Thinking Aloud

Last week, I graded somewhere around 300 papers from TTU freshman. It was a pretty simple beginning-of-the-semester sort of assignment, and so part of it was just that they relate some potential career plans. It was a depressing job for me.

Here is why, a quotation I got from one of the drafts:

"They say that you need to pursue your passion, but that can often be difficult when you are not passionate about anything."

The depressing thing about reading these three hundred or so papers was just this sort of thing. Draft after draft after draft (etc.) sent an identical message to this one, and even though I think it was something that I was already pretty aware of, it was amazingly saddening to me.

The problem, as I see it, isn't that the kids don't know what sort of career they want to pursue yet. I don’t see that as the core issue at all. The real problem is that they can't even begin to ask the question of what they might want to do with their lives because they can't identify anything that they're passionate about. There is practically no sense of meaning, no sense that there’s anything worth dying for, in their lives (except for, perhaps, a Hummer). These students made very clear that there has been such a collapse of meaning in this culture that they, quite literally, see no reason to get up out of bed in the morning. And so, they don't.

I find this especially sad considering that well over ninety-five percent of those Tech students would profess to be Christians. I think that this is a fairly strong indication of just how dead God is in our lives at the moment, even for many of those who profess faith so loudly. I would think that there would at least be a starting point for these people who profess faith, a core of meaning from which to eventually build some vision of the particular life. But, I don’t think there is that core, not in their realities.

Anyway, my perception of this situation has been high in my considerations recently. Basically, I think that this is why I've been moving away from English studies.

My thinking’s not entirely clear on this at the moment. I know that there is a lot of value in gaining the skills offered by learning to write and learning to read, skills that go well beyond the English classroom. But, it feels to me as though acquiring those skills provided by the English class is sort of a level-two accomplishment, and the students haven’t gotten even close to reaching level-one yet (this statement makes sense to me, though I’m not sure how clear it is outside of my head.). It just seems to me as though the skills offered in English classes are meant primarily to enhance lives of meaning; I don’t think they necessarily provide the skills to create lives with meaning. (This is my most debatable point, and I'm not going to provide much clarification at this time. I will say that if you read early American documents, I’m specifically thinking of works like ol’ Ben Franklin’s Autobiography and Charles Brockden Brown’s novels, you'll find that that’s what early Americans sort of envisioned--the composition of individual meaning. Basically, existentialism. I think, though, that this idea is only about halfway right, and for my students, it's the other half that's missing.)

So, it seems, that’s why I see myself moving away from the idea of teaching English for a living. My rule, provided by Frederick Buechner, is this: “I believe that it is possible to say at least this in general to all of us: we should go with our lives where we most need to go and where we are most needed.”

So, I think this explains a little, at least to myself, about why I’ve felt that compulsion to head from literature studies and toward seminary. The problem I see around me, the primary problem I see, is the sort of pervasive spiritual impoverishment that seemed so evident to me in the students’ papers last week. Answering that problem, at this point, is the need. Lord knows what, specifically, needs to done next. That's not the important thing, though, at this point. At least, I've got a starting point.