Notes from my Knapsack 8-27-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 8-27-2026
Jeff Gill

Education in modern American culture generally speaking
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In the 1990s, I taught early American history at Fairmont State in West Virginia for five years.

I was an adjunct, initially replacing a sudden death among the faculty of a coach who liked to teach at 8 am three times a week or once a week for three hours on Wednesday evening. So my office hours were in the college cafeteria after the early ones or before my 6 pm to 9 pm offering.

Spoiler alert: I was younger then. And learned some things I did not know. Which was well over three out of four conversations I would have were not about course material, it was about how to stay in school when all their family was saying “you’ve had your year, or two.” The biggest factor? Grandmas who said “it’s time to come home.”

Were economics a part of it? Sure. But not all. I made friends with a state senator who told me about how much grief he got from his mother and four brothers over going to college. It was doable for him, but they just thought it was stupid.

This is why universities have emphases for “First Gen” students; sometimes faculty and staff who were first generation to college in their family will have a special sticker on their door, to let today’s “First Gen” know there’s someone who gets it. I’m third gen, but I married a first gen. She’s taught me a few things about that passage.

But I also recall going into a vast hall at Purdue my freshman year (as we still called it in 1978). The person who spoke first said “look at the person on your left, look at the person on your right: only one of the three of you are graduating within the next four years.” Truth be told, he almost sounded proud of it. Turns out the state legislature had passed some years before a very popular requirement that they admit anyone from the top half of their high school’s graduating class. Purdue’s response was “okay, we have to take them, but we don’t have to keep them.” Do the math: that dean was telling me they had a 33% retention rate. A third left during Christmas break or after one year. Today, that would not fly; then, it was accepted.

And as I’ve told here before, but I keep coming back to, my grandfather retired as a school superintendent in 1968. The town homecoming parade made him grand marshal, Mom and I riding along with him. He got a plaque which I still have, and in presenting it they noted among his achievements was that he consistently graduated 50% of his students from high school.

When I referred to that years later, Mom said “that can’t be right, everyone I went to school with graduated.” But I have all the yearbooks from his years as principal and superintendent, and through the 40s and 50s: first or second grades had 75 to 80 kids, eighth grade graduation saw about 50 names, and her class like those before and after her ran in the mid- to high-20s. He worked his tail off through the 60s to get his earlier 35% graduation rate up to 50%.

Today, we would not accept what my Grandfather Walton was honored for. Our cultural expectations have changed. Where are we now? I’ll say more next time.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s worked in and around public education for many years, including campaigning for school levies. Tell him about cultural changes you’ve seen at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.  

Faith Works 8-21-2026

Faith Works 8-21-2026
Jeff Gill

Classic literature and scripture meet current events
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There’s still much to be said about “The Odyssey” as a literary classic.

The Iliad and the Odyssey, are a pair of Homeric narratives coming down to us from somewhere before 700 BC; they are stories of war. The Trojan War is a long siege and final destruction of a city variously known as Troas or Ilium, but ultimately people came to know the whole city-state simply as Troy. It was undefeated, until it was.

So the story of the conflict, across ten years, is the Iliad, and after the citadel of Ilus and city of Troas fall, the Odyssey is ten more years for Odysseus to make his way back home. If you saw “The Odyssey” the film does what many retellings do: it takes pieces out of both to make the story work for the current audience.

And this is where many of the complaints about Christopher Nolan’s version being “woke” I think miss the point. The Iliad and Odyssey have always been about going to war, and coming home. Each era has its own more immediate history around what it means for a community to send people off to war, how that affects those left behind, and what it means to return (and ask Agamemnon how that went).

We look at the impact and meaning of returning from searing experiences in our own particular way, using terms like PTSD and moral injury which did not exist a century ago, but these stories tell us how the lived experience was quite similar, whether you had bronze or aluminum, Greek fire or white phosphorus.

Written a few centuries later, the playwright Sophocles hearkens back to a Theban War, proposed as events centuries earlier than Troy. In his Theban Plays, a central character is Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, whose brothers die in a civil war. In the play that bears her name, the new ruler Creon decrees that those who fought him and died shall not be buried, on pain of death to any who do the corpses that honor. Antigone defies this command, casting earth on her beloved brother’s body, and will die herself… as will the ruler who set these cruel bonds.

Her story lives on in many forms, including a Twentieth Century opera, all tracing back to Sophocles writing in around 400 BC. In his time, he was trying to communicate, using history as his setting, something of the consequences that result from implacable hostility and lasting un-forgiveness. Sophocles wanted to tell a story about mercy and compassion by showing a world without them.

So it is fascinating to me as a Biblical preacher to look in Second Samuel, chapter 21, at events from around 1000 BC. It is the account of Saul’s concubine Rizpah, whose sons died in the tragic aftermath of the fall of the house of Saul, and the rise of David to the throne of Israel.

As executed lawbreakers, it was customary that after being hanged, the bodies would stay out in the open as a public warning. To bury them was a crime. We are told Rizpah on learning her two sons had been killed, went to their place of execution, “took sackcloth, and spread it on a rock for herself, from the beginning of harvest until rain fell on them from the heavens; she did not allow the birds of the air to come on the bodies by day, or the wild animals by night.”

On hearing of this mother’s act, King David is moved. He not only gives permission to Rizpah for the burial of her sons, he takes steps to see to the respectful committal of Saul and all of his sons and grandsons who had been killed in the recent past. Mercy begetting mercy.

Homer, Sophocles, Samuel: all ask us to put ourselves into these ancient stories, and learn lessons for how we should act today.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s interested in history, but you knew that. Tell him what parts of history intrigue you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.