Who? what? where? when? how? why?

For the penultimate session of this year's "Theorizing Religion," I sprung a quiz on the class. I assured students it was for their own use, "diagnostic." If they got most of the questions right, congratulations: they were entitled to a feeling of satisfaction. If instead they found they hadn't retained much (which I expected to be the case), I felt I owed it to them to confront them with this as something to work on in future classes - and maybe give some key points one more try. I also wanted to make a final plea for the value of learning your classmates' names.

So they had half an hour to take a stab at these questions, and we spent the next hour going through them, a fun way to review the course. The final question, about students' names, became a big bonding experience (cheaters!), just in time for the end of our time together. I'd been mystified that these students - 14-16 most class sessions - clearly enjoyed each other's company, listening closely to each other, but had never bothered to learn anyone's name. (I make a point of always addressing all by name.) An anomaly, a trend, or perhaps nothing new?

On our way to the joyful final recognition scene, I confirmed the less joyful reality that these students were good with ideas but not with facts. Most had no clue what sequence our texts were written in (one thought by chronological order I meant the sequence in which we read them), so no sense of who could be responding to whom. Most lacked also a sense of the distinct disciplinary approaches we had been canvassing, so little sense of what conversations our texts sought to participate in. Despite my insistence that we begin each discussions with the old journalist's who-what-where-when-how-why, only one did what most students did once upon a time, googling authors before reading them. I was clearly unsuccessful in persuading them (not for want of trying) that you can't really begin to understand a text without knowing who wrote it when, for whom, why and how. Their classmates weren't the only ones they listened to without trying to get to know.

Things I'll have to make a point of making more of a point of next time!