In my previous two posts, I shared two laments from my experience teaching writing and rhetoric at a private university in Florida. Lament #1: My students are steeped in a culture of deception. Lament #2: This culture seems to be spiritually (de)forming me, to the degree that I fear I am no longer fulfilling what I originally saw as my vocation as a teacher scholar.
As I have witnessed myself growing more bitter and emotionally closed off from my work, I have found myself turning to the serenity prayer, popularized mostly through its use in Alcoholics Anonymous materials. I re-encountered the serenity prayer a couple of years ago in a Louise Penny novel, of all things, which I was reading as a family member was just starting a journey of recovery from addiction. The best known version of it goes:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
This prayer is wonderful for so many reasons. For me, the dialectic of acceptance and action offers a deeply attractive (if ultimately unattainable) picture of a balanced life, and the ending suggests a humility in acknowledging that we may often get things wrong. It’s also given me a framework for trying to shift my focus from the things I cannot control — the things that push me most toward cynicism and emotional distance — to the things that I can.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...
I’ve come to accept that I can’t really change a university culture that normalizes deception. This has been hard, because it has meant shifting my expectations for my relationships with my 60-80 students, and for the experience of being in the classroom. I do have the occasional experience of a class section with enough buy-in and sense of relational connection to consistently gather around the common ground of our subject matter with shared purpose. I can think of two class sections out of the thirty-four I’ve taught at my current institution where it really seemed like every student was in it with me, and I am so grateful for those experiences.
I have not, though, been able to rely on that level of interest and engagement, and the prevailing culture of taking shortcuts has meant that I have had to let go of my vision of the classroom as a welcoming place where students experience challenging vulnerability that leads to learning and growth.
Accepting that this is the culture I’m working in has meant changing my policies and, in some cases, my assignments. I don’t want to get too in the weeds, but they involve things like building in no-questions-asked extensions on major papers, allowing for a generous number of absences and not distinguishing between what is excused and what is unexcused (except insofar as it’s legally required, of course), and making students’ documentation of and reflection on their writing processes be worth at least 50% of their final grade.
I also have changed my general education writing courses to involve a lot more individualized and one-on-one work with students. I have dialed back shared readings to the bare minimum and have lots of in-class workshops that allow space for students to ask questions, talk through issues and ideas, or catch up on last night’s game. In this new format, students can make choices about how much they want to engage without bringing down the energy in a whole-class discussion or small group activity.
I set these boundaries so that I am not wasting my own energy on forcing fake engagement from students who don’t want to learn while still engaging with students who are ready to learn. I accept that many students will not learn as much or as well as I hope they will, but I don’t want my disappointment to turn into cynicism or emotional distance that would detract from the educational experience of those who actually want to get something out of the class.
the courage to change the things I can...
I haven't found a reliable way to move the student culture closer toward integrity through my work in the classroom. But I have had a lot of opportunities to contribute to work that has a structural impact on campus.
My university recently revised its general education curriculum, and I participated in the roll-out and assessment of that curriculum. I designed a multi-section humanities course on “Global Cities and Migrant Narratives” that I hope will give students exposure to some of the nuances of immigrants’ experiences around the world that are not captured in much of the US-Centric political rhetoric that most of their ideas about immigration come from. It has already been taught by several faculty who have approached the course in cool ways that I couldn’t have thought of myself, and it does feel meaningful to be a part of students’ understanding of the world expanding in lots of different directions.
I also was able to be secretary and then chair of a three-year-old faculty senate committee on community engagement. I set up some basic annual tasks and established connections with offices on campus that will hopefully outlast me. Part of our university mission statement mentions forming students as responsible citizens, and this committee service feels like one of my few direct avenues to work toward that, supporting faculty who want to incorporate civic engagement and/or service learning in their courses.
And outside of work, cultivating relationships with my colleagues has been a joy. My department already had a very collegial atmosphere, and I was immediately welcomed into happy hours and writing group meetings. I’ve had a lot of fun going to see bands, plays, and movies, or to do karaoke with them. My family hosts monthly department board game nights where we try to extend a warm welcome to anyone who wants to come. While hospitality to my students has sometimes been a strain, hospitality to fellow faculty has offered some vocational fulfillment, and even though we complain about students a lot, having relational connections with people who are doing their best to teach, research, and write well has helped to keep me more hopeful and engaged at work.
and the wisdom to know the difference.
I love the humility with which this prayer ends. The line between what I can control and can’t control often feels so difficult to discern, and on top of that, it can change almost without notice. A few examples:
Example 1. A couple of months into my first year chairing the community engagement committee, the committee’s founding faculty member let me know the disappointing news that the university administration was not supportive of our pursuing the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement, a project that had been a primary reason for the formation of the committee. We could do small-scale projects, but we were not going to have the resources to grow service learning or civic engagement as we’d hoped we might.
Example 2. In the weeks after midterm papers came in, our informal faculty group chat was inundated with daily requests for faculty witnesses for academic misconduct meetings, almost all involving sources or quotations fabricated by GenAI like ChatGPT.
Example 3. In the week after spring break in this semester, I received a panicked email from a student saying that almost all of the sources she was using for her research paper had been taken down. It was as if they had vanished from the Internet overnight. It turns out, that’s exactly what happened. In response to recent executive orders, thousands of government web pages were taken down for ideological review. The Florida state government seems to have followed the federal administration’s lead: my student’s local sources on the history of women’s suffrage were potentially objectionable, it seems, and could now only be retrieved using the Wayback Machine. In the class meeting after she made this discovery, another student realized that she could no longer access the government resources on immigration that she had been relying on for her project.
These and many more circumstances of the past several years have brought home to me how the line between things I can and can’t control can be radically redrawn. There is some hope in that. We have a brand new university administration that seems more open to community engagement efforts. We have new faculty joining our department who are bringing fresh perspectives to teaching that I think could give us some creative ways to approach GenAI and other pedagogical challenges. There are opportunities that those changes offer.
Yet as the examples above demonstrate, I think, my personal sense of having the agency to fulfill my calling as a teacher-scholar has been shrinking. When I look at how I have let my current institution shape me, I see more cynicism, bitterness, vindictiveness, anger, and hopelessness than when I started.
As I have brought this realization to God, my family, my community, and friends, I wonder if it might be the case that I can’t stay in this place and be faithful to my calling anymore — or that maybe my calling has changed.
In any case, I think that I need a reset.
I’ve asked for and been given a year of unpaid leave to have space to figure out what my vocation might look like in this new world of uncertainty and rapid change. I’m parenting a toddler and a newly adopted teen. I have so much writing that I want to do. And I want to try to be better attuned to the needs of my local community rather than withdrawing in cynicism and fatigue. I feel incredibly privileged to be in a financial position where I can bring in less money for a year. But in a lot of ways, this feels like a terrible time to be stepping away from stable employment. I am often tempted to cling to things that feel certain and familiar. But spiritually, I feel confirmed that taking this step away is the right thing to do. My prayer is for a renewed sense of vocation, and by that I mean a renewed sense of my work as holy and purposeful.
We’ve all undergone tremendous changes in recent years, from the pandemic to the recent restructuring of university offices and policies in response to executive orders. I would be really interested to hear about whether some of these circumstances have shifted what things you can control, and/or your sense of vocation.
No matter what comes, I do pray that as Christian scholars in our varying institutions and workplaces, we may each have the serenity to accept what we cannot change, the courage to change what we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Photo by David Marcu on StockSnap
