Lift Up Your Hearts!

I'm not sure, now, whether Hooker and Company... is a favorite picture of Joseph's or just a favorite name. He seems to have a preference for long phrases, or at least he practices them more. During today's naptime I overheard him repeatedly reciting (while playing with trains) the Albert Anker title, Heinrich Pestalozzi and the Orphans in Stans.

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post is how absolutely clear and distinct is Joseph's diction, which I find unusual for someone just a month past his third birthday.  It makes me feel guilty for my own sloppy speech!

I also catch myself using unnecessary "child speech"—not baby talk, but the simple way adults usually talk to beginning speakers, such as, "say 'please.'"  Like any three-year-old, Joseph needs to be reminded to ask politely, but it appears to be just as easy for him to say, "Please, Grandma, may I have some more milk?" as simply, "please."  And now that he has caught on to that, the reminder, "what do you say"—or a pause, or similar actions that parents use to get their children to say please—will often evoke the whole sentence, with "milk" swapped out for the appropriate word.

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! (More)

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. (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.