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My last blog was about assessment in immersive classes and outdoor or wild learning. As much as assessment is about how I assess my students in those classes, assessment is also for me. How do I know if my outdoor classes and lessons are working?“Assessment” often feels like a dirty word. Generally, I dread it when I see the word in an email subject or agenda line. At the end of the semester, after I get my grades in, I still have one more set of forms to fill out to “assess” the effectiveness of my courses in order to appease the accrediting gods. I hate that paperwork. It is the opposite of everything wild I am trying to do. But the intent is not wrong. I ought to be assessing the effectiveness of my classes, my assignments, and my learning activities so that I know if they’re helping my students learn. Perhaps I need to make adjustments so students can thrive. The paperwork I fill out for assessment does not usually lead to this thoughtfulness, but it is important that I continually assess throughout the semester. What seems to be helping or hindering student learning?At this point I need to articulate to myself why I take students outdoors. Is it just because I prefer being outdoors, or is there a particular point of learning that is facilitated better outdoors? Just as I assess how well students are meeting the goals I have for them, I have to assess how well my activities and locations meet the goals I have for them. Then I can assess how successful the activity is. Even if the answer is simply, “It’s a beautiful day and I’d rather be outdoors than in a stuffy classroom,” I can assess whether students learn what I hope they will learn that day or if being outdoors hinders their learning in some way. For instance, Was I harder to hear? Do I need to stand closer to them or project better? Do I need to be clearer about what they should be taking notes on? And if I make those changes the next time, do they help, or do I need to take us back inside?In general, though, the question is what outdoor learning is about. As I’ve said before, I hope being outdoors makes students feel more playful and therefore more curious and open to learning. I want being outdoors to ground them more in the present, in their world, with each other. That is, I want being outdoors to make them more human in our AI world. I want it to make them more open to conversation with each other. I want them to feel less anxious because they feel the sun on their skin and the sun makes life feel more possible, especially after a long winter, and being less anxious helps them learn. Or I want them outdoors because a walking role-play is best done outdoors or an art scavenger hunt between multiple buildings. Could I do that lesson as effectively indoors? For my immersive courses, the goal is for students to be more present to one another with fewer distractions.As I consider these goals through a semester, I ask questions like, “Have I introduced or nourished any distractions I didn’t intend to?” “What did location add to the lesson and to their learning?” “Are students engaging with each other and material more or less than they would indoors?” One method to assess this is through my own observations, but answering my own questions, especially when I love being outside, is prone to biased answers. Observations in immersive classes are more reliable because of the sheer amount contact I have with students, but even then I am human and have blind spots.So I ask questions of students on mid-semester written evaluations. I listen when students are in my office hours talking about what’s hard for them. Sometimes when students come early to class I just ask them explicit questions about something I’m curious about: “Can you hear your classmates well enough outside?” “Do you have any suggestions to make this activity more engaging?” I ask colleagues to come observe me teach and give me feedback. And in the end, I look again at student work to see if they are learning what I hope they are learning. A final reflection assignment I give is especially helpful for understanding whether they are being drawn more into themselves, their community, and their world. In immersive classes this is especially true of their final reflection assignment as well as closing rituals for the community of the class.Are any of these assessments scientific? Not really. I’m looking at far too many variables at once. We always are. A classroom is a certain kind of laboratory, but not the kind where we can isolate a single variable to experiment on. So we do our best. We stay open to the wildness of our classroom in all its wild ways and hope to be attentive enough to keep our students learning wildly.

In the previous blog in this series, we learned from Ramona Quimby’s kindergarten teacher, Miss Binney, that there is value to connecting with students. To writing them notes. To communicating that they matter in the classroom. To giving a shit.But sometimes we just have no shits left to give. Miss Binney was an unseasoned pedagogue. She possessed the eagerness of youth. When she printed Ramona’s name, she, like Ramona, always added kitty-cat ears and whiskers to the Q. “That was the kind of teacher Miss Binney was.” One who still had many shits to give.Mrs. Griggs, Ramona’s first grade teacher in Ramona the Brave, does not. And I don’t think we should begrudge her for it.The narrator describes her physical appearance as such: “Mrs. Griggs, older than Miss Binney, looked pleasant enough, but of course she was not Miss Binney. Her hair, which was no special color, was parted in the middle and held at the back of her neck with a plastic clasp.”Mrs. Griggs’s unremarkable appearance matches her no-nonsense pedagogical vibe: she is in the classroom to guide the students in the hard work of the first grade, which she consistently reminds them is not, like kindergarten, a place to play.Part of the hard work of the first grade is becoming literate. Ramona’s burgeoning literacy is one of two pedagogical themes that punctuate Ramona the Brave. When the first grade begins, Ramona can read three grown-up words that she taught herself from road signs: gas, motel, and burger. She is consistently disappointed, as they rarely appear in literature.The other recurring pedagogical theme in the novel is the big emotions that Ramona brings to the classroom. These begin on day one of first grade. Ramona has been eagerly awaiting the start of school. For once she has something really interesting to share with her peers during Show and Tell: at the end of summer, some workmen came and “chopped a hole” in her house.This revelation does not receive the reaction Ramona anticipated. Rather than being amazed, the class laughs. The laughter stings, but insult is added to injury when Ramona’s best friend, Howie Kemp, who himself had jumped through the hole in the house, refuses to publicly confirm the hole chopping. As Ramona’s rage boils, Mrs. Griggs addresses the situation: “‘Ramona,’ said Mrs. Griggs, in a voice that was neither cross nor angry, ‘You may take your seat. We do not shout in the first grade.’”Ramona seethes at the injustice of the situation and refuses to participate actively in the class the remainder of the day, “even though she ached to give answers.”Things get worse over the next month. Ramona remains despondent. Mrs. Griggs has said every day since the first grade began, “We are not in kindergarten any longer. We are in the first grade, and people in the first grade must learn to be good workers.” Mrs. Griggs does not seem to recognize what a good worker Ramona is. She has learned the words bunny, apple, and airplane, along with all the others in her new graduated reader.And then come the paper bag owls. Ramona constructs a perfect bird: bespectacled with eyes peering off to the side and covered with little Vs to make it look feathered. But, to Ramona’s horror, Snoozin’ Susan Kushner’s owl looks just the same as Ramona’s. Mrs. Griggs holds up Susan’s owl for the entire class to admire. Knowing that her teacher will tell her “Nobody likes a tattletale” and the class will call her Ramona Copycat instead of Ramona Kitty Cat if she narks, Ramona says nothing about Susan’s academic dishonesty. Instead, she crushes both her and Susan’s owl and slams them into the trash can.The behavioral snafu is addressed by Mrs. Griggs at parent-teacher conferences, which Ramona is absent from. She remains at home, feeling proud that she could read bits of the evening newspaper, learning that the z-z-z-z-z-s were going to play the z-z-z-z-z-s in z-z-z-z-ball.The Quimby family debriefs the conference and reports that Mrs. Griggs expects Ramona to apologize to Susan. Ramona’s older sister, Beatrice, who was also in Mrs. Griggs’s class in the first grade, recalls (interrupted by Ramona feeling frustrated and screaming the most-vulgar word she can possibly think of: “guts!”) that Mrs. Griggs was always big on apologies. She also reports that Mrs. Griggs operated with a monotonous, consistent curriculum: “We just seemed to go along with our work, and that was it.” Beatrice got along well with Mrs. Griggs because she was the kind of student that she liked: neat and dependable, very un-Ramona.The report indicates that Ramona is progressing well with her reading and math, but that she needs to work on exhibiting self-control in the classroom. Ramona thinks the feedback unmerited and asks why she cannot change to the other first grade class. In response, Ramona’s father, Robert Quimby, drops these golden nuggets of pedagogical wisdom:Because Mrs. Griggs is teaching you to read and do arithmetic, and because the things she said about you are fair. You do need to learn self-control and keep your hands to yourself. There are all kinds of teachers in the world just as there are all kinds of other people, and you must learn to get along with them.As teachers, we bring not only our methods but our persons to the classroom. Who we are matters there. Not all humans get along swimmingly with all other humans. That’s okay. Not all professors get along swimmingly with all students. That’s okay.It is a kindness to ourselves to find out what works for us in our classrooms and repeat those things. If we are constantly reinventing the wheel, eventually we will run out of inventions.It is a kindness to students to find what works for the widest variety of students and repeat those things. It is also a kindness to students to have some flexibility with respect to some course policies, practices, and assignments. A bend-but-don’t-break model of teaching.Just as students, like Ramona, must learn to get along with all kinds of teachers, so also teachers must learn to get along with all kinds of students. Because, to echo the wise Mr. Quimby, there are all kinds of students in this world just as there are all kinds of other people.And Mrs. Griggs learns to get along with Ramona, big personality and all. At the end of Ramona the Brave, Ramona loses one of her shoes on the way to school (she had to throw it at a ferocious, sharp-toothed dog). Rather than make a paper turkey, Ramona requests that her teacher allow her to make a paper slipper. Mrs. Griggs begins to balk, “We always—”, before changing her mind and allowing an educational audible. This is much to Ramona’s delight, who now feels she no longer needs to dread turkeys or her teacher.

In an address at the 1968 International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), Senegalese forester Baba Dioum famously declared, “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”[i] We cannot understand what we do not notice, and we will not notice what we cannot name. To love and learn we must first know, and to know, we must name. In my more conventional courses, I continue to assess students on theological and philosophical terms and names. I do so not to determine students’ comprehension and competency in a master discourse, but instead for the sake of calling them to account, to attention, to care, for the uses of variegated, precise language. Because the world is dynamic and changing, and since I hold that God calls human creatures to growth in self-transcendence, we must take seriously the task of stewarding our thoughts and speech.Concepts, ideas, and words, labels, classifications, and names all have dates. Each has a history. But language use is not merely a matter of historical interest, it is a profoundly serious moral task. Through naming, or taxonomy, we learn to navigate the worlds of meaning we have received.[ii] The work of learning, and even creating, new names can be a profoundly liberative, even salvific, activity. But naming can also be used to instrumentalize, enslave, and degrade places, creatures, and persons.Consider the moral difference between labeling fungi, plants, and animals “natural resources,” on the one hand, and “living organisms” on the other. The former risks instrumentalizing such lives economically; the latter might instead help us to recognize their intrinsic value. A third approach might recognize such lives not as resources, or as living things, but instead as “creatures” called into existence, loved, and sustained by God.Whether one uses the language of “natural resources,” “living organisms,” or “creatures,” all three are morally preferable to operating with a mental bestiary or botanical consciousness that ascribes worth, or wrath, to creatures from a narrowly anthropocentric perspective. “Pests” and “weeds” play major roles in our collective cultural psyche, but our distain for such living things does not make them any less loved by God.[iii]In Creaturely Theology we share in the divine work of knowing and caring for other creatures through noticing and naming the lives, even those we might initially despise, that surround us. Each student is tasked with identifying at least one hundred different species of plants, animals, and fungi during the semester. That work requires leaning on scientific and naturalist wisdom gathered in field guides and the living community of iNaturalist experts to get to know the creatures we happen to meet.[iv]Such work has lasting, powerful effects. As one student put it, “The class as a whole showed me how to wonder again. We would go into the woods not knowing what we would find, and then see a plant and not know what it was, and then not know much about it even after identifying it!”We are learning so much about the biodiversity of this place, but such knowledge only increases our appreciation of the mysterious otherness of each creature! We never encounter a generic flower or beetle or bird or snake; each chance meeting is with a unique, unrepeatable individual, known intimately by its Creator. To share such knowledge is a holy privilege, and each time we do we become just a little more like the One who has made us all. Notes & Bibliography[i] See Barbara K. Rodes and Rice Odell, eds., A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 33.[ii] My approach to the related issues of self-transcendence, growth, meaning, and historicity depends upon the work of Bernard Lonergan. See especially Bernard Lonergan, “Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,” in A Third Collection, edited by Robert M. Doran and John Dadosky (University of Toronto Press, 2017), 161–76.[iii] For an important exploration of the risks and deleterious effects of such consciousness on both non-human creatures and on humans, see Bethany Brookshire, Pests: How Human Create Animal Villains (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2022).[iv] See https://www.inaturalist.org/. We also use the apps Seek (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app) and Merlin (https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/). Both are useful but Seek often exhibits the significant limitations of AI technology, while Merlin more regularly shows its promise.

American media has only just begun to speculate about the political leanings of Pope Leo XIV as they comb through his social media posts. Just as they tried to fit Pope Francis into the binary categories of conservative/liberal and traditional/progressive, so too will they with Leo. Such analysis so often fails because it rarely takes seriously what animates their lives: proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ. Gospel means good news, and the four Gospels are these men’s principal source of guidance. To understand Francis’s words and deeds, we have to take seriously that he prayed with these Gospels for his entire adult life. We can say the same about Leo XIV. Neither prioritizes whether their positions align with liberal or conservative positions; rather both worry whether they are being Jesus’s faithful disciples. Here are just a few examples of what challenges them when they pray with the Gospels. In Luke, Jesus announces his ministry quoting from the prophet Isaiah. The Spirit has sent him to proclaim the following: good news to the poor, the release of prisoners, the blind seeing, and the oppressed being liberated (Luke 4: 14-22). Francis’s relentless insistence that we remember and care for the poor comes from his obedience to gospel passages like these. Before his election, Robert Prevost lived out this ministry of Jesus among the Peruvian people whom he greeted in his first address as Pope Leo XIV. In the current political landscape, liberals and conservatives fall short when measured by the Gospel’s standard. Francis and Leo have meditated on and preached from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount many times since their ordination. The Sermon opens with the Beatitudes where Jesus identifies those blessed in his kingdom. He names the poor, the mourner, the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemaker, the one hungry and thirsty for righteousness, and the one persecuted for the sake of righteousness.  In his exhortation on holiness, Rejoice and Be Glad, Pope Francis describes the Beatitudes as ”the Christian’s identity card” (63), even as “the world pushes us towards another way of living” (65). He encourages Christians to be open to the Holy Spirit and to “allow [Jesus’s] words to unsettle us, to challenge us and to demand a real change in the way we live” (66).[i] In light of the Beatitudes, the liberal-conservative binary dissolves and the traditional melds with the so-called “progressive.” The American media notes every time that Pope Francis and Pope Leo speak on behalf of migrants and refugees. This defense should come as no surprise when one turns to Matthew 25 and reads Jesus’s parable about the final judgment. A king, aka Jesus, welcomes into his kingdom those who, unbeknownst to them, tended to him when they tended to the hungry and thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, cared for the ill, visited prisoners. Those who failed to show mercy end up in the kingdom where demonic suffering reigns eternally. Reflecting on this passage in 2016 during the extraordinary jubilee year of mercy, Pope Francis warned: “The lesson of Jesus that we have heard does not allow escape routes.”[ii] And Leo XIV, in his first message told the world, “we want to be a Church of the Synod, a Church that walks, a Church that always seeks peace, that always seeks charity, that always seeks to be close, especially to those who suffer.”[iii] Like Francis, Leo recognizes there is no escape route from tending to the suffering. Jesus demands even more from his disciples than these works of mercy. In the Sermon on the Mount, he calls them to be light and salt for the world and challenges them in all manner of living from turning the other cheek and  loving their enemies to avoiding even lustful thoughts. These demands culminate in the Torah’s commandment: love God with one’s entire being, to which Jesus joins love the neighbor as the self. In his parables, Jesus identifies the neighbor as the one who shows compassion exemplified in the Good Samaritan and the father to his prodigal son as well as his resentful elder son. Like the first disciples, most Christians in every age fall short of these demands.  Pope Francis meant it when he declared himself a sinner in need of God’s mercy. Clearly, contemporary Christians face challenges that require creative fidelity from attending to the climate crisis to understanding the complexities of sexual and gender identity. An often cited example of Francis’s “liberal agenda” is “who am I to judge?”  Rarely is Francis’s entire comment quoted. He said, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” In this response, Francis gives witness to  two dimensions of the Church’s life. The first is to embrace every person because no one is excluded from seeking and receiving the love and mercy of God. Echoing Francis, Leo XIV calls for “a Church that builds bridges, dialogue, always open to receive like this square with its open arms, all, all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue and love.”[iv] Yet, implicit in Francis’s response is the challenge to live in the demanding way of discipleship: loving God with one’s whole being and loving the neighbor as one’s self. To borrow from Paul, in Christ, there is neither conservative nor liberal, traditional nor progressive. Or as Leo XIV declares in the motto of his papacy: In illo uno unum”: “In the one Christ, we are one”.     Notes & Bibliography [i] https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20180319_gaudete-et-exsultate.html [ii] https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/audiences/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160630_udienza-giubilare.html [iii] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-5392318/transcript-pope-leo-xiv-speech [iv] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-5392318/transcript-pope-leo-xiv-speech

There is nothing simple about creating attendance policies. Instructors, rightly, find themselves all over a spectrum of expectations and philosophies, informed by their own experiences as students, their departmental standards, their student population, and their own interest in monitoring learners. I myself have ranged from no attendance policy whatsoever, to point loss for absences, all the way to my current policy, which I’ll discuss below. Regardless, I would suggest that teachers think about two major questions when they have the freedom to craft their own attendance standards. 1. What is the likelihood that an invested student will have to miss class at least once or twice during the semester?This involves analyzing factors like the prevalence of communicable illness (do most of your students live in residence halls where norovirus could sweep through hundreds of them within a month?), the socioeconomic realities (do many students balance school with jobs they need for living expenses? Do they have access to reliable public transit, and if not, how does the need for carpools/rides or the reliability of their personal vehicles factor in?), and family obligations (are many learners parents who would be required to stay home with their sick children?). There’s no simple calculus here, but in general, if it’s likely that even the most earnest students will have to miss class sometimes, one’s attendance policy might need to be more generous. 2. How have I constructed the course and assessments?For courses where each day of class depends heavily on comprehending the materials of the previous day, attendance policies may be a way to incentivize that necessary regular attendance. For courses that circle more than build, an occasional absence may not significantly impact a learner’s ability to meet the larger course goals, and a looser attendance policy might give students a “release valve” to take care of their larger needs every now and then. One semester I found myself stuck after my loosey-goosey attendance policy meant that I regularly had half-full classrooms. I knew something had to change, so I reflected.First, in my context at a small women’s college where we focus on first-generation students, single moms, and undocumented students, I knew that missing class was part of life for my learners. Sick kiddos, broken-down cars, and demanding jobs – some of them full-time – meant that perfect attendance would be rare. It also seemed that my students, who have the incredibly high stress levels that come with all those considerations, get sick more often and more severely. I didn’t want a policy that added more strain on them.Second, my courses are designed to be spirals rather than building blocks; we come back to the same major themes frequently throughout the term, each time from a new angle. I don’t need my students to fully comprehend a concept before we can move on because I know it will come back around and they might latch on better then. This means I can afford some leniency because a student can still perform very well on assessments even if they miss a day here or there.All of this meant that my first instinct wasn’t too far off – a gentler attendance policy works with my content and for my students. But how could I avoid those half-empty rooms? In the end, I did something radical – I asked my students what they thought I should do. I told them that I wanted to incentivize being in class, because a robust learning community makes the content more interesting and memorable, but that I couldn’t countenance a policy that would punish someone for being seriously ill or dealing with a major life event. Within the space of ten minutes, we had come up with a policy that made sense to them and me, and which I currently use. At the start of the term, each student gets a set number of attendance points. If they miss, I take away points… until they prove to me that they’ve caught up on the material. (I record all my classes, so my students watch the video and then show me their notes to get their points back). It’s easier for students to just show up than it is to do the makeup work, but no one’s grade is ever permanently impacted if they have to miss classes. It might not work for everyone, but it makes sense for my courses and context.How have you crafted your attendance policies?

Fear is the anxiety that you are about to lose something you love, need, have rightfully earned or deserve. Fear will make you hurt yourself, silence yourself, edit yourself in ways that contradict or disavow your own best pursuits. Since we teach who we are, showing up afraid will only serve to distort your teaching, raise the apprehension in your classroom and model a sense of distrust. While I understand the impulse to be afraid, we must choose to live unafraid, especially in our own classrooms.Uncertainty has been weaponized. Random acts of callousness have been normalized. Scarcity is being orchestrated. Universities are being pressured in strange and unpredictable ways. The enterprises of education are being guillotined. If there was ever a time that provoked fear, anger, and confusion for those of us employed in higher education — now is that moment. Even so, my hunch is that it is shortsighted to expect that preemptive acts will rescue anyone from the strategies of demolition and anarchy. It is not likely that the fight can be avoided—particularly for those trying to skirt it. While cowering from the fight is an option, we would be foolish to think that cowering from the attack will lessen the challenge. Fear will drive you to attempt ineffective strategies.The other day a colleague emailed the Wabash Center asking that we remove their syllabi from our online collection. They were afraid the contents of their courses would be read as diversity, equity and inclusion materials and did not, given the political climate, want to risk being castigated. I can understand their desire to avoid worry, but removing syllabi from the internet, at best, is misguided. The fact-of-the matter is that nothing is ever actually removed. Why would the colleague think that hiding materials would make them safe? In this climate, compliance has not been met with a cease fire. I recognize that the fearful colleague is following suit with many prestigious universities who have performed an audit of their own websites, purged language of welcome and belonging, then re-languaged their program descriptions for public consumption.  I suspect our safety will depend upon the capacities of our intellectual leaders to decide not to be intimidated. Harvard is leading the way.Today, a colleague teaching at a state university reported that their department chair announced that she had recommended to the provost a 60% cut in the department’s budget. The department chair stated that she hoped that by volunteering the massive budget cut that she would avoid the impending budget fights. Once colleagues were clear that this recommendation was made to preempt the department head from having to fight for their department’s budget, the startle of colleagues shifted to rage. They felt betrayed. When the faculty pressed the department head for a rationale, the department chair explained that because they were close to retirement they were entitled to choose “peace” and avoid the impending university wide budgetary conflicts. Now, the department is waiting in fear. They are afraid that the department head’s wanton actions communicated to the university the lack of importance of the entire department. Wittingly or unwittingly, the timid department head chose to conspire in her own demise. She had not considered the welfare of the community over her own fear-driven impulse to preemptively concede—or maybe she had. Evil takes advantage of self-absorption and is intensified.We do not have the luxury of being afraid if it allows avoidance, silence, or being untrue to our central aims. Values which are easily discarded to avoid a fight might need to be reassessed, but now that crisis is upon us, conceding seems reckless. Safety is not ensured. We must know where we stand before the fight comes.If we are doing our jobs of good teaching, teaching religion and theology inherently cultivates voiced students who critically and imaginatively critique the status quo.  We know there are no dangerous thoughts; to those who would squelch wonder, imagination and freedom, thinking itself is dangerous. If in this moment we waffle on this rudimentary aim of teaching — why did we choose teaching in the first place? And why do we remain in higher education classrooms? Certainly, the individual and collective answers to these questions will matter as we decide our engagement in the vitriolic challenges of this moment. May our fear not become our hallmark. The worst thing we can do is panic and allow our fears to be the guiding force. This morning, I emailed my Associate Directors a copy of Audre Lorde’s The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. Lorde's speech sheds light on the factors that may cause, in times of trouble, some people to remain silent while enabling others to speak an act. At our next director’s discussion, I am going to begin the dialogue with this Lorde quote:“For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for the final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us."Together, we will discuss the ways Wabash Center will stand firm in our commitments, and the ways we will steadfastly emphasize our mission of improving teaching, knowing that the aim of good teaching is to provide radical hospitality, to create space for open dialogue and to encourage creativity and imagination for future building. Reflection Questions for Leaders in EducationWhat do you do when you do not know what to do and you are afraid to do anything?What habits and practices (sacred or otherwise) will calm you during extended crisis?Who is your wise counsel in the season of doubt and distrust?How do you work through experiences of unprovoked or unforeseen change?What if the challenge is bigger than your capacity to lead, to teach, to serve?

My road trips contain a heavy dose of Beverly Cleary audiobooks. Traipsing around the midwestern United States, my family of six fills the time by listening to the antics of Henry Huggins and Ramona Quimby read aloud by Neil Patrick Harris (quite frankly, it’s his very best work) and Stockard Channing.The fourteen-book literary universe constellates around Klickitat Street, nestled in the shadow of Mt. Hood in Portland, Oregon. The books are filled with stories about nothing, like Seinfeld. Being about nothing also makes them about everything: transitions, family, friendship, middle-class America, financial precarity, elementary romance, death and new life, divorce and marriage, budding independence, sibling rivalry, and, most importantly for our purposes, education.My family is particularly smitten with Ramona Quimby, who first appears as a minor character in the Henry Huggins series. She takes on a larger role as Beatrice’s exasperating younger sister in Beezus and Ramona (1955) before becoming the eponymous protagonist of seven novels that chronicle her elementary school years. Throughout the Ramona series, readers are offered a window into the family life of the Quimbies and the early public-school education of Ramona first at Glenwood Elementary School and then Cedarhurst Primary.In this blog series, we take a close look at the fictional educators and experiences that shaped Ramona’s life and mind during her most formative years. From these we will glean pedagogical lessons, from the effects of rituals and social dynamics in the classroom to the importance of deconstructing the threshold between the classroom and the real world.    KindergartenAt the beginning of Ramona the Pest (1968), we are introduced to Ramona’s young and unseasoned Kindergarten teacher, Miss Binney. To Ramona’s mind, “she could not have been a grownup very long.” Over the course of the novel, what we learn about Miss Binney, above all else, is that she cares deeply for her students. The very first thing that Miss Binney does after introducing herself to Ramona, is to affirm her presence in the classroom: “I am so glad you have come to Kindergarten.” Ramona knows that she matters in this space.As the novel progresses, Ramona’s varied experiences in the kindergarten classroom are narrated. She learns the puzzling ritual of standing up straight, facing the American flag, and singing the “dawnzer” song. Ramona figures this must be about a lamp because the dawnzer gives off a “lee light:” 🎶“Oh, say, can you see by the dawnzer’s lee light.”🎶 She brings her doll Chevrolet, who is named after her aunt’s car and has green hair from an unsuccessful attempt to blue it like her best friend Howie’s grandmother’s, to show and tell.Through her Kindergarten experiences, Ramona comes to find that Ms. Binney truly understands her. She asks all the right questions and affirms Ramona in all the right ways.Until the fateful day that Ramona loses her first tooth. At recess she is on cloud nine about her plan to use the tooth as bait to catch the tooth fairy. Almost unthinkingly, she pulls the curls of her rival, Susan Kushner, just to feel them boing. Miss Binney, looking out for the physical and emotional wellbeing of Susan, tells Ramona that she can only return to the kindergarten classroom if she commits to not pulling Susan’s curls. Stubborn and despondent Ramona, forgetting her tooth in the school building, returns home where she vows to stay until Miss Binney forgets who she is, feeling that her teacher does not care for her anymore.  The Quimbies, apparently very committed to developing their child’s autonomy, allow Ramona to remain absent from kindergarten for several days. On the third day of absence, Ramona receives a letter from her teacher. The prized tooth is Scotch taped to the top of it. When her mother offers to read the letter because Ramona’s literacy is still developing, Ramona snatches it away, declaring, “It’s my letter!” She glances at the first line and can make out the first words: “Dear Ramona Q” (the Q decorated with cat ears, whiskers, and a tail, just the way Ramona herself styles it). Though Ramona can’t actually read the lines of print that follow, she vocalizes what she imagines to be the letter’s content:“‘Dear Ramona Q. Here is your tooth. I hope the tooth fairy brings you a dollar. I miss you and want you to come back to kindergarten. Love and kisses, Miss Binney.”In reality, Miss Binney’s letter reads:“Dear Ramona Q. I am sorry I forgot to give you your tooth, but I am sure the tooth fairy will understand. When are you coming back to Kindergarten?”What is written in the letter matters far less than what the letter communicates. It is a token of Miss Binney’s affection, and it makes an instantaneous and profound impact on Ramona. Miss Binney does care for her. She cares enough to write Ramona a note in her own hand.One’s handwriting, especially in personal letters, is a representation of their person. Miss Binney is able to cross the void of Ramona’s physical absence and demonstrate her care for her. A small part of Miss Binney is present in the letter, forming a connection with Ramona and reaffirming their relationship.This is the pedagogical lesson we can learn from Ramona’s Kindergarten teacher: the simple act of giving students a handwritten note is pedagogically a/effective because it affirms the unique relationship between teacher and student.Following Miss Binney’s lead, I have made it my ambition to write every student in my classes at least one handwritten note per semester. At the beginning of the semester I make a simple spreadsheet that lists each student, indicates the date on which I gave them a note, and what the note was about. The contents of the notes range from simple affirmations of something that a student said in class to congratulations about their team’s athletic victory or an individual accomplishment.What is written in the letter matters far less than what the letter communicates.Watching students’ reactions to receiving an envelope with their name on it at the beginning of class is a great joy. They discreetly open the note and furtively take in its contents, unsure what they have received or why. Even more joyful is seeing how students respond in the days and weeks that follow. Some explicitly offer thanks for being written to, saying that it means a lot. Others change their posture in the classroom, becoming more attentive and more joyful at being greeted at the beginning of class. And it has been enough for some to take additional courses with me or with colleagues in my department, a select few students taking on our department’s minor or major.At the end of the day, a simple handwritten note, which takes me or Miss Binney approximately two minutes to compose, communicates to a student that they are seen, known, and cared for. One of my colleagues once memorably said, “These students just want to know that their professors give a shit about them.” Giving a shit is a pretty low bar, but it sure goes a long way.

At the end of semesters, I often share a joke with my colleagues: “I love teaching – except for the grading!” There’s a truth hidden in that humor. Grading involves a host of emotions: joy, frustration, pride, disappointment, even confusion. Then, once we’ve finally completed the grading marathon, another emotional rollercoaster begins: student evaluations of teaching (SET).The Emotional Weight of Student FeedbackPlease don’t misunderstand. I genuinely appreciate constructive feedback from students. Their insights reveal my blind spots, push me to be more creative, and encourage me to grow. However, there are also times when I’m unsure how to engage with critical remarks, which can sting and leave me feeling disheartened. In these moments, I worry that my passion for teaching might be overshadowed by hurt or frustration.You’re Not AloneDo we, as faculty, have a safe space to process our emotional responses to student evaluations? How do we take care of ourselves – and each other – when we feel vulnerable? How do we hold on to our calling and commitment to our students during these tense times?During my days as an adjunct faculty member teaching at multiple institutions the anxiety over student evaluations often kept me awake at night. A string of negative comments could threaten my already precarious job situation and some remarks carried undertones of bias regarding my accent or background. I often wondered, “Will these comments jeopardize my chances of being hired again?” and I even tried to guess who might have written them. It was tough not to take things personally.Later on, as an early-career professor, I spent countless hours designing courses, clarifying assignments, and perfecting deadlines. So when a student mentioned that my instructions were confusing, I felt deeply frustrated. I asked myself, “Where is this coming from? Did I overlook something in my teaching?” I ended up spending even more time reflecting, revising my approach, and working hard to address any real gaps in my pedagogy.Finding Balance Amid CriticismSometimes I notice only the critical comments, letting them overshadow the many notes of affirmation and thanks. Other times I skim over the praises too quickly, missing opportunities to celebrate successes and build upon effective practices.If you’ve ever felt torn about how to use student feedback constructively – without losing heart – please know you’re not alone. Feeling this tension can actually be a sign of how deeply you care about your vocation and your students. Many of us go through these emotional swings but remain silent for fear of appearing unprofessional or overly sensitive.Seeking Support and Sharing StoriesAt this moment, I hope you seek trusted colleagues, mentors, or friends to debrief painful comments and interpret them with empathy and deep care. Allow yourself to feel the disappointment without dismissing it. Processing these responses can bring perspective and prevent lingering resentment or burnout.Engaging with feedback can be an opportunity to refine lesson plans, improve communication, or sharpen pedagogical skills. It’s not easy work! But sharing our stories and learning from one another is one way we can practice self-care as educators. We stand in solidarity with each other, striving to grow and thrive in our teaching.I remember a conversation with a first-generation Korean scholar with over thirty years of teaching experience. She confessed that she still faces hurtful biases in student evaluations. After honest reflection, her final piece of advice was: “Sometimes, you just have to delete it and let it go.” We both recognized we had already processed and learned from the feedback. Knowing when to let go continues to be a meaningful form of self-care.Moving ForwardDear colleague, when you next receive that email with student evaluations, take a moment. Recall your passion for teaching, your calling, and your commitment to growth – both your own and that of your students. Let all those emotions guide you toward reflection and learning. And remember, once the feedback has served its purpose, it’s okay to let it go (yes, you can delete it!).

We are teaching through a polycrisis – a situation in which the problems we and our students are facing in the world are complex and interpenetrating, increasing the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of our lives in the world.Many of our students went to high school or college, raised children, or cared for dying parents through the thick of the COVID pandemic. Now these students are moving through our classrooms during the most socially and politically disruptive era many of them have ever lived through.Add to this the wildfires and flooding and hurricanes that have increased in frequency and intensity due to anthropogenic climate change. Add to this persistent attacks on structures of care for trans people and their erasure from public spaces. Add to this ICE raids in all our communities, deporting the family, friends, and neighbors of our students and colleagues (or our students and colleagues themselves). Add to this…everything else.The reason these realities land so heavily on educational institutions is not just due to the targeting of schools, professors, DEI, and curriculum by the current administration. It is also because our institutions are one of the scant few intact-yet-precarious structures of community and support some of our students have in their lives.Not only has the individualism of our society gradually eroded collective structures we need in times of crisis – those which help us to hold our grief, our uncertainty, and our fear within caring community – but our current US political regime is also engaging in a process of “organized abandonment” that is systematically stripping away the supportive structures that our students and their communities depend on.We will increasingly see collective trauma showing up in our classrooms and on our campuses. Trauma is the bodymind’s response to events and not the events themselves, so personal experiences will vary along a stress-trauma continuum. Be aware of how differently students may be experiencing this moment depending upon whether they are LGBTQIA+ or BIPOC or immigrants.Polycrisis experiences like we’re facing become traumatic when there are not adequate support structures within which to hold our experiences of grief, fear, anger, and uncertainty. Adequate supportive relationships mitigate the effects of a crisis from becoming traumatic, though they’ll continue to be very stressful.Dissociation and inaction can be defense mechanisms against the overwhelm of collective trauma. We may feel this. Our students may exhibit this. We need to subvert this collectively through our actions as professors and administrators to meet this moment with robust forms of care for our campuses and the communities our students belong to.Anger and reactivity can become attempts to restore a fracturing status quo. We shouldn’t be surprised at the anger. It’s a signal about what’s going on in student’s lives. Your institution may be the only relatively safe place for a student to even direct their anger, misplaced though it may be at times. Take anger seriously and treat it with care. Remember: you can’t argue people out of a trauma response. We need to be mindful of the ways that focus is going to be fractured for many of our students in the coming months.(Oh yeah... ours likely will be, too!) Students may fear falling behind, so some supportive and encouraging messages addressing this may be helpful from time to time. Additionally, faculty productivity may fall behind as more of our time is directed to supporting students in ways we may not normally have needed to in the past.A few things are key to our response in meeting the moment’s critical needs: Trust takes time and relationship to build and many of our institutions are starting behind in this regard with many students for a wide variety of reasons. Whatever we can do to cultivate trust and build relationship will be critical. Time for open processing of student experiences of this this era will be vital. Subjugating these painful and fearful experiences into silence will mean they’ll be processed in much less helpful ways that will ultimately create more disruption to students’ education and formation.Our expressions of leadership need to exhibit consistency and congruence, both critical in crises and amid pervasive uncertainty. We don’t need to have all the answers, but we need to listen carefully and take all the pertinent questions seriously.How we engage in this moment as educators is teaching students something, and we need to be sure it’s teaching what we really hope for them to learn when they’re leading communities in the larger world.

Teaching. Is there a greater thing to fear? For those of us in religious education, the “straw epistle” tells us that the teacher will be judged more strictly (James 3:1). These words on strict judgment are a source of meta praxis reflection for me. Irene Orr defines meta praxis as: “the potential for human flourishing through an awareness of practice and the value of making craft as an explicit knowledge pathway. Within and beyond the practice, this pathway has the potential to put us in touch with the essential vitality of life and its human value.”[i]Below, I focus on my meta praxis with the idea that the craft of teaching requires courage. This courage reflects on the essential vitality of life and its human value. Furthermore, it requires us to make a serious connection between what we study and how we live it out. In Spanish we say, “Del dicho al hecho hay mucho trecho” which means something like “From saying it to doing it there’s a big stretch.” It is similar to saying, “It is easier said than done.”Teaching is a task that is undervalued in our cultural milieu – and especially in fundamentalist circles it is seen with suspicion. I live and work in fundamentalist circles in the Southeastern US. Fundamentalism loves the end-time prophets, the soothsayers, and the showmen. In the classroom, it prefers indoctrination and rote recall. For example, it took a solar eclipse in 2024 to generate speculation about eschatological events and a lot of misinformation pouring into the livelihoods of people of faith. True education involves so much more than fear mongering. It engages people where they live. Otherwise, there can be no authentic reflection or flourishing.In my experience, writing about teaching requires us to have the courage to be human. For example, in my classes I have experienced that it is important to build and establish a rapport with students. In building a rapport, the teacher must engage the students right where they are at, wherever they come from, and with the baggage (for better or for worse) of their religious background. It is here that being human involves a level of relatability. Griffiths states that being relatable can help to create an appetite for learning.[ii] As a person with a PhD, I am an expert on the content. I have studied it and know that the material I teach is potentially life-changing. The difficulty arises because as a teacher I engage the learner at the mundane level of everyday reality. The journey towards the deeper layers of cognition and the underlying base epistemology is quite daunting, particularly when my students are not asking the questions I want to answer. Furthermore, the age of disinformation complicates my work.[iii] I have had several students who have no formal theological training in my classroom. They are usually content to compartmentalize the grammars of theology from their lived reality. Quite simply, some students just want to know how to make their church grow numerically, how to increase donations, and about the latest eschatological theological fads. It is taxing to engage them in the everyday visceral reality with the deeper theological grammars that powerfully shape and mold human beings.I have found that an effective way of demonstrating humanity is by incarnating my deepest values in the classroom. Much of what I teach about is modeled in the classroom. The values that I hold dear are more often “caught” than they are taught.[iv] For me, it has become imperative to establish some sort of relational connection with my students. As a teacher, I find myself carefully observing the world around my students. I become a student of my students. It is similar work to that of ethnographers when they enter a group and establish a rapport for their task of observation. I have heard many of my peers criticize this by saying that our students don’t need their hands held, but when looking at different academic studies about the classroom, the most common denominator in retention success is a human connection.[v]And when one considers that the number of students specializing in religion is actually decreasing, this becomes even more important. Ultimately, it is a battle for the affections of our students, whether they are undergraduate or graduate students. I recognize that this affective work cannot be readily quantified as the affections are an elusive but very real element of our humanity.Having courage means that I must create a hospitable environment – even with the fundamentalists. I have found that teaching works best when I create a hospitable environment, even when we vehemently disagree. However, students desire a “relationship-rich” experience in their journey through higher education.[vi] It requires courage because quite honestly, my time is filled with faculty meetings, committee meetings, personal research, writing, and the search for creativity – the temptation is to let contact with my students slide and limit my communication with them to terse sentences via email (if I respond at all). This press for time means that my contact with students must be intentional and meaningful. The teacher must have the courage, even in asynchronous online interactions, to establish quality contact with students.I am convinced that being courageous yields positive results. It ultimately means that my voice, a Honduran-American mestizo voice, is at the very least respected because I have shown hospitality when many students merely think of me as just “the Hispanic professor.” This hospitality transforms me from a stranger (read: a “Bad Hombre”) into being able to engage my students, even with the insertion of a dissonance of perspective. It is this relationship with them that allows me to introduce them to a new thought or a different pattern of living (meta praxis) that can alter someone’s life journey. My mere presence has a new sense of authority that can possibly create enough ripples at the edges of life experiences so that I might alter the web or system of beliefs.[vii] I engage the teaching discipline to discover ways to alter webs and engage my students as I further embody concepts and the dense stuff in the clouds and give it traction in their daily lived experiences. We agree, disagree, and yet ultimately strive for synthesized solutions on our journey together. Notes & Bibliography[i] Irene Orr, “Meta Praxis: Craft Praxis: A Way of Being,” (Doctoral Thesis, University of Dundee, 2020).[ii] Paul J. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 2, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=b3a0cf3c-9a8b-3131-b54f-14e766e41a5e.[iii] W. Lance Bennett, The Disinformation Age (Cambridge University Press, 2020),https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914628.[iv] For an example see Ronald Allen, “Is Preaching Taught or Caught: How Practitioners Learn,” Theological Education 41, no. 1 (2005): 137-152, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=5e35cd3a-845e-389c-bddd-d72efdd95eb0.[v] Rebecca A. Glazier, Connecting in the Online Classroom : Building Rapport Between Teachers and Students, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=b7ecbdd5-70bf-3ed1-9f85-342d7e4829bd.[vi] Glazier, Connecting.[vii] Brett Topey, “Quinean Holism, Analyticity, and Diachronic Rational Norms,” Synthese 195, no. 7 (July 2018): 3143-3171; 3144, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26750351.