It's time to face the book

Some thoughts on Facebook...

In years to come, will my generation have Facebook reunions, when we'll get together with all the other Facebook Alumni and remember about the good old days when we "poked" each other and sent each other goldfish?

If we do ever have reunions, where will they be? Online, or in some actual physical space somewhere?

When we're elderly and retired, will we have online communities instead of Probus, Rotary and Lions?

When people put full-length avatars of themselves in bikinis, do they ever think that complete strangers might be seeing them? Do they want complete strangers seeing them?

Are they really photos of them in bikinis?

Maybe I should have a picture of someone in a bikini as my avatar and see if anyone notices.

When I request Plato Son of Ariston as my friend, who is administrating his account?

Is Plato Son of Ariston also administering an account for Socrates, when he carries out both sides of an online dialogue?

Are the conversations on Plato's wall ideals, or just shadows?

Just some important issues that Facebook brings up. We need to be engaging thoughtfully with the culture, after all.

Northside Reading

It's true, I'm going mildly nuts with this whole blogging thing. Having two blogs of my own and a student blog that I administrate just isn't enough for me. Until I've got as many blogs as Mike Patton has "side projects", I won't be satisfied.

This latest venture isn't a blog as such - it's just that I couldn't figure out quite how to set it up unless I gave it a domain of it's own. This is an extension of the "Northside Reading" segment of Ideas From the North, where I'll (hopefully) take the time to comment in a bit more detail on the variety of books I'm reading at any given time.

There aren't any posts about specific books just yet, but I'll get there. Click on the name in this post or follow the link in my blogroll to check it out.

2 sir W lov

Well, my fascination with the blogosphere has now taken me into brave new territory - the world of educational blogging.

Not that that's so new for me. I do, after all, have my own personal, rarely updated educational blog. But now I'm experimenting in a blog that my students, and other students at the same year level, can use. The theory behind it as that the web has a magical power over our students, that some who are completely unwilling to talk in class will happily talk online for hours. Is this something we can harness for educational effect? Quite probably. Is it easy to do? Yes and no.

Setting up the blog itself was a breeze. It took a mere five minutes on learnerblogs.org to set myself up with a username, password and blog. Getting the site functioning as something more than a personal vanity project was a bit trickier. Initially I planned on making it something that all students had to register for, to avoid any unwanted e-traffic. (Which is, I regret to say, why I'm not going to put a link to it from here, because, while I theoretically trust you all, I don't know who most of you are, and am not sure that I want you hanging around my students.) However, given how few people actually have the site's URL, I doubt it will get out of hand. If it does...well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Ultimately, it was too much of a hassle to register other teachers, let alone students, so in the end I gave up. This shouldn't be a problem, unless we start getting e-stalked by someone particularly unsavoury, but the main shortcoming is that students can't write posts. They can only respond to the posts that we've written.

Neverthless, as far as student-centred learning goes, the site's doing pretty well now. Students are chatting enthusiastically about Arthur Miller's "The Crucible", using punctuation and grammar that would make Miller cringe, but they would have done that in their essays anyway.

The one dampener has been the handful of students that have just HAD to be immature about it - the kind, of course, who would have been immature about most things we did, but it's still a nuisance, particularly when their immaturity is now theoretically open for the world to see. It's also just a bit sad when some of the students who this was most designed for - kids who are into computers but not brilliant at English - treat it as a joke or a waste of time. And, of course, there's the kids who haven't even got a copy of "The Crucible" yet, and no amount of technology is going to help them write intelligent comments on a book they haven't read. It's a sad reminder that, no matter how much effort we put into being engaging, there's still a need for students to try being engaged.

But on the whole, it's been a roaring success, at least for its first two days of active existence. Certainly the number of intelligent and useful comments being made far outweigh the idiocy of some other comments, and, at the end of the day, I'm the site administrator, and can block any comment that I deem inappropriate. On the plus side, students from different classes are communicating readily with each other, and with a range of different teachers - a real community of learning.

Pity some kids still have to be idiots, but you can't succeed with everyone. Technology's not the all-purposes answer, but it's certainly helping.

Revival in Moreland?

Well, it's been a while since I've blogged on my search for a church community. That doesn't mean that the search has been on hold - quite the opposite. I guess I've just been a bit reluctant to blog about my thoughts partly because I haven't wanted to sound critical of some churches that may be functioning perfectly well but just aren't quite what I'm looking for. Then there have been other churches that I do feel quite critical about but don't feel that this is the forum for expressing that...

Nevertheless, here I am once again talking about it, and, PTL, I have good news to relate. I've now found a church - I think...While I'm very excited about it all, and confident that it's where I'm supposed to be, it's all quite new and I don't exactly want to speak too soon. That said, I went there today for the third time in a row, and am still happy there. A good sign, I suspect. It's a small evangelical Anglican church in Moreland - not Darebin, but it's only five minutes' drive from my place, and my end of Darebin is practically Moreland anyway (see the attached photograph that I took while going for a stroll near my place - the sign says "Moreland City Council: Diverse Community", if you can't make it out).

Now, when I started the whole church-hunting process, I wasn't exactly sure what I was looking for. One of my housemates suggested, some months ago, that I might want to write out a list of essentials, which I thought was a wonderful idea, but didn't have a clear enough concept in my head of what was and wasn't essential. I suppose what brought me to this position was a fairly naive, faith-driven notion that the church in the inner north was struggling a bit and that, now that I was living in the area, it would be good for me to get involved there, rather than commuting to the east each Sunday. I suppose I also had an idea about localised community, something lacking a lot in Melbourne, and wanted to be part of a geographical church community for the first time since I left home.

Having now found the kind of church I want to be a part of, I've also been able to figure out what my criteria were. And they aren't surprising, but I suspect I needed to go through the last eight to seven months to figure them out anyway. I won't list them here, because they're probably not that interesting to anyone not me, but what's really struck me, and surprised me, has been a growing need for clear orthodoxy.

I say this is surprising because, while I've grown up in the evangelical church, and have been a low-church evangelical Anglican for the past four or so years, I always felt a bit liberal around most evangelicals, but then quite fundamentalist around liberals. I'm still not crazy about categories, but I have to say that, from my travels to different churches in the area, I'm not blown away by how successful the more "fresh expressions of faith" are proving to be. Not because there's anything wrong with being fresh - quite the contrary - but because they are seemingly too caught up in being fresh that they aren't spending enough time going to the "ancient paths" to be reminded of what the foundation of our faith is. Now I'm not talking about liturgy or church tradition here so much as an understanding of the common basis of faith that can unite today's believers with the church as it was at all different stages throughout history. Because, as a member of the Acts 29 Network suggested in one talk, you can engage with culture all you like, but you also need a foundation in faith and doctrine, otherwise you're just "engaging with culture", but what are you engaging them with?

There are a lot of questions abounding about what constitutes orthodoxy. Currently I'm living in an area where the "Orthodox" church is quite prominent, and that's a whole different matter. For evangelicals, orthodoxy often centres around certain recurring debates. Some would say you are not orthodox if you believe in the ordination of women, or if you support gay marriage, or don't believe in predestination, or agree with all the parts of Calvin's TULIP. Now I've deliberately used a mixture of issues where I do hold the mainstream line, issues where I diverge, and issues where I don't know what I think. I'm not sure how essential these issues are to our faith, mostly because I believe that, if we get the fundamentals right, a lot of other things will follow. If we have a healthy, growing relationship with Christ, all manner of sin and heresy will be brought to our attention by the convicting power of the Holy Spirit. And if the Holy Spirit isn't convicting us all that often? Well, male or female, gay or heterosexual, whatever our individual struggles are, if we're never being convicted of sin in our lives, we either don't have the Holy Spirit, or aren't listening.

Here's my suggestion for what should constitute orthodoxy:
That we believe Jesus Christ was God in human flesh, and that He was without sin, but died a sinner's death so that we could be reconciled to God, if we put our trust in Him.

It's possibly not quite that simple. It often isn't. But I've been to some churches lately where that basic belief has not been mentioned once. Should it be mentioned every service? It probably wouldn't do any harm, and it would certainly help keep things on track. The Anglican liturgy offers a mixture of creeds and prayers that cover the essentials every week, whatever the sermon topic. That's probably why, at this stage of my life, I'm most happy to call myself an Anglican. First and foremost, I'm a Christian, but right now, as I search for different ways to minister to the world around me, some involving "fresh expressions of faith", I'm also being reminded of how essential it is that we keep coming back to the essentials, because, without them, what are we standing for?

Or, to put it another way, without getting our foundations right, what are we standing on?

Like a horse and a carriage

When I was at University, I was told that any movie or book that "reinforces family values" is fundamentally conservative - and, of course, in an Arts degree at the University of Melbourne, "conservative" was well and truly a pejorative term. At the time, it just annoyed me that family values were immediately equated with Conservatism, meaning that anyone who adhered to them might as well just join the Liberal party and start supporting the war in Iraq. Those kinds of terms - conservative vs. progressive - like Left and Right, are unnecessarily reductive, and I was becoming aware of that at the time.

Since finishing my Arts degree, though, I've been struck more than before with how progressive "family values" can sometimes be in this day and age. Now, this may sound a little unusual, but just bear with me and I'll explain where I'm coming from.

Last week a colleague of mine lent me her copy of the BBC's recent modernisation of "The Taming of the Shrew", starring the above-pictured Shirley Henderson and Rufus Sewell. I wasn't exactly sure what to make of it at first when I watched it this afternoon. The gender roles seemed to leave a little to be desired, and Shirley Henderson, funny as she was, did seem just that little, teensy bit over the top, as she sometimes does.

What amazed me, and won me over, though, was the ending, in which Katherine and her new husband are talking to Bianca (Katherine's sister) about the "perfectly sensible" prenuptial agreement that she has asked her 19-year-old Italian toy-boy fiance to sign, on their wedding day. Toy-boy is none too pleased by the prenup, and Bianca can't understand why. We live, she and her mother argue, in an "age of divorce". A pre-nup doesn't mean you're assuming things will go wrong; you're just prepared for the possibility. Knowing how "shrewish" Katherine has been in the past, Bianca calls on her support, and is quite horrified by how Katherine responds. Instead of supporting Bianca, Katherine tells her that her husband should be her lord, and that she should either submit to him completely, placing her hands under his feet, or not marry him at all. Bianca, appalled, asks Katherine if she is willing to "place her hands under her husband's feet". Katherine's reply is the emotional climax of the movie - she would, she says, if he asked her to, but he feels as much respect for her as she feels for him, so he would never require her to do that.

This adaptation never shows what happens to Bianca, nor should it. Perhaps it wants the viewer to make a decision along with Bianca, and it's a decision that, I must admit, I feel like most people should put a bit more thought into they usually do. Why bother vowing to spend your lives together, if you're also preparing for the possibility that that life-long commitment may only last a few years, or, if you're Britney Spears, hours? It's life-long commitment - and total commitment at that - or none at all.

Some of my University lecturers would call this adaptation "conservative", but it's nothing of the sort. In a day and age when divorce and selfishness are the status quo, anything which argues radically against that has got to be progressive, or the terms mean nothing any more. And it's not as if standard gender roles are being reinforced by this adaptation either. The couple remain assertive, unique people. (As well as this, Rufus Sewell's Petruchio has a particular quirk that I'll keep a secret to avoid spoiling it, but it's hard to call the film conservative once you find out what it is.) Perhaps Katherine's arguments about lordship are a little extreme for some tastes - but sometimes extremity is needed to make people think. Marriage is an absolute commitment. That means submission - from both sides. And, much to my (pleasant) surprise, this adaptation of "The Taming of the Shrew" showed mutual submission in quite an admirably progressive light. It really wasn't just the "shrew" who was tamed, because marriage only works when both are willing to sacrifice - to be "tamed", if you will. You leave Katherine and Petruchio at the end confident that their marriage will be one of give and take. And you only want Bianca to marry if you can say the same for hers.

John, I'm only dancing

Not wanting to add to material already covered more than satisfactorily in Dave's post on "guys who don't dance", I have to say I've been forced to think a bit lately about the politics of dancing in public. I've also been forced to recognise that the majority of the people that I work with are very immature. When you remember that I'm a high school teacher, and that I work in a school of 1,400 teenagers, it shouldn't sound surprising, but it is from time to time. Just bear with me and I'll tell you why.

At the request of some of my Year 11 students, on Saturday night I went along to my school's Debutante Ball, a thoroughly anachronistic institution that, amazingly, many teenagers, both male and female, are still quite attached to. I guess it's an opportunity to dress up and get trashed at the expense of parents and school - or maybe there's more to it that I just don't get. Anyway, it seemed important to some of my students that I go to support them, so I was the dutiful teacher, paid my $55 and went along to the Melrose Ballroom in Tullamarine for what my mother would call "an interesting cultural experience".

Now, there was a lot of sitting down, talking, and watching countless teenage girls walk across the dancefloor with their partners and curtsey before the official party. There was also a reasonable amount of dancing. At a few points I contented myself to sit and talk, rather than dance, but when some of the women from work asked me to come out onto the dancefloor, I didn't want to be an uptight pain and say that "no, I didn't dance", which would be a lie - I do, but I did feel uncomfortable at the thought of dancing in front of students, because, when you work with teenagers, you never know what will win you more respect and what will just provide them with scope to laugh at you. Anyway, I decided not to be self-conscious and got out onto that classy Western suburbs dancefloor - and found myself being the token young man dancing with a bunch of (lovely) middle-aged women. Nothing wrong with any of them - they were all very nice. But it was amazing to realise just how much my status as a teacher influenced where I danced, how my dancing was received, etc. Despite being far closer in age to the students than I was to any of these colleagues and spouses of colleagues, I was clearly designated as one of the slightly daggy old people. A bit unsettling, but not an issue for me unless it was an issue for others.

But then you see the looks that some of the students give when they see Sir dancing, and, of course, you know that, to them, seeing you dance is like (to borrow an expression from "Mean Girls"), "seeing an animal walking on its hind legs". You are no longer just a young person dancing. You're a teacher dancing.

A Year 9 boy who I've taught in the past and coached for Debating charmingly told me at school today that "apparently there's a video circulating of you dancing". I refused to react, and showed no interest whatsoever in the situation, which I think was the appropriate response to have, but I went away feeling like somehow I'm no longer just a person. Not in the eyes of my students. Even the kids that like and respect me are a little amused to think that I might dance, or be in any way human. I mean, to give them further ammo today, I arrived at school having had a hair cut (gasp!). I got my fair share of compliments on the hair (it badly needed to be cut, so it was probably an improvement), but was also acutely aware at how much I'm being watched and surveyed. I guess it's just part of life as a teacher, but it's been quite an adjustment this year to realise how much I am on display all the time - and by people who, lovely as they often are, still sometimes delight in identifying faults in you, such as being a slightly dorky dancer. And then there's the ones who are vindictive and cruel. Every school has them. We have to put up with them watching us and laughing at us too, because for them it's about power. We have it, and they resent that.

It just reminds me of how counter-cultural a career teaching is. Normally in life, we go through the various stages of immaturity that everyone goes through in growing up, then, reaching maturity, we spend the rest of our lives (mostly, aside from kids) only with mature people. But in teaching, we willfully return to the often frustrating awkwardness of youth and live alongside it, tolerate it, bear with it every day. It's well worth doing, but also irritating at times. I wonder if it ever gets any less frustrating? As one group of students grows up, we always have a new bunch of Year 7s coming along to replace them. There's no cure for it - just continual patience, and a willingness never to take yourself too seriously.

I'm sure I'll learn. And I'll probably come to embrace how my dancing seems to them. I'd always rather that than be a teacher who doesn't dance.