Lift Up Your Hearts!

 Sunday, September 21, 2014

Give to the Winds Your Fears (words by Paul Gerhardt, translated by John Wesley; music by Joseph M. Martin; Shawnee Press 35029616)

Porter graciously waited in the airport so I could sing this one with the choir.  It was a special day because we had a guest cellist to play with us.  (You can hear the cello part with the anthem, though not our performance, at the link above).  The anthem itself was notable for a couple of reasons.  First, the words (albeit in translation) are by Paul Gerhardt, a German hymn writer I've come to appreciate thanks to Stephan's efforts.  Second, although I'd never heard of this hymn before, I encountered it again in a Christianity Today article on the temperance movement.  (I've included the link, but you'll only just be able to start reading this one unless you're a subscriber.)

Many temperance advocates also promoted voting rights for women.  After all, women were more likely than men to vote to shutter the saloons that were destroying their homes.  Carrie Nation and her hatchet may be the most famous image, but the 1873-74 Woman's Crusade—which led to the founding of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)—is a more accurate representation, with its crowds of nonviolent protesters linked arm-in-arm before saloon doors.  A later WCTU historian described the crusade in Ohio:

Walking two by two, the smaller ones in the front and the taller coming after, they sang more or less confidently, "Give to the Winds Thy Fears," that heartening reassurance of Divine protection now known to every WCTU member as the Crusade Hymn.  Every day they visited the saloons and the drug stores where liquor was sold.  They prayed on sawdust floors or, being denied entrance, knelt on snowy pavements before the doorways, until almost all the sellers capitulated.

Here's something else I learned from the article:

There are a number of misconceptions about the 19th-century temperance movement.  The first, which was shared by temperance activists themselves, is that it didn't work.  In fact, it did.  American drinking dropped dramatically after the temperance movement took off in the 1830s.  Americans in 1830 were drinking 7.1 gallons of absolute alcohol per year per person.  ...  By 1835, they were down to 5.0 gallons; by 1840, 3.1.  By 1910, shortly before Prohibition, this had dropped to 2.6 gallons; post-Prohibition, it was down to 1.2.... Even after every moral loosening the 20th century wrought, from flappers to the counter-culture movement, by the year 2000, the average American drank less than a gallon of absolute alcohol.  That's more than six gallons less a year than their ancestors had about 200 years before.

Your Life Calling:  Reimagining the Rest of Your Life by Jane Pauley (Simon & Schuster, 2014)

This is why we have friends.  I would never have picked out this book to read.  For one thing, I tend to avoid books by or about celebrities.  For another, I in no way can identify with people who, when their children go to school, or leave home, or when they turn 50, or retire, say, "What on earth am I going to do with the rest of my life?"  I don't need a new life; I have enough planned in the one I have now to see me through more productive years than I can possibly have left.

But a friend highly recommended Pauley's book, and I'll admit that it kept my interest even though I didn't buy into its focus.  The Penzey's fans among my readers will best understand the effect that Your Life Calling had on me.  It was very much like reading a Penzey's catalog, where I find myself repeatedly annoyed by the self-aggrandizement, the leftist slant, and the in-your-face distain for several of my strongly-held principles—yet I keep reading, because the stories are interesting and inspiring.

Pauley premise is that our generation is the first to have the long lifespan and the leisure to "reinvent" ourselves, possibly several times as we go through life.  Today's young people are already doing it ("what we call reinvention is just 'the churn' for them").  In fact, for them it may be more of a necessity, given the pace at which technology (and thus the job market) is now changing.  (The last sentence is my analysis, not Pauley's.)  But it's new for us.

You may be surprised to know that people over fifty-five represent the largest age group of owners of new business start-ups.  At an age when our own parents and grandparents expected to wind things down, people are getting a second wind.

The Stanford Longevity expert, Laura Carstensen, notes that withour new vitality come some pretty big questions.  She says, "Those of us living today have been handed a remarkable gift with no strings attached—an extra thirty years of life for the average person.  Now that gift is forcing us to answer a uniquely twenty-first-century question—what are we going to do with our supersized lives?"

Permit me an exasperated wail at yet another expert who misunderstands the term "life expectancy."  But aside from that, it is true that our generation finds itself thinking in terms of second, often radically different, careers more than previous generations.  One only needs to listen to someone of my parents' generation talk to realize that the men, at least, defined themselves very much by their careers.  Of my generation this is less true, mostly I think because we were betrayed by the "be loyal to your company and your company will be loyal to you" compact.  What is "me" is not my employment, and therefore I am free to move on to something entirely different.

That I get, as evidenced by my need to elaborate on it.  I also appreciated Pauley's description of Imposter Syndrome:

I'll never forget how [David Letterman] described his television career.  He said, "It's like robbing 7-Elevens.  The money's good, but sooner or later you know you're gonna get caught." This was a perfect depiction of a popular psychological term—that wouldn't be coined for another two years—"imposter syndrome."  There was a lot of that going around.

Apparently a lot of people feel that way.  The most amazing choir I've even been in was the work of an extremely gifted and experienced musician who couldn't get over the feeling of having to prove that she was not an "imposter."  I've met great teachers who deny that they do anything more than keep one step ahead of their students.  I myself received A after A after A in school without ever being convinced I understood any of the material I was supposedly learning.  I think there's more to it than Pauley's suggestion that maybe we're all in the wrong career, but the following point is certainly true:

You've got to have the goods to get that promotion, to get through medical school, to be the successful job applicant.  But a successful career isn't necessarily a happy one.  And a proficiency is not the same as a passion.

Most young people I know would say amen to this one, a quote from Paul Giannone, a successful Information Technology professional suffering from Imposter Syndrome, who reinvented himself as a New York City pizza restaurateur:

I just thought that you go out, you pick a career, you work, eventually you build up a retirement fund, you retire, and you go do something you like.  I wish they had told me that you need to find something that you like and do it right now for the rest of your life, because that's what everybody should do—find your passion and do it because you're gonna be good at it."

Pauley adds, "Sometimes it takes the better part of a lifetime to find out what your passion is, but in my observation, if you do, it might be the best part of your life."

Later, Pauley says of Paul,

If you're ever in Brooklyn, drop by Paulie Gee's for some great pizza!  Paul Giannone is always there.  I asked him how many days a week he worked.  "Seven," he said.  Then quickly blurted out, "No!  I work no days a week.  I haven't worked in over two years.  I really haven't.  When I come in here I'm not working."

Your Life Calling is full of stories like this, of people who have taken on second, often radically different careers.  I find in the collection and interesting and contradictory charitable selfishness, or selfish charity.  Seeking more meaningful use of their time, several of the "reinventees" went into fields, from teaching to social work to drilling wells in Africa, where they could have a direct, positive impact on others.  At the same time, there's a disturbing thread of hyper-individualism in most of the stories:  My children are out of the house, so it's my turn; I'm going to make my own life.  I've just been divorced; now I'll do what I want to do.  Worse still:  My husband won't accommodate my new life, so I'll ditch my family and go my own way.  Not all the stories are like this—one woman's reimagining was going into business with her son.  But I found so many of the stories sad, even as they were inspiring.  There's too much self-centeredness, too much divorce, too much of the attitude that you have a small number of children and get them quickly out of the way so you can live your real life.  As if family responsibilities end there.  Haven't these people heard of grandchildren?  :)

Still, as I said the stories are both interesting and inspirational.  I'm grateful for my friend's recommendation.  And I've tried not to hold against the author the fact that the otherwise-rational-sounding husband Garry she keeps talking about is actually Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip Doonesbury.

It was good to sing this one again.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

To Love Our God (Mark Hayes, Hinshaw Music HMC1576)

Forget Area 51, the NSA's invasive civilian spying, and anything else you may think the U.S. government has tried to keep up its sleeves.  Edward Snowden has nothing on me.  I will now reveal to you the government's greatest secret:

The United States Post Office has discovered instantaneous transport!

Here at Lift Up Your Hearts! we have obtained a copy of the official government record of a small package sent between the United States and Switzerland.  (Not to CERN, but to what our sources indicate may be the home laboratory of one of its top up-and-coming scientists.)

There it is, ladies and gentlemen:  the Secret of the Century is out.  And you thought only quantum particles could be in two places at the same time.

Next up for our intrepid investigative reporters?  Digging into the dirty secret of why it still takes four days to travel the 250 miles from Altamonte Springs to Miami.

"Great goddess Athena, great god Apollo, we ask that you impart wisdom in these proceedings today," Jennifer Zarpentine, a Wiccan priestess, prayed at the town board meeting of Greece, New York, in April 2008.

"Help the board to make the right, informed decisions that will benefit the greater good of this community. This we ask of you." As board members contin­ued to bow their heads in prayer, several other meeting attendees responded with the pagan version of amen, "So mote it be."

Thus begins a Christianity Today editorial from a couple of months ago (subtitled "Why we pray before public meetings—and let pagans do the same").  It's a serious article, which is no doubt why the location of this town meeting passes without further comment.  To the writer, I suppose, it might as well have been Chili, or Brighton, or any of the other suburbs of Rochester, New York.  Being from that part of the state, however, and under no compulsion to be serious, my own first reaction was that nothing could be more appropriate in Greece than prayers to Athena and Apollo.

The Brainy Bunch by Kip and Mona Lisa Harding (Gallery Books, 2014)

Facebook, like smartphones, can enslave or empower.  Or both at once.  At the moment I'm feeling grateful to Facebook, and the friend who posted a link that eventually led me to this Today Show feature about the Harding family and their book.

As most of you know, education has long been my passion, particularly the education of young children, and most especially my belief that most children can learn and do so very much more than we give them the opportunity to achieve.  It will thus come as no surprise that when I heard of a family where seven (so far!) of the children had gone to to college by the time they were twelve years old, I immediately ordered the book from our library, and finished reading it the day after I picked it up.  If read with an open mind, this is a book that can blow away a number of stereotypes and presuppositions, and not just about education.

Although a large number of homeschoolers are Christians, including many who have spectacular records both academically and socially, as the movement has grown there have slso been examples of less-than-stellar achievement, especially in academics.  It is unfortunate that when many people think of "Christian homeschoolers," it is the latter example that comes to mind.  The Harding family is a stunning counterexample, especially since The Brainy Bunch bristles with buzzwords that set off alarm bells:  Mary Pride, A Full Quiver, Josh Harris, early marriage, Michael and Debi Pearl (at least they label the Pearls' book "a bit legalistic"), creationism, the Duggar Family, and others that might send some running for the hills.  But hang on—they also mention John Taylor Gatto, Raymond and Dorothy Moore, unschooling, and the Colfaxes, quite on the opposite end of the spectrum (inexplicably leaving out John Holt, however).  Mona Lisa and Kip sound like people after my own heart, able to take the best from many sources and leave aside what doesn't work for them.  In any case, the family deals a clean blow to many prejudices, including that of the college student who once told them, "Children in big families have low IQs."

The Hardings insist, however, that their IQs are strictly average; their children are not geniuses.  This bothered me at first, as it seemed almost a reverse boast, as if there were something wrong with being smart.  But I think I know why they make this point, and it's important.  There are a surprising number of people who have gone to college at an extremely young age (here's a list of the ten youngest), but they are generally prodigies with super-high IQs and extraordinary skills.  This does nothing to encourage most families to believe that early college entrance is possible for their children.  Or desirable.  Despite its title, The Brainy Bunch shows that this higher-level work is well within the grasp of the average student, and why this is a good idea.

Some might even say the Hardings started out as a below-average family, or at least one with several strikes against it when it came to predicting their children's academic success.  Kip and Mona Lisa were high school sweethearts who married in their teens.  After high school, he went into the military and she started having babies.  Lots of babies.  Their life was not easy, requiring many moves, and times of great financial hardship.  And yet here they are, with their children not only college graduates but successful at a young age in many fields:  engineering, architecture, medicine, music, and more.

So how do they do it?  The book may seem short on specific practical advice, because it's a lifestyle, not a curriculum.  Here, however, is a brief timeline of their approach:

• Around age four we start to teach reading.
• By age six we start teaching borrowing, multiplying, writing short essays, and encouraging independent reading.
• By age eight we start algebra, reading real chapter books, and having the children do more writing on their own.
• By age ten they are figuring out what they really believe and why.  They continue along in math as they add in reviewing for the SAT/ACT.
• Somewhere around age eleven, they have mastered the five-paragraph essay and can produce a decent research paper.
• By age twelve (sometimes sooner) they have finished lots of high school-level books on many general subjects to fill in their transcripts.  With that and enough emotional intelligence, they should be ready for a college class or two.

Sixty-three sticky notes festoon the book, marking places I thought I might quote in this review, but I'll content myself with a few observations.  Okay, several observations.

• I've read the complaint that the book is not well written. I see the point, but I've read a lot of popular books that are much worse, trust me. I would say it's not so much that it's poorly written as that the writing reminds me of blog-writing. It's not polished. But it's not bad; rather it's like the difference between folk music and a Bach fugue. Read it for what it is, and enjoy it.
• Most people's first reaction to this idea is, "Why not let your kids be kids?"  It's a legitimate question, but as the Hardings point out, in many ways their children are allowed to be kids longer than most, since they are immersed in a loving family and don't have to face the pressures to "grow up" prematurely that are present in school.
• They make sure their children learn about creationism, but also about evolution.  They encourage independent thinking.
• They are careful that their children read good books, and partake of quality television.  They realize that the Internet can be a dangerous place, but liken it to a hot stove:  it's a powerful tool that must be used wisely.  ("The Internet wants to reveal all of Victoria's Secrets to your child.  Teach them the real secret to success in life is to overcome temptation.")  Once a child can use the Internet, the sky's the limit for learning, and parents can respond to questions with, "Go look it up and share with us what you learn."
• The book never mentions Project-Based Homeschooling, but there is a similarity in their methods.  With the Hardings, however, it appears to be much less organized and purposeful.
• Conversations, especially at the dinner table, play a key role in the children's general education, and in sparking their interests.  It reminds me of Richard Feynman's early education, given informally by his father in the form of questions and discussions on frequent, casual occasions.  It also reminds me of a family we know; although they were never homeschoolers, they were always challenging their children with questions, and encouraging the children to do the same to their parents.  Written like that it sounds unpleasant, but I observed it, and it was delightful, not at all like a test or a drill session.
• The Hardings were good at finding "back doors" when faced with locked front doors.  When they lived in California, their children could obtain high school diplomas by taking a comprehensive test.  They were nowhere near the age minimum to take the test, but there was a loophole: high school sophomores could take the test no matter what their age.  Since the children were homeschooled and doing work on that level, the parents had no trouble classifying them as sophomores.  That didn't work in Alabama, but they discovered that community college transfer credit made up for the lack of a diploma.  They used lesser schools as stepping stones.  Why not?  At that age, they had plenty of time.
• The idea of sending a child to college at middle school age doesn't seem to jibe with their emphasis on family togetherness, but again this is the advantage of not aiming for the perfect college.  The young students went to school close to home, in most cases living at home, and at first accompanied by one of their parents.  When family needs forced them to be in different states, the children stayed with siblings or other relatives.  As I recall, one child stayed in a dorm—at a somewhat older age—but the parents still managed to have plenty of contact and presence.
• Reading the descriptions of their efforts to keep their college kids close to family at all times rang a bell with me, and that's when it struck me:  Mona Lisa Harding is a Hispanic mother.  This would not have meant anything to me had our own children not attended a high school with a significant Hispanic population.  Two characteristics marked Hispanic families, as far as I could tell:  the importance of the Quinceañera celebration, and very tight parental reins kept on the girls, such as mothers accompanying their children on band trips, and a girl staying in the mother's hotel room rather than with the other students.  Suddenly I recognized the Hardings' practices as typically cultural on the one hand, and extremely liberal on the other.
• They never say it in so many words, but I think the Hardings would agree with the idea that the middle and high school years are usually the most wasted time in a child's life.  At that age they can and should be doing college-level work.  Not MIT-level, but a lot more than is generally offered in middle school and high school.  So they considered what it takes to get into college, and geared the children's early education to meet those requirements.  The kids take none of the usual standardized tests, but begin preparing for the ACT and SAT instead.  As soon as possible they begin taking classes for which they can get college credit.
• High priority is given to character education; there's no point in being academically advanced if your character development and social awareness are lacking.
• Since much emphasis is placed on the children's following their own interests, a big question is, How do you (or they) know what that is?  By doing a lot of listening, and working together, for one thing.  It's also important to note that the kids aren't deciding at age six what they want to do with the rest of their lives.  Interests are never set in stone, but are allowed to change, going one way, then another.  As long as learning is happening, the parents are happy.
• There's a lot of flexibility in the Hardings' program ("We follow more of a checklist than a timed schedule"), but here's a sample day:

  • Get dressed
  • Eat breakfast
  • Chores
  • Bible study
  • ACT review (a section a day)
  • Writing
  • Lunch
  • Reading (history and science)
  • Math (if not covered in the ACT review)
  • Spanish
  • Violin or piano (they alternate)
  • 2:30, ready or not, PLAY OUTSIDE!
  • no homework "allowed" in the evenings—just reading for fun.

One of the reasons I read The Brainy Bunch was to know whether or not to recommend it to our children.  I would say, most definitely.  Would I buy the book?  Not if I could get it out of the library.  It's definitely worth reading, but I'd read it once before committing shelf space to it.  Then I'd wait for the paperback to come out rather than paying over $16 for the hardcover.  (Hint:  it's available Interlibrary Loan in New Hampshire.)  If I couldn't borrow it?  It's under $10 for the Kindle version; I'd go for that.

We missed a lot of choir this summer (all for good reasons), and I've missed even more keeping track of what we've sung when I have been there.  As in not since May 18, after which I took off for Switzerland and other wild adventures with grandchildren.  I'm not going to try to remember what I might have missed documenting, but will start with the past two weeks, since the new choir season began.  Because these music posts are mostly for my own record-keeping, I won't be including YouTube videos most of the time now.  Each title below links to an excerpt, however, and many of our anthems can be found in their entirety (though not with us singing) via a YouTube search, should anyone be interested in more.

Sunday, August 30, 2014

Look at the World (Hinshaw Music, NMC1527)

Sunday, September 6, 2014

Be Unto Your Name (Word Music, O80689124273)).