New publications announced--and accepted in the English Department:

Prof. Bill Elgersma published an article in The English Record, a reflection on how reading and writing can be utilized with at-risk high school students as the hidden curriculum. “Sneaking in Reading and Writing” touches on several units from a class labeled "Lifeskills English," where a cross-disciplinary approach was utilized to develop reading and writing skills while the content of the class appeared to be completely unrelated to the students.

Prof. Leah Zuidema’s student, Theo Mobach, a senior biology, pre-med major from Edmonton, Alberta, created an “EMT Transition Guide” for emergency medical technicians, as an assignment in Zuidema’s Business and Technical Writing. The 31-page document trains new EMT volunteers and was presented to the local, Sioux Center squad. Mobach has been part of that organization for all of his years at Dordt. The project was so well received that it is presently being shown to EMT inspectors throughout the state as a model for local squads to imitate.

Adrianna Oudman, a junior from Wheatfield, OH, recently received word that an interview she did for Prof. James Schaap’s class has been accepted for publication in the Banner, the denominational magazine of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. In the interview, she talks with an unnamed subject about his experiences as an illegal immigrant to this country.

Dustin Biel, a senior from Lacombe, Alberta, also was contacted recently with the good news that an essay of his has been accepted for publication in the Christian Courier, an independent, cross‑Canada, Reformed‑in‑origin magazine. Dustin’s essay, a travel narrative highlighting his stay in Lebanon last year, was done as an assignment for Prof. Schaap’s writing class.

Waldo

Today, Emerson. Today, "Self-Reliance," for just about the fortieth time.

No matter. Still thrills my soul--or Oversoul, or whatever weird spiritual essence the dreamer Emerson had in his sights. I admit I'm powerless in the man's charms, even though I've been over and over and over that silly essay. I know it's crazy, just so much dreamy madness, the rantings of a parlor prophet who watched the heavens so fervently his feet only rarely touched the ground. I know it. But no matter.

Transcendentalism was among the goofiest excuses for a religion America ever birthed. Ian Frazier calls the Ghost Dance, a cultic phenomemon in Native America in the late 19th century "America's first religion," and skips thereby New England's hybrid Transcendentalism. But then, there were Europeans similarly convicted; the roots of Emerson's dreaming lay as much in Europe and the Far East as his own native soil. Even though it grew here, I suppose it wasn't born here.

In whatever soil it took root, Transcendentalism was a hazy hybrid that curled up and died in 1860, once this nation went to war. When blood flowed as deeply as did then, reality brought transcendentalism down like fire did the Hindenberg, and Emerson and his band of New Age groupies became little more than a chapter in a history book.

No matter. I love him, always have. "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." Those were marching orders way back when, during the late 60s, I first read Waldo. And they still thrill me, even though when I look back it's hard to conceive of a life's path that has been more conventionally institutional than my own. Mark me among those most rarest of evangelicals--I never left the church into which I was born.

No matter. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Still thrills me, even though, after years and years and years, I still call myself a Calvinist.

No matter. "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." Still thrills me, even though I've been on boards and committees more often that I care to count, even chaired 'em. I've been a conspirator myself, for heaven's sake.

No matter. "I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim." Still thrills me, even though I came to place where I teach close to two generations ago and, like a barnacle, never left.

No matter. "Nothing is at last sacred by the integrity of your own mind." Still thrills me, even it's as heretical as it is poppycock.

No matter. "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." Still thrills me, even though, methodically and even consciously, I just about always do the opposite.


Today, in class we have Ralph Waldo Emerson--flaming heretic, peddler of grandiose illusions, pie-in-the-sky romantic, dizzy dreamer, buzz-bomb idealist, founder of the uniquely American school of positive thinking, half-whacko, three-fifths genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.


Today, Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous essay, "Self-Reliance." Forty times over, I'm still thrilled.

Today I'm thankful for a heretic, a lovely dreamer named Waldo. I'm no disciple, but he still gives me goose bumps.

Revenge of the New Kids

When the New Kids on the Block emerged from the pop scene of the mid ’80s, I did what any self-respecting, early teen male did: revile them. Clearly, the five boys put together to create the first of the modern boy band sensations were a media construct designed to make teenage girls scream and swoon, pieced together out of psychological profiles to match the largest possible range of archetypal young males that would appeal to the largest range of young females. They were a formula, a Pavlovian reaction, a late Twentieth-century example of social Darwinism—and as such they were truly dangerous, subversive and Satanic. Filling young heads with vacuous lyrics on love and “the right stuff”—this was a recipe for world takeover by the megalomaniacs behind their construction, by the media moguls who used them as pawns to brainwash half the population.

Okay, so when I was 14 I didn’t say this in so many words—I mainly used adolescent slurs and questioned their sexuality. But I saw through the ruse that they represented—I did.

The alternative in the mid-80s, of course, was hair bands: Motley Crue, Poison, Bon Jovi, and Guns ‘n’ Roses, just to name a few, bands that wore make up and wigs and cut a path of decadence that coincided nicely with Reaganomics and the arms race. Not much of an alternative.

Fortunately for me, also in the 80s, my sister Heidi, a bit too old and too smart to be touched by the New Kids craze, came upon an Irish band called U2. Heidi and I made our home in U2 and the Australian INXS, thus staving off the total depravity of the late 80s. Then came an actual alternative: the grunge bands that emerged from Seattle to save the world: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Sound Garden, among others.

In high school I consumed a steady diet of these alternative bands and became an alternative snob: clearly, the integrity of these bands as they questioned capitalist excess and captured the teenage angst a la The Catcher in the Rye made them transcendent beacons for civilization. Of course, I hadn’t actually read The Catcher in the Rye or really knew what Reaganomics or capitalist excess really was, but no matter. I knew authenticity when I saw it: alternative bands were the model of it; the New Kids were the antithesis of it.

And so it is with great irony that I married a huge New Kids fan. And not just a New Kids fan, a Back Street Boys fan, an NSYNC fan, an all-around pop music fan. In fact, my wife is such a big NKOTB—that’s a current nickname for the group—fan that she not only went to their concert as a teenager, she went as an adult to their reunion tour! Yes, there on the fridge is the picture of my wife with the New Kids, standing next to the one she always liked, Jonathan Knight, the one she says I remind her of.

Lucky me.

But it doesn’t end there. Currently, my children’s—my boys’—favorite CD to listen to is, you guessed it, en-kot-buh’s (that’s the best I can do to phonetically pronounce the acronym NKOTB in an attempt at mockery) greatest hits album. My four year old break dances to it. Woe is me. I am undone.

If this feels like a cry for help, gentle reader, it’s not. It’s more of a confession.

No, I’m not starting to like their music. If anything, the dated simplicity of it shows how thin it really was. Musically, it really does rank right up there with the Toddler Tunes CD my kids used to listen to.

Rather, I’m confessing to a sort of amelioration. I’m confessing to being a snob, an elitist and trying to change that. Marrying a self-proclaimed pop queen has been the best thing for me. I depend on my wife to keep me current on these things as a matter of principle. I confess to letting her open up my world a bit, to stepping down from my high and mighty throne of superiority where I ruled with my scepter of authenticity. I even confess to being a Whitney Houston fan. Honestly, I am clearly aware that “The Greatest Love of All” is sheer narcissism but it can still bring me to tears.

I confess to not being bothered that my sons sing “The Right Stuff,” but now I’m wondering why it doesn’t bother me. And I’m not sure what to say. I don’t want to say that it’s because the music is meaningless and pointless because I don’t think it is, and I don’t want to say that it doesn’t matter that they really were a media construct because I think it does. I don’t want to say anti-intellectual acceptance has taken over because I don’t think that’s it either.

Perhaps I’m just tired of big-bad-wolfing it—of finding the big bad wolf in everything. Perhaps I’m not bothered because I want to accept the no-brain part of human existence. I want to accept the odd mystery that is female adolescent sexual development—words I very well may eat as my daughter hits the “tween” years.

On the other hand, I know that I admire my wife’s ability to maturely and determinedly remain a kid at heart. I also know I’ve learned how arrogant I was—okay, "can be" or "am" would be better verbs there. Perhaps, too, I believe in the larger structures of society a bit more than I did in the past, that family and community and education and faith lasts while the New Kids just age.

Who can explain human culture? Who can explain the phases we go through? The things we cling to get us through the turmoil of adolescence? The kind of culture we’re drawn to? I can’t. Rather, I’ll have a world where the fluffiness of pop rubs the edges off the angst of grunge. Isn’t this, among other things, why we marry--to get outside ourselves? And have kids—even kids that dance to the NKOTB?

Counting Beans

Her hair was thin, streaked with a bothersome auburn rather amateurishly rinsed in. She wore more makeup, I thought, than most other 50-year-old women I knew; her cheeks seemed glazed, her lipstick a bright, cardinal red against her shiny, dark skin.

She was Cuban, she told me, a refugee. She spoke with an accent, and she was unlike any other student in my college writing class. I was fifteen years her junior, and, like most of the rest of the students, I was lily white--in country of origin, like them, some flavor of European.

Writing teachers get to know students well because what we read from them comes from the insides of their minds and hearts and souls. I looked forward to reading the Cuban woman's papers because I wanted to learn what she could teach me.

When she wrote her personal narrative, I expected something as fascinating as she was. What I got was an account of the what she felt, years before, at the near-drowning of her daughter on a beach in Cuba--how breathlessly scared she was at the moment, how awful it might have been to lose that child.

I expected something exotic written by a middle-aged Cuban emigre, and what I got was the story of a mom. I expected the specific, but what I read was far, far more universal.

I like to think that beneath the colors of our skin there lies a humanity with more to share than to differentiate. The horrors of the 1862 Sioux Uprising in Minnesota began when four young Indian males got out of control, just lost it, did insanely stupid things. Does that ever happen in other cultures? Seems it does.

Honestly, I have an aversion to bean-counting, to tallying the numbers of minorities in any given situation, as if making sure we have a token person of color on our committee insures righteousness or equity or that totally blessed word these days, "diversity."

However, yesterday I sat in a lecture hall to hear yet another white male hold forth--admirably, I might add--before an assembled audience of college students, most of whom had their note pads out in front of them. Another white male. Like me. When it was over, someone announced the next speaker in this semester's special series. Yet another white male.

Twenty years ago, I taught--for the very first time--a course in "the short story." There among my more traditional students was a non-trad, the wife of a visiting professor, who took the course. After the final class period, she came up to me. I remember the room, remember it empty because she waited. She told me that she enjoyed the course. She was polite, not pushy.

And then she said the line that I'll never forget. "Do you realize that all semester long we didn't read one woman writer?"

What hurt even more than the truth of her assertion was that I honestly didn't realize what she said was true. I hadn't thought about it. Skinheads and neo-Nazis aren't the only folks guilty of racism or sexism. I was. I am.

Some of us--me, for instance--have to work at being deliberately inclusive.

Why? When I was one of those students, years ago, I read a book by a man named Frederick Manfred, who'd come from northwest Iowa, where his roots were Dutch Reformed. When I read his novel, I suddenly understood that the very life all around me, as a Dutch Reformed kid, was fair game for fiction. I didn't know anyone in my childhood who wrote books before I met Frederick Manfred between the covers of one of his own most obscure novels. But when I read him, I knew I had a place, even a calling.

And there's this. The most significant cause of the 1862 Sioux Uprising in Minnesota wasn't a bunch of testosterone-wild kids gone berserk and out of control; it was starvation, poverty, and cultural genocide created by the Great White Father and his minions, who perhaps would have been more generous and just (that's speculation, of course) if it hadn't been for the fact that in 1862, no one in Washington D. C., was thinking about the lowly Dakota out in the territories. There was, after all, this war going on, the Civil War. One story has a mix of angles.

Yesterday, an uninterrupted string of white males reminded me of all that, but most specifically of a day I stood in an emptying classroom and discovered something about myself and my course I honestly hadn't realized.

Something I haven't forgotten.