defense I was obliged to intensively learn and then follow the Audio-Visual Method in my own teaching.  The core of the method was to show pictures to students and require that they repeat, chorally and individually, a particular affirmative sentence that corresponded to that picture.  Then they would have to learn a yes/no question that required the newly-learned response, and then a “wh” question.  Got it?  Here we go:

Everybody repeat now:  “There is a pen on the table.”

Very good, and again:  “There is a pen on the table.”

Excellent, and now the yes/no question:  “Is there a pen on the table?”

And the answer:  “Yes, there is a pen on the table.”

Having practiced this for 30 minutes of so, we can move on to the “wh” questions and, for fluency, contractions.

The “what” question:  “What’s on the table?”

Answer:  “There’s a pen on the table.”

The process is actually kind of fun for about 45 minutes, but imagine doing this for 5 hours a day, 5 days a week.  It was mind-numbingly boring, equivalent to Chinese water torture.  Of course, when you are working for National Defense the fact that something is boring is no reason not to do it--almost the opposite.  Pain is good!  So all we teachers had workbooks that we were required to follow and there were Senior Teachers patrolling the hallways who could drop into our classrooms at any time.  We teachers figured out pretty quickly that no-one was going to learn to speak English by doggedly following this method.  Behind close doors we did all the things that “the method” did not permit:  offering translations, writing on the board and letting the students take notes (yes, note-taking was verboten for beginners), rehearsing skits, learning vocabulary from Playboy and Playgirl magazines, getting our students to listen to popular music with English lyrics, etc, etc, but always ready to switch to a choral drill from the workbook if there was a knock at the door.

My lunch with Gustine and Dave took place just as we were being allowed to emerge from the Dark Ages of the the Audio-Visual Method--so Dave’s enthusiasm for a new method was understandable.  We all agreed that the Audio-Visual Method really sucked (before this expression was current), and the teaching of language went through an intense period of methodological experimentation.  In pre-audio-visual teaching, I used what was called Grammar-based Instruction (following the erroneous notion that there is anything more than a tenuous connection between grammar and spoken English), but post-audio-visual I was introduced (and actually got certificates in) Criterion-referenced Instruction, Teaching by Objectives, Communicative-based Instruction, Communications Strategies, Suggestopedia, Student-Based Learning Strategies, Teacher Effectiveness Training, Real Materials Instruction, Educational Technology, TPR (Total Physical Response, which I really liked because it meant role-playing and theatre) and a bunch I can’t remember and some I invented myself, not to mention the tidal wave that followed computers coming into vogue.  I tried them all, and they all worked.

If you were applying for a language-teaching job during this period, the correct answer to the question “What method do you use?” was:  “I’m eclectic.”  In more general terms the shift was toward anything that could be called “communicative.”  Once again, the tendency was to have teachers step back and let students “communicate” as if through this process of not-teaching them students would, accidentally or through magical osmosis, learn English.  And, once again, it worked!  However, my favourite example of the “Communicative Method” not working was when the British Council at Reading University, where all the top gurus of the “Communicative Method” were employed, accepted a lucrative contract to teach a cohort of Libyan business men.  As the story goes, after a few days of the “Communicative Method,” the Libyan business men revolted because, in their view, the teachers were refusing to teach them, which sent all the leading lights of the Communicative Method running for their old grammar books and audio-visual materials.

And now the punch line of this posting:  after a number of years of teaching at the military college (where I taught as much literature as language), I was seconded back to the military base as a replacement language teacher for the summer.  Since I hadn’t taught basic level ESL for years, I was at a bit of a loss, and had little choice but to return to my old audio-visual materials and methodology, even though I knew perfectly well that a communicative approach had become pretty much de rigueur over the years.  I was surprised to discover that the students I ended up teaching took to the audio-visual approach with enthusiasm.  When their regular teacher returned, he approached me, with deference and concern, for an explanation of what I had done with his students.  His students were in rebellion because they wanted to be taught with the audio-visual approach, and nothing but the audio-visual approach would do.  I did my best to explain the audio-visual approach, and threw out all the expected cliches (“a change is as good as a rest,” “variety is the spice of life”) but ultimately, all I could tell him is that “everything works!”

Good Teachers Are Always Underdogs

What kind of underdogs?  Pit bulls, I hope.  I read Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath:  Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants recently and, as usual, I found myself endlessly bobbing in agreement, especially when Gladwell talks about education, which he does a lot.

Much of David and Goliath is on a theme that I have passively been considering as a book subject for years.  (Ahh, indolence!) Though the themes and education examples might be similar, my point of entry would have been much different from Gladwell’s.  I wanted to develop an idea I first encounter in E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful:  “the concept of enough.”  The problem with capitalism, the reason it is destined for eventual and inevitable failure, as Schumacher argues, is that it is based on a belief in infinite growth.  The idea of “enough” is anathema to capitalist greed, to the idea that more is always better, and to Ayn Rand’s and her acolyte Alan Greenspan’s (Chair of US Federal Reserve 1987-2006) notion that selfishness is a virtue. (See Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964.)

In his book, Galdwell adopts a more cogent and, from what he writes, well established conceit of the “inverted U.”  An “inverted U” is what you get when you graph the results of increasing some “x” in order to get benefit “y.”  At a certain point the benefits of x begin to produce less significant y benefits, and ultimately too much x begins to create disadvantages.  An obvious x example might be food, and the y benefits health.  (This is my example, not Gladwell’s.  Yes, I dare to out-simplify Gladwell!)  The availability of food benefits health up to a certain point, then the benefits become negligible and ultimately the over abundance of food can produce negative health results like obesity and diabetes, etc.

The graph above shows the relationship between performance and arousal which could be applied to a number of different activities, including teaching.  If you are bored and uninterested, your level of performance will be low.  A certain level of excitement, passion and arousal will optimize your performance; however, if you become too aroused, over-excited and hyperactive, your level of arousal will have a negative effect on your performance.

Gladwell’s salient examples are, of course, unexpected and much more surprising (which is why he is always so interesting to read):  class size and money.   I can absolutely relate to both, and it was satisfying to see my own foggy intuitions clarified and even quantified.  As a counterpoint to endless debates about “the poverty line,” in my book Enough (yes, the one I haven’t written!), I wanted to answer the question:  “where is the comfort line?”  How much money is enough?  With his typical nonchalant boldness Gladwell gives us a number:  $75,000.  

Statistical studies researched by Gladwell indicate that there is a direct correlation between between happiness and money up to an income of $75,000 per year.  Between $75,000 and $100,000 money does not seem to significantly influence happiness, but people who become abundantly wealthy frequently report that their wealth has become a source of unhappiness, the cause of new and challenging problems in their lives and the lives of their families.  As Robin Williams once joked about the Hollywood crowd, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling us we are making too much money!”

Gladwell also points out that for decades politicians and administrators have been obsessed with reducing class sizes in American classrooms—but downsizing classes hasn’t resulted in improved performance in the educational system.  Gladwell’s interviews with teachers and statistical data amply demonstrate that smaller class sizes do not translate to better teaching and learning, and I would be quick to agree. High-school teachers Gladwell interviewed reported the ideal class size to be between 18 and 32 students.  A class of fewer than 18 students can be as big a problem as a class that is too large. 

I have always felt that I would rather teach a class of 60 than a class of 6 (having done a lot of both), but I was never able to explain that feeling to myself—especially since the class of 60 would demand more than 10 times as much energy, preparation and correction.  The basic ideas which Gladwell raises, and which fit with my experience, are 1) that you need a certain mass in the room to guarantee that there are 5 or 6 people ready to question and debate what is being taught, and create a classroom dynamic and 2) students need to feel they have a peer group in the room in order to learn.  This second idea implies that if students feel they are not up to the level of the group, they will tune out.  The student with the courage and gumption to ask the so-called “dumb question” (which in my experience always ends up being the most profound, insightful and challenging question) is a valuable asset in every classroom.  That student who dares to ask the ostensibly simply, redundant, intuitive, knee-jerk question is not only energizing the room and providing a teacher with the opportunity to summarize, clarify and repeat information (repetition is the essence of education), but is helping to maintain  the participation and confidence of students who would otherwise simply turn off.

In the past, when I have questioned my preference for larger classes, I came up with a number of my own potential reasons.  One of the reasons I considered was my possible “messiah complex”; that is, that I was sacrificing myself for the greater good, the good of my colleagues.  Throughout my career the university was obsessed with budgets, which means saving money by having larger classes.  By teaching larger classes, I thought I was allowing my colleagues to teach smaller classes while overall we maintained a good average class size.  However, no colleague ever thanked me for teaching a larger class.  On the contrary, teachers of my ilk were openly criticized for selling out to the administration, making large classes routine, and thereby putting pressure on everyone else to teach large classes.

When my first rational would not hold, I had to admit that the satisfaction I derived from teaching larger classes was narcissistic, a hold-over from days working in the theatre.  A full house appealed to my ego, all the more so when the audience was full of charming young people and I was a one-man show.  True enough, but ultimately I decided that I liked teaching large classes because it was more work.  I will need an analogy/allegory to explain, which, I suppose, is sort of my version of the inverted U.

The title of my fable is:  “The Three Waiters, and the Three Tables.”  One of the jobs I never mention in cvs is the three years I spent working as a waiter and bartender.  I consider that experience to have made a valuable contribution to my teaching.  However, the analogy is also based on my experience of being a customer.  Here it is:  you go into a restaurant and there is only one waiter and there are three tables full of customers, but you end up getting quite good service.  However, you go into the same restaurant on another day and there are three waiters working and you are the only customer, and this time the service is terrible.  What happened?  

For anyone who has worked in a restaurant the logic, though counterintuitive, is quite clear.  There are “down times” in the serving business when there aren’t many customers, so it’s the time to refill the salt shakers and clean the counter and straighten out some business with the other waiters who usually don’t get much chance to talk to each other.  In other words, serving the customer which, if the waiter were alone and busy, would be his number one priority, in this new and more generous circumstance drops down to priority number three or four.  Add to that, three waiters with only one customer know that they are not going to be getting rich tips and are likely to be more lethargic than motivated.

The same logic applies to teachers and teaching.  Teaching too little and too few students can result in a gearing down, a loss of commitment, focus, energy and motivation.  This is a malaise that is all too prevalent among tenured university professors where the system encourages, if not requires, that they make teaching a third-or-fourth-level priority in order that they succeed at their careers as researchers or administrators or in their careers outside the university.

Obviously there are lots of exceptions to the argument I am presenting here.  Class size has to depend on who and what and how you teach.  A teacher who knows the students, the subject and the pedagogical methodology is the person best qualified to determine an optimal class size.  Unfortunately, on one hand, class size and teaching hours are typically determined by administrators who, no matter how good they once were as teachers, inevitably come to be governed by a system of administrative values like uniformity, orderliness, standardization and economy. On the other hand, unions, collectives and some individual teachers will inevitably lobby for and negotiate smaller classes and fewer teaching hours.   Good teachers, those determined to do the job the best way they know how no matter what, will find themselves, sooner or later, in the position of underdogs, Davids forced to find a way around the Goliaths who are always getting in the way.

How to Make Love to a Logophile?

What does it mean when John gives Mary flowers?

For more than a dozen years, I taught an introductory literature course to 60 or so first-year undergraduates, 80% of whom were young women--a number of whom would typically report being interested in questions of love and romance.  Every year in the first class I described the following scenario and asked the class what word they would use to describe this young man’s actions.

John’s eyes always light up when Mary enters the room.  He always talks in a tender, flattering manner to her.  He takes her out to dinner and buys her flowers and small gifts. Etc. Etc.

What is the verb for when a man pursues a woman?

As I presented this hypothetical heterosexual scenario, I could feel Judith Butler and the gender police breathing down my neck, but bear with me. So what do we call what John is doing?  Over the years I noticed a shifting in the tenor of the answers.  The typical mid-90s answer was that he “was cruising,” “on the make,” “hitting on her” and, cutting to the chase, “trying to get laid.”  At the millennium the answers became strident:  “he’s a sexual predator,” and “it’s patriarchal oppression” and “hegemonic domination.”  In more recent years the pendulum swung back slightly and it was typical to hear reported that it’s not about him but them:  “they are friends with benefits” or “they’re dating” or “hooking up.”

Without "wooing" and "courtship" is romance dead?

As I called the room to order, I reminded my students of what they already knew: that the expressions they had given me did not include the correct verb for the scenario I had described.  When pressed, someone would eventually come up with the proper expression:  “to court.”  Eliciting the older and much more English verb “to woo,” even among students who claimed to have read Romeo and Juliet where the lexeme is used a half dozen times, was a much greater challenge.  I eventually asked my students when they had last used the expressions “to court” or “to woo” in conversation.  The point of my questions was to provoke philological reflection on the relationship between language and culture using an example that I knew mattered to a lot of them.  What does it mean that there are no current, earnest words for courtship?  Does this gap in the vernacular prove that romance is no longer part of our daily culture?  The number of advertisements I see for dating and match-making companies and web sites tell me that there is a void in the culture which consumer capitalism has been moving rapidly and vigorously to fill. 

"Making love" before 1920 and after

The scenario I have described used to be called “making love.”  Thanks to Edith Wharton’s novel, The Age of Innocence, we can now date the shift in meaning to what Wharton called the “French sense” of the expression (i.e., having sex) to just before 1920 in the USA.  We might also associate this American shift of mores with the automobile, which F. Scott Fitzgerald likened, in his famous essay on the 1920s, to a bedroom on wheels.

"Making love" in the 19th century

It would be perfectly reasonable for us to imagine a conversation between two men in the 19^th century in which one mentions fairly casually to the other, “I noticed you making love to my sister last night.”  Modern readers are likely to misinterpret Algernon’s meaning when he tells Jack, in The Importance of Being Earnest, “The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.” Not a very nice sentiment, but not quite as bad as it sounds. “To make love” in this context means to display the courtship rituals I have described above; it does not mean to copulate.

"The Rules" for making love

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates the earliest usage of “to court” meaning “to pay amorous attention or make love” as 1580.  The OED dates the Old English verb “to woo” as 1050.  Oddly, the OED describes “to woo” as “Now somewhat homely” but contradicts itself by adding “also poetic.”  (Much as we might love the OED--and I do--we should remember that the original version was significantly compiled by a homicidal maniac confined to a lunatic asylum.  See:  The Professor and the Madman.) “To court” is also a problematic expression because of its elitism since it explicitly refers to what goes on in the royal court and more specifically what went on in the court of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine where the rules of “courtly love” were first written.  The rest of us peasants and plebeians were to get by in whatever way we could, clubbing women over the heads in Neanderthal fashion and dragging them off to our caves I suppose.  I feel like the Grinch in saying so, but a lot of the behaviours which people today point to as evidence of “true love” are the remnants of the rules of “courtly love” codified in the 11^th century under the supervision of Queen Eleanor and her daughter.  Over the last 30 years,  Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider have turned their version of The Rules of “courtly love” into a not-so-cottage industry.  

Making love to a logophile 

Oh yes, the answer to the question posed in the title of this post:  a “logophile” is a lover of words, so the answer is almost redundant-- with words!

Parti Québécois Hypocrisy Has a New Face

PQ hypocrisy has a new face:  Jean-François Lisée, elected as the PQ Member for Rosemont in 2012.  When he was a journalist with L’actualite, I don’t remember ever feeling that he was unmeasured or unreasonable in the presentation of his ideas.  When he debated Mordecai Richler on English-language television, he seemed not only more on top of the issues but the more reserved and rational of the two.  I was therefore very curious to see how he would defend the Charte des valeurs in his press conference on RDI this week.  His presentation and responses were brisk, vague and evasive:  sure signs of a politician who knows he is skating on very thin ice, or just a man forced to defend a policy that he doesn’t believe in.

When I quoted Premier Lucien Bouchard’s address to the Anglophone community of Quebec at Centaur Theatre, March 12, 1996, in my last posting, what I didn’t mention was that Jean-François Lisée was the Premier’s speech-writer at the time, as well as  the organizer of the event.   We can safely assume he had a substantial hand in preparing the speech, if it wasn’t entirely his work.  So here, once again, is what Jean-François Lisée supposedly believed in 1996:

If we're looking for shared values between Quebecers, a number of them come immediately to mind: parliamentary democracy, equality, freedom of expression, pluralism, a taste for each other's culture, a somewhat greater sense of fun than most of our neighbors.

This week, Jean-François Lisée, defender of the “Charte des valeurs,” no longer believes in “freedom of expression” or “pluralism” or “a taste for each other’s culture.”  A “sense of fun”?  That’s not even on the map anymore!

If you want some sense of the depth of his newfound hypocrisy read the first entry of his journal on his official web site concerning the program of Africa-Quebec cooperation that he seems so proud of and moved by.  Of course, under the Charte des valeurs which  Minister Lisée now espouses, these “professionilized,”  Senegalese women in their brightly coloured costumes, which he was so moved by, would not be allowed to hold  a job in Quebec’s public and parapublic services unless they were ready to abandon their head scarves.  How’s that for a message of welcome!  And a message of respect for the people of Senegal invested in cooperation with Quebec!

What does Jean-François Lisée really believe in?  Not much it would seem. If his support for the charter of values is an attempt to follow through with the strategy outlined in his book Emergency Exit: How to Avert Quebec's Decline  and provoke a new conflict with the federal government and a referendum on Quebec’s powers within Canada, then he should say so clearly. Like the rest of the PQ, his sense of “values” this week seems pretty vacuous and negative.  Like the rest of the PQ, he seems ready to surrender his values of pluralism and openness in favour of the political exigencies of the moment. Like the rest of the PQ, he seems ready to surrender his earlier beliefs for a charter of non-values, a charter of anti-values, a charter in opposition to minorities’ expressing their beliefs and values, in a vain attempt to claim some sort of petty, short-term, ethnocentric political victory.  History, the one which won’t be controlled and written by the PQ, will judge him poorly.

According to the PQ, "Loving Your Mother" Is Not a Québécois Value

Since first hearing about the Parti Québécois’ proposed “Charte des valeurs,”  I have gone through the typical range of emotions that I keep hearing all around me:  outrage, shame, embarrassment, anger, frustration, fear.  What most continues to bewilder me is the idea that any democratic government feels that it can legislate the values of its people.  If a Taliban government announced that it was planning to legislate a charter of values for Afghanistan, I could at least recognize a level of coherence.  But who ever heard of a western democracy announcing plans to legislate people’s values?

Every law, every constitution, every judicial proceeding emerges from and is a reflection in some degree of the people  governed by those laws.  The laws change as a culture and its values evolve.  Laws are the purview of legislators, but values belong to the people.  Attempting to legislate values directly is by definition reactionary conservatism; that is, it is an attempt to stop any change from happening, an attempt to make the future like the past, and to stop culture from evolving.  “Preserving culture,” an expression you hear a lot in Quebec these days, is an oxymoron.  It only makes sense if  you are talking about the preservation of artifacts.  The root notion of “culture” is “to cultivate,”  to grow, and that means change.  Attempting to legislate culture, to specify a charter of values, is  indirectly an admission that a culture is dead, that it cannot survive the current environment, and attempting to compel the people to live in the government’s vision of the past.

However, in all of this I am attributing nobler motives to the Parti Québécois than they have actually shown in their proposed legislation.  The “Charte des valeurs” is, above all, an exercise in hypocrisy.  It is presented as an attempt to create equality and neutrality, but it is all too obviously intended to be exactly the opposite in its effects.  The evidentiary intent of the charter is to appeal to an imagined xenophobic base which defines itself as “pure laine” or “de souche” and at the same time pass on the not-too-subtle message that if you are not part of this mono-culture then you should not feel too welcome or comfortable in Quebec.  This ugly real-politicking is designed to mobilize those Quebec ethnocentrists who attach themselves to the slogan “nous sommes un peuple” and discourage anyone else who might consider Quebec as home; the ultimate goal being, of course, winning an eventual referendum in favour of Quebec’s independence.

You might ask why I am ostensibly talking politics on this blog about education.  I’ve been hearing the slogan all week and then the brochure arrived in my mail announcing “Parce que nos valeurs, on y croit.”  (I am not the first to immediately ask if my tax dollars are being used by the Parti Québécois to spread their message of xenophobia and ethnocentrism.)  No doubt the government will try to claim that this is an “education” campaign.  The fallacy and disingenuousness of using propagandistic, tautological arguments under the pretense of “education” was the subject of my first posting, and, in many ways, the raison d’être of this blog.  Excuse me for quoting myself, but just to remind you, this is what I wrote on the first posting, May 15, 2013:

"Education" too often means simply replacing one set of ideas with another set that the educator likes better. Unfortunately, whenever you ask someone why one set of ideas is better than another, you very quickly find yourself running in a circle, trapped in a tautology, exhausted by a conversation that never quite takes place. 'My ideas are better because they correspond to my values.  My values are better because they correspond to my ideas.'

If you have ever tried to have an in-depth conversation with a Québécois/e who labels her/himself as “pure laine” and  “de souche” then you have already faced the passionate closure of this tautology.  The brick wall pictured on the PQ’s propaganda brochure is a good representation of what you will be hitting your head against if you attempt to challenge the project with logic or rationality.  The PQ wants the world to believe that Quebec’s ethonocentrism is an impenetrable fortress.  

The wall of cinder blocks in the PQ brochure is also an ironically apt representation of the Bloc Québécois.  Decades ago when Mordecai Richler described PQ policies as “non-violent ethnic cleansing,” I thought the description was exaggerated and inappropriate.  This week the expression seems stickily appropriate.  It is universally acknowledged that the Quebec government has a very poor record both in terms of attracting immigrants and employing minorities.  The charter is going to make that record a lot worse, and it is very hard to imagine that this result is unintended.  

Maria Mourani’s exclusion from the Bloc caucus and her eventual resignation from the party have made her the icon of “ethnic cleansing.”  It was astounding to hear her Bloc colleagues (on Le Club des ex) claim that she was excluded from the caucus because she had described the PQ policy as ethnic nationalism, when television viewers who heard her comments only moments before could recognize that that is not what she said.  They excluded her without even paying attention to what she actually said.  She had made it clear that she wanted to fight against the misperception of her constituents that the charter was proof of ethnic nationalism.  Now we know that, no matter what the context, the words “ethnic nationalism” cannot be spoken.  I wonder why?

The whole idea of a charter of values is not just an absurdity, it is a perfidious absurdity.  If it was really intended to represent what we all really believe and value, shouldn’t “loving your mother" be included as one of our common values?  What about compassion, fairness and kindness?  Shouldn’t the charter indicate that we are all against bullying?  And against fascism?  And pedophilia?  And exploitation of the young and the elderly?  The point is there are lots of values that we hold in common.  If we already hold them in common, all the less reason that we need laws to spell them out.  If those values already exist in law, all the less reason that we need a special charter of values to repeat them.

This realization brings us to a whole new level of the hypocrisy and misrepresentation with which we are dealing.  The project is not to create a “Charte des valeurs.”  This phrase is just part of the sales pitch which the PQ is spreading in the media in order to sell the idea to its ethnocentric base.  The proposals are supposedly beneficial additions to the existing CHARTE DES DROITS ET LIBERTÉS DE LA PERSONNE to encourage greater equality, clarity, tolerance and harmony.  The very serious question which I have yet to see debated or even mentioned is:  What changes is the government planning to make to the existing charter?  More precisely, what “rights and liberties” are they planning to remove?

If you take a look at the existing CHARTE DES DROITS ET LIBERTÉS DE LA PERSONNE it becomes patently obvious that the PQ’s inclusion of sexual equality in the new proposal is redundant, purely an exercise in political gamesmanship.  The inclusion of sexual equality in the "Charte des valeurs" simply means that everyone who wishes to oppose it is forced to say, “I agree with part of the charter; the part concerning sexual equality” before they can go on to register their objections to what the charter proposal is really all about.  For the same reason, the PQ has already rejected the repeated suggestion that the sexual equality and religious neutrality proposals be dealt with separately.

Here is what the CHARTE DES DROITS ET LIBERTÉS DE LA PERSONNE already says:

Toute personne a droit à la reconnaissance et à l'exercice, en pleine égalité, des droits et libertés de la personne, sans distinction, exclusion ou préférence fondée sur la race, la couleur, le sexe, la grossesse, l'orientation sexuelle, l'état civil, l'âge sauf dans la mesure prévue par la loi, la religion, les convictions politiques, la langue, l'origine ethnique ou nationale, la condition sociale, le handicap ou l'utilisation d'un moyen pour pallier ce handicap.  

Toute personne est titulaire des libertés fondamentales telles la liberté de conscience, la liberté de religion, la liberté d'opinion, la liberté d'expression, la liberté de réunion pacifique et la liberté d'association.

In other words, “égalité hommes-femmes” is already covered in the existing Charter, and what is really being proposed is the removal of rights and liberties related to religion and ethnic origin, and the amending and limiting of rights to liberty of religion and expression.  

When we come to consider the proposals for religious neutrality, the hypocrisy and perfidy of the PQ prove even more profound.  While head scarves, mandalas and turbans might be banned, the loopholes which will allow Catholic symbols not only to exist, but to proliferate and become more visible have already been written into the proposal.  The cross which will be allowed to remain in the National Assembly is the leading and most infamous example, but it is just one example of how the same loophole will be allowed to operate across Quebec.  Not only will numerous levels of government and institutions be allowed to write their own rules, but any religious symbol which is considered part of Quebec’s history and culture can also remain, ensuring that Quebec will remain dominantly and visibly Christian and Catholic to the detriment of all other religions and cultures. 

Of all the disturbing suggestions in the PQ proposal, the most disturbing for me is that the government will control history.  The PQ plans to protect religion (we can safely assume Catholicism) on the grounds that it is part of Quebec history and heritage  (and in the name of “preserving culture” we can assume that Quebec history and heritage will end the day the Charter of values becomes law).

La religion a occupé un rôle fondamental dans l’histoire du Québec ; nous devons protéger cet héritage.

So much for religious neutrality.  But what makes the proposition even worse is that a PQ government seems comfortable with the idea that they will determine how history gets written and taught.  Presumably, from now on, Quebec history will be all about white Catholics, and the artifacts and symbols will be maintained to ensure that the story gets told and taught that way.

Riche de son histoire, le Québec est fier de son patrimoine qui explique d’où nous venons et ce que nous sommes aujourd’hui. Il importe de le transmettre aux jeunes générations et à toute personne venue d’ailleurs, afin qu’ils enrichissent à leur tour cet héritage.

La religion a occupé un rôle fondamental dans l’histoire du Québec ; nous devons protéger cet héritage

This idea that history can be controlled by government and rewritten to suit policy is the kind of thinking we used to criticize the old Soviet Union and 1950s China and various totalitarian regimes for.  How did this mode of thinking suddenly become acceptable in Quebec?  Is there anyone literate enough in the Parti Québécois to remember Winston, the hero of Orwell’s 1984?  Winston’s job was to rewrite history for the government.

This week Barry Wilson delivered a Postscript editorial on CTV television lambasting the Charter project as ethnic nationalism, but he eventually commented in an offhanded tone that he does "not believe this will ever be voted on in this legislature because the PQ does not want it to pass." The cartoonist Aislen also claimed the legislation would never pass, and journalist Jennifer Ditchburn implied the same on CBC television.  Have any of these people done the math?  Of the 125 seats in the national assembly, 2 are currently vacant.  The PQ and the CAQ together currently hold 72 of the Assembly’s 123 seats.  By my count that is more than 58% and more than enough to pass this legislation. 

According to the party press release, CAQ (the Coalition Avenir Québec) is not only in favour of most of the Charter’s provisions, CAQ representatives claim: “We’ve debated enough in Québec. It’s time to take action.”  With the CAQ’s urgent support most of the provisions of the charter of values are bound to pass.  The CAQ’s official position is that 

Regarding religious accommodations, the time has come to take action and to legislate. All positions regarding the issue have been largely presented and discussed more than once in the past few years.

The Coalition Avenir Québec considers the government’s idea of holding new public consultations on the issue before tabling a new bill totally useless. A consultation will follow the tabling of a bill anyway.

The CAQ’s urgency remains as mysterious as the imagined problems which the PQ is supposedly solving with the charter.  As if to prove that their ethnocentrism and determination to legislate Quebec values are even stronger than the PQ’s, the CAQ has already announced that 

 . . . if the courts were to repeatedly strike down or endanger the measures taken by the government of Québec in order to preserve the fundamental values of Québec as defined by the National Assembly, Quebecers would not be helpless. In such circumstances, a Coalition Avenir Québec would not hesitate to resort to the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Constitution.

Sometimes it is easy to forget that François Legault is an old-time PQ sovereigntist with the same ethnocentric baggage and attitudes.  But the important point here is that the PQ and CAQ have the votes to pass this legislation, or am I missing something?  Why is the English-language media so certain that this legislation will not be passed?

I truly empathize with Maria Mourani because like her I have allowed myself to maintain an open mind toward the PQ and the sovereignty movement in general, believing that they could be open, inclusive, socially responsible and  democratic.  Right now I feel that my open-mindedness has been simply foolish.  I have been conned by the humanistic faces that the PQ have occasionally been able to show to the public. However, now I realize that behind every René Lévesque there is a lobsters-in-the-pot Jacques Parizeau ready to blame the “ethnic vote” for the referendum loss and a Bernard Landry ready to accost an innocent hispanic bystander with the same accusation.  We might want to think of the PQ as being like Lucien Bouchard in his 1996 address to the Anglophone community saying: 

If we're looking for shared values between Quebecers, a number of them come immediately to mind: parliamentary democracy, equality, freedom of expression, pluralism, a taste for each other's culture, a somewhat greater sense of fun than most of our neighbors.

No, none of these “values” made it into the charter, unless you count a redundant, hypocritical use of “equality.”  In fact, we can now recognize that the charter is designed to resist these values and ensure that they do not take hold in Quebec. Behind the humanist face of Lucien Bouchard there will always be the PQ reality of an Yves Michaud chastising Montreal’s Jewish community for failing to vote in favour of Quebec’s independence, and of course Drainville’s Herouxville-style Charter, and Premier Pauline Marois still pushing the PQ’s failed enthnocentric slogan, “Nous sommes un peuple.”  Et les autres?  Well now we know; they are expected to remain invisible.  

Do No Harm Part III: Don’t Joke about the Bible

Do Not presume

I hope I have made it clear that I have not lived up to my own recommendation that teachers should avoid irony.  The best I have been able to do, and I suspect this will be true for most teachers, is to be careful and to be wary of the pitfalls of irony.  In recent years I saw a dramatic increase in the multicultural mix in my classes:  students from Africa, the Caribbean, the former Yugoslavia, Iran, China, Japan and various Arab countries.   Over the years, I had learned from lecturing on feminism and what used to be called “women’s liberation” not to presume to know what individual women want or, worse still, should want.  Even though, I was supposed to be the expert on “culture” and “intercultural communication,” I think I knew enough not to presume that I understood my students' lives, and to recognize that I had a lot to learn from them.  In general, I was in awe of their openness and resilience.  H.G. Wells’ short story “The Country of the Blind” provided a perfect framework for discussing the challenges of respecting, adopting, adapting to and negotiating new cultures. I think I did alright with these students.  The group of students which proved the greatest challenge for me and who were increasingly present in my classes in the new millennium were what I would describe in general terms as “evangelical Christians.”

On Being "born again through Jesus"

A professor teaching at a university in Alabama once told me that he could not invite students to say anything personal in their essays.  As he explained, if there were 50 students in the class, he would get 45 essays describing “how I was born again through Jesus.”  The proportions I faced were about the reverse; around 10% of students in my courses would express Christian convictions if I invited them to express personal opinions as well as knowledge of literature and theory in their essays.  The presence of evangelical Christians in my classes was the opposite of a problem.  They were typically among the nicest students in the room:  they were punctual, attentive, polite, respectful, typically sat at the front of the room, participated actively and asked questions.  You can’t argue with those kinds of behaviours. 

Why question when God is the answer to everything?

Nonetheless I was compelled to announce in my classes that while I was aware and respectful of the psychological comfort which a belief in God and religious faith might afford individuals, the context of the courses I gave was science, rationality and reason. I typically explained to students that Nietzsche’s aphorism “God is dead,” which had taken hold in the 20^th century, was a pithier version of the physicist Laplace’s much earlier declaration that “God is a hypothesis of which the world no longer has need.”  We created God (and gods) because we needed answers to so many questions about the world we found ourselves living in.  As science began to answer these questions, the need for God as an answer to these questions faded.    The disadvantage of a firm belief in God and of religious faith dominating our thinking is the same reason we call the Middle Ages the Dark Ages and the Age of Reason which followed the Enlightenment:  God can be a quick and easy answer to every question  and consequently slow down if not outright prohibit rational and scientific inquiry.  Why go through the hard work of thinking if you have a ready-made answer to every question?  God did it!  It is so because God wants it to be. 

How to talk about the Bible?

This was the warning I issued to students:  don’t use God to avoid the hard work of thinking through an issue.  This caveat was accepted with varying degrees of willingness, but where I was eventually taken to task was on how I talked about the Bible.  My comeuppance came in the form of a mature and able student, a mother of adolescent children, who was planning to open a religious-based school with her husband after graduation.  The student made an appointment with me to discuss very seriously (“complain about” would be an accurate locution but one she avoided using) the way I talked about the Bible. 

The Bible is a book worth reading

Her concern was that I was discouraging students from reading the Bible.  This was a contention that I took very seriously.  In the first place, I counted myself among a relatively small number of professors in my field who required students to read parts of the Bible as a prerequisite to the study of literature.  More importantly, I regularly informed students that, although it did not sound particularly elevated or refined, what I taught was reading. (Although the titles used to describe what I taught kept changing—English, English Studies, Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies—the skill set I was passing on and encouraging students to develop remained the same: reading and writing.  I must confess that my secret desire has long been to be known as a “philologist,” which not only has a high sounding tone but fairly accurately described what I researched and taught.)  While I thought she was wrong to think that I discouraged students from reading the Bible, she gave me pause to reconsider the ironic tone with which I exposed the Bible to students.

Adam and Eve; Pandor and Epimetheus

I typically began an introductory course comparing the Biblical story of Adam and Eve with the Greek myth of Pandora and Epimetheus, noting for example how women consistently get the blame for introducing evil into the world. Do these stories prove that this is the way women are?  Or maybe what explains the stories is that they were written by men.  However, what got my student on my case came much later.  To introduce Shakespeare, I had to explain the Elizabethan Age, which of course meant introducing Elizabeth, which in turn meant explaining Henry VIII and at least the first two of his many wives, Catherine of Aragon and Elizabeth’s mother, Henry’s mistress and second wife, Anne Boleyn.    

Henry VIII, Deuteronomy and Leviticus

Henry’s problems began with the Bible.  When Henry’s older brother Arthur, the heir apparent, died, political exigencies dictated that Henry marry Catherine of Aragon, his brother’s widow, to maintain an alliance with Spain.  Henry was worried that marrying his sister-in-law might be incest.  Such moral dilemmas were of course resolved by reference to the Bible.  Luckily for the political wonks of the time, the Bible seemed quite clear, even insistent on the subject:

Deuteronomy 25:5   If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband unto her.

The Bible indicated not only that Henry could marry his sister-in-law, but that he must marry her.

However, as time wore on and Catherine failed to produce a male heir (yes, despite biology, women always get the blame!) and things were getting cozy (for now) with Anne Boleyn, Henry had a second look at the Bible.  This time Leviticus confirmed his original suspicions and gave him grounds for divorce.  Sleeping with your wife’s brother was incest.

Leviticus 20: 21 And if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless.

As you can probably tell already, my tone in discussing the Bible was not as serious and reverent as many people might think it should be.  Nonetheless, up to this point, I think I was on fairly solid academic and pedagogical ground, but then I strayed into a number of irresistible tangents that were not directly relevant to my lecture on Shakespeare and his times.

Leviticus is that part of the Bible which explicitly condemns homosexuality. 

20: 13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

I’m not sure how people who claim to read the Bible literally, as the word of God, can square this pronouncement with contemporary laws against hate crimes.  As they read this proscription, I encouraged students to put it in context, noting, for example, that Leviticus commands that children who curse their parents be put to death.  I also found myself asking students if they agreed with Leviticus that brother and sister who saw each other naked or husband and wife who had sex during a menstrual period should be expelled from the community.  I should have stopped there, but I didn’t.

Levitcus also commands that:

20: 15 [. . .] if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast.

Sometimes the Bible made me laugh and I shared the joke

No matter what your sexual morality, it seemed unfair, to me, to kill the animal.  (Okay, definitely a tongue-in-cheek observation.) At the same time, I couldn’t help noticing that among these numerous, detailed rules governing sexual behaviour there was nothing against lesbianism.  (At last, one small advantage in being woman!) I should have stopped there, but I didn’t.

Deuteronomy 25 outlines a scenario that is oddly specific.  I would imagine it to be quite an anomalous situation, but Deuteronomy treats it as a regular occurrence which must be governed by a specific law.  Imagine two men are fighting, and you are the wife of the man who is losing.  Seeing that your husband is about to be killed, you enter the fray and grab your husband’s attacker by the testicles to subdue him.  (I’m not making this up.  It’s in the Bible.)  The question is:  what should happen to you, the wife who saved her husband?  Deuternomy’s answer is that you should have your hand cut off, the one you used to grab the attacker’s gonads.

Here’s the exact wording from Deutoronomy:

11When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets:

12Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.

My Student was right to complain

My student was right to complain that I had no particular reason to draw attention to this passage (beyond the fact that it had drawn my attention).  It seemed clear to me that this passage was not “the word of God,” but I could imagine it having been written by some man who had once had his gonads savaged by the wife of some guy he was putting the boots to (make that “sandals”). (Despite postmodern gibberish about “the death of the author,” it is always useful to consider who the author might have been as you attempt to fathom the meaning of a text.)

And yet I was right to question the Bible as a guide to modern morality

To my surprise when my student had discussed the problem with her pastor, I had to agree with what she reported his opinion to be.  The Bible was written by relatively pragmatic individuals, with a narrow range of experience, dealing with the specific, down-to-earth problems of their tribal group or community.  I couldn’t agree more, but I was left to wonder how evangelicals get from this reasonable observation to the idea that the Bible is “the word of God” and should be used to determine modern morality.

But Toning down the irony was the right thing to do

Nonetheless, I had to agree with my student that I should (and I did) tone down my irony in discussing the Bible and avoid lingering tangentially over Deuteronomy.  I think we reached an agreeable compromise and managed to maintain mutual respect.  The student chose to do at least one more course with me and when I met her a couple of weeks ago in the grocery store she suggested I might want to teach in the school she and her husband were setting up.  (Of course, now I have to wonder if she wasn't being ironic.)