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I have been teaching Jewish studies in the School of Religion a the University of Iowa for twenty-two years. For the past decade or so I have offered several guided correspondence courses through the Division of Continuing Education. Let me begin by describing two of these courses, which I also teach on campus. "The Quest for Human Destiny: From Eden to '2001'" is one of many options the undergraduate may choose to fulfill part of a requirement in the Humanities. The course has become the single most popular course on campus and always fills the largest lecture hall (850 seats); were there room, the enrollment would top three thousand. "Literature and Philosophic Thought: The Holocaust" is an upper-level elective course.
In the five years I have been teaching these two courses via correspondence, 160 students have completed "Quest" and sixty-two have finished "Holocaust." At least twenty-five percent of the students who matriculate do not complete these courses. This compares with a drop rate of less than one percent when these courses are taught on campus. This difference indicates, I think, the additional motivational and pedagogical hurdles that confront the correspondence instructor.
The framework for "Quest" is provided by two texts as redoubtable as they are ancient: the first ten chapters of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible and The Epic of Gilgamesh. The narrative in Genesis moves from the story of creation through that of the cataclysmic flood. Though the story line of The Epic traverses a somewhat different path, the two accounts have much in common. Both narratives pivot around the question of why death is an ineluctable fact for the human creature. Any serious consideration of this question entails an examination of the large issues which frame our existence (our relationship with nature, with gods or God, the nature of the human animal, etc.) and this the two ancient authors do with remarkable reserve and clarity.
The other course, "Literature and Philosophic Thought: The Holocaust," is an upper-level course which is entirely elective. I limit the on-campus enrollment to 150 students, most of whom are juniors, seniors, and graduate students. This course initially focuses on Nazi Germany's attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, after which we read remembrances and reactions of some of the survivors. The course then moves to a consideration of the religious and philosophic implications of this event, and to this end, we read Plato's Euthyphro and Apology, Machiavelli's The Prince, and, from the Bible, the book of Job and the story of Cain and Abel.
When I wrote the correspondence manuals for these two courses I divided them into eight units to each of which the student responded with a mail-in assignment. Each assignment consists of one or more essay questions (typically requiring about a four-page typed response, although many students do considerably more). There are also two exams, one at the midpoint of the course and the other at the end, which ask the student to provide a critical summary and synthesis of the material covered in the relevant mail-in assignments.
Each unit sets out its goals and then moves to a "Comments Section," which consists of a compendium of the classroom lectures for that portion of the course. I then present a series of questions intended to guide students through the assigned reading. Students are expected to integrate responses to these guide questions into their essay assignments.
Just as I had been brought up short in my initial attempts as a classroom teacher, so too with my first effort in correspondence courses. For instance, the first assignment in "Quest" asks the student to submit an "outline" of the book of Ecclesiastes. I had in mind a summary which would consist of a systematic listing of that book's most obvious features. I was aware that Ecclesiastes, which seems prolix to the point of being otiose, and which, at the same time, is filled with crucial ellipses, would present a host of interpretive problems to my typical student. In the Comments Section I offer a detailed analysis of some of the ways in which the author of Ecclesiastes adduced evidence for his hypothesis that life is meaningless, and I attempt to show that the verbosity and the ellipses are part of a rhetorical strategy designed to allow the author to communicate with different readers in different ways, each according to his or her abilities.
It quickly became apparent to me that most student not only did not follow my argument but that many did not know what I expected in terms of an outline. I received mail-in assignments ranging from a few casual observations to virtual paraphrases. I knew what I meant by an "outline" and I knew that I expected the students to consult my exegesis of Ecclesiastes, but far too many students ignored the Comments Section and had their own ideas of what an outline was.
In the classroom, when this material is assigned it is checked for conflicting interpretations by me and/or my graduate teaching assistants, and we are able to respond immediately to questions about our expectations. Since none of this is possible in a course manual, I decided I had to be more specific or concrete about what it was I expected the students to do.
In one way or another the same problem, i.e., my failure to communicate with sufficient clarity, surfaced repeatedly. In the Holocaust course, for example, one of the mail-in assignments asks the student to compare and contrast the experiences of two survivors, one a former inmate of a death camp, the other a woman who attempted to "pass" as a Christian in occupied Poland. My intent was to involve the student, both intellectually and emotionally, in two experiences that, while obviously disparate, were essentially equal in their compelling testament to the human capacity not only to survive but to survive with dignity. However, the graphic, unrelenting terror of the death camp made the woman's experience seem almost mundane by comparison. Accordingly, most students gave short shift to her testimony, and I was unable to lead the students to the recognition that the heroic could be found in the commonplace as well as in the horrific. It was, I thought, important that the students discover this for themselves so that it would be easier for them to take the next step: involving themselves existentially in order to raise what is for me the most important question, vis., what would I have done under similar circumstances? My written instructions were, however, too oblique. I might add that when we dealt with these remembrances in the classroom, the give and take of the discussion process enabled me to guide the discussion toward the desired goal.
These examples could be multiplied tenfold. It is a truism that the success of a correspondence course depends on the instructor's ability to communicate what is expected of the student with as much exactitude as possible. In the example cited above, it was for me crucial that the students grasp the true dimensions of the woman's heroic resolve, a resolve all the more remarkable given the fact that the danger she saw was for her ubiquitous but for others (i.e., non-Jewish Poles) non-existent. She was alone in a way in which the Jewish inmates of Auschwitz were not. But to explicate this to the students would deny them the power of recognition that comes from self-discovery.
When I teach "Quest" and the Holocaust course on campus, I "see" immediately whether and to what degree I am connecting with my students, and I can make mid-course (and oftentimes mid-sentence) corrections. Both in explicit ways (questions, comments, and challenges) and in implicit ways (disquietude, amusement, indifference), students always are responding to my spoken thoughts, and I proceed in response to what they are "telling" me. Sometimes I respond by going back over material or by simply pausing to ask questions or by searching for a concrete example to retrieve their attention.
In the classroom the large questions that shape the educational process (as, for example, What do I want to teach? How do I intend to teach? Who is likely to be my ideal typical student? What do I want this student to take from this course?) are always sharpened and conditioned by student feedback that is both immediate and enduring. No matter how structured and detailed my lecture notes are—and, over the year these notes have become both more structured and more detailed—I am continually improvising and fine tuning. One sentence does not simply follow another driven by the internal logic of the argument; rather, these sentences support what follows in response to the students" reception of their antecedents.
However, the correspondence instructor neither "speaks" nor is "spoken" to. The occasional telephone call is no substitute for the living, breathing dialogue of the classroom situation. The correspondence student responds to what the instructor has written by writing. My "listeners" in my correspondence courses are readers. And most of my students—born, bred, and nurtured in and by a culture dominated by television—are, to put it gently, not adept readers. Reading a text like The Death of Ivan Ilych, to say nothing of the Bible, requires a concerted internal effort; external stimuli are counterproductive. But most of my students have been conditioned, as it were, to respond precisely to external stimuli. Consider, for instance, how an award winning "educational" production such as "Sesame Street" relies on short bursts of vivid imagery. Reading, however, requires sustained concentration and, as we have been told, even Homer nods. At least in the classroom the instructor can resort to changes of pace, anecdotes, etc. to get the students back on track.
On the basis of these reflections I offer the following cautionary remarks to those engaged in correspondence studies.
First, one must teach oneself before one can teach others. Writing is difficult because it exposes the many ways in which we shield from ourselves the fact that we have not examined closely much of what we claim to know as fact.
Second, it is necessary to present "lecture" notes as clearly as possible in the correspondence guide book. As written words on a page they are not susceptible to the process of deletion and expansion which happens as a matter of course in the classroom. But how is it possible to write so as to foster the quest for knowledge when that endeavor arises out of unique and concrete circumstances facing each human being? I constantly am surprised by the inability even of good students to comprehend what I wrote, an inability which says more about my own shortcomings than theirs. When this happens I am reminded of these words in the Phaedrus:
For writing certainly has this terrible power, Phaedrus, as if truly like the painting of living animals. For the offspring of that stand forth like living animals, but if someone were to question them, they maintain a solemn silence. (Plato, 275d)
Like Socrates' description of painted animals, my words remain the same, unable to respond to queries. Making one's written words "speak" is the great challenge facing the correspondence instructor.
The centerpiece of the Quest course is an interpretation of the Garden of Eden story (Gen. 2–3) which, in the correspondence medium, frequently falls on "deaf ears." This interpretation turns on the conversation between the serpent and the first woman, a conversation which gives witness to the fact that some writers depict "animals" with the capacity, both literally (in the case of the serpent) and figuratively, to "speak" when questioned properly.
For those readers unfamiliar with this tale I note that first man and first woman find themselves in a fabulous garden in which the climate is ideal so that neither clothing nor shelter is required; in which a varied and nutritious diet is there for the picking; and in which there is a "Tree of Life," which is a remedy against disease, debilitation, and death. In the garden there is another tree, called the "Tree of the Knowledge of the Good and the Bad," about which the human creatures are told, in no uncertain terms, that if they eat of its fruit they will die.
For the purposes of this discussion, it is sufficient to point out that, as a result of the conversation between the serpent and the first woman, death enters the human experience. Once the woman and then the man take of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge they are expelled from Eden and thus denied access to the Tree of Life. Nor is there any way back, for the approaches to Eden and guarded by creatures of fantasy wielding weapons of fantasy.
Based on a belief in the metaphor that a picture is worth a thousand words, I present to you my latest attempt to teach this conversation via correspondence. Here is the Biblical conversation (Genesis 3:1–7), with my parenthetical commentary, as it is presented in the student handbook:
Now the serpent was the most subtle of all the beasts which the Lord God had made. [The word "subtle" in Hebrew and the word "naked" are homonyms and thus does our writer introduce the serpent with a pun. It will be the serpent who will initiate a process whereby the first human couple will become aware of their nakedness.] The serpent said to the woman [the fact that the verb employed here is "said" and not "asked" alerts the reader to the rhetorical nature of the serpent's query. As we will see, the serpent is not asking for information,]: 'did God really say that you were not to eat from any of the tree in the Garden?' [Now this clearly is an absurd question if taken literally since if there is no ingestion of food the human creatures will die; much had been made earlier of the many fruit producing trees in the Garden. Se 2:9]. 'And from the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that was pleasant to the sight and good for food,' [Since the serpent's outstanding characteristic is subtlety one has good reason to suspect the serpent of irony. But to what effect? Is the serpent indicating not the lack of food in the Garden but the lack of real sustenance, i.e., is the serpent suggesting that there is, so to speak, no food for thought in the Garden? This would be tantamount to suggesting that there are no meaningful quests in the Garden because, quite simply, there is nothing to do in Garden and even were there choices none of them would have consequences due to first man's and first woman's access to the Tree of Life.] The woman said to the snake: 'From the fruit of the trees of the Garden we may eat. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the Garden [both the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life are said to be in the middle of the Garden (2:9) but it is only about the Tree of Knowledge that the human creature is warned. As we will see, there is a good reason no mention is made of the Tree of Life in that context (2:16-17).] God said to neither eat from it nor touch it lest you die.' [It is worthy of your most careful attention that the woman responds to the serpent's ironic query with irony of her own, and, as in the case of the serpent, the woman's irony take the form of hyperbole. In the Lord God's warning to the human creature He had said nothing about not touching it. What does the first woman's over-statement convey? The possibilities are perhaps limited only by the power of our imaginations. If your "see" something in the text which I do not then you must adduce relevant evidence for what it is that you see. You might ask what constitutes relevant evidence. It would be evidence rooted in the text, in what the text "says" and not in what you would like it to say or what another person or tradition, no matter how exalted, believes to be in the text. That is, at any given moment the argument proceeds by referring to data in the text. Now, can reasonable people differ about what is in the text? It happens all the time. The important thing is not to be so locked into any given position or interpretation so as to be unable to be open to new evidence. In a celebrated text like the Eden story, which has generated a wide variety of interpretative positions, it is always wise to be aware of one's ignorance. In any case, here is what I "see." By adding the word "tough" the first woman is indicating that when one takes of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, death will be instantaneous. No one in the story, not the human couple, not the serpent, not God disputes that the Tree of Knowledge is a death-dealing tree. Clearly, in the aftermath of this story it is a given that all human beings who are born will die. The woman asserts, in effect, that one would have to be an idiot to take from the Tree of Knowledge. She is not, as such, questioning the serpent's contention that there is no food for thought in the Garden (or, to use another metaphor, nothing to get your teeth into) but that however little there is to do in the Garden, such existence is preferable to immediate dissolution.] Then the serpent said to the woman: 'You are not going to die [i.e., instantaneously] for God knows that on the very day you eat from it your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings who know the Good and the Bad. [The serpent's rejoinder speaks directly to the woman's fear of the Tree of Knowledge. In the first place, the serpent assures the woman that she will not die immediately and, more important, that the life-enhancing qualities of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge make it worth dying for. The fruit "opens" one's eyes in a god-like sense. Surely outside of Eden one's eyes will need to "open" in order to deal with a world as complex and variegated as life in Eden was simple and static. In Eden, apart from the choice to take of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, there simply were no choices of consequence. Outside of Eden, humankind's newly activated sexual capacities will function as an antidote to death. In Eden's world without death, procreation was not a possibility as it would have resulted in a world of standing room only. As we will see, the Tree of Life was not forbidden to the first humans because it was not a one time elixir of life but a tonic of rejuvenation. The choice facing the first human couple is in the form of a hard disjunction: either the Tree of Life or the Tree of Knowledge. The serpent's point is that life in Eden (with access to the Tree of Life) is a kind of living death. The dominant mood would be pervasive boredom. And whatever else might be ambiguous in the story, this much is clear: the woman agrees with the serpent. "listen" to her reaction.] When the woman saw that the Tree was good for eating and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the Tree was desirable as a source of wisdom she took from its fruit and ate and then she gave some to her man and he ate. [Thus does the first woman come to agree completely with the serpent. And, as we will see in 3:22-23, God confirms the accuracy of the serpent's position. Moreover, her reasons are made quite explicit: the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge resonates with both sensual and theoretical delight. Ironically, while she had thought that simply "touching" the tree would result in death, it turns out that merely looking at the fruit with appreciation gives one its power. For the first time the word "good," heretofore restricted in its usage to the character God, because part of the human lexicon. First man, who is not given one word of dialogue here, agrees completely with the woman's decision, especially since, we might suppose, the serpent's assertion that death would not be instantaneous has been borne out by the woman's continued existence.]
The above example should give the reader some idea of the manner in which I try to suffuse the flexibility of speech into the Quest correspondence manual. More than that, I want the reader to consider what the author of the Eden story achieves in this interchange between the first woman and the serpent. He has crafted an episode that, while extraordinarily laconic, is filled, figuratively speaking, with an elliptical density that forces reader to fill in these gaps. One can appreciate Hemingway's remark that he learned to write by reading the stories in Genesis. Specifically, Hemingway asserted that he learned the importance of deliberately leaving out precisely some of the most important elements of the story so as to actively engage the reader in "conversation." In the case of the episode from the Eden story, the reader is forced to ponder the following questions:
- What is the significance of the serpent's subtlety being congenital?
- Why, of all animals, did the author choose a serpent to deliver these crucial lines of dialogue?
- Why did the serpent approach the woman and not the man?
- Why did God place the fruit, so pleasing in appearance, of the Tree of Knowledge within reach?
The ability of this biblical context to continue to engage the most serious kinds of readers in "conversation" is witness enough to the writer's capacity to create characters who not only speak to each other but who, in a real way, "speak" to us. Plato's Socrates, who expressed deep reservations about writing, could surely have appreciated this biblical tale.
One more point. My correspondence courses have attracted both the best and worst of students. Some students appear to take correspondence courses as an end run around what they perceive to be a more difficult campus hurdle. They almost always are mistaken, I believe, because of the great difficulty many of today's students have in reading with care and writing with clarity.
There are also students, often nontraditional ones, who exhibit a depth of understanding that is breathtaking. One of the best students I have ever encountered in any setting, a housewife in Los Angeles, took the Holocaust course and displayed such intellectual acuity, curiosity, and integrity that I was left grasping for words of sufficient power to praise her. She wrote a paper on Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz which, were the author alive, I would have sent to him.
Were it not for my correspondence courses I never would have encountered this woman and others like her. In a small way, then, in spite of the multiple and multi-faceted problems of such courses, it is precisely the written word which allows these courses to transcend time and space. The reward can be great but one should not deny the risks. In the classroom one can do everything right (i.e., prepare assiduously and devote the amount of energy necessary to engage students in dialogue) and still fail. In the correspondence course, since it is so much more difficult to do things right, my failure rate is probably higher.
References
Hebrew Bible. New York: Hebrew Publishing Company. (The translations are by the author).
Maimonides, M. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated by S. Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
Plato. Phaedrus. Translation and Commentary by C.J. Rowe. Wiltshire, England: Aris and Phillips Ltd., 1986.
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