Sweet Little Moral Crusaders

“From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don’t look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be scandalized and to try to find explanations in charity.”
(Flannery O'Connor)

As an ethics professor, I have long taken my students' capacity to be outraged as a good thing.

That is to say, I have mistaken my students' capacity to be outraged as a good thing, in far too many ways.

If they are outraged at an injustice that I present to them, I take it to mean that they care about justice.
I take it to mean that they are paying attention in class.
I take it to mean that I am a good teacher, for eliciting such responses.
I take it to mean that they are maturing as ethical beings.

This isn't true.

Or at least it may not be true.

Moral crusaderism is a stage, just as Flannery O'Connor says it is.  (She's not the only one.  Sociologists and developmental psychologists agree with her, although I doubt she'd need to know that to feel confident in her own observation.)

It's a mature stage for a child, but an immature one for an adult.  It's not a great stage for a child to be in for very long, especially if it happens to occur at the same stage as the All Authority Is Arbitrary and Evil and RUINING MY LIFE stage.  (Alas for parents of teenagers, this happens with some regularity.)

And it's sort of a bad sign when twenty- to twenty-four-year-olds are still in it.  Freshmen? Sure.  They're still children, really.  Grad students?  Um, no.  We are okay with it only because we still expect twenty-four-year-olds to be children.

Pragmatically speaking, encouraging students' moral outrage could be a short-term plus; they're more interested in class, class is more lively, they give better evaluations, it makes you look good, you have more fun doing your job.

I'm less and less convinced that it's a good practice, though, even in the short term.  Short term problems: you confirm their pre-existing prejudices, feed their habit of judgmentalism, and strengthen their addiction to the feeling of justifiable anger.  All that snippiness may just turn itself around and set its sights on you.

But it could potentially be a long-term disaster.  They cannot reach genuine moral maturity if they're encouraged (by their ethics professor, no less!) to substitute mere outrage for the pursuit of justice.  Outrage (especially of the click-to-share-and-raise-awareness variety) is a satisfying emotion, but does little actually to satisfy the demands of justice.

Far better for their moral maturity for us to prefer the slow, thankless, unfun task of getting them to do hard things--hard, boring, daily, unseen and unrewarded things.

Kids to Make a Mama Proud

Dear Moms of all my students:

This past week, while explaining Philippians to my students, I asked them what they would do if they won half a billion dollars in a lottery.  (It was sort of relevant.  You'll have to trust me.)

Everyone that answered said, and I am not making this up, "First I'd drop out of school, then I'd buy a house for my mom, then I'd buy a [insert car/truck here]."

I didn't know how you'd all feel about the dropping out of school part, but I thought you should know that they all put you above even their Lamborghini/Bugatti/Ducati/whatever.

Facebook is for Old Folks

Actual conversation in one of my classes Friday:

Me [trying to sound hip while making a point]: So, different genres, different kinds of texts, have different expectations of the reader.  You know this already.  You read your financial aid award letter differently than you read your Facebook feed, I'm sure.  Uh, wait.  Are you guys even on Facebook, or is that just for the old folks now?

Them: Old folks, man.  That's definitely old folks.

Me: So, what are you guys on?

Them: Twitter!

Me: Oh.  Okay.  Twitter.  Yeah, okay.

Them: And, yo, Instagram.

Me: Wait, what?  I thought Instagram was old folksville!  Like, people sharing baby pictures for the grandparents and, you know, pictures of their food at restaurants.

Them: Naw, we all on Instagram.

Me: So, what do you . . . like . . .
[massive giggling ensues]

Me: Uh, never mind.  Don't tell me.

Active (Shooter) Response

One of the faculty workshops I attended this week--the last week before classes begin--was called Active Shooter Response Training.

I will admit that I did not quite appreciate either how forward-thinking and proactive my college was being in offering this training or what I might learn from it.

I did, by the end of the talk, come away with a renewed appreciation for the all-but-impossible task our law enforcement and public safety officers face and a feeling that I would not be entirely bereft of hope should the unthinkable occur.

I would encourage anyone to take advantage of such training, if the opportunity presents itself.

One tiny little niggling doubt, however, remains in my mind after the event.

One thing the presenter did over and over and over was to downplay, even ridicule, the possibility that someone who was engaged in or about to start a Columbine-type assault could be talked out of his or her plan.

I found it providential that this occurred the exact same day of our training:

Gunman Talked Into Surrendering By His Hostage

I understand how unlikely this sounds, and I appreciate that the probabilities are with the gentleman that did our training.  People who become sufficiently unhinged to plan and execute large-scale assaults like this are not usually open to rational argument or pleas for mercy.

But perhaps they are still open to love.  Perhaps they can still be reached by prayer.

Perhaps a people that still remembers to pray for the violent, the criminally insane, the sinner, the abuser--perhaps that people can still reach the violent, the insane, etc., when no one else can.  Perhaps a people that prays not, "God, please don't let me die," but "God, please help me to help him," perhaps that people has more resources to hand than those who are merely trained how to survive an assault.

What's in a Name?

Friends of ours at [Happy Little] College, where Stephen and I will both be teaching in the fall, tell us that the students are already calling us "Mr. Dr. [Our Last Name]" and "Mrs. Dr. [Our Last Name]."

I took Stephen's last name when we married, and we have the same first initial.  So, on the class sign-up site, there are a whole lot of classes being taught by "S. [Our Last Name]."

And the students--clever kids!--have already figured out that it's going to be a problem.

I'm not sure why this makes me smile as much as it does.

Maybe it's because "Mr." and "Mrs." seem a little more personal to me than "Dr."  And there's an undeniable "cute" factor to "Mr. Dr." and "Mrs. Dr."

Or maybe it's because nicknames, too, are a sign of familiarity (if not always of affection).  And it's nice to feel that the students are already calling us anything at all--and something more personal than "those new guys that are coming."

One thing I'm sure contributes to my happiness: I'm glad to be going as "Mr. Dr. and Mrs. Dr." and not "Dr. and Mrs."  I'm glad to have finished the doctorate so that Stephen and I are going there on equal footing (at least with respect to our professional accomplishments, if not to our standing at the college).

I'm glad that there's no question of the subtle denigration of my qualifications with respect to his by the application of different titles.

I'm glad that I'll not be subject to the domestication of my professional accomplishments by the assumption that they are dependent on Stephen's.  "Oh, so after got his degree, you got one, too?  How cute!"  "Oh, he put you through school?  What a great guy!  Not many husbands would do that!"  "You must have learned so much about theology while Stephen was getting his degree!"  (At least, not by the students, who will always know us both as Dr.)

I'm glad that, even though people we meet at the local churches and community centers ask, "What does your husband do?" and express surprise that "You work, too?" the students, at least, expect me to show up for class every day.

I have to confess that I had gotten accustomed to the rarefied atmosphere of the Ivory Tower, where the idea of my being a "trailing spouse" had not occurred to anyone, or, if it had, it was more often referred to as "the two-body problem."  A "two-body problem," of course, implies that both bodies are, in general or at least potentially, equally weighted.  There was no suggestion that Stephen's dissertation was weightier than mine (even if it was, quite literally, longer and thus heavier).  In fact, almost none of my professors and mentors even mentioned Stephen when they were talking about my work or my job prospects.

And, before that, to the loving and supportive atmosphere of my family, in which I was never "pretty smart, for a girl" or encouraged to "get a useful degree, in case you can't find a husband."  I'd heard of families and businesses and government agencies where having breasts and ovaries was a liability, but I'd never experienced it--not once.  Not ever.

I can't say that I've had genuinely rude or mean-spirited interactions with any Alabamans yet.  But there have been more than a few of those moments of surprise, those quick recoveries, those raised-and-then-hurriedly-relaxed eyebrows.

I must try to remember not to overreact to those moments.

And knowing that the students are calling Stephen "Mr. Dr." means that they are calling me "Mrs. Dr. [last name]" not to mark my doctorate off from all the doctorates of my male colleagues, but simply to distinguish between the two "Dr. [last name]s" on campus.  "Which Dr. is which?" is such a different question than, "Oh, you're a Dr., too?"

It's a good difference.  And that makes me smile.