The Last Sermon (of yesterday’s 3)

The first two sermons were, in a sense, practice runs for the third sermon, which I’m more-or-less transcribing below.

Today’s Gospel lesson is John 16:12-15.

Jesus says in today’s Gospel lesson from John, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.  He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.  All that the Father has is mine. For this reason, I said that he will take what is mine, and declare it to you.”

This passage is the enemy of fundamentalists everywhere.  Because Jesus says explicitly to his disciples that he is not done giving his message to the world… only that his flight is called, he still has to get through the security and customs barriers, and it’s time to go.  But don’t worry, his associate is on his way, and he’s an even better teacher.

We can look at the first century AD world of Jesus, and get what he means.  The times that Jesus lived in were horrific.  Death claimed most men before the age of fifty.  Childbirth claimed most women before the age of thirty. Child mortality was two deaths for every hundred births, maybe even higher.  A brutal totalitarian government had controlled most of the Mediterranean world for the last century, and would rule for another three.  Jesus preached his message of love and forgiveness to an audience that had seen brutal repression at sword point for sixty years, had fought for and lost their freedom four times in two centuries.  Relationships between women and men were drastically unequal, and often violent.  Marriages were usually arranged while the happy pair were still in diapers, and marriage for love was out of the question.  In less than fifty years, a volcano would erupt and bury a city of thirty thousand people under molten rock, ash and mud.  There had been more or less constant war for four hundred years.

OF COURSE there is no way that they could handle all the truth.  The whole truth would kill them.  There’s electricity, and computers coming,  Jesus might say,  and mobile phones.  And cities of millions of people. And storms that can kill cities of millions of people.  And nuclear weapons, and cold wars.  And oil slicks the size of New England states. And New England states.  There are two continents beyond the World-Ringing Ocean, did you know that?

They didn’t have asylums in the first century AD.  Or psychotherapists. But they’d have found a way to keep Jesus sedated for that kind of talk — confined in his mother’s house, and out of sight and mind.

Nonetheless, this passage in the Gospel of John is Christianity’s escape clause from the insanity of fundamentalism.  Because Jesus explicitly argues that there is more truth than what he has time and inclination to reveal, and that some of it is so harsh and difficult that his audience is nowhere near ready to hear it.   Fortunately, the Spirit of truth is coming, and that Spirit will speak what it hears from Jesus, and Jesus will say to the Spirit of truth what he hears from dear old Dad.

In Christian doctrine, we say that the three persons of the Trinity are co-equal in power and ability, but with distributed responsibility.  It’s like a major project — and I say this to the engineers in the audience — where you need a chief designer, a chief marketing guru or project manager, and a hammer.  The designer’s job is to make the design so that it’s effective, and that’s God the Father originally.  The marketer’s job is to set a date for delivery, and see that the engineering schedule keeps up to deliver the product on time.  That’s God the Son, come into the world at the right time to deliver the right message to the right people.  And the hammer’s job is to deliver the… pardon the pun, Come-to-Jesus speech or the arm-twisting, that gets the product delivered on time.  The hammer delivers the hard truths that the designer and the marketer know, but feel uncomfortable about saying out loud.  That’s the Holy Spirit, who kicks us and tells us in no-nonsense terms, enough with the dawdle and delay, change is coming and there’s nothing to do about it but accept it.

And the nice thing about the Trinity is that all three are co-equal… any one of them can be the engineer, the marketer or the hammer. You can meet any of them, or all three, at any time.  And their messages sound remarkably the same, because they all talk to one another, all the time.

• God the Father, the creator, says he has have given us every green herb of the field, and the whole Earth is ours.  That’s a pretty powerful truth.  But there are side effects to that ownership:  the laws of nature as God has designed them insist on it.  So if we drill too deep into the earth, we may poison the ocean.  Be careful:  we already own the planet, but it’s the only one God’s going to give us.
• God the Son, the redeemer, says that we are empowered to make all kinds of choices in our personal lives, having to do with what we eat, what we say, and what we do.  But we should choose to do to others what we would want done to us.  And if we refuse to forgive others, it will come around to hurt us.  Moreover, there are people sick, in prison, lonely, upset, in trouble, and in harm’s way — if we don’t protect them, the damage is incalculable.
• And God the Holy Spirit, the giver of life, says Yeah, what they said.  Or else.

We recognize these truths every day.  Some of them are easy, and some of them are incredibly hard.  Our tradition, the Episcopal Church, is having deep, divisive fights between those who say we must remain the same as what Jesus taught two thousand years ago, and those who say we must move forward and accept new truths.  The Gulf of Mexico, and perhaps the whole world, is reeling from the damage caused by “a few short-cuts to profit”.  Hard truths can be ignored, but never forever.

When I was in the eighth grade, I had terrible difficulty with Algebra.  My father labored with me at the dining room table for most of the year, trying to teach me to understand math.  I didn’t get it.  While I loved the attention from him, I fought his instruction for so long, that my father hired me a tutor.  He was older than me, but younger than my dad, and with the tutor’s help I passed algebra by a hair’s breadth.

Many years later, I was able to assist another student who had difficulty with algebra, and I used the dimly remembered experiences with my tutor to do it.  About a year after that, I ran into my old tutor in the grocery store, and I thanked him for the assistance, all those years ago.  “I couldn’t do it with my father,” I told him.  “It had to be you.”

He laughed at me. “My math teacher in eighth grade left because she got pregnant.  Your dad was my long-term substitute teacher.  I taught you his way… it’s the only way I know to explain algebra.”

When the Father couldn’t reach the Son, he sent another comforter.

So don’t get caught up in who the messenger is, or whether you like the message or not.  The really important thing isn’t who says it. The important thing is whether it’s true. Because if it is true, the source of the message is God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.

Engineer, Project Manager, and Hammer.

And if the message is true?  It’s time to act on it.

Sermon

My religious boss, the head of the congregation where my school holds its services, has asked that I preach at all three services today. So I’ll be on at 8:00, 9:15 for school, and 10:15.

It’s Trinity Sunday, marking the Nicene Creed and God’s threefold nature. I had my sermon planned. I really did.

But I’ve just realized that this isn’t the sermon I’m going to preach. And if that were not bad enough… I’m going to preach three different sermons. Heaven help me.

The School & the Egregore

There’s a concept in magical group practice that’s relevant to discussions about schools and school design, which I’ve written about before.

That is the concept of the Egregore (or egregor).

For magicians, would-be magicians, charlatans and poseurs alike, the egregor is a critical part of any working group, be it a company or a coven of witches, or a schoolyard gang. It’s the energetic being that watches over the members of the group and their interactions with each other. And it’s the energetic governor of relationships between members. Egregor comes from a Russian interpretation of a Greek word meaning “Watcher”; they’re a class of angel, which is why the hymn speaks of “Ye watchers and ye holy ones, bright seraphs, cherub and thrones, raise the glad strain: Alleluia!” If guardian angels watch over individuals, egregores watch over groups of interrelationships, like the ones between members of a given law firm — and their clients; between members of a fencing team and their coach; and of course between the teachers, students and administrators of a school.

You knew we were going there the whole time, didn’t you?

In magical theory the Egregor is incredibly hard to challenge. It may be an invisible and intangible, but it has power nonetheless. If you were a member of a country club, it would be like going into the main dining room in a tshirt, shorts and sneakers when the dress code said jacket and tie. You wouldn’t be allowed to sit down, even if you were the club’s most important member, and your behavior would assure that you wouldn’t be the most important for long even if the staff DID let you sit down. The other guests would show their displeasure in ways both subtle and gross. At the other end of the spectrum, even the most jaded nightclub goer gets skeeved out by the older guy in shabby clothes who hangs outside the velvet rope trying to buy his way in while snapping photos of every half-dressed girl who goes in to dance.

These may not be the best examples. Teachers don’t often frequent nightclubs or country clubs.

Dress codes, behavior, activity, hierarchy, power sharing, membership, interactions between members, interactions with the outside world… The egregor watches over all these, and (again) in ways subtle and gross, reinforces the norms over and over again.

Moreover, it links up with the egregors of similar institutions, and these networks of association-angels moderate on the spiritual plane everything from how a foursome operates on a golf course to how the Country Club Association lobbies Congress.

What empowers egregors is the appearance of symbols. Put the same signs or images or icons in the same spaces and places; put the same word set and code of behaviors in place; put a particular set of ideas in the heads of the membership at any level, and the egregor appears. If the building has a square and compasses on the pediment, the Egregor of the Freemasons will have at least a passing interest in what happens in that building. If you man a certain kind of flagstaff at sunrise and sunset, or hang out the storm warning flags, the egregor of yacht clubs may come calling.

By now, the non-magical among my readers may be scoffing.

And yet, even from a non-magical point of view, isn’t it a little eerie how schools in Seattle look a lot like schools in Arkansas and very much like a school just around the corner from me here in Connecticut?

And isn’t it just a little bit freaky — just a little bit? — that all these institutions are so incredibly hard to CHANGE?

Food for thought.

I know lots of teachers who could be better

I recently watched my friend James work on a painting. He started by layering heavy gray paint onto the canvas, and then applying large swaths of black on top of that. Then he dropped a bunch of white and gray with smaller brushes on top of that, lightening and transforming his big black blobs. And then he added a few swatches of red.

The response to my post about “not knowing any incompetent teachers” surely struck a nerve. It’s been one of the most popular posts to argue with in the comments I’ve ever posted.

But I think my audience doesn’t really get what I think “incompetent” means, which is surprising given our profession. I mean, from a dictionary point of view, it means not having the skills to do something successfully. Legally it means not formally qualified to perform a given role. And medically, it means unable to perform its proper function.

But when it comes to teachers, we tend to lump together certain colleagues under the banner of “incompetent” when what we really mean is:

• Beaten down by the kids
• Beaten down by the administration
• Cowed by the parents
• Cowed by the students
• Cowed by our colleagues
• Old and exhausted
• Too close to retirement
• Insufficiently rigorous
• throwing insults or charges at colleagues
• Friendless in their department
• Weak in administering discipline
• Weak in classroom management
• Unfocused in giving lessons
• Unprepared to teach
• Too committed to trouble-making
• not a team player
• not clear on how to use technology in the classroom
• too wedded to a particular textbook or teaching style
• Financially criminal
• Criminally negligent
• Criminally sexual with minors

And we won’t mention what our students say about us. That would be impolite, and confusing, and gossipy — and therefore mean.

But none of these things are about incompetence. The last few may be villainous, as I wrote in a reply to one of my commenters. But evilness has nothing to do with capability (if only evilness guaranteed incompetence, as it usually does in movies, fiction and other fairy tales).

Maybe if we could identify WHAT it is that makes us label a particular colleague as “incompetent”, we could drag that colleague back toward best practices. But the point I wanted to make with part one of this pair of posts, I think, is made.

The media has painted our profession with a broad brush — that we allow incompetent non-professionals to hide in our midst. No doubt a lot of us are worried about being stained with that particular swab of paint.

But, as said at the beginning, I recently watched my friend James at work on a painting. He put in all those big black blobs, and then dropped a bunch of white and red onto it.

Clio the Dog, by James K., (on brushes for iPad)

The media has blobbed our profession in black… maybe it’s time that we started painting a more detailed portrait of what ‘incmpetent teachers’ are really doing, and be specific about which ones can be retrained, which ones can be retired early, and which ones we need to shuffle out of the profession.

That requires a lot of detailed analysis of what are teachers are doing: day by day, month by month. It requires collegial visitation, professional development, community, and communication.

But you can’t take a big black blob of paint and make it into a successful picture of a problem with a broad brush. Or a heavy hand. It’s time to do the detail work.

I don’t know any incompetent teachers

I don’t know any incompetent teachers.

You may scoff. “Of course not, Andrew. You’re in a wealthy boarding school. They wouldn’t tolerate incompetent teachers for very long.” And yes, I suppose that’s true. But I still don’t know any incompetent teachers.

And I bet that you don’t, either. I don’t care how impoverished or broken down your school is. I’d guess that there aren’t any genuinely incompetent teachers in that school of yours.

On my late-March trip down to DC with a group of kids, we shared the train with an exuberant group of middle schoolers from a mostly-black urban school in Hartford. They were awesome. It was clear that they’d worked hard to pull together enough cash to go on this trip to the capital; for most of them it was the farthest they’d been from home in their lives. They did it on a shoestring budget, much more lean than the $800 a kid I’d had to work with. Car washes, bake sales, incredible wrangling every step of the way.

On the way home, one or two teachers rounded up everyone and made them get out ire worksheets. They turned the train car into an impromptu classroom. And my students, my colleague and I listened in astonishment and mild horror as the teacher read out a list of around 100 questions about Washington, DC monuments, architecture, and trivia.

No questions about Congress, or the Supreme Court, or the presidency. It was all “how high is the Washington monument?” and “when were the cherry trees planted round the Tidal Basin?” my colleague and I listened to the groans and dismay as it became clear that this was a marathon trivia search for kids, and most of them had no idea what the answers were.

And of course you’re thinking, “that’s an incompetent teacher right there! She’s one! Exhibit A! Look with your eyes open, kid!”

Oh. But hold on.

This teacher was not one of the lead organizers, from what I understood. Yet she felt she needed to contribute something to this trip. She found a niche for herself. She found a website with a bunch of questions about DC, and she was going to quiz the kids on them on the train ride home. She was going to turn a crowded train car at the end of a weeklong field trip into a mobile classroom for an hour.

And the questions she picked? It turns out they were from the employment opportunities side of the website of a company that runs student tours of Washington, DC. These were the questions that guides were supposed to have the answers for at the tips of their tongues.

That’s standards-based education right there. Want a job as a DC tour guide? Know the city inside out from the level of trivia on up.

If I think through the teachers in my school, doing each and every one of them justice, and not just giving the pass to the ones I like, I have to admit that I respect them all. Some of them are passionate, others phlegmatic, others angry, others dull and dry. Some are lax, some are rigorous, some are easy-going, some are hard-asses. Some are misinformed, or mean, or blind to kids’ machinations or weaknesses, or poor disciplinarians.

But none of them — not one — is incompetent.

This is way too hard a job for the incompetent. They leave midyear. They bow out at the end of the year, with little fuss. They stick it out for a year or two and then vanish. A few really horrible ones abuse their students or have sex with them, get arrested and vanish after the media circus. And we who stay in the profession forget their names, forget their faces… forget that they were ever here.

We remember the ones who stick it out.

So no. I don’t know any incompetent teachers. And neither do you. If a reporter you trusted came to you, and insisted you provide her with a name, just one, only one, incompetent teacher that should be fired — I bet you can’t think of someone, anyone, who is so awful that they should pilloried on the front page of the local paper as the Worst Teacher In The World.

Gilgamesh, Backlash, and Deepwater Horizon

We were going over the Epic of Gilgamesh in one class today, and all the the arguments were about grades and work habits, and who had done what homework and who had gotten what grades, and we only have two weeks left including exam week, why are we doing this again?? It was almost impossible to get anything done, and I was practically shouting (not following Lemov’s advice at all) in order to be heard talking about the Deepwater Horizon accident and how it related to an ancient epic poem written about five thousand years ago.

In the other class, we were going over the Epic of Gilgamesh again, and they were being goofballs and angry about having to work.  And then I started talking about the Deepwater Horizon accident.

And the room became utterly silent.  I found myself talking clearly, calmly, outlining what I knew about the accident, how it happened, how things should have worked, and how they didn’t work in this case, and what the results of the accident were.  How the long-term effects might change the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic.  The kids in the second class asked two questions.  Three questions.  Four, tops.

Then I asked my big question:  ”How is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill like the story of Gilamesh and Enkidu going to kill Humbaba and taking his cedar forest from him?”

There was silence a moment.

I would have bet you all the plastic stuff made in China that the kid who answered wouldn’t have even tried, much less given the answer he did.  But I  was so proud.

“Every civilization needs resources to survive, and they’ve gone into nature to get them.  And mostly we’re successful at getting them.  But when fail, the consequences are huge.”

Another student added,

“Enkidu and Gilgamesh show that humans in partnership can kill almost anything, win through almost any difficulty.  But they know there’s a risk of destruction, of death, from not taking all the precautions they can.”

And another student completed the thought:

“The Deepwater Horizon accident is the same story as hunting Humbaba in the cedar forest. It’s going after resources, and encountering terrible monsters.”

This is the “dumb” class.  But as I keep telling them… they’re not dumb at all.  And they’re not.  They’re capable of seeing things that their ‘smarter’ colleagues don’t, because they’re committed to trying their hardest to do something hard here.  And as near as I can tell, they’ve got it.  This is the point…  Humbaba, with all seven of his glories on, is functionally equivalent to an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

How shall the likes of us go [there], my friend?
In order to safeguard the forest of cedars (or the Gulf of Mexico)
Enlil has appointed him to terrify the people,
Enlil has destined him seven fearsome glories.
That journey is not to be undertaken,
That creature is not to be looked upon.
Humbaba’s cry is the roar of a deluge,
His maw is fire, his breath is death.
He can hear rustling in the forest for sixty double-leagues.
(or,  he spreads across the Gulf for sixty double-leagues, and rides the Loop Current).
Who, even among the gods, could stand against him?
Besides, whosoever enters his forest (or his waters) is struck down by disease.

The kids are starting to get this.  I’m so excited, and I’m really excited that the so-called, allegedly-dumb kids got there first. They made the connection between ancient history, and present news.  It’s my hope that, since it was so hard-won, that they will never give it up again.

Library Magazines

The school librarian sent out a reminder today that it’s the time of year to consider renewing periodicals for another year. She asserted in her letter that many of the periodicals are never used.

Among the three on the chopping block are The New York Times (for around $400 a year), the Economist (about $120/year) and the New Scientist (about $125/year). A lot of the other titles are scientific or literary or news titles.

The proposed replacements include Teen Vogue, Wired, Popular Photography, Sound and Vision, and similar right-brain, teen-oriented titles.

I’m not opposed to the new titles, really. Some of them are substantive. Others are intended to appeal to our growing teen girl population.

But to me, it’s also an indication that books and magazines are fading from our school’s public consciousness. I used to photocopy two or three articles a week for my classes. Now I put the first few paragraphs of a story on the class wiki, and a link to the article on the website. It’s free, in a sense, to both school and library: the library isn’t paying for the subscription to the magazine and the school isn’t paying for the paper or the wear&tear on the photocopier.

But this isn’t a sustainable model, either. Without subscribers to the paper copies, the websites may cease to exist. A whole generation of kids are falling out of news-reading habits because the teachers used to the old means of gathering news don’t understand the new models. And the magazines are vanishing from the shelves.

Thirteen years ago when I started teaching, the ten eighth graders probably got fifteen or sixteen magazines a week— sports illustrated, mostly, but Newsweek and Time, and even the New Yorker (Once a sister subscribed her brother to Playgirl as vengeance for some Christmas-vacation practical joke).

Now there are none. And my experience of student awareness of the news is that it has gone away. It’s all Facebook and social media and Skype and cellphones. It’s a profound lack of curiosity about the world outside the extant-expanding social networks they’re forming.

I take some comfort in knowing that my own political, economic and technical awareness didn’t really start until High School. Maybe there’s still hope for my kids.

But I wonder if my old school will replace the magazine racks soon with a line of computer terminals.

The Perils of Real Sex-Ed

One of the joys/perils of working at a boarding school is that kids will ask you — often — for sex advice. It’s something that stirs their curiosity — and other body parts — quite frequently. And they’re still spouting bad information to each other, years and years after I learned that many of these playground adages were false. We do our teens in America a disservice by not providing good sexual information in a consistent way.

But when, as an adult, in a dormitory late at night, I get asked questions about sex… hooo boy. How does one balance one’s responsibilities to the parents and to the school — those want to be the ones who provide the information, and then don’t — with one’s responsibilities to the students (and their future sexual partners)?

At the beginning of the year, I tend to err on the side of caution, and remember my responsibilities to the school and parents more closely and carefully. As I learn the students’ attitudes and build a ‘case file’ on each of them, I tend to open up more, and provide snippets of data in an appropriate way. Once, for a very complex kid from a very repressive culture coming out as queer, I bought a book as a graduation present.

There has to be a better way.

As a school chaplain, I suppose I should be in favor of abstinence programs of various sorts. But I’m not, really. For one, from what I’ve seen, they substitute fear for information, and this is never a good thing. For another, they portray one very narrow and (frankly) theological point of view about sex. And finally, in their rush to talk about how wonderful marriage is, they neglect to teach the communications and intimacy skills that married couples need in order to stay married happily and successfully. Which (for better or worse) should include frank talk about sex.

That all is the easy part — saying it should be different. But when one kid asks a question, and you answer frankly… and then host of other kids start appearing to ask their questions… well.

I can’t imagine requiring anyone to accept that as part of their official job description.

First of Last Two Sermons: Pentecost

At my new job, I won’t be the chaplain of a school any more, so I won’t be preaching for a long while, until some other congregation decides I’m worth the hassle, or I get asked to visit. There will be two more sermons here, this week’s and next week’s, and then that’s all folks, for a good long while — possibly forever.

Today is Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter.  It’s called the feast of the tongues of flame, because crowns of fire, or light, or energy, settled on the heads of the disciples, and the crowd of witnesses heard the disciples speaking to them in all their native languages.  It’s the moment when the message of the Gospels gets opened to the world for the first time.  God empowers the followers of Jesus to speak in all the languages of humanity, and to spread the message of love and salvation to everyone.  My friend Rob Baldwin calls it the Miracle of the Ear — it’s not that the disciples are able to say Jesus’s message to a larger audience that’s so important; it’s that the audience chooses to listen, hear, and understand.

The Psalm this morning, number 104, is about the natural world, and how it depends on God’s presence and connection for its continued existence.  In the Acts of the Apostles, it’s the story of the tongues of flame.  And in the Gospel, it’s Jesus telling his disciples that the Father is in him, and he is in the Father.

If Christmas is Incarnation — Jesus coming into the world — and Easter is Ressurection — Jesus rising from the dead… then Pentecost is … connection.  The awareness God is the connecting force that binds everyone and everything together.  The physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson said it thus, “We are all connected, to each other biologically; to the Earth, chemically; to the rest of the universe atomically.”  By which he meant that the same atomic elements that make the stars, also make us.  The same molecules and particles, in roughly the same concentrations and proportions, make the rest of the planet beneath our feet.  The same DNA is in you, as is in me.

Remember that.  Remember that we are not just Easter and Christmas people, forever celebrating two unique events in history, when God came to live as a human being, and when God conquered death.  Remember that we are also people of the Pentecost.  The same tongue of flame that settled on the apostles is on you.   God has connected you to everything else around you, if you but have the ears and eyes to see it.

Gilgamesh: Results

The program I’ve got going now, using some of Doug Lemov’s techniques from his book Teach Like A Champion, is on the text of the first five tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and I have to say that it’s going pretty good.  I’m just worried about how to structure the examination.  Paul Bambrick-Santoyo talks about designing assessment questions in such a way that you know what it is that a wrong answer means.

I’ve noticed that a lot of my students got this question wrong in daily homework:

What ancient culture first told stories about Gilgamesh?

Our text tells us that the standard text came from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, but the original story comes from the Sumerians.  This is the answer I’m looking for; I want one of the answers to be the Sumerians. But now, if I’m making a multiple choice question out of this, I want one of the wrong answers to be the Assyrians — Ashurbanipal’s people.

Now my two choices look like this:

1. Sumerians
2. Assyrians

This is good as far as it goes.  But what data do I really need from my students?  Maybe the first thing I need to know is, do they confuse peoples and nationalities with individual historical figures? So then maybe my third choice should be this:

1. Sumerians
2. Assyrians
3. Ashurbanipalians

What should be my fourth choice?  Again, it depends on the question I’m trying to ask, and whether or not I want a casual answer that they can eliminate more easily, or do I intend to make it challenging.  Perhaps one question should be: Are they able to distinguish between persons, nationalities and place-names? Now my question ought to be:

1. Sumerians
2. Assyrians
3. Ashurbanipalians
4. Ninevehites

My colleague Greg pointed out that the Sumerians sounds like a reasonable name, as do the Assyrians.  Ashurbanipalians sounds almost plausible, but Ninevehites is rather a stretch.  If they sound the word out, Ni-ne-veh-ites, the word doesn’t really sound reasonable.  So it fails the test on two levels:  it’s a complex word to say or sound out, and the veh-ites at the end is pretty awkward; and it’s the name of a city they’ve heard and placed on a map, but we’ve never talked about them as a people, so they’ve never heard me say this word.  Nor Ashurbanipalians, for that matter.

So we have four possible answers, two of which are close but a stretch, and further discounted because I’ve never said them.  And then we have two real peoples, one of whom is much earlier than the other, and the correct answer.  And the other of whom were the final guardians of the text.

And the answers to these questions will help me understand not merely whether they know the right answer or not, but also which way they’ve misunderstood.

I think this counts as a pretty good multiple choice question.  I wish it hadn’t taken me almost 500 words to figure out why.