is, I’m assuming, a newly-coined (passive voice alert — subtly tooting my own cliche) fear: fear of blackboards. Rather, fear of cleaning blackboards. The joys of Iraq never cease.
Imagine having a serious discussion over who would eventually wipe clean the blackboard?
I’ve been thinking about the idea of the soul lately, and I keep coming back to one question: what is the soul? Christian theology teaches us that the soul is the “real” us, the software, and that our bodies are just “temporary dwelling places” – the hardware. The “real” me is not something physical, but something spiritual.
But what is it? Where can we hang the soul in the body? The soul is synonymous with consciousness in many ways, but consciousness and all it entails (memories, emotions, personality, etc.) is merely a load of very complex chemical reactions going on in our brains. Brain imaging is mapping more and more of what we traditionally associated with the soul and showing these things are just that – physical things.
Furthermore, if the real “I” is a soul, how can things that seem to be so basic to the real “I” (personality, sense of humor, emotions, etc.) be affected by physical things? When someone gets drunk, their personality usually alters a bit; when one takes an anti-depressant, it changes an emotion; and of course, there are plenty of other examples. If the real “I” is a soul, then how does this happen?
A related question would be when the soul enters the body. Catholicism says it’s at the moment of conception. Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate, writes,
Sometimes several sperm penetrate the outer membrane of the egg, and it takes time for the egg to eject the extra chromosomes. Where is the soul during this interval? Even when a single sperm enters, its genes remain separate from those of the egg for a day or more, and it takes yet another day or so for the newly merged genome to control the cell. So the “moment” of conception is in fact a span of twenty-four to forty-eight hours (225).
And what about fertilized eggs that split and become twins? When does that extra soul enter into the picture? And what of the phenomenon when two fertilized eggs merge into one embryo which, as Pinker writes, “develops into a person who is a genetic chimera: some of her cells have one genome, others have another genome.”
I posed this question on Catholic.com’s discussion forums, but I didn’t get any satisfactory responses.
One individual responded quoting F. J. Sheed’s Theology for Beginners:
Our ideas are not material. They have no resemblance to our body. Their resemblance is to our spirit. They have no shape, no size, no color, no weight, no space. Neither has spirit, whose offspring they are. But no one can call it nothing, for it produces thought, and thought is the most powerful thing in the world—unless love is, which spirit also produces.
The soul is like an idea – you can’t measure the color or size of an idea, so the argument goes, and so it’s immaterial. Not quite.
What is an idea if it’s not remembered, recorded somehow? If I have the idea, it’s recorded in my brain in a sequence of proteins and such; if I write it down, it’s recorded on paper; if I tell another person, it’s protein sequences in her brain. But it always depends on something physical. An idea must have a physical medium to survive, else it ceases to exist in a practical way.
This is the same analogy Chuck Missler uses when he talks about humans, hardware, and software. He asks, “How much does a piece of software weight?” He points out that you can load a floppy disk or CD with data, weigh it, and it still has the same weight as it did empty. This is intended to prove the non-material nature of software, which of course is the soul in humans, according to this analogy. But it suffers from the same problem as the “color of an idea” analogy. Software also depends on something physical – a magnetized plate of metal called a hard drive; radio waves as its transmitted from a wireless modem; the scrap of a napkin on which the programmer scribbled a particular algorithm.
And so this is indeed not a proper analogy for the soul, for the soul is not supposed to be dependent on anything physical. Ideas and software are dependent on their storage mechanisms. The soul isn’t supposed to have a storage mechanism.
Blinded by science? Most likely not — probably just not interested in questioning a taken-for-granted belief.
English has twelve tenses; Polish has three. It’s a nightmare for beginning students to keep all that straight. We spend a lot of time drilling, doing “boring” written work, etc. but from time to time, I’m able to think of something completely original and — dare I think — even entertaining.
It happened one evening that I was planning lessons, thinking, “I need a good, fun lesson for present continuous,” and wondering what I would come up with. (Present continuous, for those of you who don’t know, is, for example, “I’m reading a book at the moment.”) I put some music on, sat down, and began planning.
Gradually, I found my attention drawn to the music I’d begun planning, and I sat there, jaw open, as I listened to the perfect present continous lesson (not to be confused with the not-so-perfect present perfect continuous lesson) — Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.” It had everything going for it: the whole thing is in present continuous; it’s very popular in Poland, especially the DNA mix; the vocabulary is relatively simple.
In the intervening years, it’s become one of my most successful lessons.
It goes like this:
This was the most recent “performance” of the video. The day we were preparing the skits, several people were absent, who were then not absent when we were to perform it. What to do with them? Simple — they were a doo-wap chorus, and they even danced.
Most of the time, it’s very rewarding being a teacher. Sometimes, it’s simply fun, as well.
Yesterday at school there was an unexpected “surprise” — a concert. Zamfir came, and brought his whole music-lite ensemble: a keyboard player. They began with a few classical-esque selections, but once the keyboard player got the programmed drum beats and bass going, there was no stopping them.
Many of the students were having trouble sitting still to such stirring music and would half leapt into the aisle to go Polka mad but for the fact that everyone was crammed like “herrings in a jar.” So they just tapped there feet and smiled merrily.
Some, moved by the music’s depth and power, sat in awe — I think I saw a tear or two trickle.
A couple of students whispered to me, “This is great, sir, but I sure wish we were back in class!”
Of course, ninety percent of this is made up. Ninety-nine, more like it. There was no Zamfir, no Polka sparkle in the eyes, no longing to go back to lessons. There was a concert, and it did include a young man of about twenty-five playing the pan flute while a woman accompanied. And the music was as artificial as you have probably been imagining.
I’m all for broadening students’ cultural awareness, but not in this way. Introducing them to such music as a way to get them interested in styles of music other than techno or metal (the two dominant preferences among my students) is doomed from the start, mainly because the students agreed to go (each class had the option of going or not, but they had to go as an entire class) in order to get out of lessons. Of course, I would have done the same thing at their age. Also, just giving a concert is not going to engage a sixteen-year-old male in any meaningful way if it’s the music he’s not used to, and he wrinkles his nose on first hearing it. Better to have a shorter concert, interspersed with explanations of the songs — their history, the period they come from, etc. — followed by perhaps short discussion afterward of the music. “Yes, that particular song did have a bird song quality to the melody. It’s because…” And for Mahler’s sake, don’t let it be simply a way to get out of class. That accomplishes nothing.
I try to introduce my students to various types of music throughout the year. One lesson I like to do toward the end of the year involves at least five different songs. It’s for intermediate students, and I simply have them do some free-writing (that’s where you just write uncritically what comes to mind — like most blogs, I would imagine) while I put on various songs. “Imagine you’re at the cinema,” I tell them, “and as the movie begins, this is the song you hear. What’s the movie about? What do you see happening?” And then I put on an incredibly eclectic mix: Ben Folds Five, Mozart’s requiem, Albert King, Ella Fitzgerald, and Johnny Cash come to mind as I recall past lessons.
The reaction is generally bad.
But at least once I held them in rapt attention. While doing some quite writing work (not related to the lesson described above), I put on Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising and told them that much of this album was connected to 9/11. Students who were usually squirmy sat and wrote quietly, while others just listened to the music, hands on folded arms, eyes wide open, utterly still.
I’m still at a loss, though, as to how effectively to broaden students’ musical awareness.