The Byzantine State

Each year, at the beginning of the week I teach my AP World History class about Byzantium I tell the following true story:

When I was a junior at St. Thomas I took a whole semester on the topic that we will cover here in one week. It was an upper level course attractive only to history majors so I was surprised when I walked in and there were 12 young men who I had never seen in any other course. I was even more surprised when, several minutes later, a priest walked in and the entire class stood and began to pray. What is a confused suburban Lutheran boy supposed to do in a situation like that? I jumped to my feet and tried to follow along.

The priest was the teacher and I was the only student in the class who was not a seminarian. Father Welzbacher was one of the smartest and most knowledgeable men I’ve even met. He had a deep, jowly voice and a jutting bald forehead that seemed to have grown with his learning. Educated at the University of Chicago, the only thing he ever brought with him to class was a worn leather Bible. He would lecture an hour and a half four days a week without a single note. Of course he was a hopeless academic and impatient with both youth and current events. On at least three occasions that I can remember him addressing a modern topic, turning more scarlet than his usual pink and bellowing righteously, “that is a sin against God!”

It is probably the hardest class I ever had. The lectures were dry and the tests, just two of them in the term, were brutal.

This is what we call, in the trade, an “anticipatory set”. It introduces students to a topic and gets their attention. For whatever reason, this one is gold and I usually have then in the palm of my hand for the rest of the hour. Whatever my reasons for telling it, I’ve been doing this long enough to understand that every student takes something different away.

Never was this more clear to me than after an e-mail I received from a parent on the first day of winter break, within weeks of my story to my class:

I just wanted to respond to a couple things going on at SES lately. There has been much talk here at home about evolution and all the issues that go with it. Kids are very impressionable and K*** has been militant about the theory and separation of Church and State. All fine and good. But kids seem to take it to another level and one of her friends decided she didn't believe in God anymore. That concerns me. Fortunately, K*** seems to have worked through all sides now and hopefully has rested on the co-existence level. I wanted to thank you for telling the class you were Lutheran. K*** respects you so much and everything you say she deems above all. Also fine and good. We are also Lutheran and I appreciate for K***'s sake that you shared that. We are political liberals but also strong ELCA people. They can co-exist!

No one is as militant about the separation of church and state as I am. As a result, when we teach the theory of evolution, I take great pains to keep my own beliefs as veiled as I can. The only place and only way I can remember revealing my Lutheran roots is in my introduction to Byzantium. Despite this parent saying some very nice things about me, there was no way I could reply that she was about as wrong as she could be. But I had to respond, didn’t I? So I crafted a response that is born as much in my history in customer service as it is in my long career in teaching:

Thanks for your message. I've long been amazed and humbled by the influence I have on students. I take it very seriously. My strategy is to be respectful, positive and patient. In the end, students are going to come to their own conclusions and their time with me represents only a small fraction of all the information they acquire and process. Most students, including K***, are far more the product of the conversations they have in their homes.

The e-mail gets even more interesting in the second paragraph, but I’m going to indulge the luxury of having very few readers by making it a New Year’s cliff hanger.