Lift Up Your Hearts!

I don't believe I was aware of the launch of the first Sputnik 50 years ago.  I do remember going outside with my father two and a half years later to watch Echo 1 traverse the sky.  That marked the first of many excursions with him to look at phenomena in the sky:  satellites, lunar and solar eclipses, comets.

When Sputnik aroused consternation in the United States and set off furious attempts at educational reform, I was a month into my kindergarten year, so I can't speak accurately about consequent changes in our public schools.  There are some comparisions I can do, however, looking at the three generations I know.

The results are mixed.  I remember my father remarking that I was learning much more than he did, by which he chiefly meant that I studied calculus in high school.  His first calculus course was in college, and the only reason he had been exempt from taking trigonometry first was that he had gone to a particularly good high school.  That our children's first calculus experiences were in early high school was due to their previous home education, not the public school system, but their high school does deserve full credit for making it possible for them to complete half a dozen or more college-level classes before they graduated.  There was no Advanced Placement program when my parents were in high school, and in my day it was limited to just a few courses and open to seniors only.  It's undeniable that the 50 years post-Sputnik have expanded our educational opportunities, and many people are graduating from high school with knowledge far advanced from that of previous generations.

And yet....  In general knowledge I could never compete with my father, and neither could my siblings, our children, nor any of our contemporaries.  In history, geography, and literature the gap was especially noticeable, all the more so since by profession he was an engineer.  He was continually astonished at what people didn't know about things he assumed were common knowledge, such as the location of Hudson Bay.  He could recite great quantities of poetry, understand literary references, and converse about history from ancient times to the present.  Some of his knowledge, to be sure, must be credited to his life-long habit of reading books, but I know he learned much of it in school, and even in his love of books he differs from most contemporary students—how many graduate with the habit of reading to sustain their education all their lives?

Technically, of course, today's students are far beyond his knowledge, even though he had a master's degree in physics to supplement his engineering degree.  And yet, even though he would have been lost in most of his daughter's and granddaughter's mechanical engineering courses, his college courses left him with a gut-level, practical knowledge of the behavior of materials lacking in those "who just plug numbers into computer models."

So—is our educational system better than it was pre-Sputnik?  Certainly yes, and definitely no.  We know more in some areas, but are we better educated? For poor, minority and special-needs students (both low- and high-end), opportunites are certainly greater.  But are our children, in general, better off?  Are they graduating with both the skills and the will to continue learning throughout their lives?  Do they have a sound foundation in all basic areas on which to build?  Are they building on that foundation?

Have the changes been worth the cost?

I don't know the answers.

What I do know is that in our home education program we did not give our children a tenth of the education I had hoped for—and yet it rocketed them to the top of their college classes and best of all left them with the desire and ability to continue learning.  If we, doing so little, did so much, why hasn't our educational system done better, with its vast resources, its near-monopoly status, and its strong community, business, and governmental support?

John Taylor Gatto would no doubt say public education is still doing an excellent job of accomplishing its true goals, but that's another issue.

Throughout my school years, I hated the study of history.  Perhaps that's not quite accurate; I remember in elementary school enjoyable units on Indians and on Early Settlers, and a large and informative project on Ethiopia.  Progress after that was mostly negative, however.

A 10th grade World Cultures teacher was fairly inspiring, despite his other incarnation as a baseball coach.  Other than that I'd have to say that my history teachers could hardly have done more to make the study of history dull and tedious.  On top of that, I somehow picked up the idea that one was either a "math and science person" or a "history and English person," and it was not possible to be in both camps.  I staked my claim squarely in the math and science camp.

It was not till well after I graduated from college that I discovered that the story of our past is vital—in the sense of being full of life, as well as in the sense of critical importance.  I also learned the foolishness of limiting one's interests by someone else's categories.

I'm most definitely hindered by my lack of historical background. Dates and events are lost on me that are so ingrained in Porter he has difficulty imagining my ignorance.  To be fair, I believe it was more his own interest than his school experiences that gave him that knowlege, but in any case, he has a clear historical framework into which any new information neatly fits, which makes it easier to remember.  I have none of that.

But the foundation is growing, brick by brick and fact by fact, even though the required mortar seems to be many repetitions.  I can live with that—I'm learning, and that makes me content.

Perhaps the greatest help in my quest into our past has been my recently-acquired hobby of genealogy.  I, who had previously had no interest even in relatives beyond my immediate circle, now delight in dredging up information on even the remotest ancestor.  That I have discovered some to be famous, royal, and/or historically interesting thrills me.  To the best of my ability to determine, my joy is not that of snobbery; in fact, one of the reasons I eschewed any ancestor interest in the past was my annoyance at such organizations as the DAR and other people's bragging about their ancestry.  I truly would rather have found Native American ancestors than Mayflower immigrants.

But now I talk about them all, myself.  What excites me is having a connection to historical times, be it through my late-19th century Western Pennsylvanians, or distant kings of England.

Which brings me, at last, to the inspiration for this post.

Don't ask me why I'm reading a 1000-page book on the history of the Crusades.  I'm not sure myself, except that the Christianity Today review of Christopher' Tyermans' God's War was intriguing, and the book was available at our local library.  I'm currently on page 19 of the Introduction, and so far, it's fascinating.  Especially when I'm struck by passages such as the following.  Don't worry about understanding it, since it's completely out of context:

As a result of dynastic inheritance and a military and political victory in a long English civil war, in 1154 the situation was further complicated when Henry, count of Anjou, also duke of Normandy by inheritance from his mother and duke by marriage of Aquitane, became king of England.  Henry II, the first of the Angevin (i.e. Anjou was his patrimony) kings of England, was overlord to far more of France than his supposed French sovereign Louis VII:  Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, Brittany, Poitou, the douchy of Aquitaine, the Limousin, Gascony and parts of the Auvergne, with unachieved claims to parts of Languedoc.

Sounds pretty dry, right?  Not if Henry II is your distant grandfather, Eleanor of Aquitaine your distant grandmother, and Maine a part of France you visited last spring, where you stood on the mount of one of Henry II's fortifications. Which just happens to be on part of the home of some friends of yours.

Connections!  That's what it's all about.  The more you learn, the more you know; the more you know, the easier it is to learn, and the more you want to learn.  The very best part of education is to inspire that victorious cycle.

Central Florida is the most dangerous place in the country, at least if it's lightning strikes that worry you.  The tragedy of a girl who was struck by lightning just after descending from her school bus is still fresh in our memories, so it's no wonder the Orange County school board policy errs on the side of caution:  No student is allowed outside until 30 minutes after the last lighning flash, if thunder follows the lightning within 30 seconds.

They are wisely reconsidering the policy, however, after a recent debacle.  A long-lasting storm coupled with rigid enforcement of the rules kept some 2000 students trapped at two schools until nearly 9 p.m.  Snacks were trucked in (the district apparently caring less about the safety of their employees), and no doubt many of the students thought the excitement high adventure—at least for the first hour.  But most of the children—not to mention the teachers—must have been anxious to get home to their families, with not a few kindergarteners crying for their mommies.

Certainly their mommies were longing to get to them.  If the students were imprisoned in relative comfort and safety, their parents did not fare as well, trapped as they were in a long line of cars, with no idea when their children might be released.  The students may have had food, but picture the poor mom, waiting in a hot car with a couple of preschoolers and no more than a couple of rice cakes and a bottle of water among them.  If that.  The schools would not even allow parents to sign their children out and walk outside with them under their own responsibility.  This policy, above all, needs to be rethought.

There are scenarios in which it may be necessary to keep parents away from campus and their children for a time.  We had a situation not long ago where a student was threatening others with a gun; under such circumstances, adding a swarm of panicked parents to the mix would only increase the danger. But such very exceptional cases should not be the model for less critical situations.

While students are on campus, schools have an awesome and serious responsibility for their safety, but this is a delegated responsibility.  The true authorities in a child's life are his parents, and if they temporarily transfer some of their responsibility to someone else, be it babysitter or institution, they must retain the right to take it back at will.  A school that does not recognize the primacy of parental authority needs to rethink its raison d'être, or risk tempting parents to rethink their educational choices.

Mommy, It's a Renoir! was the title of a book about art appreciation for children that I fell in love with many years ago.  To my chagrin, by the time I decided we could afford to buy the set, it was no longer available.

Thus I was thrilled to discover that the program is back in print.  Once a homeschooler, always a homeschooler, especially when one has nephews and grandchildren to consider.  For reasons I can't imagine, the exciting title has been changed to How to Use Child-Size Masterpieces.  Could they have tried to make it sound more boring?

It is the same book, however, and the "Child-Size Masterpieces" booklets that provide materials for the program are also available, from Parent Child Press.  Perhaps I find it easier to spend money for grandchildren than children; perhaps I fear they will go out of print again; perhaps I'm looking forward to learning more about art myself as I try it out.  Mostly likely all three.  In any case, I ordered the whole set!

I also ordered the DVD that explains how to use the program.  (The website says it's a videotape, but it's actually a DVD and less expensive than the tape.)  The information on the DVD is covered better in the book, so I can't recommend spending the additional $20; on the other hand, it is helpful to see the program in use, so I can recommend watching the DVD once, if you <ahem> happen to know someone who already owns it.

Another thing not to spend money on turns out to be the folders.  The program is very Montessori-like, with a specific, color-coded folder setup designed, as are most Montessori materials, to give the child as much independence as possible in his work.  I'm not saying this is a bad idea; I think it's great.  But it's probably worth making them yourself—the book includes instructions.  I chose to purchase the materials "with vinyl storage folders" for an additional cost, expecting that the work would be done for me:  cutting the folders down to size, pasting the "representative" picture on the outside, adding the color-coding dots for the pockets, gluing folders together to make the four- and six-pocket folders needed for some of the steps in the program, cutting apart the pictures and sorting them appropriately amongst the folders.  Wrong.  The folders are of the right color and dimensions, but the rest of the work remains.  We'll see what I think about my decision when I've done the work.

Those are the negatives.  For the rest, I'm excited!  Janet and I are going to enjoy working through the program ourselves before passing it on.  I hope to gain, not only a better appreciation for art, but sufficient knowledge of the program to be able to expand it ad infinitum using other art postcards.

With my interest in both children and education you knew it wouldn't be long before I commented on the latest "Baby Einstein" controversy.  A study (based on telephone surveys) published in The Journal of Pediatrics found that babies between eight and sixteen months experienced a significant decrease in language development for every hour spent per day viewing baby videos.

Now those who ridicule parents' attempts to enrich their children's early educational enviroments are having an I-told-you-so field day, and those who profit from the business are crying foul.  The responses that bother me most, however, are those of the defenders of baby videos.  They are giving answers to the wrong questions, and reassurances for the wrong concerns.

Commentators rushing to the defense of parents readily cede the ground of infant stimulation and assure us that it doesn't really matter what the videos do or don't do to our children; all parents need a break now and then and letting a video entertain your baby is a perfectly good way to achieve that goal, just another form of baby swing, bouncer or other device designed to give parents a little distance from the demands of parenthood.

I don't deny the need of parents for some respite, though I may disagree on what constitutes a good approach to the problem. But that's hardly the main issue here; I don't think it would even make the top ten of my questions, which include:

• When is an infant's visual system sufficiently developed to make sense of the image on a television screen, which is not the same as seeing a physical object?


• What effect does this unnatural visual experience have on the baby's developing eyes and brain? 


• What type of video experience did the babies have?  Are all baby videos equally bad?


• What is the effect of small amounts of video exposure, say less than 15 minutes per day in the context of a great deal of other experiences and personal interaction—a more likely situation in a household where parents are not looking for an electronic babysitter but are actively trying to enrich their baby's learning experience?  The study rated the effect in terms of hours of video exposure per day—I can't even imagine how a parent could set his child in front of a television screen for that much time and think it to be a good thing.


• What is the best use of a baby's time when it comes to mental development?  Is watching a video better than sitting in a dark room but worse than crawling for a toy?  Is being carried in a sling, close to Mom, still better?  Would the opportunity to see a very short video (content is still another question) plus plenty of time for crawling plus lots of time being carried around best of all?

I've never had a Baby Einstein video, never bought one for nephews or grandchildren, and as far as I know never seen one.  I certainly have no vested interest in them.  But if we're going to discuss such important issues as babies' mental development, let's consider the critical questions and not be sidetracked by defending business interests and assuaging parental guilt feelings.

Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology), by Mitchell Stevens (Princeton University Press, 2001)

I've forgotten what led me to find Kingdom of Children, but from the reviews on amazon.com I knew I had to read it.  I have been trying to explain to our own family some of the homeschooling controversies of the late 80's and early 90's, and why I emerged with prejudices against certain people and organizations they are even now encountering, such as the Home School Legal Defense Association, even though we were members, and Josh Harris—though the latter is a case of visiting the sins of the father on the son, which I realize is unfair.  If they want to understand, this book would be a good starting point.  They won't get enough information to know much of the whys and wherefors of my concerns—the author is too objective, too nice for that—but they will get a general picture of the history of the era.

As anyone who has read my other reviews will know, I frequently find the beginnings of books frustrating but by the end find they have redeemed themselves—or at least I've found something of value worth keeping, even if it's not the main thrust of the book.  Kingdom of Children is in many ways the opposite.  As Stevens was setting the historical background, I was impressed with his research and his objective understanding of the complexities of the homeschooling world in those days.  If he had stopped there, I would have recommended the book unreservedly.  But Stevens is not a historian, he's a sociologist, and I found the sociological aspects of the book boring and even ludicrous in places.

His idea that homeschooling of all forms represents a peculiar emphasis on the importance of individual souls (rather than the collective "society," I assume) is a bit frightening, and his view that it requires an enormous sacrifice betrays a complete lack of understanding of the most important part of the movement—and of parenting in general.  The author seems truly mystified as to why families would sacrifice extra income, and women their "careers," to be at home rearing their children at all, much less for the many years required by homeschooling.  He talks about the modern emphasis on "self," and extends that to increased parental emphasis on the importance of tuning a child's education to his individual needs, rather than accepting a collective approach to education.  He views the renewed emphasis among some people on the importance of homemaking and childrearing as women's desperate attempts to console themselves for the loss of their careers and "liberation."

In other words, he has no clue. 

On the one hand, I was happy to read through his history and recognize the issues and debates that troubled us in those years, especially the HR6 controversy.  I could recognize myself and others; I knew most of the names and movements.  As I had hoped, he explains the issues and sequences of events better than I could.  I was disappointed, however, to see that he has missed a large segment of the picture.

I suppose it is natural for a sociologist to view people through the lens of the groups with which they align themselves.  I was happy to see that he recognizes considerable overlap between the two major branches of homeschooling in those days, which he calls "the inclusives" and "the believers."  What he fails to appreciate, however, is the many homeschoolers who were not "joiners," but preferred to take ideas from all factions and craft their own way without finding it necessary to give allegiance to a particular view or organization.  He does make it abundantly clear that this is not the road to political power, and I'm not downplaying the significance of politics and power in our lives.  As Pericles said, "Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."  However, I have deep suspicians that politcal power usually comes at the expense of family power, and equally that family power is the more important of the two. 

And that's a distinction that transcends any particular educational choice.

Television has long been called the "idiot box," but here is more evidence that being a couch potato harms the brain as well as the body.  Unfortunately, in this case reading is just as bad as watching TV.

The Swedish experiment was actually about depression.  Previous studies have shown that the hippocamus region of the human brain shrinks in depressed people.  In this study, exercise was shown to have a significant anti-depressant effect in rats, and promoted dramatic neuron growth in the hippocampus.  (If you, like me, wonder how on earth they can tell if a rat is depressed, read the article.)

As usual, the study raises more questions.  How does this apply to humans?  Is the effect noticable in both young and old?  Is it physical activity, per se, that makes the difference, or are some types of exercise more valuable than others?

Most intriguing of all:  The study was about depression, but the hippocampus is also involved in learning and memory.  What effect, then, does exercise (or lack thereof) have on our general intellectual abilities?  Since the days when most people earned their daily bread through physical labor, have our sedentary lives taken away a significant portion of the intellectual growth gained by increased access to books and schooling?

When I mentioned this article to Porter, his first question was, if this is so, why the generalization of the "dumb jock"?  Perhaps the kind of exercise really does matter.  Maybe running, being a natural human motion, builds brain cells better than say, tennis.  Maybe the average intellectual ability among athletes is brought down significantly by those sports that involve massive blows to the head.

The sedentary lives of most American children are harming their brains as well as their bodies.  Blame television, video games, long hours in school/day care, urban apartment and suburban homes with small lots, or crime rates and parental fears that keep children close to home—any and all of the above.  Our kids need to get moving!  Until there is more data, I would favor the more natural forms of movement such as crawling and creeping for babies, and walking and running for older kids, and swimming for everyone (except that I worry about the high chlorine level in public pools), and only add organized sports on top of a good program of the above.  But that's a personal preference; I imagine that for most children any exercise will help.

Moreover, we adults need to get moving, too!  If we're worried about our children's intellectual development, they have equal right to worry out their parents' intellectual decline.  If exercise now will help keep our minds sharp as we age, we owe it to our kids as well as ourselves to get off the couch (or out of the computer chair).

I'm extrapolating here, of course.  This particular study was just about depression.  But I'm all for non-pharmaceutical solutions, and in this case running was as effective as anti-depressant medication.  We'll be happier, and we might become smarter.  What are we waiting for?

That's the subtitle of a Wired article by Edward Tufte.  My brother sent me the link.  I prefer to believe he didn't know I was in the middle of working on a PowerPoint presentation of pictures from our recent trip to Europe.

Tufte is not speaking primarily about education, but he makes this perceptive observation: 

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

PowerPoint isn't really the villain here, however.

When our children were in high school, long before classroom computer use became pervasive, they were sometimes asked to "report on" books by making posters about them.  This was in honors, "gifted," or Advanced Placement classes, mind you!  Being artistically-minded, the girls enjoyed these projects, but they took up a lot of time and their educational value—except possibly in graphic arts—was essentially nil.

Speaking from experience, it's much easier and more fun to find clipart, arrange graphics, tweak colors, choose backgrounds, and play with shapes and shading than it is to craft text—and I happen to love writing.  How much more so to a student who is still struggling with the art of putting his thoughts down on paper! The making of an attractive presentation of written and visual information is not a bad skill to learn, but any teacher who frequently allows students to get away with Internet research instead of library visits, and low-content, high-graphic PowerPoint presentations instead of well-written, detailed, highly verbal reports, is wasting their time and taxpayers' money.

That said, I'll get back to my own PowerPoint work.  :)  To me, it's computer-based scrapbooking, and I want to get our trip pictures into a form that's easy to appreciate.  Some people prefer to read an illustrated story—the blog version is for them.  A few (very few) people will want to see every picture we took—all 900+ of them—minus the really awful ones.  Most, however, will appreciate the PowerPoint version, condensed, edited, and spruced up with some music and a few graphic effects.  At least I hope so—that's why I'm creating it.

I doubt any English teacher will ever see it.

One of our nephews is a Boy Scout.

My father was for many years a Boy Scout leader, so when I joined the Girl Scouts I was mightily disappointed that we did so little of the camping, hiking, mountain climbing, knot-tying, fire-building, and survival skills work he did with his boys.  Thanks to some amazing (and somewhat rebellious) leaders and dedicated parents, we still had a good time, but the national program left me less than impressed.

From what little I know of it, I'm even less impressed with today's program.  It's politically correct, oriented towards modern society, relevant to today's girls—and therefore boring as all get out.  At least to me.  (They still make great cookies, though, and Boy Scout popcorn doesn't even come close.)

For all I know, the Boy Scout program has changed, too.  But my heart is encouraged by knowing one troop that is still in the business of helping boys grow into men.  And even more so to see the video-game, text-message, iPod, virtual reality generation rising to physical, organizational, and social challenges.  I applaud the leaders who provide necessary support and guidance while giving the Scouts much of the responsibility for running the troop.

They leave this week for Philmont, the apex of Boy Scout adventuring.  What they are doing "on the way" exhausts me just thinking of it, including hiking up and down the Grand Canyon's Bright Angel Trail.  During their two weeks at Philmont the boys themselves chose the most rigorous program available to them, which includes over 80 miles of hiking and lots of camping and other intensive activities.

Sounds like the best conditioning short of joining the Marines—and without getting shot at.

If I'd known how big a project book cataloguing would be, I'm not sure I would have had the courage to start, but now that it's done, I'm quite pleased with it.  There's a link to it here, and on the sidebar, and on the Sursum Corda home page.  I'm not yet ready to leave it open to any and all web crawlers, so there's a small amount of security associated with it.  Family members can get in the same way you access the Family News page.  If you're a friend who happens to want to browse in this library, please e-mail me, and I'll be happy to open the door to you.

C. S. Lewis once quipped that the only books we will have in heaven will be ones we gave away or lent on earth. This is a lending library; if you see something you'd like to read that's not in your own public library, please ask!

The effort ended up taking over a month of pretty steady, hard work.  I made much of that for myself, I'll admit.  If I had been content with the content the software downloaded from the Internet, it would have gone much faster.  But I wanted the information to be correct and reasonably complete, though even so I ignored many of the less important data fields, such as cover price.  Even more time-consuming, I insisted on having a cover photo for each book, which required a lot of scanning, because most of our books are too old to have their cover photos online.  No, it's not necessary, but it looks nice!  I know how much I appreciate being able to browse books visually, as well as by title, so I'm assuming others do, too.

The last room to be done was my office; I had saved the hardest for last.  On the one hand, there are more modern books here, so I could use the barcode scanner more effectively.  On the other hand, there are more old books, too—just plain more books!  I offer some statistics below for your amusement.  They are only approximate, because sometimes I let one entry do for an entire series of books, but they're interesting nonetheless.

• Total number of books: about 1800


• Number of books in my office: nearly 900


• Top 10 authors: George MacDonald (77), C. S. Lewis (49), Patrick O'Brian (22), Charles Schultz (22), Dorothy Sayers (21), Arthur Ransome (19), Miss Read (Dora Jessie Saint) (18), Robert Athearn (16 - all in one set of American history books), John Montroll (15), Isaac Asimov (14)


• No, we haven't read all the books.  Some, like cookbooks, aren't meant to be read through.  Many, many others came our way when my father moved from his big house, and I mean to get to them, someday...

Why did I do this?  The most important reason is that a book isn't of any use if it stays on a shelf.  There's no point in having a book if you don't read it (or at least plan to), and you can't read it if you can't find it.

Moreover, we have a great treasure here, and would like others to be able to share our bounty.  That's why the list is online—so others can browse and borrow.  The Book Collector software comes with the ability to keep track of books lent out, which has heretofore been a problem for me.

Some people might recognize books of theirs that made their way into our collection, and say, "Aha!  So that's where my book is!"  Stranger things have happened.  I once lent two books to Person A, and never got them back.  I told you (see above) I have a problem with keeping track of what I've lent to whom. By the time I got around to asking, it was so much later Person A had no idea where the books were, so I wrote them off.  Not without some sorrow, but I try not to lend any books I wouldn't be willing to give away, if needed—for just such occasions.  Much later, a dear friend, Person B, died, and I was one of the people who helped sort through her books.  Lo and behold, there were my two missing books!  I knew they were mine because of the inscriptions, and of course I was given them back.  But no one could at that point explain how they had ended up where they did, and it's still a mystery.  Okay, I will give in to a trifling vanity and reveal Person A, because it's amusing to be able to say I lent books to R.C. Sproul.  I also once gave a dime to a Rockefeller who needed change for a pay phone. :)

With a nod to hurricane season, which began in the middle of my efforts, all this documentation should help if we ever need to file an insurance claim.  Not that any of our books are worth much, in an insurance-company sense, but if they express disbelief that we really had 1800 books, I can reply, "Yes, sir, we did—I counted them."  Not that I want to lose a one of them, after all this work

And finally, when the time comes, if our heirs want to fight over who gets what book, they can do it much more conveniently this way.  :)

Today's Frazz:

Among the more bizarre stories of the day, here's a study that claims to be able to predict your child's future SAT performance based on the relative lengths of his fingers.  Those whose ring fingers are longer compared with their index fingers are statistically likely to do better on the math portion, and those with the reverse situation to do better on the verbal.  This supposedly reflects prenatal testosterone/estrogen exposure.

It's a lot harder to measure finger length than I thought.  I finally settled on measuring from the knuckle, and it seems my ring finger is a bit longer than my index.  It's true, I did very well on the math portion of the SAT.  But I did even better on the verbal, so I must have measured wrong.  :)

The researchers plan to expand their studies into "other cognitive and behavioral issues, such as technophobia, career paths and possibly dyslexia."

My hearing is very good, probably better than that of many my age because I didn't ruin it in my teens with headphones and loud music.  But I still find that I can understand what people say better if I can see their faces.  Now I know why.

A Canadian study indicates that there is a signficant visual component of language understanding even amongst hearing people.  The four-month-old babies in the study were able to distinguish when adults in a silent video were speaking English and when they were speaking French.

The eight-month-old babies could do the same, but only if they were being raised in a bilingual French/English environment.

We have been blessed with a surprising number of very bright friends, their talents ranging from math to music, from business to origami, from computing to law.  It was with the last that we had a disturbing conversation recently.  The conversation itself was delightful; what we learned from it was not.

To begin, the background.  Most of my readers are familiar with the following story, which I told several years ago in our family newsletter.  But for the benefit of the one or two who meander over here from random places, I'll reproduce it here, sufficiently altered to protect the innocent and the guilty alike.

At the time these events occurred, our friend Curt was a junior at Swansea High School.  He was a top-notch student (he would later be valedictorian), a phenomenal musician, and as clean-cut as a teenage boy gets:  no body piercings nor tattoos, short hair—but not too short—typically wearing neat, khaki shorts and a white polo shirt.  His family was comfortably upper-middle-class.  Both parents were professionals; his father employed full-time, his mother part-time.

Curt was taking a course in biotechnology at his school; as part of the class he often left school early to do research for the Scopes Cancer Institute, sometimes at home, sometimes at the Institute itself.

One day, Curt was riding his bicycle home as usual, and had made it into his own neighborhood, when suddenly he was stopped by a police car.  The policemen asked him what he was doing out of school, and, when he explained, they responded, “Do you expect us to believe that?”  He told them that if they would call Dr. Hedges, his teacher, he would confirm the story.  Curt never heard the phone call directly, as it was made from headquarters; what apparently happened was that they did not speak with his teacher, but called the school attendance office, which only confirmed that Curt was a student at the school who should have been in attendence that day.  The word came back from headquarters to the policemen:  he’s supposed to be in school.

Curt was frisked, and his backpack searched.  He was allowed to ride his bike home, followed by the policemen.  One of them held onto the the front door of his house (“so you can’t sneak out the back”) while he put his bike in the hallway—he wasn’t allowed to take it to the garage.  Then he was put in the police car and taken to the Swansea County Juvenile Assessment Center (JAC).  There, he was interrogated.  (“Do you have any tattoos?” was one of the pointless, insulting questions.)  Curt is brilliant, but not quick of speech, and his slow responses apparently infuriated the officers.  When Curt said, at one point, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,”  the officer yelled, “You’d BETTER hear me!”

Finally, Curt’s mother was contacted.  (The message she received at her workplace was, “Did you get the strange phone call from the police about your son?”  It took ten years off her life, she said.)  She called the school and spoke to Dr. Hedges, who then called the JAC.  Curt's parents immediately left work.  At the JAC they found Curt sitting between two very scruffy-looking boys, with a police officer, arms crossed, glaring at them.  By this time, Dr. Hedges had succeeded in convincing the police of the truth, so he was able to go home.  All's well that ends well?

Not quite.  Curt was a shy child, and this incident shattered both his trust in general and his respect for the police.  One absolutely innocent child abused and terrified, his parents pulled out of work, scared to death—and needless to say, Curt’s cancer research did not make any progress that day.  For what purpose?  According to the county sheriff, the purpose was to prevent crime.  Teenaged boys who are not in school are likely to be commiting crimes, so we stop them before they have a chance to do so.

Does anyone else find that as chilling as I do?  And what if Curt had had long hair, or an earring, or parents who couldn’t be reached, or didn’t care, or were too poor to make a fuss—and was still just as innocent.  Would he have fared still worse?

So that's the story.  Nothing in the intervening years has lessened my belief that the police—and the sheriff—were wrong, wrong, wrong in their attitudes and actions.  Curt was not threatening, he was not running away, he was doing nothing wrong whatsoever, not even anything suspicious.  But here's what I learned in the conversation with our legal friend.  Curt did absolutely nothing wrong—but neither did the police.  All the police need to arrest someone is probable cause, a reasonable belief that a crime has been committed.  There are truancy laws in the state of Florida, and—despite private schools on different schedules, and the legality of homeschooling—the fact that public school students are expected to be inside a school building during certain hours provides probable cause for believing that a teenager riding his bike toward home during those hours is truant, and is therefore committing a crime.  Especially if the school tells the police what they expect to hear instead of the whole story.  The fact that the crimes the sheriff was hoping to prevent were more serious than truancy, and that there was absolutely no probable cause to suspect Curt of any of them, does not change the legality of the situation.

It probably falls into the same category as one of the more absurd motor vehicle laws that were on the books in Pennsylvania when I was studying to get my driver's license:  the speed limit through all intersections was 15 miles per hour.  No one expected it to be enforced, but it was there, and the police could use it as an excuse for stopping someone if they wanted to check the car or driver for some other reason.

I still believe the police were morally wrong in their actions—though I admit my views are biased by my belief that truancy laws themselves are wrong—and especially in the way they treated Curt.  But when a hot-shot attorney who knows criminal law and correct police procedure inside and out tells you that such actions are legal, and not only in Florida, it's smarter to listen and act than to argue.  Even in these days when homeschooling is widespread and well accepted, if my homeschooled child were in a position to be alone in public outside of public school hours, I'd be sure to equip him with a letter, on our school letterhead (thanks be to computers and printers!) explaining that he is not truant.  Not that a policeman who would respond to a reasonable explanation with "Do you expect us to believe that?" would necessarily believe a letter (they know about computers and printers, too), but it might help.  And in fact such a letter did help Janet at one point.  She wasn't in danger of being hauled off to jail, but being forced to miss this particular math class would have been unpleasant enough….

(Memo to self:  When discussing a subject dear to your heart, test your arguments on Janet's unrelenting logic before subjecting them to one of the most brilliant legal minds in the state of Florida.  Better yet, don't argue at all until you can do it dispassionately.)

Having written recently about my love of student recitals, I have to mention that we went to a Florida Symphony Youth Orchestra concert yesterday.  In my limited, and admittedly biased opinion, they are far and away the best student orchestra in the area.  Not perfect:  Depending on whose philosophy happens to be strongest at the time, the emphasis is sometimes more on education than on making music. As most of you know, I strongly believe that real learning more often takes place in an atmosphere of "let's do something wonderful and important together" than in a "Me Teacher, You Student" situation.

Be that as it may, the FSYO is the best game in town for a young person who wants to play good orchestral repertoire, and it's good listening, too. The only reason we don't attend more of their concerts is that there are so many other great things to do in life.

But we went yesterday, because it was the last concert of the season, and we hadn't been to one yet this year.  More than that, we went because the concert included three commissioned pieces, one of which (Mountain Air and Dance) was written by our friend John Dupuis.  Unfortunately, John's composition was for the Prelude Orchestra (third from the top of the four orchestras, one above the strings-only group of beginnners), which for various complicated reasons had not had enough time to practice it.  It was a bit of a stretch for them.  Still, there was a gorgeous melody in the middle, and in the rest I could detect an interesting piece that reminded me of why I fell in love with John's Atlantis many years ago.  (Atlantis, which was written with a particular group of FSYO musicians in mind, was recorded by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and used by Universal Studios for the grand opening of their Islands of Adventure theme park.)

The Prelude Orchestra was interesting to hear.  (They did much better with their other pieces).  My experience with student orchestras has been that the winds are, as a section, better than the strings.  For one thing, the competition is more fierce (fewer positions); for another, good orchestral music tends to have very hard string parts.  But this time the situation was reversed, probably because the strings had a few really good players, and in the winds there's no place for a less confident player to hide.  Playing tentatively is a major mistake for an oboe or a trumpet, and these kids haven't yet learned to "sin boldly."  There was a lovely oboe solo in Edelweiss, however.  (Hmm, I did manage to work a flower into this post after all.)

The Philharmonia Orchestra's commissioned piece (Stephen Foster Song-Suite) was by Joe Kreines.  He may be world famous, but "Mr. Kreines" will always be remembered in our family as the person who came in occasionally to enliven band practice, and who could get more out of an ensemble that any other conductor.  He still can, as today's concert proved.

We don't know the composer of the Symphonic Orchestra's new work (Sojourn), Robert J. Brownlow, but I suppose two out of three is pretty good!  His work matched the ability of the orchestra best of all, I think.  The Symphonic Orchestra itself has been better.  Don't get me wrong—it was still very good, just not up to the standards of a few years ago, when it was absolutely stunning.

Not that I'm prejudiced in this matter or anything—but not one of the orchestras had a decent A to tune to.  I'm a bit particular when in comes to oboes.  Their solos were fine; it was just the A's.  A 440, 460, 415...whatever!

Being involved with student musical groups for so many years, it was impossible for us not to notice the frequent coorespondence between musical and general academic ability, today's Frazz comic—in which Caulfield asserts that we need arts education so the bottom half of the math class can do something for a living—to the contrary.  This year's FSYO graduates are no exception.  Take the assistant principal cellist of the Symphonic, for example.  Valdictorian of his high school, going off to Harvard to major in biochemical sciences, and scored a perfect 2400 on the SAT (on his first try, even).  Hmm, only assistant principal cellist?  The slacker!  Oh, wait, the principal is taking her cello to the Eastman School of Music next year, so I guess the competition was a bit stiff.  She, by the way, is graduating with a mere 4.7 weighted GPA....  C'mon folks, invest a little time and money (okay, maybe a lot of time and money) in your children's musical education.  It'll be great for their brains!

All in all, the concert was a delightful way to spend a Sunday afternoon, and we even ran into some friends we hadn't seen in ages.