Theological Notebook/Personal: Intro to Intro; the Official End of Summer 2006

[novak]

In brief, I was fairly pleased with how the Introduction to Theology classes opened. I had ended up, in the few hours before class started, in a prolonged e-mail debate with Erik in Geneva about the best way to deal with the problem in our culture of the negative baggage students can have toward religion or theology as they come into the topic.

Comments

[friede]

Your opening class sounds rather like mine -- well, more like my lit survey, for what are perhaps obvious reasons. One does what one can to clear the dead brush, but there's too much information to impart to linger there for very long.

With my freshman comp course, I get the luxury of a whole syllabus built upon discussing their assumptions about why they're in the class. This may be why at the moment my frosh nearly-idolize me and the literature students suspect I'm not quite all there...

[novak]

Yes, definitely the latter for the moment. Today I continued my "push them in the deep end" immersion and know I have a lot of them in doubtful confusion for the moment. Even though I intended that, and won't be able to judge whether these lessons worked until toward the end of their experience, it certainly doesn't leave me happy with my performance in any overt way.

[friede]

I hear you, brother. Luckily, my content-driven course only means I have to get small concepts across, really.

And as it is, the course is turning into a nonmajor "appreciation" course rather than the introduction for majors it was intended to be, which saves my bacon from the wrath of my colleagues. (I'm eyerolling a bit at that last one)