A Day in the Life

Have you ever woken up in the morning and been so intrinsically motivated to go to work that the satisfaction of a job well done completely superseded your impending payday? Me neither. However, I was able to set pecuniary pursuits aside until the end of the school day because I was legitimately excited about teaching my “behavioral issue” class. Allow me to clarify my motives. I loathe the naively optimistic teaching caricature a la Hilary Swank in “Freedom Writers”*and not only because her incongruous grimacing smile looks like she just had a colonic. I find this Pollyannaish depiction overly simplistic, and I had to sit through far too many grad classes hearing classmates cite the movie as their inspiration to teach. Instead, I wanted to teach this challenging class because I am hypercompetitive and took a selfish interest in trying to succeed where others had previously failed.

Although I may facetiously quote Howard Gardener at times, much of what he wrote about in Five Minds for the Future about The Synthesizing Mind does resonate with me. The concept, in essence, refers to a learner’s ability to integrate seemingly disparate information from different disciplines into a cogent understanding that is greater than the sum of its parts. If this sounds familiar, and it should if you’ve taken education classes, it is because it is largely a repackaging of Susan Zimmerman and Ellin Oliver Keene’s Mosaic of Thought . Their comprehension strategies (text-to-self, text-to-text, text-to-world) are really the foundation of my reading philosophy.

Today the goal was to get students to analyze the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by the 18th century theologian Jonathan Edwards, not the baby faced former Presidential candidate John Edwards. I wanted to build their background knowledge of fire and brimstone messages and offer a comparative piece from nearly three centuries later. I played an excerpt of Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s 2006 documentary “Jesus Camp,” and we discussed the persuasive elements of this approach before beginning the sermon.

I was so pleased with how “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” went that I assigned an impromptu journal entry examining how both works were reflective of their respective historical periods. We had a very thoughtful class discussion, and I concluded by explaining that they had just successfully made connections outside of the text which would be the same focus of the course.

As important as I think these textual connections are, Gardener was even more passionate in Five Minds. He said: “Our survival as a planet may depend on the cultivation of this pentad of mental dispositions.” Although The Synthesizing Mind is only 20% of the quintet, the message is clear—I’m saving the world. And, as glamorous as living with my parents is, I’m one paycheck closer to moving out.

Adam’s Notes: Not so Swank, religious zealots, budding Nobel Prize nominee

*If you enjoyed this movie please find the nearest book (assuming it’s hardcover) and repeatedly bang it against the bridge of your nose. If you have a soft cover version, please spread your index and middle finger while running a single page between them until you have a self-inflicted paper cut.