TITLE: Burn All Your Sermons
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 16, 2014  2:11 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Marketers and bridge players have their Rules of Seven.
Teachers and preachers might, too, if they believe this
old saw:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Once in seven years I burn all my sermons;
 for it is a shame if I cannot write better
 sermons now than I did seven years ago.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I don't have many courses in which I lecture uninterrupted
for long periods of time.  Most of my courses are a mixture
of short lectures, student exercises, and other activities
that explore or build upon whatever we are studying.
Even when I have a set of materials I really like, which
have been successful for me and my students in the past, I
am forever reinventing them, tweaking and improving as we
move through the course.  This is in the same spirit as the
rule of seven: surely I can make something better since the
last time I taught the course.

Having a complete set of materials for a course to start
from can be a great comfort.  It can also be a straitjacket.
The high-level structure of a course design limits how we
think about the essential goals and topics of the course.
The low-level structure generally optimizes for specific
transitions and connections, which limits how easily we can
swap in new examples and exercises.

Even as an inveterate tinkerer, I occasionally desire to
break out of the straitjacket of old material and make a
fresh start.
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-09.html#e2011-09-08T20_19_25.htm">
   Burn it all</A>
and start over.  Freedom!  What I need to remember will come
back to me.

The adage quoted above tells us to do this regularly even if
we don't feel the urge.  The world changes around us.  Our
understanding grows.  Our skills as a writer and storyteller
grow.  We can do better.

Of course, starting over requires time.  It's a lot quicker
to prep a course by pulling a prepped course out of an old
directory of courses and cleaning it up around the edges.
When I decide to redesign a course from bottom up, I usually
have to set aside part of a summer to allow for long hours
writing from scratch.  This is a cost you have to take into
account any time you create a new course.

Being in computer science makes it easier to force ourselves
to start from scratch.  While many of the principles of CS
remain the same across decades, the practices and details of
the discipline change all the time.  And whatever we want to
say about timeless principles, the undergrads in my courses
care deeply about having some currency when they graduate.

In
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2006-08.html#e2006-08-31T17_12_04.htm">
   Fall 2006</A>,
I taught our intro course.  The course used Java, which was
the first language in our curriculum at that time.  Before
that, the last time I had taught the course, our first
language was Pascal.  I had to teach an entirely new course,
even though many of the principles of programming I wanted to
teach were the same.

I'm teaching our intro course again this fall for the first
time since 2006.  Python is the language of choice now.  I
suppose I could dress my old Java course in a Python suit, but
that would not serve my students well.  It also wouldn't do
justice to the important ideas of the course, or Python.  Add
to this that I am a different -- and I hope better -- teacher
and programmer now than I was eight years ago, and I have all
the reasons I need to design a new course.

So, I am getting busy.  Burn all the sermons.

Of course, we should approach the seven-year advice with some
caution.  The above passage is often attributed to theologian
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wesley">
   John Wesley</A>.
And indeed he did write it.  However, as is so often the case,
it has been taken out of context.  This is what Wesley actually
wrote in
<A HREF="http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/journal.vi.xviii.viii.html">
   his journal</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Tuesday, September 1.--I went to Tiverton.  I was musing here
 on what I heard a good man say long since--"Once in seven
 years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame if I cannot
 write better sermons now than I could seven years ago."
 Whatever others can do, I really cannot.  I cannot write a
 better sermon on the Good Steward than I did seven years ago;
 I cannot write a better on the Great Assize than I did twenty
 years ago; I cannot write a better on the Use of Money, than
 I did nearly thirty years ago; nay, I know not that I can
 write a better on the Circumcision of the Heart than I did
 five-and-forty years ago.  Perhaps, indeed, I may have read
 five or six hundred books more than I had then, and may know
 a little more history, or natural philosophy, than I did; but
 I am not sensible that this has made any essential addition
 to my knowledge in divinity.  Forty years ago I knew and
 preached every Christian doctrine which I preach now.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Note that Wesley attributes the passage to someone else -- and
then proceeds to deny its validity in his own preaching!  We
may choose to adopt the Rule of Seven in our teaching, but we
cannot do so with Wesley as our prophet.

I'll stick with my longstanding practice of building on proven
material when that seems best, and starting from scratch
whenever the freedom to tell a new story outweighs the value
of what has worked for me and my students in the past.
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