Loving paintings more than frames
I don’t remember the commencement addresses I heard in college, but I’ll bet the University of Portland Class of 2009 will remember theirs.
Part of the problem for my grad speakers was that UC Berkeley is huge, so it holds separate commencements by department. I was a double major, so I had not one but two forgettable events – one for music, one for anthropology. The speakers spoke as and to musicians and anthropologists, I’ll bet, not as and to humans with their toes at the edge of a cliff and a hang glider on their backs.
When it comes to commencement addresses, specialization murders inspiration.
The University of Portland is about a tenth the size of UC Berkeley, so it makes sense that they got ten times the speech – this year, at least. The speaker was Paul Hawken, author, environmental activist, and co-founder of Smith & Hawken, as well as Erewhon and several other environmentally progressive firms.
Though the speech is peppered with religious terminology and ideas – unsurprisingly, since University of Portland is a Catholic institution — I’m struck by the similarity between his ideas and mine. Some excerpts:
There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING.
____
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on Earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.
____
The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours.
Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe – exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”
____Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.
I respond differently to the religious bits than I once would have. In my thirties, while teaching at a Catholic college, my high wince-factor at lines like “The world would become religious overnight” would have blinded me to the incredible insight of the lines around it (“Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course…Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television”). I might also have failed to notice that he was doing no harm – in fact, that his speech was a call to positive action in perfect alignment with my own values.
Now I’m more inclined to notice that Paul Hawken and I agree on the painting rather than fussing quite so much about the frame.
Full text of the Hawken address
(Hat tip to Facebook friend Debra Hill Frewin for bringing the Hawken talk to my attention!)
Easy ethics and hard
“They shot him…he was running. It was during their exercise period. They said he just broke into a blind raving charge at the fence and started to climb. Right in front of them….We had such a good chance. I told him what I thought, but I couldn’t in truth say that we had more than a good chance. I guess Tom was tired of white men’s chances and preferred to take his own.”
–Atticus Finch on the death of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird
“Remember in To Kill a Mockingbird when Tom Robinson gets shot?”
It was in the middle of a silent car ride that Connor (13) blurted this out.
“Oh yeah. Worst part of the book.”
“He wasn’t really trying to escape, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well Atticus says he was trying to escape, but there’s no way! They just shot him because they wanted to and made up that story. I know it. But Mrs. Lawson and the whole class said he was shot trying to escape, just like it says.”
“…”
“And I said he wasn’t trying to escape, you’re supposed to read between the lines and figure that out, they shot him seventeen times, but they were all just saying, ‘No, no, no, he was escaping, that’s what it says, that’s what it says.’ I HATE that.”
“Hate what?”
“When you’re right but every other person says you’re wrong! Because then you basically ARE wrong.”
“…”
Now before anybody gets all hifalutin’ about being the Lone Voice of Truth or starts quoting Kipling to my boy, at least tell me you know what he means. If you’ve got your self-confidence polished up so shiny bright that you can confidently stand your ground against unanimous jeers without a flicker of self-doubt, without feeling even for a moment what it means to be rendered “basically wrong” by the judgment of the many—know that I hold you in the highest respect, and think you a freak.
It’s easy to picture ourselves in retrospect matching the courage of Galileo or Giordano Bruno, or Fulton and his steamboat, or Hershey and his chocolate bar. I can manage these fantasies, but only in retrospect. I am Bruno taking the nail through the tongue while KNOWING I’ll one day be vindicated. Being the Lone Voice of Truth is one helluva lot harder without that perspective.
So we talked about Kohlberg.
No, it’s not a tasty hybrid of kohlrabi and iceberg. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg laid out a useful set of “stages” of moral development. Connor’s question isn’t exactly a moral issue, but the willingness to speak up about what you believe is right or true definitely is.
The six stages:
Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
Stage 1. Avoiding pain
Stage 2. Seeking reward
Level 2 (Conventional)
Stage 3. Social conformity
Stage 4. Rule following
Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
Stage 5. Social contract (understand that rules are human creations and can be changed)
Stage 6. Universal ethical principles (standing on principle regardless of consequences)
Early childhood is usually limited to the pre-conventional. If you want your kids to spin their wheels in the lower levels, base your parenting solely on punishment and rewards. Later, most kids become obsessed to some degree with the next two, and would yes very damn well jump off a cliff if their friends did, or slavishly follow rules because they are rules, depending on age and stage. And plenty of adults never get beyond this conventional, conformist morality.
It’s the tug of Stage 3 that Connor was talking about—the fact that it can feel like the loud majority defines right and wrong just by dint of its loud majorityness. So we had a quick chat about Kohlberg’s stages of moral development.
Don’t laugh—kids can do this.
“Yeah, I know what you mean about feeling wrong when everybody else disagrees,” I said. “It’s a stage three thing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Something I remember from psych class—six different levels of moral development. For little kids, being good is all about rewards and punishments. Then you want to please other people, that’s stage three, or follow rules, that’s stage four.”
“My school is OBSESSED with rules,” he said.
He’s right, they are. “Yep. And that’s okay as far as it goes. But what you want to do is push yourself higher than that.”
“Like what?”
“Like standing up for what you think is right even when everyone around you thinks you’re crazy. That’s the top level. Gandhi. Galileo. Jesus. Darwin. Atticus. Connor McGowan. People like that.”
Wry smile.
It’s not that we leave the lower stages behind as we move up. Everybody still responds to punishment and reward and social pressure, even as we show bursts of high-level morality. But it’s worth talking to our kids about the difference between the easy rule-following moralities so many are so fond of, and the higher, harder levels that all of our moral heroes, if you think about it, seem to occupy.
I pledge-a yada yada
- April 11, 2009
- By Dale McGowan
- In humor, schools
14
Just back from a family week in D.C. We imposed on the hospitality of very good friends, both of them deeply impressive and humane people employed by admirable non-profits influencing public policy and making a difference in the world. The kind of people who make me feel (through no fault of their own) like I’m not doing nearly enough with my own limited time as a sentient thing to make said difference in the aforementioned world.
They have twin daughters on the cusp of eight, both of them funny and adorable and whip-smart. One evening the girls shared, in identical sing-song, their school’s morning ritual, which is led as in most schools today by a talking head on closed-circuit TV. In the process, they illustrated the pure pointlessness of such things:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,
and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God,
indivisible with liberty and justice for all, as a Belmont student
I promise to do my school work to the best of my ability,
I will be kind courteous, considerate and respectful
to other students and teachers, today’s lunch choices are.
Petition: Thank Politicians Who Say “No” to Creationists
I am occasionally asked by religious friends why I make such a fuss over evolution. Some have suggested that secular types beat the drum for evolution only because it sticks such a sharp object in the eye of theism. One went so far as to suggest that “If you guys would just let that one go,” we’d have a lot better luck building bridges with the religious.
The question is a good one. Fortunately the answer is even better. And it’s nothing so trivial as making Churchy Eyeball Kebobs, nor nothing so grand and simple as “I champion evolution just because it’s true.” It’s also true that George Washington had no middle name, but I’m unlikely to devote much of my life force opposing someone who insists that yes he did, and it was Steve, and that only Martha called him George, and only when she was drunk. Even if this hypothetical Stevist insisted on teaching the middle name in American History classes, I might think it daft, but I’ve other fish to fry.
Evolution is a fish I choose to fry. It’s an idea that I want my children and as many others as possible to know and care about.
A list of reasons to champion evolution education, each building on the last:
First, it is an everything-changer. If knowing about evolution by natural selection hasn’t changed almost everything about the way you see almost everything, dig in deeper with the help of the great explicators and know that I envy you the journey.
Second, it inspires immense, transcendent awe and wonder to grasp that you are a cousin not just to apes, but to sponges and sequoias and butterflies and blue whales.
Third, it annihilates the artificial boundaries between us and the rest of life on Earth.
Fourth, it puts racial difference in proper perspective as utter trivia.
Fifth, when taken as directed, it constitutes one of the four grandest-ever swats of humility to the pompous human tookus.*
Sixth, it contributes enormously to our understanding of how and why things work the way they do.
Seventh, that understanding has led in turn to incredible advances in medical science, agriculture, environmental stewardship, and more.
The list goes on.
I’ll turn it over to Clay Burell, education editor at Change.org, for the call to action. Hit it, Clay.
Petition: Thank Politicians Who Say “No” to Creationists
by Clay Burell
First appeared 18 February at Change.org
WE COUNT OUR INJURIES far more closely than our blessings, the old saying goes. That might be especially true in our dealings with politicians. They surely hear far more complaints than thank yous. Let’s change that for once.
Let’s say thanks to these two in Texas:
It takes courage for a politician in Texas to speak out against religious fundamentalism. Texas state Senator Rodney Ellis and Representative Patrick Rose deserve the thanks of all Americans – or those who value real science, anyway – for showing that courage.
Whether you’re a Texan or not, if you want creationism out of high school science textbooks – and evolution in them – please take a moment to thank Sen. Ellis and Rep. Rose for fighting the Discovery Institute/creationist-dominated Texas State Board of Education (SBOE).
As I reported last week, Rose and Ellis proposed legislation “to place the board under periodic review by the Sunset Advisory Commission and hold them accountable for their performance, just as we do the Texas Education Agency and other state agencies.”
Why? In their own words:
The decisions of the SBOE not only impact millions of young lives on a daily basis, but impact the economic progress of our state as well.
For these reasons and many others, the public has a right to full disclosure and oversight.
The board has escaped such scrutiny for far too long. The disregard for educators, instructional experts and scientists can’t continue. It’s time to take a closer look at the operations and policies of the State Board of Education.
Our state, and especially our kids, deserve better.
Again, please take a moment to send them your thanks in this petition. It will also be cc’d to your own state and federal representatives, asking they show the same courage in your state.
_______________
CLAY BURELL is an American high school Humanities teacher, technology coach, and Apple Distinguished Educator who has taught for the last eight years in Asian international schools. According to law, he’s married to his wife. According to his wife, he’s married to his Mac.
When you’re done signing the petition, it’s time to support our troops at the National Center for Science Education. These are the heroic and seemingly tireless folks who do the heavy lifting for the rest of us.
*Copernicus, Lyell, Darwin, Hubble.
Secular Homeschoolers — guest column by JJ Ross
You think YOUR secular kids face some tricky issues in Christian-branded society? Ha!
Picture a homeschooling family. Do you see a bible in the picture, prominent in the foreground — perhaps on the kitchen table around which six or seven modestly-dressed children do their lessons, while their denim-jumpered mother bakes bread and solemnly applies her righteous rod to strays?
Kathleen Parker’s column this week about the GOP might as well be about homeschooling:
To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch…is what ails [us] and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.
You could say I’m a “constituent” of homeschooling, but in a radically different picture from the evangelical right wing oogedy-boogedy branch. Heck, not just a different picture, a whole different story, written in another language.
Last week Dale said of secular parent blogging:
“Our greatest deficit — the lack of a connected, mutually supportive community — is slowly being erased. Equally important, this chorus of voices helps us to build consensus about the best practices for nonreligious parenting. So visit ‘em, read ‘em, comment and link up — and let me know who I missed.”
He can picture secular homeschool parent bloggers as a friendly neighborhood in that community. So if homeschooling, like Harvard, had a Humanist of the Year Award — and why don’t we, come to think of it? — Dale would deserve it. 🙂
We’re just starting to find ourselves and each other in the blogosphere, a search made more challenging by the fact we don’t know what to call ourselves. (Homeschoolers Beyond Belief?) Secular, inclusive, rational, atheist, freethinking? The online homeschooling community fights over the word “homeschool” itself, never mind the weight of all those adjectives hung around it like baggage on a skycap’s cart.
Some of us are trying Thinking Homeschoolers and Evolved Homeschoolers on for size. The main lesson I’ve taught myself so far is that it takes real thinking — knowledge work if you will — with plenty of detours through link farms and those insipid generic “about homeschooling” blurbs, to discover solid secular homeschooling resources that endure.
Three comprehensive favorites:
National Home Education Network with discussion forums (now read-only) on thinking topics such as networking between religious and not-religious families
Sandra Dodd’s Radical Unschooling and her “merrily unschooling” family blog
A secular network of trustworthy — preferably jaded — independent homeschooling parents doesn’t just connect us with the good stuff; it helps steer us around the bad. There’s the HSLDA to get to the bottom of, of course, which I won’t link because those patriarchs blot out the homeschooling sun without any help from me. Then there’s an elaborate online con game in which an individual (with many names) sets up a fake but believable show of influence as homeschool leader and authority, quoted by reporters, selling products and running private schools, sometimes from dozens of intertwined sites very unlikely for one parent to suspect, detect or connect.
It takes running down rabbit trails and then networking in controlled chaos, to share what we learn in places innocent newbies are likely to find it, and save them starting all over again — real education! I would give you three infamous names to prove the point, except then Dale would get indignant letters threatening legal action. (That’s how they operate. See why you probably won’t hear about them without some networking?)
Email lists were the hot ticket when we started homeschooling in the 1990s. For years they were my lifeline. Ten years ago the secular National Home Education Network (NHEN) was born of and built on email lists. But — maybe in a form of punctuated equilibrium, or would it be climate change? — it’s not the same today. My blog partner Nance Confer and I still operate Parent-Directed Education for a static membership, 28,000 archived messages dating back to the summer of 2001.
If you’re just burning to roam the archives of a particular list, it may be worth joining. State and local email lists often thrive; I hear two good examples are VA Eclectic HS with Shay Seaborne and Stephanie Elms (see her bloglink below) and Ben Bennett’s Indiana Home Educators Network (IHEN).
And there are tightly focused mentoring lists, for new unschoolers say, or college prep advice. But generally I no longer recommend email lists, for any homeschool parent comfortable in the blogosphere.
So think blogs, maybe find a couple here that speak to you. Then see who comments there, and who’s on that blog’s blogroll. Follow at your leisure, to infinity if you like. The universe is expanding, not contracting. 🙂
This has worked better for me than searching for atheist or rational, plus homeschooling or school choice or education freedom, etc. Oh, yeah, here’s a tip — don’t assume “rational” means merely logic and thinking. It can indicate ideology more than analysis, code for Ayn Rand discipleship as an “Objectivist” and sometimes coupled with an extreme brand of libertarian homeschool politics that uses Founding Father quotes and defend-the-constitution rhetoric to forward its fascist fringe beliefs. There is one blog for example listed on every “rational” homeschool blogroll I see, that’s anything but. So I don’t go back to that blog. Just sayin’ — it would be RATIONAL to vet your links more thoroughly, ahem, unless you too actually believe Obama is Jesus and Hitler all rolled up into one Marxist plot to overthrow America.
With that [drum roll please!] here’s a grab bag of 15 smartly secular homeschooling blogs, from my own little corner in my own little chair, just right for my home and hearth:
Home Education, Religion, Politics & Eclectic Stuff (HERP&ES)
Unschool Days
_________________________
JJ Ross blogs about thinking parenting and secular homeschooling at Cocking a Snook!
Edumacation
It’s been a couple of weeks now since the nation was introduced to the execrable Michele Bachmann (R-MN) when she called for witchhunts to ferret out “anti-Americanism” in Congress.
Some of us, especially those who watched her rise in Minnesota, were not shocked. While in the Minnesota House, Bachmann noticed that most college professors are politically liberal. Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion (that education generally leads to the left), she declared that colleges have a hiring bias toward liberals, who then indoctrinate students into liberal thinking, perpetuating the cycle. She called for legislation requiring that Minnesota colleges hire 50 percent Republicans and 50 percent Democrats.
(The bill was DOA.)
I do think education leads to the left by exposing the mind to the wider world, to a variety of ideas and people, thereby reducing fear of the Other — a fear Bachmann still has in spades. This acceptance of difference is at the heart of the divide between liberal and conservative thinking. Conservatism embodies our evolved tendency to value what is familiar, shared, and traditional while distrusting the unfamiliar or foreign. Liberalism tends instead to distrust sameness and to see greater value in diversity and change.
This election captures that distinction spot-on. One candidate, the familiar and safe archetype of the politician/war hero, has benefited from (and at times encouraged) fear of the unfamiliar, and therefore unsafe, Other.
If it’s true that education leads to the left and diminishes fear, fear-based campaigning should increase in effectiveness as education levels decrease, and you’d expect states with the lowest per-capita educational attainment to favor the fearmongering candidate.
The list below ranks all 50 states and the District of Columbia in order by proportion of college degrees in the population (highest to lowest). Those in blue are favoring Obama (as of Nov. 1). Those in red favor McCain. Black indicates a current toss-up:
TOP THIRD BY EDUCATION LEVEL (15 blue, 2 red)
District of Columbia
Massachusetts
Maryland
Colorado
Virginia
New Hampshire
Connecticut
New Jersey
Minnesota
Vermont
Kansas
California
New York
Washington
Utah
Delaware
Illinois
MIDDLE THIRD BY EDUCATION LEVEL (7 blue, 8 red, 2 toss-up)
Rhode Island
Hawaii
Nebraska
Missouri
Oregon
Arizona
Florida
North Dakota
Georgia
Ohio
Montana
Pennsylvania
Texas
Iowa
Oklahoma
Wisconsin
Alaska
BOTTOM THIRD BY EDUCATION LEVEL (12 red, 4 blue, 1 toss-up)
South Dakota
North Carolina
Maine
New Mexico
Tennessee
Michigan
Alabama
Idaho
Louisiana
South Carolina
Indiana
Kentucky
Nevada
Wyoming
Mississippi
Arkansas
West Virginia
[Source: Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the 2003 Current Population Survey, U.S. Census Bureau, 2003-04, quoted here. State electoral polling via FiveThirtyEight.com.]
When it comes to strength of support in each state — the percent of the population by which the candidate is favored — the correlation is even clearer. Eight of the 10 bluest states, i.e. where Obama support is highest by % of pop (DC NY CT VT CA IL MA DE) are in the top third educationally, while 7 of the 10 reddest states, i.e. where McCain support is highest by % of pop (ID AL WY AR LA KY TN) are in the bottom third educationally.
Bill O’Reilly calls me a “secular progressive,” and as labels go, it’s damn close to perfect. But religion and conservatism aren’t my real enemies. They are symptoms of something much more fundamental — ignorance and fear — and education is the remedy for both. If wanting a better-informed, less fearful world makes me an elitist, then honey, we ALL ought to embrace that label.
(N.B. To save y’all some emailing, rest assured that I know there are many people of great intelligence and worth who lack a college degree. I have only used the college degree stat as a general indicator of educational attainment. But I do think it’s fair to say that susceptibility to political fearmongering tends to decrease as education increases. Kirk out.)
Tray tables up! Flights of nonsense landing in Texas schools
The next act in the long and ugly creationist end-game will take place in Texas. After the previous two acts, my confidence is high.
One of my dearest hopes for the next generation is that they get a real shot at understanding evolution. My own teenage understanding of the theory was fuzzy around the edges, since we touched on it for all of about eight minutes in high school. I didn’t encounter it again until Anthro 1 at Berkeley–at which point it dazzled me so much I changed my major from psych to physical anthropology.
And am I ever glad I did, because understanding evolution changes everything. It is not just true but transformative and elegant and exquisitely, lastingly wonder-inducing. And the wonder is increasingly evident the deeper you dig — as opposed to religious wonder, which pales with each stroke of the spade. Yes, I want kids to understand evolution because it’s true, but I also want to gift them with the giddy perspective it brings, both humbling and exalting in its implications. It is indeed the “best idea anyone ever had,” but also the most astonishingly wonder-full.
When I fight to keep evolution in the schools and creationism out, it’s that wonder that I’m fighting for as much as fact. The fact that ignorance and cowardice among parents and educators keeps our kids from learning much about the Coolest Thing We Know simply breaks my heart.
That’s why I’m so excited to hear that creationists are busily reviewing state science standards in Texas.
(Wha??)
You heard me. When I read about this on Pharyngula, I squealed with girlish glee. Here’s why: When lunacy flies too far below the radar, the good guys slumber, the middle shrugs, and untold damage is done. But once in a while it flies high enough and caws loud enough to wake enough of us up to do something serious about it. That’s why I’m a big fan of those flights of nonsense.
It happens in politics as well. A recent such flight was piloted by the ghastly Michele Bachmann, a fascist (and I don’t use that word lightly) from my former state who won a seat in Congress in 2006 despite my objections. She’s been a dangerous nut for two years but only came to the country’s attention when she went on Hardball recently to call for a McCarthyesque rooting out of “anti-Americanism” in Congress:
Bachmann’s no more dangerous this week than last — she’s simply visible. As a partial result, the most admired Republican in the country endorsed the man she slandered. And as a direct result, three quarters of a million dollars poured in to her opponent’s campaign.
Another example: Would the left ever have gotten its act together if John McCain had selected a sensible running mate?
So we really shouldn’t gnash our teeth too much when nonsense flies high. Pass out the peanuts and encourage them to enjoy the in-flight movie while you spread some foam (or not) on the runway.
Evolution education has benefited tremendously from such high-visibility nonsense in recent years. The Dover trial was a lopsided victory for evolution, and the judge, a Bush appointee, wrote the most devastatingly powerful and scornful evisceration of “intelligent design” in the history of the issue. (If you haven’t seen the NOVA program about the trial, oh my word, people, click here.)
Without that high-flying attempt by the creationists, a crucial moment of progress couldn’t have occurred.
Then there’s Kansas, where the state Board of Education’s attempt to throttle evolution education ended with evolution more firmly ensconced in the curriculum standards than before and every last one of the creationist board members out of a job. Again, progress not in spite of, but because of, overt lunacy.
Now the flight is landing in Texas, where the Texas Board of Education (itself stocked with two creationists for every science-literate member) has named a six-person committee to review science standards — three science-literates and three high-profile creationist activists. The committee is headed by a seventh member, Don McLeroy, a creationist dentist (of all things).
See where this is going?
So why should parents outside of Texas care? Here’s why, from the Texas Freedom Network:
Publishers will use the new standards to create new textbooks. Because Texas is such a large market for textbook sales, publishers typically craft their textbooks for this state and then sell those books to other schools across the country. So the results of this curriculum process could have consequences for far more than just the 4.6 million children in Texas public schools.
Unsurprisingly, the National Center for Science Education is on it. They’re the good folks who coordinated the brilliant victory in Dover.
So be glad the lunacy is flying high where we can see it — but don’t be complacent, especially y’all in Texas. If nothing else, get yourselves informed before the board election by listening closely to this incredibly clear message from a well-informed Texas gentleman whose resemblance to Satan is almost certainly coincidental:
“What happened in Kansas and in Dover, Pennsylvania is about to happen here in Texas, too,” he says. Well I certainly hope so. It won’t be easy or smooth. The fable purveyors will do some damage along the way. But I’ve never been more confident in our ability to win in the end.
Thinking sideways
It’s parent-teacher conference time, which I love. There always seems to be a moment in these conferences when I’m reminded that my kids think sideways.
Present any one of them with a question or problem and they tend to choose the least conventional solution that’s still a solution.
Mr. H, Delaney’s first grade teacher, showed us an assignment in which the kids were asked what superpower they would want to have. Informal web polls tend toward mind-reading, flight, super-strength, super-speed, invisibility, and the rest of the Marvel Comics arsenal. Mr. H said the other kids had generally chosen from that traditional list.
Not Delaney. “If I could have any supper power,” she wrote, “I would want the power to help other peple. Like if some one was blinde, I would make them see again. Wenever I would here HELP!, I would come.”
I wonder where “reversing disabilities” would be on a frequency graph of power preferences. Then there’s the fun fact that the children of Christian parents were busily emulating Superman while the child of humanists chose to essentially emulate Christ.
Last Thankgiving, Erin’s fourth grade class did the usual “what are you grateful for” assignment, and again we heard our child’s sideways answer in the teacher conference. Most of her classmates were grateful for health, family, sunshine, food, a home, our country, our soldiers, our freedom. All marvelous answers.
And my daughter?
“Pain,” said Mr. J. “She said she is most grateful for pain.”
I smiled. “Really.”
“Yes, pain. At first I was a little, uh…concerned,” he said, “but then she explained it. She said that pain warns us when something is wrong, and without it, a little injury or sickness could get worse and we’d never know. We could die from something small. So she’s grateful for pain.” He smiled and shook his head. “I never thought of it that way.”
We’d talked about this once when she had a bad splinter in her foot. If it weren’t for pain, I said as I worked the tweezers clumsily, she might not have known the splinter was there. It could have become infected, even dangerous.
But here’s the thing: that splinter came out four years ago, when she was six. I had no idea at the time that the idea of pain as our friend had made any impression, much less a deep one. Unlike the splinter, that sideways idea worked its way in and stayed.
The Devil Goes Down to Georgia
I read to Delaney’s first grade class yesterday. She had prepped me for my visit like a military operation, reminding me at least five times of the exact time and S.O.P.
“There’s a chair you sit in, and I’ll sit right by you,” she said. “You have to bring three stories, but don’t be sad if we don’t get to all three.”
I promised to hold it together.
She nodded, then ran upstairs to rummage through her books. Five minutes later she was downstairs, beaming.
“First, you’ll read this one,” she said, handing me Rosie’s Fiddle, a great version of a classic folktale. “Then Crictor, the Boa Constrictor, and then”–she held up a finger, eyes closed– “IF there’s time…you’ll read Pete’s a Pizza.”
“Ooh, good ones,” I said, only really meaning it about Rosie’s Fiddle. The other two are nothing much, but Rosie’s Fiddle is the kind of story that can keep a roomful of six-year-olds perched at attention on the edge of their buns.
The operation commenced at 1330 hours.
“If Rosie O’Grady ever smiled,” I read dramatically, “no one but her chickens had ever seen it. She was as lean and hard as a November wind…”
The story goes on to describe the solitary Rosie playing the fiddle on her porch at night.
Folks said Rosie could fiddle the flowers out of their buds. They said she could fiddle the stones out of the ground. Folks said Rosie O’Grady could outfiddle the Devil himself. And that was a dangerous thing to say.
Oh…shit.
I flashed forward through the story in my mind, a version of Aarne-Thompson taletype 1155-1169 (Mortal Outwits the Devil). The tale has taken many forms through the years, but once a Russian folktale put a violin in Lucifer’s hand, the fiddling faceoff became the preferred choice, from Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat to The Devil Went Down to Georgia. And Rosie’s Fiddle.
“What’s the Devil?” one kid piped up.
Shitshitshit. I looked at Mr. H, Laney’s magnificently gifted and cool teacher, whose smile was unperturbed.
“It’s a kind of a monster,” offered another kid.
“No,” said a third, “the Devil is the one who curses you if you do something bad.”
Aw shit. Stupidly, this hadn’t even crossed my mind when Laney selected the book.
I turned the page to reveal a drawing of the Devil, horns and tail and dapper red suit, standing at Rosie’s gate with a golden fiddle. They exchange pleasantries, then he gets down to bidness. “I hear tell you can out-fiddle the Devil himself,” I said with a growling Georgia accent, for some reason.
Soon the inevitable challenge is made, and Rosie mulls it over:
Now Rosie wasn’t any fool. She knew what the Devil would ask for if she lost: it was her soul she’d be fiddlin’ for. But Rosie had a hankering for the Devil’s shiny, bright fiddle.
I see all of this as great folklore. But I also knew that if I’d walked into my daughter’s classroom and heard another parent reading a parable of the Devil casting about for human souls, I’d have laid a poached egg.
The kids were riveted — it is quite a compelling story — and Mr. H didn’t seem the least bit troubled. But I was glad to pick up the second book, leaving the world of Faust and Charlie Daniels in favor of a safe, dull story about a pet snake — pausing for only a moment to remember whether the damn snake offers anybody an apple.
Laughing matters 6: Crossing lines, thank gawd
- September 03, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In humor, Parenting, schools, sex
12
Your [human] race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug push it a little weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.
–Satan, in The Mysterious Stranger by MARK TWAIN
This brilliant piece of satire immediately brought that Twain quote to my mind:
When Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist posted it, several commenters said they found it “inappropriate” and “in poor taste.” One sniffed, “I highly question the integrity of someone who would post it.” That the commenter’s incoming link was from a conservative blog is, I’m sure, a coincidence. An equal number of the protestors were surely my fellow Democrats. Our knees have a long history of turning to Jell-O when someone implies we’re being unfair — whether or not they’re right. It’s the one implication we can’t bear.
I don’t care what the perspective is — when a piece of satire is smart, funny, and relevant, I’ll defend it to the death. This parody-poster brilliantly condenses fact and implication by juxtaposing the abstinence-only position of a vice-presidential candidate and her pregnant teenage daughter.
As many others have noted, the McCain campaign made her pregnancy an issue. This parody simply (and quite mildly, folks) makes use of establish facts to drive home a crucial point: Abstinence-only sex education does not work. Over $176 million has been poured into the promotion of abstinence-only sex education, despite studies indicating that a majority of kids taking a virginity pledge fail to keep the pledge, are more likely to have unprotected sex than non-pledgers when they do have sex, and are equally likely to contract STDs.1
Fortunately, teen prenancy is on the decline — but not because of abstinence-only education. According the Guttmacher Institute’s 2006 report, teen pregnancy rates are down 36 percent from 1990 to the lowest level in 30 years, but just fourteen percent of this decrease is attributed to teens waiting longer to have sex. The other 86 percent is the result of improved contraceptive use.
Obama wisely put the topic “off-limits” for campaign staffers, threatening to fire anyone who went after it and rightly noting that he was himself the child of a teenage mother. That’s smart politics. Making the necessary connection to Sarah Palin’s views on sex education is appropriately left to the rest of us. And if we can do it humorously, so much the better.
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1“Abstinence Education Faces An Uncertain Future,” New York Times, July 18, 2007; Bearman, Peter and Hannah Brückner: “Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and First Intercourse.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 106, No. 4 (Jan 2001), pp. 859-912.