Safely ensconced...

Back again for another round of classes under "The Dome." I'm taking Romans with Luke Timothy Johnson and Liturgical Prayer with John Melloh. Looking fwd to it. So far the reading for the prayer class is far and away more engaging than that of the other. But one text for the Romans class is promising. It's by Katherine Grieb, I think, though I can't remember the title. ANd it's whole point is to excavate the narrative substructure of Romans. Grieb's thesis is that story is everywhere in Romans if we have eyes to see it. Cool. Much cooler than thinking of it as merely a theological treatise. Anyway, we'll see...

Two classes this time. That means hell. I might as well admit now that I'm not going to get all the reading done, especially if I'm going to work in a train trip to Chicago. And frankly, I think the Chicago trip is in the end more important than these classes. I hope I can pull it off.

My goal here is to learn something, not make an A. I feel like I should write that about a thousand times until I really believe it. Why this need to ace my classes? It's really kind of dumb. What drives me nuts is how grades and an education often seem at cross purposes. In other words, I'm likely to learn more and have an all-around better experience if I simply put grades out of my mind. As soon as I start shaping my studying behaviors to make an A, my actual education is in peril--or at least I'm headed in a direction that will likely be less educational than if I pay grades no mind.

We'll see how it goes.