Ch- Ch- Ch- Ch- Changes (again)

The new semester has begun, and the shape of my week has changed yet again. Instead of being spread across 4 courses at 3 different campuses in two different cities, I'm very thankful to be based at just one campus this time. Unfortunately it's not very close to home, so I'm going to have to start making the most of train and bus travel time for reading and thinking.

My teaching this time is entirely in a postgraduate translation studies program. I'm teaching two subjects I haven't taught before (although one is very similar to one of the ones I taught last semester) but many of the students are the same as last semester so I'm glad to be able to continue with them, get to know them a bit better, and keep trying to equip them with linguistic skills to be good translators/interpreters.

As well as teaching, I have also started a ministry apprenticeship with the Simeon Network but based at the campus I'm teaching at. Teaching part time (and deliberately less than last semester!) gives me the opportunity to spend the rest of my week doing other things, and I was glad to be offered the chance to get some training in ministry. At first, it will mainly involve participating in training sessions in theology and ministry skills like one-to-one bible reading, leading small groups, etc. I'll also help with planning and organizing Simeon Network events and eventually help run training sessions for others. My apprenticeship includes time for thinking about the nexus between my discipline and my faith, so I hope to be able to update my blog more frequently with the fruits of those thinking times.

Workaholic culture

There is an ad campaign on the buses I catch and the moment (probably elsewhere too) for Bank of Queensland which promotes their service based on the dedication of their staff to solving customers' financial issues quickly. One such, over two posters, quotes a bank manager saying 'Finance for their first home FELL THROUGH' followed by another adjacent poster saying 'I worked overnight to get approval in 24 hours'. Another tells of a bank staff member staying back over a half-day public holiday to get the approval sorted out for some guy to put a deposit on a ute.

Does anyone else see something wrong with this? I am all for working conscientiously and helping people, but at what point do work hours stop and rest hours begin? Why has it become necessary for people to demand 24 hour approval for something they will spend most of the rest of their life paying off?

Because of the nature of competition, now that this bank has made this commitment to working in their own time, it's likely that the others will follow suit. And then what is to stop consumers demanding businesses in all the other industries from doing the same?

The academy is not immune from this mentality of 24-hour availability. Many students who send emails to teachers out of office hours are disappointed and sometimes openly critical if they do not receive an immediate response - especially if it's a weekend and the assignment is due on Monday! Apparently it is no longer the responsibility of the student to ensure they ask their questions well in advance of the due date. You can almost feel the frustration in online discussion board posts where a question is posed out of hours and is met with silence (at least from faculty).

To a certain extent, many of these teaching and learning technologies have been developed precisely to enable students greater access to learning resources, including the community of scholarship, and especially where students would otherwise be isolated from such contact by geography or life circumstances. But people's need for rest each week needs to be acknowledged, respected, and, even better, reintroduced as a valid idea.

An itinerant linguist

It's now week 5 of teaching and I have more or less got used to the routine of being at a different university teaching a different subject virtually every day. Sometimes I actually find myself teaching very similar lessons but for different subjects - not because I'm recycling the same tutorial for 11 different classes, but because it happens to be relevant!

Image © Images.com/Corbis

Thankfully, I am enjoying this period of being an itinerant teacher. In that sense, it's a bit like what Jesus was doing when he was bodily on earth - travelling around primarily to teach. Of course I can't claim divine powers of healing or exorcism (that would look interesting in my tutorials...), and Jesus' teaching priority was about the kingdom of God rather than grammar, academic writing, or semiotics (although he did talk about signs a lot...). But it reminds me that moving from place to place for work is ok - if it was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me! At least I have the same place to go home to each night.

There is a lot of temptation for me to be discontent in this role. Tenure is, of course, the holy grail of academia, and it would be nice to be 'secure' in a job that does not rely on students numbers and universities being in teaching session. Note I said 'nice', not 'essential'.

In my home group last week we worked through 1 Corinthians 4:1-13 together, and were reminded of the stark and often uncomfortable contrast between Jesus' leadership (and Paul's, following him) and the kind of leadership the world values. The world looks up to wealth, physical strength and attractiveness (or at least good grooming), nobility, worldly wisdom, reputation, stability, and distance from the 'dirty work' of manual labour. Jesus and his apostles were weak, held in disrepute, seemingly foolish, poorly dressed, homeless, and involved in manual labour.

I can see this period of unstable and almost mercenary work as an opportunity for humility and sacrificial service. It's not 'beneath me' to work as a casual tutor, especially if Jesus didn't consider it 'beneath him' to wash his disciples' feet. I can think of the exposure it gives me to students from a range of backgrounds whom I can love and encourage and point to Jesus, my Saviour and King, when the opportunities arise. And I can see it as an opportunity to be light and salt, encouraging colleagues who are walking the same uncertain path as casuals but who don't have a great heavenly King as their hope and strength.

Work is a verb (and a noun)

Teaching started in earnest at the three universities where I am teaching this semester. When my temporary full time contract finished last year I didn’t really know what work I would have this year, and I just hoped I could pick up enough tutoring to pay the bills. But in fact I have an abundance of classes to teach and in the end I had to turn some down. It’s just as Jesus said when he was speaking to the crowds and disciples on the mountain one day (Matthew 6:25-34; ESV):

²⁵ "Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? ²⁸And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ³⁰But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? ³¹Therefore do not be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' ³²For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. ³³But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

³⁴ "Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

And he was right about each day having enough trouble for itself! First year students and new casual tutors will know how difficult it can be to negotiate admin, IT access and online learning systems at your new institution, and in my case I'm trying to negotiate them at 3 unis all with different systems! But I think I've got it all sorted now.

Yesterday I witnessed one of the greatest student epiphanies I've ever seen in one of my classes. This being the first lesson in a first year grammar course, I was trying to lay the foundations by introducing nouns, verbs and the like. I asked them to give me some examples from the text we were looking at, and then asked them to tell me how they were able to identify that is was a verb just from looking at the text. Was it a wild guess, or a feeling about the word, purely intuition, or some other way?

One student, who had earlier indicated that she was at a loss to understand the subject so far, said 'I think it was just that the rest of the sentence seemed to be about that word and so I thought it might be the verb'. Wow! I got really excited at that point and gave lots of encouragement.

And then I tried to build on her observation by make a transition to a more technical version of it, i.e. that each clause needs a verb and the verb is like a nucleus that all the other elements in the clause revolve around. But the other students wanted her to repeat her version because that was a bit more accessible! So I think I misjudged their readiness for technicality at that point.

Anyway, the thing that thrilled me was that I had an opportunity to show this student, who had said she was anxious about grammar and ‘couldn’t do it’, that actually she was able to ‘do it’. She seems to have even been able to ‘feel it’, and not only that but to articulate how she came to her conclusion. Exactly the kind of outcome I’m hoping for in my grammar classes!

Long time no blog

Wow, I am shocked to discover that my last post was in August! On second thoughts, it's not that surprising. I have been burning the candle at both ends all session, but I'm about to finish up at UOW (tomorrow) and then I'm off to Cite (find out more here and here) on Saturday and then I'm unemployed for a little while and plan to do a bit more blogging from then on.

So stay tuned!

Different values, stylistically speaking

The other night I did something I hadn’t done before – I watched an episode of ‘So you think you can dance Australia’. I know nothing about dance and can’t really do it myself, but, I bet like other non-dancers who watch it, I sort of catch the dancing vibe and feel like doing little jigs in the living room after getting caught up in it. It’s quite refreshing how generally encouraging the judges are (although still encouraging an unhealthy self-absorption), compared to other programs that run on a similar model.

There was a guy on there who was older than most of the other contestants – 31 I think – who had been out of the dancing scene for a while. He was criticised for using moves that were outdated. The moves that he imagined would be appropriate to use in a dancing audition and give him a chance of getting through to the next round were not valued as highly by the judges. His repertoire of dance moves was fairly restricted so these particular moves held a different value for him than for the judges, who had been continually exposed to new moves and combinations of moves in all kinds of different dance genres. The moves he used in his audition were identified by the judges as moves you learn as part of training in a particular genre and then move beyond as you continue to train and learn more complex moves. They were expecting dancing at a level of sophistication and development that he didn’t produce because he didn’t understand what the judges would value in a routine.

A similar lesson is going to be one of the central concepts I’ll be teaching my students this semester in the ‘effective written communication’ course. Most of us use a range of styles and genres and language in the course of our lives, and each of these styles may be valued in its appropriate context. Academic writing is a particular kind of written communication that is unlike everyday communication in a number of ways. One of the most important ways is the value it holds in the academic context. In order to ‘impress the judges’ in an academic context, you need to know what patterns of language use are highly valued in the context and how to use them appropriately. Like dancing, it takes reflection, training from those who have mastered it, and practice.

The year past and the year to come

Well, I know it's already the 3^rd of January, but better late than never to think through the year that has been (2009) and think ahead to 2010 – the beginning of a new decade brings many new beginnings for me. In February I will begin a new job at the University of Wollongong, lecturing in English Language and Linguistics at the Language Centre. Initially it will be for 6 months, but may become longer, God willing. So that will involve moving to Wollongong (for the uninitiated, that's about 1.5 hrs drive south of Sydney), finding a new church, getting to know a new city, making new friends, somehow trying to keep in touch with family and friends in Sydney, and getting my head around a different university, its administrative systems and the curriculum I will be teaching.
The final year of the 'noughties' (BTW, what will this current decade be called?) was a very full and busy year, and I was able to witness God's work in my life in many ways. I give thanks for many things, including:

• Being able to complete my thesis on time, and the encouragement and support of friends during the writing up stage
  
• The blessing of an office on campus for the final 12 months of my PhD, and a friendly and supportive office-mate
  
• The encouragement and support of my supervisors and colleagues at uni
  
• Continued fellowship with the Lighthouse Forum at Macquarie Uni, and the work God did on campus through all the Christian groups throughout the year
  
• God's provision of everything I needed throughout all the lean and stressful times, especially the provision of work after my scholarship expired at a time when work appointments at uni were very hard to come by
  
• Safe travel to China twice, and the helpful experiences I had there at the conference and job interview
  
• Safe travel to Canberra for the inaugural Cite conference, and the great encouragement and inspiration it was to meet with other Christian academics there
  
• Safe travel to Victoria at Christmas to spend time with family
  
• Opportunities to make new friends in a number of contexts, and opportunities to share the good news about Jesus with various people
  
• The generosity of my family

I'm really thankful for this new job also, because not only will it be helpful financially (boring pragmatic reason), but it is also a really good opportunity for me to develop skills in lecturing and convening university courses. And it's a good time for me to move away from home and branch out a bit too. Wollongong is a very pleasant city, from what I've seen of it, and it's not so far from Sydney!