Christian Higher Education in the Baptist Tradition
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 62, No. 2 – Spring 2020
Editor: David S. Dockery
By Christina Bieber Lake. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020, 240 pp., $22.00 paperback
Christina Bieber Lake is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College, a Flannery O’Connor scholar, and a seasoned academic who has written a volume that deserves to be read annually by anyone who teaches in a formal academic setting. Dr. Bieber, as her students call her, is witty, wise, and experienced. She knows the agonies, ecstasies, and grind of the teaching life.
In The Flourishing Teacher, the author saves readers the pain of discovering for themselves twelve “Things About the Scholarly Life I Learned the Hard Way.” To do so, she takes readers on a journey of the academic year from “the month-that-shall-not-be-named” (August) to the end of the following summer. Bieber Lake is no Pollyanna. She admits that the academic year is a long slog, and that journey is sustained by passion. “Most of us,” she affirms, “went to graduate school because we had a deep passion for our discipline, a passion that typically translates into a desire to share that passion with other learners. We became teachers because we wanted to profess our love and persuade others to join us in it” (p. 7).
The evidence for her passion for students, her subject matter, and her craft surfaces on every page. For example, every year she begins her preparation for the “spiritual marathon” that is the academic year by retreating to some beautiful destination with only her planner, Sacred Ordinary Days: A Liturgical Day Planner, and a roster of her students for the upcoming semester. There she prays for her students because she realizes that “Although we are not primarily ministers of the gospel in our classes, we must never lose sight of the fact that it is souls that we are caring for when we teach” (p. 10).
There are real gems in this book. For instance, Bieber Lake has helpful tips about the first day of class. Instead of the blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada of reading the syllabus to the class, she offers alternatives that help form the class into a learning community from the beginning. Another example is her life-saving counsel about how to say “no,” which, if heeded, will preserve faculty members from that perennial temptation to overextend themselves.
Bieber Lake is brutally honest about the life of an academic. In “The Cruelest Month” (April) of the year, she helps us prepare for the Lenten season and the realization of our brokenness and need for repentance. And surely even our best teaching deserves repentance. It is during the chapter for that month that she offers her favorite examples of how to get out of teaching ruts. Some of them are grand gestures like decorating the classroom and giving a highly dramatized lecture. Others are less grand, but potentially as effective, such as turning off the lights in the classroom and reading a poem by flashlight and asking students to make their comments about the poem in the darkness. She has a “soul shelf” in her personal library, where she keeps those volumes that help to sustain her through the journey. Browsing that shelf with her during the academic year is worth the price of the volume.
Bieber Lake is the academic daughter of her estimable mentor at Emory, the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Those who knew “Miss Betsey” and her work will recognize the legacy of intellect, wit, and snarkiness in the work of Bieber Lake. And since snark is the lingua franca of the academy, this vernacular will be welcomed by readers of The Flourishing Teacher. But don’t be fooled by the acerbic style. This is a profound work of reflection, advice, and wisdom from someone who has worked very hard to hone her craft and will help sagacious readers do the same.
Read this book from cover to cover when you get it. Then read it month by month the first year. Then read it once a year. It’s that good!
