Lift Up Your Hearts!

When did "different" come to require a diagnosis?

The child who once was an energetic boy now has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.  The shy kid who likes math and science more than his classmates do is "on the autism spectrum."  We have conflated normal-defined-as-average with normal-defined-as-free-from-disease, and view with suspicion anyone who strays too far—in any direction—from the common herd.  It's a very contemporary diagnosis, too:  today's hyperactive child would likely have been an admired leader in Viking society.

We are learning, possibly too late, of the dangers of narrowing the once-vast diversity of life on our planet, especially in agriculture, where nearly every Thanksgiving dinner is dependent on a single breed of turkey—turkeys so stupid as to be unable to reproduce without human intervention—and where one variety-specific disease could wipe out nearly every existing banana plant.  I believe we have a similar problem in the human population, where for all we talk about the importance of diversity, we are identifying more and more people as abnormal—people who would in an earlier day have been considered merely quirky, or even honored for their differences.  We then attempt to "cure" them by squashing them into standardized boxes, the most common of which is school.

I officially gave up on the psychiatric profession's labels when I discovered hyperlexia:  "the precocious ability to read words without prior training in learning to read typically before the age of five."  If children aren't reading by the end of first grade, schools and parents begin to worry, and yet reading before kindergarten is a problem?  What's with that?

The proximate inspiration for this post was observing grandson Joseph, age three, as he is learning to speak.  His speech is much more echolalic than I am accustomed to, and because that is yet another psychiatric diagnosis, I was wondering if I should be concerned—though it's difficult even to think of a child who speaks two languages as being "behind" in speech.

Now that I'm where I can observe Joseph directly and interact with him I can laugh at any concerns, though I doubt that would stop the psychiatrists from labelling him.  His speech is definitely different from that of the average child his age, and so is the way he is figuring out language patterns.  But it's not bad; it's just different.  And fascinating.

Instead of repeating words and short phrases that he hears from other people, then gradually putting them together into longer and longer verbalizations, Joseph remembers, and repeats, entire sentences and long passages, such as the name of one of one of his favorite Frederic Church paintings:  Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford in 1636.  Really.  With such things as these as his basic language building blocks, it's not surprising that his approach to speech is unusual.  Instead of creating phrases of increasing complexity by a more additive method, he starts with a long sentence, takes it apart, and puts it back together.

Recently he and I were watching the people walk up and down a main street in Zermatt; more precisely, we were observing their dogs.  "Here comes a dog," I said, and Joseph repeated, "Here comes a dog."  Then he expanded with, "Here comes a white dog."  Later, he proclaimed, "Here comes another dog," and still later, "Here comes a little, white dog."  Same pattern, expanded from the inside out.

It is my totally unverifiable theory that Joseph started out thinking in large chunks of language.  For example, "put your shoes on" is associated, as an entire sentence, with the act of putting on his shoes.  Thus, whether describing his actions or asking for help, "put your shoes on" has been the phrase of choice (sometimes modified to "no put your shoes on").  Gradually, however, he is dissecting these chunks and discovering the recombinant possibilities.

It's fascinating to observe.  It's different.  It's not normal-defined-as-average.  But it's certainly not a disease.

Be warned:  as usual, when we get more grandchild time, you get more grandchild fare.  Here's a Joseph story from our trip to the Swiss Transport Museum in Luzern, about which I hope to report more later.

Near the space travel hall there is a wall of curved couch-like segments that kids love to climb on, over, and around.  A couple of somewhat older children—I'd say aged 10 or 11—were also there.  One of them, clearly revelling in some newly-acquired foreign vocabulary, flopped down on a curve and exclaimed, with a heavy accent, "What da f***?!"

Joseph, our tape-recorder child, promptly flopped himself down in imitation, and loudly proclaimed his own interpretation:  "What da fun?!"

I had a wonderful belated birthday celebration here in Switzerland, including a long, leisurely mother/daughter breakfast of pastries and free-ranging conversation at a local bakery while the guys and kids played at home.  Both Vivienne and Joseph made me birthday cards, all cute in an adorable 18-month- and three-year-old grandchild way.  Then again, one of Joseph's was cute in a decidedly not-three-year-old grandchild way.  He refused to write "Happy Birthday," or "I love you," or "Grandma," or even "Joseph."  But when Janet suggested that he could write numbers instead, he went to work with alacrity.  Here's one page of his unprompted, unscripted response:

July 14

Come, Christians, Join to Sing arr. Carlton R. Young

I'm sorry I can't find an example of anyone singing this arrangement, but the link will show you a sample of the sheet music.

July 21

O Great God by Bob Kauflin, arr. Joey Hoelscher

What I Saw In America by G. K. Chesterton (originally published 1922)

In 1921, G. K. Chesterton embarked on a lecture tour of the United States, and "everybody who goes to America for a short time is expected to write a book," so he did.  This is no travelogue, however, but a set of serious essays inspired by Chesterton's observations.

It was only after graduating from college that I began to have an appreciation for the study of history.  During my school years, the world was divided into "math/science people" and "English/history people." Being both good at math and an avid reader of science fiction, I was clearly one of the former.  The reasoning behind this idea that one should not be good at, nor even interested in, all of the above escapes me as much as why I allowed myself to be so labelled.

While I would still choose reading and mathematics as of all the school subjects the most important for a child to master "early and often," I'd now put history a close third.  I know of no other way to counter what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery."  It is far, far too easy for us to assume that progress only goes in one direction, that we have come "sooo far" from our predecessors socially as well as technologically.  Reading history—especially writings that were current at the time—is the best way I know to understand that the people of the past were human beings like us rather than incomprehensible, unenlightened savages.  To use an extreme example, it is easy to hate Adolph Hitler, almost as easy to revile the German people (and others) for not rebelling wholesale against the evil he brought on, and pathetically easy to assure ourselves that we would never let anything like that happen today.  But never in all my schooling did I experience a serious attempt to understand historical events and situations as they were seen at the time by intelligent, thoughtful, normal people.  We are appalled when Hitler speaks of the "Jewish problem," but don't make the effort to figure out what it was about the circumstances that made the Jews a particularly acceptable scapegoat.  We're taught, as I was in school, that white southerners were evil to resist having their children bussed across town to attend black schools; I never had an appreciation for the many non-racially-motivated reasons not to place your child on that sacrificial altar until I spoke with someone who had lived through it.  By no means do I subscribe to the theory that in the attacks of September 11, 2001 we "got what we deserved," but if we—or at least our policy analysts—had been in the habit of looking at ourselves and our actions through other eyes, we at least would not have been so surprised.  

What I Saw in America is a great antidote.  Chesterton is so insightful that it's easy to think of him as outside of his cultural and historical surroundings, but he was writing nearly a century ago.  Think for a minute of what the world was like during his 1921 American tour.  (Maybe you do this kind of thinking all the time, but it's new for me.)  The Civil War was closer to 1921 than the Korean War to 2013.  Arizona and New Mexico had only been states for nine years, and last of the Indian Wars were but a few years past.  Prohibition was new.  Harding was the newly-elected president.  The Panama Canal was a mere seven years old.  Chesterton's essays glow with the perspectives of both another culture (British) and another time.

I don't claim Chesterton is always easy to understand, especially for someone who knows little about America in that era, and who doesn't possess the everyday knowledge he expects to be common to his British audience.  But he's always worth reading, nonetheless.  Very thought-provoking, but alas, not further-post-provoking at this time.  Life calls.

This quotation from an interview with Anne Fine set me to thinking.  (H/T Stephan)

[I] hate the way that we have weeded out the things that I remember made my heart lift in primary school, and were transforming in my secondary education. I mean, we did so much singing when I was at school – folk songs, hymns, we sang everything. But now that seems to have gone, along with the language of the Book of Common Prayer and so much classic poetry. And school days are horrifically long if pretty well everything you are doing lacks colour and style, just for the sake of 'relevance' and 'accessibility'".

Music was a big part of my own elementary school, though not being British we missed out on the BCP.  Music lessons started in grade four (of six) for strings and in fifth for band instruments.  Chorus started at about the same time, and in two of the three schools I experienced, we were singing three-part harmony.  (Occasionally four, as in one school we had a set of older boy twins whose voices had mostly changed.)  These musical activities were optional, but what stands out most in my mind in contrast to today is that nearly every classroom had a piano, and many of the teachers could play it.  (So could some of the students, and we were allowed to use it some ourselves outside of class.)  We sang patriotic songs, folk songs, hymns, Negro spirituals, and children's songs.  And most of these we read out of music books.  Not that we were specifically taught much in the way of reading music, but we were expected to absorb basic skills simply by observing the relationship between the printed notes and what we sang.

I should note that these were not "music magnet schools" but ordinary public elementary schools in a small village/rural school district in the late 1950's and early 60's.

Our own children had a fantastic music teacher in elementary school, there's no doubt about that, and their musical education outside of school was far greater than mine, with the availability of private music lessons, youth orchestras, and excellent church choirs.  And being in the South, their high school chorus still sang the great Western choral music, which had already been all but banned in the schools we'd left behind in the North because it is largely church music.  So I'm not complaining about that.

But something great has been lost in general education if there's no longer daily singing in the classroom, children graduate knowing nothing of the music of the past and without the most basic music-reading skills, and adults would rather attend a concert or plug into an iPod than raise their own voices in song.

I don't think, based on the interview, that I would like Anne Fine's books.  But she's spot on in the quote.  "Relevance" and "accessibility" are two of the dirtiest words in the educationist's vocabulary.

What were your musical experiences in the early school years?  How have they affected your adult life?

I'd rather be with family than almost anywhere, but it's a pity that we only manage to spend Independence Day with the Greater Geneval Award Marching Band about every other year.  This is what we missed two days ago.

I've written more extensively about the band before, so I won't reiterate, but if you ever want to experience the true spirit of American Independence Day, visit Geneva, Florida on July 4th.

Is College Worth It? by William J. Bennett and David Wilezol (Thomas Nelson, 2013)

It is the best of times and the worst of times for education.  From preschool through higher education, there has been a steady decline in the quality of public education in at least the half-century I’ve been observing it.  If my father is to be believed—and he was always a very reliable source—it’s been declining for a lot longer than that.  He was frequently appalled at my generation’s ignorance of basic history, geography, and literature.  (He’d have said the same thing about basic arithmetic, but he was surrounded by engineers.)  It doesn’t take much observation to realize that today the average American’s grasp of those subjects makes me look brilliant.

At the same time—and my father would concur—in some fields, for some people, knowledge and ability has soared.  As a science fair judge, he was blown away by the scope and quality of the research done by high school students.  His own high school had offered no math beyond trigonometry, and it was rare among high schools to offer even that.  My high school offered only one Advanced Placement course—and that for seniors—whereas our children had at least a dozen to choose from, beginning as freshmen.  And yet only a few students were actually prepared to take advantage of the generous offerings:  back in fifth grade, I would have said the expectations of their teachers were well below those of my own, and far below those of my father’s.

Despite the best efforts of educators to mush us all into a sameness at any level—better all low than some higher than others—there has always been an upper class and a lower class when it comes to education, and there always will be.  What I’ve been noticing is that the highs are getting higher, the lows are getting lower, and the middle class is rapidly descending—much as is happening with economic measures.

I’m hoping the economic situation does not lead to revolution, but there’s a crisis and a revolution coming in education and I say, bring it on!

Except for Catholics, for whom parochial school was usually an option, and the rich, who had their exclusive, expensive private schools, for as long as I remember—and a long time before that—sending one’s children to the local public school was the assumed, unquestioned, default position.  About 40 years ago Protestant schools began to flourish as well, as more and more Christians found themselves less and less happy with the values being taught in the default schools.  Secular private schools arose to meet the needs of parents of the hippie generation who wanted a different approach to education for their children.  And then came homeschooling, for which there are nearly as many reasons as there are homeschoolers.  Even public schools got into the act, with magnet schools and some—though pitifully limited—choices offered to families.  What all these new options have in common is that more parents and students are now thinking about what’s best for their situations and making informed choices, even if they end up in the default position anyway.

Bennett—former U.S. Secretary of Education—and Wilezol wish to see the same thing happen at the level of higher education.  Just as our public schools have consistently consumed higher and higher sums of money for lower and lower return, so college tuition has risen explosively and yet left an unconscionable population of young people with staggering debt and no employment beyond what they could have found with just a high school diploma.  Everyone from parents to high school guidance counselors to college financial aid advisors to President Obama is urging high school students to make college the default option, and Bennett says this is a disaster waiting to happen—or rather having already begun.  College education, he says, is likely to be the next “bubble,” and when it bursts it will be as bad as the housing bubble.

If I were rating solely for the ideas presented in this book, it would receive five stars.  But the writing could have used a better editor—more than once the same story is presented twice—and the sheer quantity of numbers thrown about is overwhelming and wearying even for a math geek like me.  But even though I’m skeptical of some of Bennett’s numbers—if only because he sometimes uses the same statistic to bolster opposite points—there’s more than enough convincing evidence to prove his thesis.

Everyone considering attending (and/or paying for) college within the next 20 years should read this book.  Now.  What’s best about it is that the authors present facts, figures, philosophies, and scenarios but fall short of (better, rise higher than) answering the title’s question either yea or nay.  Whether or not college is “worth it” is a complex issue comprising such questions as, “for whom?” “for what purpose?”  “which college?” and “at what cost?”  The objective of Is College Worth It? is not to dismantle the higher education system in the United States, but to rethink it, above all encouraging students and their parents to put aside their prejudices, do their “due diligence,” and choose what is best for their particular situation, rather than simply taking the default. 

Reading the first section of the book, it is tempting to wish that Bennett was not so focused on the “return on investment” of a college education in purely financial terms.  Isn’t college all about growth and maturity and broadening one’s horizons?  Has someone who choses homemaking, motherhood, volunteer work, or working for less than his or her maximum potential income wasted a college education?  “Yes,” and “not at all,” the authors would say later on, but for many reasons the economic calculation is more relevant than ever before.  Students have been sold a bill of goods—by those who should know better—that going to college will guarantee them higher-paying jobs.  On average, this is true, but “average” includes doctors, lawyers, and petroleum engineers, which masks what happens to anthropology, religion, and women’s study majors, let alone the 40% of first-time freshmen who fail to graduate after six years of college.  College costs have skyrocketed, a fact cleverly hidden from students by college financial aid offices, which class as “aid” whopping loans that “don’t have to be paid until after you graduate.”  It’s astonishing how many college-bound teens have graduated from high school without realizing the effect on debt of compounding interest.  Then again, they’ve been lured by the siren song of, “it’s an investment; you’ll easily pay it off once you’re earning a paycheck."  Which is patently false for an increasingly worrisome segment of the population.  They’re defaulting, they’re mad, and all they can do is Occupy Whatever and whine that the world is unfair.  To be fair to them, it is our generation that let them think that college was a time for lavish living, wild parties, and little work—all on someone else’s dime $100,000.  Now the bill has come due, and they realize that much of it was on their tab after all.

How did we get to the point where college is where children go to become morally and financially wasted?  I suppose my generation—the ill-named flower children—deserve much of the blame for the moral degeneration.  But the proliferation of massive, crippling student loans is of more recent origin, and Bennett puts that at the combined feet of the Federal government and the colleges themselves.  Intentions were good, but you know the rest of that saying.  The dramatic increase in student loan money has fueled not only correspondingly increased tuition, but has led colleges (who have no stake in the loan repayment) to push loans on students who have no reasonable expectation of being able to pay them off.   In order not “to leave (Federal) money on the table,” colleges have every incentive to accept students who are not fit for college, and to lower academic standards so they bring in student aid dollars for as long as possible.  More sickening still is the use to which much of the increased tuition money—not to mention alumni donations—is being put:  the proliferation of obscure departments, enormous sports facilities, luxurious dormitories designed to wow prospective students (our own University of Central Florida is a recent case in point), and obscenely high salaries and benefits for a few super-star professors and administrators while more and more classes are being taught by poorly-paid adjunct professors with no benefits.

It’s a situation that’s bound to blow up sooner or later, and Bennett predicts (and perhaps hopes, for the sake of necessary if painful correction) it will be sooner.  It was a decade or so ago that a math professor friend prophesied that someday parents would wake up to what they were actually getting from their extravagant college outlay.  We’ve been a little slower on the uptake than he expected, but the time is coming.

There is some good news:    First, contrary to common belief, there are many good, well-paying jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree.

One study conducted by Georgetown University found that by 2018, nearly fourteen million jobs will require more than a high school education but less than a bachelor’s degree. … In 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics identified twenty jobs typically requiring less than a bachelor’s degree that had a median salary of $50,000 or more, far above the median annual wage of all professions of about $34,000.  These included air traffic controllers ($108,000), dental hygienists ($68,000), and geological and petroleum technicians ($54,000), jobs that won’t disappear anytime soon.  Many of the jobs on the list were in health care and technology, two fields repeatedly shown to be in the top echelon of fastest-growing economic sectors throughout the next decade.

What’s more, many of these are jobs that are now going to non-citizens, because too few Americans have the necessary skills.  Bennett’s strongest plea is the establishment of an apprenticeship/certification system to which students with the appropriate interest and ability can be directed in lieu of four-year college, or even earlier.  Instead of struggling, languishing, or partying through college, these students could be bringing home a respectable paycheck years before their age-mates graduate with massive debt, a room in their parents’ basement, and a job as a Starbucks barista. 

Best of all, thanks to the Internet, higher education is even now in the throes of a revolution similar to that which opened up pre-college education.  The monopoly claimed for centuries by the brick-and-mortar university model is becoming increasingly available for free—or at least for a whole lot less.  There are still some bugs to be worked out, but the handwriting is on the wall.  The following story is long, but worth the effort to type it in.

One of the men responsible for what may be an Athens-like renaissance in higher education is Sebastian Thrun, Google’s vice president and pioneer in artificial intelligence and robotics.  Known in science circles for his engineering feats—like Stanley, the self-driving car—Thrun is using his technological prowess to make quality higher education available to the world.

In 2011, while teaching a graduate-level artificial intelligence class at Stanford University, Thrun lamented that his course could reach only two hundred students in the suburbs of Palo Alto.  So, he decided to offer his own free online class, with the same homework, quizzes, and tests that he gives to Stanford students.  He announced the proposal with a single e-mail.  Before he knew it, he had a flood of takers. … “Usually I reach about 200 students and now I reach 160,000.  In my entire life in education I didn’t have as much impact on people as I had in those two months.”

By using online videos and educational resources, Thrun’s class was being accessed by students from all corners of the world.  In fact, the students translated the class for free from English into forty-four languages.

Until now, an overwhelming number of these students—many in developing countries and lacking standard education credentials—never would have had a chance at a Stanford-level education.  Yet their appetite for quality education was strong.  When Thrun began testing his new hoard of students, all of the students taking the class globally and at Stanford, the top 410 students were online students.  The 411^th top performer was a Stanford student.  “We just found over 400 people in the world who outperformed the top Stanford student,” Thrun said.

Realizing the potential at his fingertips, Thrun launched Udacity, an independent online education company that provides high-quality education at low cost to virtually everyone.  … There are no admissions offices, and anyone can sign up.  After the class, students can choose to certify their skills online or in one of Udacity’s 4,500 testing centers for a fee….

The classes are structured much like university classes, but instead of traditional types of lectures, all-star professors give video presentations that directly engage and challenge students.  Thrun is using technology not only to transform educational access and curricula but also teaching.  For the past thousand years, professors have been lecturing at students.  “[It’s] like trying to lose weight by watching a professor exercise,” quips Thrun.  Now he is leading a new charge—interactive, student-focused technology education. …

As you can imagine, Thrun’s enterprise has rattled the foundations of the education establishment.  His critics say that a Udacity certificate is worth nothing, and how can one know the true identity or scholastic work of a student on the free-for-all jungle that is the Internet?

[Thrun] said Udacity has already partnered with more than twenty companies that verify and accept the certificates of course completion.  Some are already hiring graduates of Udacity courses.  [I would add, who cares?  Hire the person for, say, a three-month probationary period.  Either he can do the work or he can’t.  If he can’t, let him go; if he can, what does a certificate matter?]

We asked Thrun if his enterprise and others like it will be the end of higher education as we know it—exclusive enclaves for a limited number of students at high tuitions.  “I think it’s the beginning of higher education,” Thrun replied.

Much of traditional American higher education prides itself on a false promotion of diversity, opportunity, and excellence.  But to our knowledge, with one class alone, Thrun has provided a level of diversity, opportunity, and academic rigor not seen before.  People from any country, any background, and any income level can receive an elite education at virtually no cost.  We have been talking about equal educational opportunity for years.  This may be its true advent.

Bennett still finds plenty of scenarios under which it is best to go to college.  If money is not an issue for you—or more likely, your parents—you are one of the few who can afford to choose your school and your major without regard for future earnings potential.   If you’re a very good student and can get into one of the elite universities, it’s probably worthwhile to take on some debt, because even though those who know assure me that the quality of education even at Harvard has declined considerably, the quality of the school’s name, its students, and the connections you will make there still translate into financial reward sufficient to enable you to repay your loans without undue hardship.  But if you’re really, really good, you may want to find yourself a way directly into the workforce—such as the son of some friends, who because of his expertise in a narrow field was offered a job straight out of high school making more money than most college graduates.  He lives a good life in California, loves his work, and has already advanced significantly in the field.  Despite his parents’ fears, it would have been foolish for him to waste four years getting a degree.

What about those who can’t afford college tuition, won’t be going to an elite school, and still want to go into a field that requires a four-year degree or higher?   Think about getting creative:  Pick up what credits you can through Advanced Placement, community college, or online classes, particularly those credits that are required but in which you have little interest, then transfer to a four-year school for the last year or so.  You’ll save yourself a lot of money, and it’s the junior and senior courses in which the interaction with professors and fellow-students is most important.  (Just be aware of credit-transfer policies.  Sometimes state universities are excellent, and required to accept community college credits.  Unfortunately, you’re likely to find your community college colleagues less inspiring than in high school, and the courses less rigorous, which is why it’s better to get credits in courses you don’t care much about.)  If you’re considering post-graduate education look for a less-expensive undergrad school that is still good enough to impress the school you want to give you your final degree.  And if you want to major in the fine arts, or gender studies, or something else with few job prospects, consider taking a second major, or otherwise acquiring skills to fall back on while you are awaiting a job in your dream field.

Or, you could do what we did, and what our children did:  choose parents whose own parents paid for their college educations, and who felt an obligation to pass on the blessing.  But I suspect even that is no longer sufficient.  Students today need to be much wiser, and more creative in their college choices than we were, and than our children were.  On the whole, that’s a good thing, a needed wake-up call.  Following  the default actions of the crowd is rarely advantageous.  Parents, too, need to consider that spending money on a child’s pre-college education (private school, high-quality homeschool materials, specialized camps, educational travel) may in the end be more valuable than saving extensively for college.  Note to parents:  that’s not a go-ahead to buy an expensive boat or golf club membership, unless your child happens to be Jacques Cousteau or Tiger Woods.  Note to students:   above all, get out of your heads the idea—no matter how widespread among your peers—that the purpose of college is to party with your friends.  (Unless it’s on your own—unborrowed—money; then, as you please.)   You can buy a LOT of beer with just one semester’s tuition payment.

The bottom line is:  go into the post-high school decision well-informed, well-prepared, with your eyes wide open.  A good place to begin is by slogging through Is College Worth It?

I've been told it's a peculiar affliction, but I've always enjoyed listening to beginning Suzuki music students.  There's a warm place in my heart for the Book 1 repertoire, both piano and violin.  I'm not a music teacher of any kind, but recently I had the privilege of introducing my six-year-old grandson to pre-Twinkle and Twinkle on the violin.  He has been taking piano lessons with his other grandmother for a year, and his mother laid the foundations for violin playing with him, so I was able to step in and reap the benefits of a prepared and eager student.

It was glorious.  I can't begin to describe how much fun it was.  He's very responsible with his half-sized violin, and the need to put it away carefully did not deter him in the least from getting it out several times a day, begging me to teach him something new.  He has a good ear and an observant eye, and catches on very quickly.

His excellent violin is a gift from his aunt—it was hers during her Suzuki days—and has only a first finger tape on the fingerboard, she having passed the beginning stages with a smaller size.  When it was time for him to learn a song involving the second and third fingers, I explained that he could use his ear to help him find the right finger placement, or I could put on some additional tapes.  He asked for the tapes.  While I was searching the house for appropriate materials, I suggested he listen to the piece and see what he could figure out on his own.  As I was returning with scissors and tape, I could hear him playing:  playing the whole phrase in perfect tune.

I put the tape away.  He's not always perfect by any means, but if the note is off he's learning to notice and make the correction.  I find this awesome.

I know most people aren't as enamored of beginning violin music as I am, but there are some relatives who might enjoy the following.  The first is a pre-Twinkle piece called See the Pretty Flowers, and the second is the first Twinkle variation.  The videos were made after he had practiced the pieces maybe half a dozen times.

The sad part is that for most of the year we're 1300 miles apart, so teaching him is a rare and special privilege.  It's a relay, and I've handed the baton back to his very capable (though very busy) mother.  Too bad his aunt—who is both a music teacher and a violinist—is almost three times as far away as I am.

When Life and Beliefs Collide:  How Knowing God Makes a Difference by Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan, 2001)

As I mentioned before, I first read When Life and Beliefs Collide in personal circumstances that led to a great reluctance to tackle any of the author’s excellent subsequent books.  Only a few years previously, we had left the church which remains to this day both our best and our worst church experience.  Because James’ husband was in the leadership of what had become (or revealed itself to be; I’m still not certain which) an oppressive, even abusive situation, I had assumed that he and his family were in agreement with and partially responsible for the oppression.  This was confirmed in my mind when I read glowing, positive comments about “our church” in When Life and Beliefs Collide.  Re-reading it now, I’m amazed at how effectively that blinded me to the strengths of the book, how bold it was, and indeed how much of a risk James took in writing it.

This is a “women’s book,” written as it was in a situation where women, no matter how qualified, did not teach men, but as theologian J. I. Packer said, “[This] book seems to me to be a must-read for Christian women and a you'd-better-read for Christian men, for it gets right so much that others have simply missed.”  The heart and soul of James’ work is the importance of theology in the lives of everyone:  male and female, young and old.  Don’t let the word scare you into thinking this is a dry, academic subject:  as James says on the masthead of her website, the moment the word “why” crosses your lips, you are doing theology.

James makes many excellent points, every single one of which I missed the first time because of the prejudice I brought to my reading.  Mighty scary, that.

As usual in my reviews, the following quotations are not meant to be a summary of the book as a whole, but are instead ones that struck me for one reason or another and which I want to remember.

Many Christian men seek wives who know far less than they do or who have little interest in theology. The assumption is that a woman who knows less will make a better wife.  Her ignorance will be an asset to the relationship, or as another woman put it, “The less a woman has in her head, the lighter she is for carrying.”  This assumption leads women to conclude that the godly thing to do is hold back for his sake.  And so the age-old game carries on—a woman keeps herself in check to make a man look good.  It happens all the time.

How differently the Bible portrays women.  There they are admired for their depth of theological wisdom and their strong convictions.  Women in the Bible did not need anyone to carry them.  Their theology strengthened them to get under the burden at hand.  Contrary to current fears, these wise women did not demean, weaken, or overthrow the men.  They empowered, strengthened, and urged them on to greater faithfulness and were better equipped to do so because of their grasp of God’s character and ways.

Far from diminishing her appeal, a woman’s interest in theology ought to be the first thing to catch a man’s eye.  A wife’s theology should be what a husband prizes most about her.  He may always enjoy her cooking and cherish her gentle ways, but in the intensity of battle, when adversity flattens him or he faces an insurmountable challenge, she is the soldier nearest him, and it is her theology that he will hear.

Glory is the uncovering of God’s character—the disclosure of who God is.

I love that last quote.  I haven't thought much about it yet, but if it's a reasonable description of what is meant when the Bible talks about God's glory, many Biblical passages suddenly make a lot more sense, particularly the ones that appear to show God as a petty tyrant, concerned most of all with making himself look good at others' expense.

[T]he Father’s glory—his reputation—is on the line in our race.  God’s glory cannot be separated from what he does, from his plan for you and for me.  God cannot be glorified if his goodness breaks down along the way.  If he fails to be good for a split second, or if even one runner crosses the finish line with a negative report of his faithfulness, then shame will displace glory.  The promise of God’s glory is the guarantee that no story will put God to shame; they all will only add to the mounting evidence of his great goodness.

The night Mary [of Bethany] went public with her theology [anointing Jesus for his burial], my search to find a great woman theologian ended.  In Mary’s ministry to Jesus, I found what I had been looking for and more.  She was, as I have argued, not simply a great woman theologian.  She was the first great New Testament theologian.  On the dark side of the cross, she was the first to understand the gospel.  She listened and believed, and so she was the only one who ministered to Jesus.

[W]e would do well to ponder some important issues raised by Mary’s actions that night. Her actions poke all sorts of holes in the notion that it is ungodly, unfeminine, insubordinate, and pushy for a woman to take the initiative.  Here we see Mary taking the initiative in public, on a theological matter, and in a gathering of male leaders.  What is more, she did it right in front of Jesus.  And to everyone’s astonishment, Jesus praised her for her actions.  Jesus taught a brand of theology that was living and active.  It did not lead Mary to withdraw into passivity or wait for a man to do the job; it led her to accept responsibility, step out, and take action where she saw a need.

This is not to suggest, however, that Mary’s actions leave room for women to be offensive, insensitive, or cavalier toward others.  Mary didn’t elbow her way into the room or behave disrespectfully toward the disciples, although they were in fact offended by her actions.  Her conduct was above reproach, filled with grace and graciousness.  The fruit of the Spirit must always govern how Christians interact with one another.  This underscores the importance of fixing our eyes on Jesus to know him and his ways, so we will reflect him when we step out.  Mary was not putting herself forward, fighting for herself, her rights, or her sex.  She was fighting for her Lord.

The point of Mary’s story is not … that women will do a better job of things than men but that in the body of Christ, men and women need each other.

When Mary sat at Jesus’ feet for the first time, the door to learning theology opened wide to women.  But when she knelt at his feet this last time, the door to ministry swung open for women too.  The need Mary sensed in Jesus wouldn’t have been answered by the sumptuous plate of food on the table before him.  Nor would it have been good enough for her to wait passively on the fringes, praying for one of the male disciples to notice what was needed and do something.  The Holy Spirit had opened her eyes to the need.  Jesus had trained her to be active and to contribute … and so she stepped out to anoint Jesus, not to shame anyone else or because there wasn’t a man who was willing to do it but because this job belonged to her. Mary offered pastoral ministry to Jesus, which he warmly and publicly accepted.  Jesus’ response to Mary’s critics gives women permission to think in wider categories for how we can minister to others.  On this momentous night, Mary set a precedent for us to follow.  A woman’s theology opens new spheres of spiritual ministry in which she can readily engage—spiritual ministry to other women, to children, and also to men.

Some military organizations ban women from their ranks.  But Jesus wants them in his.  Furthermore, female recruits, such as Mary, are not in the way or a liability to the troops, as some might fear.  Neither are they a disgrace to their sex.  In the trenches of the war zone, God’s army is stronger for its female theologians.  It is the crown of our womanhood, the essence of true femininity, the highest praise ever accorded a female that it should be said of any of us, she was “a brave and godly soldier in the army of the Lord.”

The war zone is no respecter of gender.  The inclusion of women in the ranks of God’s army is not to meet some affirmative action requirement or to ensure women receive the same treatment as the men.  The simple yet revolutionary reason for including women is because the army needs them.  God never intended for women to sit on the sidelines and await the outcome of the battle the men are fighting.  He meant for us to be theologically active and engaged right alongside the men on the front lines of the battle.

The Bible doesn’t teach a theology of women that applies only to a subset of the female population or fits only certain seasons of a woman’s life.  God’s calling for women applies to all of us from the cradle to the grave, whether we are single or married, divorced or widowed, childless or moms, infirm or able bodied.  Our conclusions (if they are true) should fit any woman’s life, under any circumstance, at any point in history, and at any location on the planet.  That is the nature of truth and the reason we need to stick together as we study.

[Adam and Eve’s] “bone of my bones” union meant no one shared a greater interest in his welfare or a deeper concern for his struggles.  She was his rib, formed to protect and defend his vital organs.  God did not create her to let her husband do the thinking while she flattered, cajoled, complied, and shored up his male ego.  Her mission was to build him up in God, to stand with him in truth and to oppose him whenever he veered onto wrong paths.

The greatest asset a woman brings to her marriage is not her beauty, her charm, her feminine wiles, or even her ability to bear a child.  It is her theology.  Every wife is her husband’s partner, pastor, spiritual counselor, motivational speaker, and his fellow soldier in the war zone.  With her eyes fixed on Jesus, she is less inclined to make her husband, herself, or her children the center of the universe.  With head and heart filled with the knowledge of God, she will find strength to enter the fray and wrestle with all of life’s problems alongside her husband.  As she lives in the light of God’s sovereign goodness, she will radiate hope and courage to him in the darkest hours.  With her feet firmly planted on God’s holy character, she will find boldness to stand up to her man when his disobedience is tarnishing God’s glory.  And her husband will only be the better for it.

When God raised the problem of Adam’s aloneness, he never said, “I am all you need.” Instead of giving Adam a lecture on contentment or a sermon on God’s sufficiency, God formed a woman—a tangible, flesh and blood human being—to come alongside and, in her own imperfect way, enter into his struggles.  He commissioned a person to stand in the gap and be there for the man.  But women aren’t somehow better suited to cope with aloneness than the man was.  Everyone needs an ezer ("strong helper")—especially women who are living in crisis.  The ezer’s ministry is not simply about the role of women in marriage.  It is something all Christians are called to do for one another.

There are plenty of times in my life that I look back on and hate to think what would have happened if someone hadn’t been there for me.  Often the friend who reached out didn’t have any experience with my particular struggle.  But that didn’t seem to stop them from trying or hinder them from getting through.  Elderly women were strong for me when I was a teenager and a young adult.  When I was single, my greatest support came from three women who had married in their teens.  Sometimes, the one who is an ezer for me is my daughter.  There’s no minimum age to do his work.

Fitness-conscious Americans should have little trouble grasping the implications of this biblical imagery for the church.  Health is a whole body concern that is jeopardized if any organ or limb is weak or not functioning properly.  The person who has one strong leg and one that is weak is not viewed as strong because they have a strong leg.  To the contrary, they are lame and in need of physical therapy to restore the weak leg to full strength. … When women are encouraged to take a passive role, the church becomes more like a stroke victim shuffling down the road, dragging a limp and lifeless leg along behind.

A woman’s ministry in the church (and the principle holds true for a man too) is defined in concentric circles, beginning with those nearest to her and moving out until the entire church is encompassed.  This principle isn’t taken from some book on ministry methods and guidelines but from the Scriptures that establish marriage and family as the primary ministries both for men and for women.  During certain phases in a woman’s life, her family may be her only ministry.  But who can overstate the importance of investing ourselves in our marriages and in the lives of our children?  Ministry to the family is kingdom work that edifies the body of Christ.  A mother rocks the next generation of the church in her arms, and one way or another, the church to come will feel the effects of her spiritual influence.  Her husband and her children will either draw strength from or be weakened by her efforts as a pastor, teacher, and counselor at home.

Sadly, in the church today, important ministries are overlooked or done poorly because the feminine perspective is missing.  Again the point is not that women have superior gifts to offer the church but that men and women need each other in the church and that we harm the church when we minister selectively rather than freely to anyone who needs our help.

Mary may have the privilege of anointing Jesus for his burial.  But Martha claims the honor of being the only woman in the Gospels to proclaim his true identity.  Martha’s confession ranks her as one of the few individuals who, before the resurrection, affirmed Jesus as the Son of God.  “Yes, Lord,” she tells him, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”

Those who know God find deeper meaning in the ordinary and extraordinary moments of their lives.  They know that he is in control and that he is good here and now, no matter what is happening.  Strange as it sounds, theology belongs in the kitchen every bit as much as it belongs in the pulpit or the seminary classroom, perhaps even more.

Priscilla Dunstan is a super-hearer with a photographic memory for sounds.  What this did for her when she became a mother could be a breakthrough for all newborns and the parents they are trying to train.  (Many thanks, Jon, for the link.)

Don't miss the latest post from the Occasional CEO.  I don't have time now to summarize it, so you'll have to read the whole thing, which you should anyway.  Here's a teaser:

I truly appreciate software.  I also love my cotton Hanes, sugar on my Grapenuts and enough gas to get to the beach this summer.  But, if there’s nothing else three centuries of sugar, cotton and oil have taught, it’s that first we own the advantaged commodity, and then it owns us.

For the sake of all else I have to do, I took the Front Porch Republic off my feed reader, but I still get, and read, their weekly updates.  Which means that sometimes ... often ... I get caught.  This time it was a piece by Anthony Esolen, who turns out to be the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, a book highly recommended to me but which I still haven't read, though I have requested that our library order it.  I hope they acquiesce, because reading just one of Esolen's essays made me long for more.  Hence less was accomplished this day than intended....

What I read in this week's FPR update was Play and No Play, which is but the latest in a series entitled Life Under Compulsion.  Of course I then had to read the whole series:

2012-10-08  Life Under Compulsion

2012-10-22  From Schoolhouse to School Bus

2012-11-06  The Billows Teaching Machine

2012-11-19  If Teachers Were Plumbers

2012-12-03  Human-Scale Tools and the Slavish Education State

2012-12-17  Curricular Mire

2012-12-31  Bad Universality

2013-01-21  The Dehumanities

2013-02-11  The Itch

2013-03-11  Music and the Itch

2013-05-13  Noise

2013-06-10  Play and No Play

It's not as if I want to suck up all your time, too—but it wouldn't be time wasted.  You can always quit after the first one....

You have to crawl before you can walk.

Except that you don't.  Some babies roll, some scoot on their bottoms, some never develop a nice, clean, cross-pattern crawl (or "creep" to use the technical term), and most of them still learn to walk.  Do they suffer later in life for the lack of crawling?  Officially, doctors no longer think so, and have removed crawling from the list of important childhood milestones.  Based on my own observations over a long life, and on much reading on the subject, I think they're wrong.  It is no less than hubris to decide that a normal part of human development is not important, and most systems we used to think vestigial—tonsils, for example—turn out to have a distinct purpose and function.  We can live without tonsils; many do, and for some their presence does more harm than good, but that doesn't mean we should excise them from healthy children, as was common half a century or so ago.  The burden of proof for crawling's importance should be on those who insist it isn't, not the other way around, and "we see no evidence that crawling matters" isn't good enough for me, especially since there are plenty of therapists who disagree.

But I'm no doctor, and I'm not going to take on the American Academy of Pediatrics here, not now.  What I view as blatantly irresponsible, both on the part of doctors and on that of writers like Nicholas Day, whose article deriding the importance of crawling hit our local paper recently, is the reason and the timing behind this change.

Since the implementation of the Back-to-Sleep campaign, in which parents are intensely pressured not to let their children sleep on their stomachs for fear they might die of SIDS, the age at which babies are meeting the customary developmental milestones has increased, and more and more children are skipping the crawling stage.  It's not that doctors don't notice:  as one said, after the mother fearfully confessed that her child had always slept on his tummy, "I knew that.  Look at his head shape!  Look at how advanced he is!  This is no back-sleeping baby."  But few dare not to push Back-to-Sleep.

Nor am I recommending tummy-sleeping here.  If I did, I'd hear immediately from my brother in the insurance business.  It's a personal, parental decision, best reached by careful research and deliberate decision, although I have known of babies who have made the decision themselves, by flatly refusing to sleep in any position other than prone.  Parents are only human.

Besides, I no longer think Back-to-Sleep is the chief culprit here, except insofar as it makes parents afraid to put their babies on their stomachs at any time.  This is not the first time doctors have insisted that there is a right way for babies to sleep:  When my eldest brother and I were born, it was important for us to be on our backs "so the baby won't smother."  By the time my next two siblings came around, tummy-sleeping was pushed, "so the baby won't spit up and choke."  None of us had any trouble learning to crawl.

Here's what I think the critical difference is:  although there were a few baby-entertainment devices back then—I had a bouncy seat and my brother an early Johnny-Jump-Up—we didn't spend a lot of time in them.  A baby on his tummy learning to crawl is a baby learning to entertain himself, and a self-entertaining baby is critical to a parent's sanity.  It takes a lot of work to learn to propel oneself forward to a toy one has accidentally pushed out of reach, but babies are hard workers when motivated.  Today, the goal seems to be to sell more baby equipment to make the job easier by keeping both the kid and the toys corralled, so they don't have to work (i.e. become frustrated and cry) to reach them.  That's easier for the parents, too, but in the same pernicious way that plunking children down in front of the television for entertainment also makes a parent's life easier—in the moment.

I won't even get into the amount of time children these days spend strapped into car seats, where they can barely move.  And we used to think the Native American habit of confining their babies to cradle boards was cruel.  Car seats, entertainment devices, strollers—sometimes all three wrapped into one so the baby doesn't even get freedom of motion in transfer—the proliferation of these is keeping our babies off the floor, and not crawling.

Bottom line:  American babies are not meeting the traditional developmental milestones because of lack of opportunity.  So what do we do about it?  We change the milestones.

New York State students are failing the math Regents exam?  We make the questions easier.

SAT scores have fallen?  We "re-center" them, to reflect the lowered average.

Florida schools can't meet the new standards?  We lower the standards.

High school students can't handle your tests?  Give them easy extra-credit work to pull up their grades.

America's children can't seem to leave the nest and support themselves, even after college?  Force their parents to pay for grad school, and to keep them on their own insurance policies until they're 26.

From birth through extended adolescence, we keep lowering the bar for our children.  Some day they may forgive us, but I wouldn't blame them if they don't.  It is good to recognize that "normal" is a range, and relax about minor variations in timetable and achievement.  It is appalling, however, to respond to a general decline by redefining normal as average, and lowering the bar.  Again.

Our children deserve a better future than we are preparing them for.

This was posted at Free-Range Kids this morning, and I can't resist sharing it.  I have no love for Allstate, but insurance companies know the risk/benefit business better than anyone else, and this is just great.