Critical Discourse Analysis for the Win!

So I spent the weekend watching the LDS General Conference. Every six months the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a conference in which the leaders speak and members and other interested people watch, either from their TVs, at stake centers, or now on the web. I usually watch/sleep through at least most of it, and I usually find that I'm uplifted and strengthened by the talks.

A speaker who is consistently one of my favorites (and not just mine) is Elder Jeffrey R. Holland. When my husband was a student at BYU Elder Holland was the president of the university, and I enjoyed hearing him and his wife speak from time to time. Now he's a member of the church's quorum of the twelve apostles, one of the highest positions in the church. In terms of conference, this means that he now speaks in every conference.

One of the things he does in his talks that I really love is that he gets into a scriptural story or concept and really explores the wording and motivations and context to make it more meaningful and powerful, and he updates some of the language to make it more accessible. I am often amazed and thrilled at the insights I get from listening to him speak, and yesterday was no exception (I hope that link works; right now it loads a template page).

This talk was about faith, and Elder Holland shared the story from Mark 9, beginning at verse 14, where a father asks Jesus if he can do anything to help him and his son, who is possessed by evil spirits. He discusses the anguish and faith of this father (Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. Mark 9:24) and the compassion of Jesus, who cast out the spirit and raised up the son. As always when I listened, I was excited and inspired. And I finally figured out why: Elder Holland does critical discourse analysis on the scriptures!

Critical discourse analysis is a branch of linguistic analysis that I have always had mixed feelings about. It's usually done to uncover bias or discrimination in texts, and it's a valuable and important sort of analysis, but when I do it I always find a dark cloud hanging over me. It's incredibly depressing, because you're always looking for the negative. In general I'm a pretty positive person, so once I realized this I decided to stay away from it. But here is a situation where the technique of examining language, power relations, and society is used to highlight the positive and redeeming nature of Christ's loving response to a man who was willing to trust, to exercise his faith. Wow! Now that I can get excited about!

Reflection

This afternoon I attended a discussion on using reflection in my composition classes. I realized a couple of things over the course of this discussion. One, I haven't been using reflection enough in my classroom. And two, I haven't been using reflection enough in my life.

Though we were talking about how to create assignments and activities that will help our students reflect effectively on their writing, I was struck by the necessity of reflection in general in our lives. Reflection is how we make sense of the world, the way we make the connections that give us inspiration.

I remembered one semester in particular when I was taking what felt like too many classes. I was rushing from assignment to assignment, writing responses and essays that I hadn't had any time to think through, just to get the assignments in on time. And I was miserable, because nothing made sense or seemed to fit together.

So I try now to be sure that when I write a response to a reading that I've actually thought, at least for a few minutes, about what it means, how it relates to other things I've read, and how I might be able to use this perspective/experience in my own work. The more I'm able to do this, the more satisfied I am with my work and the better my work is.

I've come across a few blogs and websites this evening that talk about reflection, mostly in an educational setting, though this morning LinkedIn also sent me a post about scheduling downtime--for what the author calls it 'strategic thinking'--into the work day.

Then there are all the spiritual practices that have arisen throughout history: prayer, meditation, scripture study, mindfulness. These are all ways to focus and reflect.

As we go about our lives we experience many things, but until we take time to reflect on them, the connections don't become apparent. But those connections are where new ideas (or new implementations of old ideas) come from, and for me that is where the excitement is!

So grateful

Thursdays are long. I teach at 8:00 am. I have a class that goes until 6:30 pm. By the time I get home all I want to do is crash, and that's often (like today) what I do. But I have an awesome husband who makes sure dinner is ready and the dishes get done. He does the laundry every day, and he handles calls to insurance companies (why are there so many calls that have to be made to insurance companies?).

When I got home today I smelled the most wonderful thing--bread! The smell of bread is the smell of heaven, I'm convinced. And he makes bread, homemade bread, every week or so, so we always have homemade, whole wheat bread.

I'm a lucky girl.

No Pain Day

Today I didn't have any pain in my leg. I felt some discomfort, some stiffness, and a little awkwardness (but less of each than yesterday) but nothing I would call pain. Hooray! It's been five weeks since the accident, and my healing has followed the most linear progression of anything I've ever done. With the significant exception of the one day three weeks ago when I squatted and undid all my progress, every day has been better than the day before. Amazing! Today I used the stairs to go both up and down, no elevator at all. I walked at something like a normal pace and with something like a normal gait. I really couldn't be happier. And I actually felt happy today, not just tired. There is much still to do, but I feel like I'm in a good place, physically.

I turned the heel on a sock for Benjamin. This is also good news. I was about two inches from finishing the pair when I finally saw him and had him try on the finished sock. Too tight. Grr! so I'm now on the foot portion (finished the gusset too) of the first sock again, and I'm ready to push forward and get them done. The only thing slowing me down is the ribbing. I decided to make his socks ribbed, so the foot is half ribbed and half not. I make mistakes at both transition points. But then I fix them. These socks are from a pretty sock yarn that's mostly green with dark blue and magenta in it. I really like it and it gets lots of comments. I hope he likes to wear them when they're done!