[lit-ideas] Re: Here it is again: Covenant, stool chucking, potlatch etc.

Sometimes you prepare for classes and have only limited success; sometimes you have an idea and get lucky. Yesterday, after my usual reflection on how to move forward a very diverse group of thesis students, it occurred to me that they might be asked to contribute paragraphs to someone else's thesis, the reasoning being that it's sometimes easier to shape what you don't know all that well. So we tried it. Each student was asked to explain how his or her research has developed over the past week. We (I asked if they wanted me to watch or to join in the exercise; they asked me to join in) listened and took notes. We then wrote the quickest paragraph we could, the instructions being either to imagine a paragraph that might fit somewhere or to contribute a paragraph that could be helpful in some way.
The student then chose the order of readers and we read, submitting the scribbled page to that person at the end of the readings. I had hoped that the paragraphs might produce a useful phrase or two, or an ordering principle. In fact each was really good in its own way, the result of careful listening and very generous attention to the task. Everyone left the session with loud chat about how useful the exercise had been, and in two cases there were tears of gratitude.
I see that I haven't managed to convey why the exercise was successful. As in all things to do with teaching, a lot has to do with timing. This was a week when they were beginning to panic, beginning to feel that they weren't making sufficient progress to keep up with deadlines, having doubts about the whole enterprise. Which is to say that it was a very good week to have a writing potlatch.
One other teaching discovery. One of the dullest moments in a class is that time when you need a student to take over, either to answer a question or to read a response or to take the discussion in a new direction. Until now I've used three methods, picking someone at random, calling for volunteers, circling around the room. All three methods have strengths and drawbacks. Now I have a new one, imagined from a memory of Bill Nye the Science Guy, who was on PBS. Bill Nye would take some humble object and give it a "fancy" amusing name, "Here we have the 'slightly used tennis ball of Science,' which represents the sun..." So now I use the "magic spinning pen of destiny" or whatever term occurs to me, replicating the spinning device on board games or, I suppose, spin the bottle. There's no kissing or daring allowed.
Yesterday evening I previewed a video I'd ordered. The subject is the Covenant. I ordered the video because I can never seem to get the events straight in my head and I have trouble taking them seriously. The Covenant is filed in my mind under, "bunch of people dying because they didn't want bishops or the book of common prayer." Alas, the video doesn't help. As before, the tale starts out well. Some Scots rejected Catholicism and thought John Knox the bee's knees. Charles I, worried about secular authority, tries to impose absolutism and runs into religious fervor, with whats-her- name, Jenny Geddes, chucking her stool at the minister in St. Giles' Church. So far, quite straightforward. The Covenantors pick the side you'd think they'd pick in the Civil War--Cromwell's--but later side with Charles II, who instantly betrays all his promises and, in spite of having signed the covenant, sends the militia after anyone who worships God outside. Hangings, burnings and slaughter--not all one-sided--follow.
The video implies that today's Presbyterians are true descendants of the covenantors. I've always thought that they sound more like inhabitants of Salem or revivalists. The video begins, and presumably ends (I didn't finish it last night), with a present day group of covenantors, or folk who want to cherish their memory, gathered on a moor, singing hymns. They look harmless, but I know that if I were an absolute monarch (and how easy is that to imagine) I'd be worried. 

David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
BTW What Jenny Geddes is alleged to have shouted as she chucked either a cuttie-stool or a creepie stool was, "Deil colic the wame o’ ye, fause thief; daur ye say Mass in my lug?" which, as you know, means, "Devil cause you severe pain and flatulent distention of your abdomen, false thief: dare you say the Mass in my ear?"

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