Student: Can I use “his” for my cousin?

Me: Is your cousin a boy or a girl?

Student: No, ‘e’s Chinese.

This did not, however satisfy the rest of the class. One kid in the back called out, “Come on, I rosed my hand first, why didn’t you call on me?”

I responded, “You raised your hand.”

“What’s the difference?”

Noticing what we in the business call a teachable moment (which is incidentally and ironically a really depressing term because we talk about them like we talk about the time we found a four-leaf clover) I decided to give him the full explanation.

“You know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs is, right?”

“No.”

“Sure you do. Like you can run a race, or run the dishwasher, or you can just run…the last one is intransitive, it has no direct object. You can trip Brooks, over there, or you just can trip.”

“Okay.”

“So sometimes, verbs are only transitive. Sometimes, they’re never transitive. Often, in English anyway, you can use them either way. But usually the meaning changes slightly depending on whether the verb is used transitively or intransitively. So, if you say, ‘Timmy was walking down the hall when he just dropped,’ you mean a different action than when you say he dropped his books.”

“Okay, but I rosed my hand.” Why is that wrong?

“Well if we can keep distinctions between words, we can make our meaning clear. There are two different verbs here that you’re mixing. To rise means to get up of one’s own accord. It’s intransitive. A balloon rises, the sun rises. Yesterday they rose. Rose is the past tense of rise.

“But you ought to use the verb raise, which means to lift something else off the ground. The wind raises a kite, you raise your hand. A few minutes ago, you raised it. Raise is transitive. Something cannot raise itself.

“This is important because we need two separate verbs to keep these ideas distinct. For instance, Lazarus was raised from the dead. It happened, but it wasn’t his doing. On the other hand, Christ rose from the dead. This is an important distinction. It was (at least partially) due to his own nature that he came back to life. We use a transitive verb with Lazarus and an intransitive with Christ.”

At this point, I saw a kid in the front row shaking his head.

“What?”

“You should teach a class that’s like English and Bible together.”

“What do you think I’m doing here? Good grammar is good theology.”

“It’s funny, all my teachers here think alike. English, history, Bible…it’s like you all are talking to each other.”

“Wasn’t it that way at your old school? I’m sure they talked to each other so the classes overlapped some.”

“This is different. It’s like everyone here thinks about things the same way. The teachers treat everything like it all fits together.”

If Jesus never had any children, how do we know which people look like him?

“Ummm….I got some hand sanitizer on my quiz, but it’s not drool, so don’t freak out when you touch it.”

After seeing the look on my face, she continued: “I’m just letting you know now so things don’t get awkward.”

• “What is this?”
• “This is Cool!”
• Student 1: “What are you?” Student 2: “Catholic Bishop.” Student 1: ” You’re the big cheese! You get ALL the cheese.”
• The landowning nobles immediately start telling everyone where to sit.
• Peasants discuss revolting before the bell even rings.
• Teacher is introduced to visiting prospective student. Concedes that it will be okay if spec is a peasant, too.
• Students pronounce their own estates when the teacher describes them, giving an odd echo to the whole lecture.
• Everyone knows the king’s name is Louis. No one knows which Louis.
• Teacher: “I’ll represent the king. I’ll be Louis the XVI.” Students: “Attack!” Teacher: “Not Yet!”
• 3rd estate visibly annoyed that the 2nd estate isn’t taxed. “Nice for you” says one student.
• Muted “Woo-Hoo’s” for the 3rd estate. Whenever it is mentioned during the lecture.
• 80% of the people in the 3rd estate are peasants, says teacher. Tradesmen in 3rd estate look smug, lean back.
• 2nd estate: “They work on our land? And they have to pay me for the right? Sweet!”
• Teacher: “The bourgeoisie had Bankers, tradesmen, and lawyers.” Student 1: “Liars”? Teacher: “No Lawyers.”  ”What’s the Difference?” ask about six students in unison. They all laugh like Statler and Waldorf.
• Teacher: “Louis the 16th was not decisive, he was not known for his ability to stick to a decision. He was…” Students, in quick succession: “A flake?” “Easily confused?” “A coward?”
• Peasants actually ask to stay in this seating arrangement, cast annoyed/challenging stares at 1st and 2nd estates.
• Second Estate doing what can only be described as a dance of boredom and (relaxation) behind the the teacher.

After the students realize that the 1st and 2nd estates get treats and only have to sign their names

• 1st and 2nd estates: “He’s serious!”
• Calls of horror from 3rd estate
• “Someone’s gonna die!”
• “Where’s the guillotine?”
• “Peasants gotta stick together.”
• “If we’re really peasants do we know how to write and read? Because I don’t think I can do this assignment.”
• Student: “What happens if we refuse to do the assignment?” Teacher: “There are consequences: you fail!”
• Nobles are apparently feeling guilty. One says, “I came in ready to give him an attitude and he fed me snacks!”
• Peasants have apparently done the reading. They know the answers to the worksheet.
• “This is so not fair!”
• In response to being told that there was nothing for the peasants to do except finish the assignment and watch the upper class eat: “I don’t care, I brought a book! I guess peasants can read.”

We switch to study the American Revolution

• 3rd estate: “Do they (1st and 2nd) have to do this too?” Teacher: “It’s America, of course!” 3rd estate: “Thank you, freedom!”

I’m sorry I accidentally used your superhero name, but it’s just a superhero name; I promise The Nebulizer doesn’t mean something bad.

It’s good to see you all again. I wanted to read two things for you. The first is by Rainer Maria Rilke, the guy who wrote the Panther poem from the last time I spoke. I know it’s boring to hear the same poet or Bible verse over and over again, and I know that school is boring and chapel is the most boring part of school, but I’m doing this because of two pieces of advice I got when I started teaching, which were of course completely contradictory. One person told me to be funny, zany, unpredictable in class, because students are lazy and perpetually bored, and I would have to trick them into learning. Teaching, this person said, is a form of entertainment.

Then, another person told me that if I said something coherent, students would respond, that teachers who see themselves as performers are just getting in the way of understanding. So today I’m going to put this to the test. I don’t have any tricks or jokes. No scary videos or wacky boasts about my intelligence. I’m just going to show you something I think is true and trust you all to respond to it. Undoubtedly people will fall asleep, but people slept through my last speech and even the French Horror movie last year.

The poem is from Rilke’s Book of Hours, which is a collection of prayers, and this prayer has at its heart two paradoxes, two sets of ideas that seem contradictory but turn out to be true. In this prayer, Rilke introduces two paradoxes of his own, one that all things in the universe, from the biggest to the smallest are filled with God’s life. Second, that the most miraculous things in the world, are often the things we don’t notice.

I find you Lord in all Things and in all
My fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;
As a tiny seed, you sleep in what is small, and
In the vast, you vastly yield yourself.

The wondrous game that power plays with Things
Is to move in such submission through the world
Groping in roots and growing thick in tree tops,
Like a rising from the grave.

In addition to this, Paul tells us in Romans 12 that in order to notice the things we normally miss, we have to maintain a proper understanding of our place in the world and our place in the Church. This is the passage I read last time I spoke.

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another. Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them.

Two weeks ago, when I talked to you, I told you I wanted you to remember the word: Numinous. Theologians use it to describe the paradox that we are drawn to God and frightened by him in equal nature. This is God’s numinous nature.

Christianity has at its heart, a great paradox: the notion that God died and that a man rose from the grave. That these two events describe the same person, only strengthens the power of this paradox. If Christianity is true, it makes a kind of sense then that we would see paradoxes everywhere, and find them, in spite of their apparent contradictions, to be unavoidably true. And this is exactly what we do find. Childbirth is both beautiful and agonizing. Particle physics is both mathematical and mysterious. And anyone who made it through Valentine’s Day will tell you, romance is both confusing and clarifying. In all these things, we find a basic paradox.

It is no surprise then that when Christians are asked whether they are at war with the world or at peace with it, they respond: both. It is no surprise that our faith tells both a husband and a wife that they don’t deserve each other. After all, any faith that tells the burliest, most vicious warrior to love his neighbor and turn his cheek, and then tells the meekest priest to eat and drink the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ cannot be embarrassed by surface contradiction, especially when it belies a deeper truth. It shouldn’t then surprise us when Paul tells us that functioning the best as an individual involves fitting in well with a community.

School also has two weird, seemingly paradoxical truths at its heart. First of all, the students will learn better if they teach themselves. You all know this to be true. Every time a teacher asks a question and you come up with the answer, you remember it better than when the teacher just puts it on the board, or when you read it in a book. So my job is to get you guys to think for yourselves and come up with your own answers about the books I’m teaching.

Here’s the problem. The first thing anyone learns about teaching is that you cannot ask students a question to which you don’t know the answer. It seems like I could. It seems to an inexperienced teacher that I could just come in to class and ask everyone a question and just listen to the discussion while you figure things out yourselves. After all, you guys are smart kids, you’re motivated and capable, and generally cheerful and interested. You did the reading: it should be easy. You can construct by yourselves what meaning the book will have for you. But of course it doesn’t work that way. You can tell when a teacher asks a question he doesn’t have an answer to. Right? Like someone in class asks something and the teacher says, “Hmmm. That’s interesting…what do you guys think?” That’s teacher-speak for “I have absolutely no idea.” And you can decode the language behind a teacher starting class with “I want you guys to think carefully about this today.” The teacher isn’t sure the idea is important, but he’s going with it anyway. And this always leads to dull and logy class time.

It’s not that a teacher shouldn’t care about what the students have to say, but if the teacher doesn’t know where the class is going, then the class is going nowhere. Paradox.

Now, contrary to what I said two weeks ago, when I made made fun of myself with that ridiculous claim about how smart I was, I think that no person on earth is really able to think correctly by himself. We all need other people’s opinions and perspectives to balance our own. Sometimes we seek opinions of friends, or relatives, youtube, or books, but very few of us try to figure out everything from fashion to philosophy all by ourselves. We may hear all the time from self-help gurus and daytime tv that we should follow our true selves, but have you ever met someone who does that? Who only believes what he holds to be true and takes no one else’s advice?

If you haven’t, there’s a good reason. We put those people in padded rooms. They’re crazy. The guy who thinks the government is using radio-waves to turn everyone communist, the guy who thinks Major League Baseball is using satellites to record everyone’s hat sizes, the guy who wears a tinfoil hat he claims is the ancient helm of Julius Caesar, the guy who thinks the President is secretly a foreigner, these are all crazy people. But can you convince them? Of course not, they only accept their own opinion. It’s trusting in themselves that makes them crazy. The definition of insanity is taking no one’s opinion but your own.

So this week, to prove I’m not completely off my rocker, I thought I would ask for your opinions. I have a question I’ve been puzzling over since this summer, when I read an article where a bunch of people were discussing this topic, and I want to ask for your help in solving it. It’s a question I want to bring up with my classes, so before I spring this in class, I want to ask you all to help. So, if you come up with an answer during chapel today, or over the course of the next semester, let me know, because I’m going to use it next year.

Hypothetical situation: Bill and Ted show up and loan you their phone booth. You can travel to any place in history and spend up to five years there. Where should you go? [Brief aside, at this point in the speech, I realized that none of my students knew what a phone booth was, so we had to stop to explain that concept] You can have enough money that you won’t have to work and you’ll be able to explore. Now, you can’t bring modern technology, so no cameras, or cell phones, or iPods. But you’ll live like a relatively well off person of that era. While there, you can do whatever you want, just sit and observe, or try to make changes.

Still for those five years, you have to stay within five miles of that location. So, if you’re a big Civil War buff and really want to see the Battle of Gettysburg, fine. But you’re stuck in a little town in Pennsylvania for the next five years shoeing horses, or cobbling streets, or doing whatever people did in 1865 to amuse themselves.

So where should you go? Should you journey back to Rome and watch the struggle between Pompey, Julius, Brutus, Marc Antony and Octavian for control of the Roman Empire? What about going to Worms in the 16th century and watching the Reformation play out up close and personal.  Would you move to post-war Paris in 1950 and watch the birth of new ideas about cinema, music, art, and philosophy take hold.  Considering you’d be wealthy, the French Revolution is probably out.

Should you go back to Germany in the 1920’s and warn people about Hitler? There are probably other ways to be a time-traveling super hero and save the day. Orson Scott Card wrote a book called Pastwatch in which he says that all the problems in the modern world are the result of the slave trade that started toward the end of the 15th century. Maybe you could show up in Seville or bring a machine gun to meet Cortez when he showed up in South America and put an end to that kind of thing.

Maybe there are more fun things to do. What about Detroit in the late 60’s early 70’s, you could get involved with Motown, meet young Stevie Wonder, maybe join the Temptations. You could attend Film School in USC and hang out with Lucas, Spielberg, Scorcese, Coppola, Brian De Palma, and John Cassavetes. You could go to New York in ’67-72, see the Beatles, the Velvets, The beginnings of Punk, Clapton in his heyday, and go to one of the Boss’ legendary eight-hour concerts. You could go to London around 1600, see the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the advent of the British Empire, and see if there are any good plays in town, Maybe ask Bill himself about Shylock and what on earth he was thinking when he wrote that play.

I’m sure any five-year period of Pixar’s operation would be a blast. What about hanging out with the Yankees in the late 20’s. Or being in New Orleans a few years before that and seeing the birth of Jazz. Should you go to Athens in ancient Greece and try to convince people not to kill Socrates? Where should you go?

I’ve thought about this a lot and I think one of the places I wonder about is Venice, in the 1820’s.

George Gordon Lord Byron

First of all, I would like to meet this guy. This is George Gordon, Lord Byron. Interesting guy. Lived toward the beginning of the 19th century, mostly in London, but he got around, in both senses of that phrase. One of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, who never quite got over him, called him “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” He wrote poetry, dabbled in politics, was imprisoned briefly in Switzerland, traveled the world. He is still remembered as a national hero in Greece, because he died fighting for its independence from the Ottoman Empire. He was handsome, curled his own hair nightly, a good boxer, swimmer and rider, in spite of his clubbed foot. An all around interesting guy. In fact, the public in England was fascinated by him before he was forced into exile for “lewd behavior.”

So why do I want to talk to this guy? Well, because of something he said that I want to ask him about, that had a major effect on literature and the way we humans think about ourselves. He said, “There are two kinds of people in the world, the boring, and the bored.”

He went on to write stories that incarnated this philosophy in the heroes he wrote about. Byronic Heroes are artistic, sullen, rebellious, sophisticated, intelligent, mysteriously attractive and indifferent to society’s requirements, probably to the point that they have become outcasts. You know and love some of the heroes based on his ideals:

• Batman
• Spawn
• Snake Eyes
• Dorian Grey
• Wolverine
• Every single Final Fantasy hero
• Bart Simpson
• James Bond (What happens to everyone who sleeps with him? Right. He’s basically a vampire.)
• Edward Cullen
• David Copperfield (the Dickens character and the creepy magician)
• The Sandman
• Dracula
• Angel
• Lorenzo Lamas from Renegade
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Detectives in Noir stories.
• Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights.

In fact Byron was the inspiration for the Character: Lord Ruthven, in a short story by John William Polidori, which was the first vampire story in western literature. That’s right, he was such a terrible boyfriend his lovers used vampires as a way to describe him to other people. Dating him was like having your blood drained and being left dead on a sidewalk.

In contrast to the God-like Odysseus and the Iron-gripped Beowulf who exemplify the values of their cultures, we now think of heroes as out-casts, wanderers and individualists, people who oppose their cultures’ values and refuse to conform. People who are bored with life, which is a weird thing, when they move on from it, what are they going to find? Either there’s nothing else after death or there’s more life.

But this is the great modern quest, right? We are all trying all the time not to be bored by life. People fell asleep two weeks ago while I was speaking. We are always fighting boredom. Name a movie, and someone will say they found it boring. And boredom is an intolerable feeling. You can go through pain, sickness, whatever, and endure, but a single moment of boredom will set you shaking your leg or humming, or prostrating yourself before Mark Zuckerberg’s gilded calf.

This is the great problem with school, it’s the problem with church and chapel and this speech. It’s all boring. Here’s my question: why?

Past eras struggled with anger or greed, but the cardinal sin of the modern world is sloth, and nowhere is this seen so well as in school. Right? This is the modern complaint about school. Students complain that class is boring, but when teachers complain, they say the same thing, in a slightly different form. Teachers complain that students are lazy and that they can’t teach the classes they want to teach, the really interesting material. They’re stuck doing things like Geography, grammar, and basic Bible facts when they would rather be teaching History, language skills, and theology. Stuck giving reading quizzes, instead of holding scintillating discussions.

I think there’s a reason for this, and that is the way we communicate actually encourages boredom. Our communication, because of that internet, cell phones, etc, is faster than it’s ever been before. If Watson’s triumph on Jeopardy taught us anything it’s that any singular fact is instantaneously available to us. But this great gift of speed has a second edge. What modern communication encourages in us is shallow knowledge.  We know about a lot of things, but we have only a surface knowledge of these things.

If you doubt me, let’s do a simple test. How many of you have ever looked something up on Wikipedia? Raise your hands. Oh come on. Anyone who still has a hand down is either lying or got bored and fell asleep. Put your hands up. Now, keep your hand raised if you have ever read an entire Wikipedia entry from beginning to end, including footnotes? Why not, because you either got bored with the article, or you clicked somewhere else and five minutes later were sidetracked by the entries on TMNT video games, or trees more than a thousand years old, or medieval methods of torture, or Noah’s ark, or you decided to add your friends’ names to the lists of people who have certain exotic diseases. This is what Wikipedia, and that internet do, they encourage us to learn a small bit of information and discourage us from really studying. You can start out learning one thing, but the hyperlinks that interrupt every internet sentence inevitably distract you from what you started doing. The paradox of our technology is that though it increases the number of things we know, it decreases the depth by which we know them.

Now this has a very interesting affect on us. It makes every person on that internet think he is some sort of savant. I’m not the first person to say this. A guy named Nicholas Carr just published a book called The Shallows where he says that internet is changing the way humans think. But, I see this in class all the time. Do you know how many people tell me that the books in my class are badly written? Or I bring up a movie in class that demonstrates a point about narrative art, and somebody has to tell me that it wasn’t a good movie. Really? Do you do this to your other teachers? Do you tell the chemistry teacher that he doesn’t really understand ionization? Do you tell the Bible teacher he may be confused about some parts of the Nicene Creed? When the choir director tells you you’re a little flat, do you look back at her and say, “No, you’re a little sharp!”?

Of course not, but every year I have not just one, but dozens of students correct my understanding of literature, as if I’ve never studied anything. That internet actually encourages us to behave this way. Because we’re constantly flitting about on it like butterflies or hummingbirds, we rarely spend time honing a careful position, and it’s easy to just spend time on websites populated by people who agree with us, so we can get a lot of support, no matter how stupid our ideas are. Lastly, we interact anonymously, so it’s easy to insult someone and never have to defend ourselves. We end up labeling things we barely know as stupid, or incompetent…or boring.

Do you know which books people in my classes have called boring THIS YEAR ALONE? Here’s the list:

• Julius Caesar
• The Prince
• Merchant of Venice
• Cry The Beloved Country
• Night
• Things Fall Apart
• Of Love and Other Demons
• An Ideal Husband
• Oedipus the King
• The Odyssey
• The Scarlet Pimpernell
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Lord of the Flies
• Beowulf
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Romeo and Juliet
• Wuthering Heights
• Gilgamesh
• Invisible Cities.

This is also the list of all the books I teach during the year.  I must have the most boring class in the history of school.

Now I can go through and point out why it’s ridiculous to call Oedipus boring, certainly it’s horrific, upsetting, and chillingly fatalistic, but I can’t imagine any of us making Oedipus’ discovery and saying, “meh.” I could point out that Shylock’s story may be racist, or gruesome, but a trial which might literally end with a man cutting out his arch enemy’s heart is not boring. Forget the fact that in Of Love and Other Demons the heroine is killed during a misguided exorcism and then proves herself a saint when her hair grows sixty feet in the twenty minutes after her death, or that in the first fifteen pages an army of Rabid Monkeys descends from a mountainous jungle and attacks the town Bishop during the middle of Easter Mass.

What I know whenever one of my students calls To Kill a Mockingbird or The Odyssey boring is that like the Wikipedia page you get distracted midway through, he didn’t read the whole thing. Thinking something is boring is really just a sign that you don’t know much about it.

Let me give you an example. When I was in high school, the most boring thing in the world to me was lacrosse. As far as I was concerned, it was just a bunch of idiots who wore white baseball caps running around on a field boasting about their poke checking and stick handling. To be honest, I thought it was kind of gay. But there’s a really good reason for that. I didn’t understand it.  I was raised playing baseball and I didn’t know anything about lacrosse. My ignorance manifested as insults.

Then I got married, and my wife’s three siblings all play lacrosse, and they play it very well. So instead of being a complete snot, I started asking them about it. And as I learned more, I became more interested. I realized it was my ignorance that that was preventing me from appreciating the speed, precision and ferocity of it. One of my in-laws described it as football with weapons, but I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s basketball played by gladiators. How can that be boring?

And it all goes back to Lord Byron, if we accept his definition of a hero, someone independent, rebellious, artistically talented and unique, sooner or later, we start to imagine ourselves as this same thing. Suddenly we are bored, and the rest of the world is boring, and we miss out on lacrosse, or classical music, or whatever it is that other people might teach us.

The problem is that this invites us to treat those around us with disdain. If we truly think we know more than any one else, we start acting with cruelty, and paradoxically, we prove how foolish we really are. Secretly we know this, we know that the smartest people we know are also the people who are interested in the greatest number of things. Einstein was never bored.

One of the reasons I want to talk to Lord Byron, is simply that there were so many interesting things going on in the world during his time. In Venice during the 1820’s, people were starting to talk about the unification of Italy. To understand this, you guys are going to need a history lesson.

Maybe you don’t realize this, but most of the countries in Europe are actually younger than the United States. The cities, like Rome and Berlin, and Geneva are all much older than American cities, but many of the countries themselves were established in the middle of the 19th century. Italy during the 1820’s was broken up into about a dozen states controlled by ruling families. This created a lot of problems. Everyone was always bickering and fighting each other. Every once in a while the French or the Germans would attack.

Furthermore, it was hard to communicate. Over time, people who live in different places develop different accents. If those accents are left alone for long enough, they become new languages. So all the Romance languages (Italian, Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese) are all just dialects of Latin. They are the dialects of whatever family was ruling that area. Spanish was originally just the way the Hapsburgs pronounced Latin. French was the pronunciation of the Valois. English, Dutch, German, Danish, Icelandic, Norse, are all Dialects of something called Proto-German. That language and Latin, Greek, are all in turn, dialects of a language we have now lost, called Proto-indo-European.

Every single one of these different city states you see behind me spoke a dialect of Italian so distinct it was almost a separate language from the surrounding areas. Some states even had three or four dialects. So the Italians decided that to promote the unification of the country, one of the things that had to happen was that they would all need to speak the same language. So with that decided, they started to wonder which dialect of Italian they would pick.

Now, before I continue, I want to stress that I am NOT making this up. This really happened.

They decided to use the most beautiful version of Italian they could find, which was by consensus, the dialect used by Dante Aligheri to write the Divine Comedy, the greatest of all Italian poems. The problem was that Dante had written the Divine Comedy in the early 14th century, 500 years before this event and no one spoke that way anymore. It was as if we, here in this room decided that since it’s hard to understand people from Scotland or rural South Carolina, and since Shakespeare is manifestly awesome, we were going to teach everyone to talk exactly like him so that we can understand each other. And it worked. If you take an Italian course today, you are actually learning 14th century Tuscan. And people claim that History and Geography are boring.

How did Byron think a world where this was happening was boring?

Now if you’re wondering why the Italians knew that the languages in the different states would continue to grow apart, and wouldn’t mesh together the way English and Spanish are doing in certain communities in the US, the answer is in a book published in 1819, same five year period that Byron was in Italy, so I could see both. The book is called Deutsche Grammatik, and it was written by Jacob Grimm, the guy who wrote Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Now if you look at the title, you might assume that it is a book about German grammar. It’s not. It is a history of the languages of Europe. And what it gave the world is a way to understand the way languages change. He figured out how sounds change slowly over time to create a new word.

What he realized is that some sounds are actually very similar to each other and they slip easily back and forth. Like t and d are the same sound, just one is said with the vocal cords and once isn’t. Try it…

They switch very easily over time and this is part of what creates new languages. p and b are the same. f and v. Not to mention that p,b,f, and v are all made with the same motion of your lips, you just clamp your lips a little tighter for the first two.  Some sounds, like nasals (ing) and what’s called a voiced uvular fricative, (try saying g and h at the same time) are hard to say, so they tend to drop out or change to an easier sound.  This is why people shorten running to runnin’ and why we pronounce knight and laughter the way we do, instead of pronouncing the silent letters. The pattern that these things follow is called Grimm’s Law.

bʰ → b → p → f

dʰ → d → t → θ

gʰ → g → k → x

gʷʰ → gʷ → kʷ → xʷ

If you memorize this you can do two things:

1. You can figure out older versions of words that predate even Latin.
2. You can figure out words in other languages without knowing them, just from your knowledge of English. You can find the Spanish, French, or German words for things without ever actually learning those languages.

But, I know, grammar is boring.

Let me give you an example. Let’s talk about the word FIVE. In Spanish, the number five is cinco. Are these the same word? Not at all. And without Grimm, we wouldn’t be able to figure this out, but now we know a few things.  For instance, q is hard to pronounce, it tends to degenerate into c or ch, so it shouldn’t suprise us that the Italian cinque, Spanish cinco, and French cinq all come from the Latin quinque!

But you say, oh, merciful professor of poetry and grammar, it still doesn’t look anything like five! True, but what Grimms law tells us is that while q over time turns into ch or c, over time P can turn into q. We think there was an even earlier form *pingue (Proto-Indo-European).

All the fives match up.

Now as I already told you, P, in addition to sometimes turning into qu, also turned into f or V, which are really the same sound. So, in Latin we get quinque, but in Welsh we get pimp with both the q’s turning into p’s. The p’s turn into F’s and we get in Old High German: fimf, Dutch vijf, Modern German fünf, Old English fif, and Modern English five. Everything connects.

Well why would this matter? Besides getting the Italians to get their act together, what does this little trick do for us? Well I heard a speech by Tom Shippey about this a few years ago, which you can still find at the Swarthmore College Podcast, and he points out something very interesting.  Have you ever thought about the name Pontius Pilate? If not, I encourage you to do so now. We have several incidents in the Bible where Pharisees take Paul or Peter before Roman governors, and the guy set the Apostles free. Acts Chapter 18 is one such occurrence. In it Paul is brought before the Roman governor Gallio, who dismisses the charges immediately and has the Pharisees roundly beaten for even bothering him.

Why didn’t Pilate do the same thing? The answer of course, is that he wasn’t a Roman. If he was actually from Rome, as you learned a few minutes ago, his name would have been Quintus, not Pontius. He must have been from somewhere else. So when the Pharisees ask him to kill Jesus, he gives in. Imagine if he’d actually been from Rome, he probably would have responded by saying, “I’m in charge here! Centurions, throw these rabbi’s down some steps,” and the whole history of western civilization would have been a LOT different. This, ladies and gentlemen, as Shippey reminds us, is what we call Providence. The clue to the whole history of western civilization and the genesis of the Christian faith, is buried the spelling of one man’s name.

And people say Grammar is boring.

The real reason I would like to talk to Lord Byron is to point this moment out to him. Because this is the central moment in all our lives. The death and resurrection of Christ has had a vast affect on everything we do. The whole of western history for the past 2,000 years has been a debate about who this guy was.

And in the end, we can argue the time travel question I started with today. In fact I’d love to talk to any of you about it, BUT THERE IS AN ANSWER TO IT. I’m sure there is. If you were given a time machine, and could go anywhere, there’s a place you ought to go: Jerusalem, about 30 AD. Because if 2000 years ago, a man really died, and then got up again, not because of doctors, or because someone else brought him back, but because death could not hold him, doesn’t that change everything? Doesn’t that become the most important thing that’s ever happened?

And Byron used to know it. Before he got distracted by his own image in the mirror, when Byron was in school, his Bible teacher told the class to write an essay explaining the miracle of the Wedding at Cana, when Jesus turned the water into wine. Having Jesus at a party was never boring. Most of the students in little Byron’s class immediately started writing and filled up the entire hour they had to complete the assignment busily scrawling sentence after sentence trying to show the depth of their understanding and skill. They were busy, adding fact after fact, word after word, like someone trying to write a Wikipedia entry on the topic. But Byron, in his typical rebellious, artistic way just sat there. Minute after minute passed. His teacher yelled at him, threatened him, but still he sat there. Then when time was almost up, he wrote one single sentence. He wrote, “The water beheld its maker, and it blushed.”

And people say Bible class is boring.

I told this story to a group of you a few years ago, and one of my students responded that all he wanted in life was to write one thing as good as that.

This is what Flannery O’Connor would later have the Misfit say in her story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” if Jesus did what he claimed to do, then compared to what he’s offering, it costs nothing to follow him. If he didn’t, then you and I and everything we know will die, decay and fade away, and there’s nothing lasting in the world. O’Connor say, “There’s nothing to life but meanness.”

But Christ did rise from the grave; he ascended into heaven, where he sits at the right hand of God. From there he will come to judge the quick and the dead. The point is that you, and everyone around you are going to last. No one in this room is a blip on the horizon, a meaningless piece of data, and the investigation of God’s creation is never pointless.

One of the reasons I like teaching at this school, is the way we live this idea out. I like the fact that our choirs are populated with football players, that the entire cross-country team shows up at Film Club meetings, that the basketball coach is the Bible teacher. I like the fact that I can talk physics in the afternoon with English teachers and then talk carpentry on the weekends with the chemistry teachers. I like the fact that the calculus teacher loves music so much. Ask him about seeing Hendrix some time.

So here’s my advice to you all. Here’s how to apply these ideas: Root for each other’s success. You can tell a healthy school by the fact that everyone cheers for everyone else. If you’re bored when the band wins a competition or when the coach boasts about the cross-country team or when you walk down the hallway and see the artwork on display, the problem is with you, not with anybody else. If you’re confused by why anyone would be interested in football, or lacrosse, or robotics, or creative writing, then ask someone, and listen to the reply.

We were created by an infinite all-powerful God, and we’re going to live forever with him in a community (a body as Paul tells us) with each other, which means everyone is important, and everyone is interesting.

Now, I hear there’s some sort of basketball game going on tonight. I can’t predict the outcome, but I know, that whether you understand basketball or not, if you go and cheer, it will not be boring. You might even encounter something numinous.

Teacher: You’re failing my class.

Student: I know, but I don’t know what to do about it.

Teacher: Well, you’re getting 2 or 3 out of ten on every reading quiz, so I think the problem is that you’re not doing the reading.

Student: You’re just assigning too much work. I don’t know how you expect us to get it all done. I have a busy schedule, and there just isn’t time.

Teacher: Okay, take me through your day. What things do you have to do.

Student: Well I’m here at school for six hours a day. Then I have practice. Then there’s a forty minute drive home. Then it’s dinner time.

Teacher: And then?

Student: Then it’s 6:30.

Teacher: Okay, so you do have time when you could be doing the reading.

Student: No, I just told you I’m busy all day.

Teacher: What about after dinner?

Student: I told you, I’m busy. That’s when I watch TV.

I gave this speech again last week. and it’s a pretty silly bit of fluff, I’ll admit, but the point is that we don’t know everything, and we need advice. Most people at school got it and responded pretty well.

But I had a girl come up to me afterward and tell me that I should let other people have their opinions. Now this was the point of the speech, and I agreed with her, but I started to wonder afterwards. Why should I let my students have their opinions? Why should I allow them to express themselves in class? Do they have anything worth saying? And furthermore, why do they think they have something to say? Why do they think they know things?

The students seem to enjoy school and my class in particular, but if they do, if they agree that it is good to go to school, isn’t the point of school to teach you things you don’t know? Why then do kids give me their opinions of literature? “It’s boring,” they whine. Or, “I couldn’t relate to it.” Isn’t the entire point of the class that they don’t know how to appreciate good literature? Isn’t that the point of education? By signing up for a class on English, you are implicitly declaring, “I don’t know what to think about literature, and I need help.” Or at least your parents are declaring that.

Education assumes that you don’t understand something, but you want advice. Why are my students confused about this?