4. The first blogger
(Post 4 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
9:30 am EDT
I can’t believe it’s been almost five years since I last mentioned my favorite blog: “The Essays of Montaigne.”
Don’t Google it. This blog was created in the 16th century when French nobleman Michel de Montaigne decided to write down his thoughts on whatever popped into his head. If that isn’t a blog, I don’t know what is.
Fortunately a lot of worthwhile things popped into that head, like the nature of greatness, human vanity, lies, laziness, thumbs, birth defects, the passing of gas (and the closely-related topic of smells), anger, cruelty, cannibals, laughter, solitude, drunkenness, and how it could be that children resemble their fathers. And death. He wrote a lot about death.
But these weren’t abstract essays. Montaigne’s goal was to describe human life with absolute honesty, and he ties each Essay into his own life and the lives of those around him in a way that makes the reader bolt upright in recognition again and again. There’s something so unique and incredible about hearing 400-year-old thoughts so close to my own. The most common reader reaction seems to be, “OMG, he’s talking about my life. It seems like it was written yesterday.”
If you haven’t read Montaigne, get a good translation — the Penguin edition is good — then pick an essay and go. If it doesn’t grab you in a page, pick a different one. Be sure to let me know how it goes.
Currently reading, and also hugely recommended:
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
3. Hiding in plain sight
(Post 3 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
9:00 am EDT
Q (from South Africa): Because of my demographics (female, 40, white, Afrikaans speaking) people automatically assume that I’m a Christian. So my usual tactic is just not to say anything and let it pass, but I’m increasingly uncomfortable with this as it feels hypocritical. Comments?
A: This is a great question, and I’ve seen it answered several ways.
Start with the fact that being out, to whatever degree you can be, makes it easier for others to be out, which in turn makes it harder for religious folks to stereotype nonbelievers as a cartoonish ilk they’ve never met, which in turn causes attitudes to evolve. It has worked precisely this way for gays and lesbians, and it will work for us. Being out and normal is the most important and powerful element in changing attitudes.
Some respond to this idea by essentially sewing the Big Red A on their lives, framing their every gesture, message, and wardrobe choice in terms of atheism. I have no problem with this, but it’s not for me. Sometimes I’m interested in going boldly into the fray for positive social change, and sometimes I’m more interested in having a beer. And sometimes these overlap.
A perfect example: When a new acquaintance asks what books I write, I often say “nonreligious parenting books.” But sometimes, like when I’m getting my hair cut and not looking for a big conversation, it’s just “parenting books.” Maybe it has something to do with the scissors by my ear.
I think we have to give ourselves permission to come out to the degree and to the people we choose in the ways that we choose, and to not be bullied into more. At the same time, we should constantly remember that it’s the way to positive change, and that it almost always goes better than we think it will.
Specific ideas:
1. When someone says “I’m praying for you,” say, “I’m not religious myself, but thanks for the very kind gesture.”
2. Wear a Foundation Beyond Belief T-shirt. If someone asks, tell them about nonreligious people coming together to work for a better world.
3. Wear a Happy Humanist or similar pin or earrings. Someone will ask.
4. Post and comment on Facebook in ways that gradually reveal your perspective.
5. Offer a nontheistic “grace” at a family gathering.
Aaaaand, I’m out of time. Add in the comments!
The lazy atheist
Not doing something is usually easier than doing it. Not taking out the trash burns fewer calories than taking out the trash. Forgetting to run a marathon, not getting a Ph.D. in physics, declining to write a novel—each of these non-doings is easier than doing any one of them.
So it should be easy to be an atheist, since all you have to do is not believe in God. But here’s the thing — it’s really hard.
The not-believing isn’t the problem. There are a thousand good reasons for deciding that God was created by humans, not the other way around. But like not breathing or not stopping at a red light, the problem isn’t the act itself — it’s what happens next.
Tell your mother-in-law or boss or boyfriend that you don’t believe in God and suddenly everything becomes complicated. The eyes get all shifty and hands go to wallets. You are quizzed on arcane bits of Sunday School knowledge by people who are sure you missed something. And you’re asked how you can be sure God doesn’t exist when everyone else on Earth but Richard Dawkins and his cat is absolutely sure He does.
Okay, you say, fair questions. Time for a bit of homework. So you read the Bible, cover to cover, and take a good run at the Koran, and toe-dip the Talmud and the Bhagavad Gita. You continue by reading everything that popped into the head of a theologian, only to learn that the arguments for believing in God have enormous names like Ontological, Cosmological, and Teleological. Most believers don’t know these reasons, but if you’d like to claim disbelief, you have to know them, and refute them, one by one by one by one.
You turn for help to the recent surge in atheist writing, only to find another long shelf of 600-page books written by, and apparently for, people with advanced degrees in Philosophy and Neuroscience, not to mention Sentence Structure and Footnoting. You clear your busy social schedule and dig in anyway, finally mastering the complex and nuanced arguments against the complex and nuanced arguments of the theologians.
But when at last you find those believers again, the ones who were sure you’d missed something, and share your newfound knowledge, they shake their heads and smile. It isn’t that kind of a question, silly. It’s not something you can look up in books. It happens in your heart.
And they wonder why atheists are cranky.
Most of the people I know and love are lazy Christians—people who technically believe, but haven’t given it much thought or effort. Some go to church, some don’t. Few of them have cracked a Bible, much less a Koran or the Vedas. I’m more likely to know the stated beliefs of their denomination than they are. Just slap a Jesus fish on your bumper and you’re in. Nobody asks you to list the Ten Commandments (well — not usually), or which two fabrics Leviticus 19 says not to combine, or even how you know there’s a God. It’s easy. Just believe—or at least say you do.
There are lots of lazy Christians. It’s time to clear off the couch, pop open a beer, and make room for the lazy atheist.
(Remember the reason for the Blogathon — donate in the sidebar!)
1. Naked
(Post 1 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
8:00 am
Here’s the first of 33 consecutive posts in 16 hours — about the same number I’ve done in the past six months. I do this NOT because I think I have 33 things to say, but because Jen McCreight told me to. I am nothing if not obedient.
I also do it to support the Secular Student Alliance, the World’s Bitchinest Freethought Organization™ and beneficiary of this Blogathon, to which you must donateifyoureachtheendofthissentence. HA! Now go straight to the sidebar and chip in for the future you say you want.
Ideas for ways to pledge (yoinked from Ellen Lundgren):
1. Pledge per word…say 1/10¢ a word.
2. Pledge per post (33 total).
3. Pledge per thing you’ve learned. If a post teaches you something new, you donate your pledge amount. (This may be the cheapest option.)
I’ll post on the hour and half hour until midnight tonight, holy shi’ite. About half will be on topics I’ve been ordered to write about (see? obedient) by Facebook friends and lovers, while the other half will be what I damn well feel like writing about, so OFF me.
Many are drawn from titles on Post-It Notes all over my desk, but none will be written in advance. This is a huge mistake. I usually edit the crap out of everything I write. Today you get it undigested, and it just may look like that.
Between now and midnight I will talk about the part of my brain that’s being born again, convenient monsters, implicit believers and lazy atheists, making Quakers, hiding in plain sight, a 400-year-old secret atheist document, funerals, my disappearing kids, the things that piss me off most when atheists do them, and whether my wife has ever been an idiot (spoiler alert: no). I will make a big, cool announcement and write one post buck naked. I’ll share the one extremely common word in blog names that’s most likely to keep me from reading the blog (sorry), reveal my two degrees of separation from Lisa Simpson, and offer my opinion on the single best intro to freethought. I’ll say nice things about a minister and pissy things about a theologian, introduce you to my favorite blogger (who happens also to have been the first), and wish like hell we would pay more attention to Santa Claus.
I also plan to write off the top of my head about 10-12 hot secular parenting topics (i.e. topics of interest to hot secular parents).
Pray for me.
The Social Network
One of the real pleasures of being neck-deep in the freethought movement at the moment is how quickly the conversation is growing up. Not that it isn’t still fun and worthwhile to throw tomatoes at bad religion. But we’re also talking a lot more about building our own community, including — psst, here’s the grown-up part — learning from what religion has done well.
If religion did nothing but scare people into giving money or doing as they’re told, or comfort them with fables, or validate innate hatreds, I wouldn’t bother looking for anything to borrow. But we’re getting beyond these half-answers to recognize benefits that might actually be worth a good think.
One such benefit came out in a Harvard/Wisconsin study in the December 2010 issue of American Sociological Review. Other studies had suggested that churchgoers are happier than non-churchgoers by several life-satisfaction indicators, but this one actually dug in to ask why that might be.
Turns out there’s another essential variable: Churchgoers are happier than non-churchgoers only if they have significant friendships in the congregation. As the number and significance of the friendships increase, so does life satisfaction. And those who attend church regularly but have no strong connections to others in the congregation show less life satisfaction than non-churchgoers.
Now there’s something worth noticing. Chaeyoon Lim, one of the lead researchers, put it this way:
[Life satisfaction] is almost entirely about the social aspect of religion, rather than the theological or spiritual aspect,” said UW Madison’s Chaeyoon Lim, one of the lead researchers. “People are more satisfied with their lives when they go to church because they build a social network within their congregation….We think it has to do with the fact that you meet a group of close friends on a regular basis and participate in certain activities that are meaningful to the group. At the same time, they share a certain social identity…The sense of belonging seems to be the key to the relationship between church attendance and life satisfaction.
Brings to mind a poll cited by Amanda Metskas in Raising Freethinkers:
[T]heology is less important to most churchgoers than a number of other benefits. In many cases, they attend despite the theology. It is telling that only 27 percent of churchgoing US respondents to a 2007 Gallup poll even mentioned God when asked for the main reason they attend church. Most people go for personal growth, for guidance in their lives, to be encouraged, to be inspired—or for the community and fellowship of other members. These, not worship, are the primary needs fulfilled by churches. (p. 206)
God is the frame in which many people hang their most deeply felt human needs. One of the best things we can do as a movement is think about how best to reframe that legitimate human picture.
Group Hug image CC BY 2.0
6000 days
Part 3 of 3.
Go to Part 1 or Part 2.
The aim that the child should grow up to become confidently independent is synonymous with the aim that the child should grow up mentally healthy.
Psychologist John Bowlby (1956)
We’re born with brains wired up for the Paleolithic, not for the world as it is today. We’ve developed better ways of knowing and controlling the world around us, but the fears and behaviors that protected us in that era — fear of difference, hypervigilance, out-group aggression, love of clear categories and authority, magical thinking — are still with us, even though they’ve now become either pointless or dangerous.
I want to help my kids let go of those fears so they can have a better life.
Religious and social conservatism are symptoms of those fears, reactions to the problem of being a Stone Age human. For the half of the planet still living in marginal conditions, that problem is mostly unsolved. For the rest of us — thanks to agriculture, germ theory, separating our drinking water from our poop, the scientific method, and a thousand other advances, we’ve made some serious progress. And that partial solution has made all the difference, freeing us up to live better lives than we once did.
I want my kids to get that very good news.
Education, experience, and parenting take a child from Stone Age newborn to modern adult in about 6,000 days. Or so we hope. In addition to shoe tying, the five-paragraph essay, algebra, good oral hygiene, the age of the universe, the French Revolution, and how to boil an egg, there’s something else we need to help them learn, or better yet, feel — that life is better and you have more control than your factory settings would have you believe.
At a convention five years back, author/filmmaker (and Darwin great-great-grandson) Matthew Chapman was asked why Europe rapidly secularized after the Second World War while the U.S. remained devout. He paused for a moment. “Honestly,” he said, “I think socialized medicine had a lot to do with it.”
Not the answer we were expecting.
For most of the history of our species, he said, we’ve been haunted by an enormous sense of personal insecurity, and for good reason. The threat of death or incapacity was always hanging over us. Religion offered a sense of security, the illusion of control. Once the states of Europe began to relieve some of those basic fears, people began to feel a greater sense of control and security, and the need for traditional religion began to wane.
Whether that’s the whole answer or not, I think he’s on to something here. Traditional religion is driven by human insecurity. I have a good number of friends and relations in the deep and toxic end of the religious pool, and I can’t think of one who truly jumped in unpushed. Some were born into it and raised to believe they couldn’t live without it. Other experienced some kind of life crisis resulting in a terrifying loss of control that pushed those ancient buttons — and they jumped in with both feet.
I feel immense empathy for these people — even as their beliefs make me nauseous.
I also have many friends who genuinely chose religion instead of needing it. And lo and behold, these folks tend to end up in more liberal expressions, doing little harm and a lot of good. They aren’t hostages to their innate fears. In fact, they have a lot more in common with me than with the people hyperventilating and clinging to Jesus in the deep end.
I really don’t care if my kids end up identifying with religion so long as it’s a choice, not a need. And the best way I can ensure that is by using these 6,000 days to give them not just knowledge but also confidence and security.
Turns out we know how to do this. You start with a sensitive, responsive, and consistent home life. Build a strong attachment with parents and other significant adults. Don’t hit or humiliate them or let others do so. Encourage them to challenge authority, including your own. Make them comfortable with difference. Use knowledge to drive out fear. Build a sense of curiosity and wonder that will keep them self-educating for life. Let them know that your love and support are unconditional. Teach and expect responsibility and maturity. Encourage self-reliance. Help them find and develop “flow” activities and lose themselves in them.
These aren’t off the top of my head, you know — they’re straight out of the best child development research, which strongly supports attachment theory and authoritative parenting, about which more later. Bottom line, the best practices for nonreligious parenting are in sync with the best practices for…parenting.
Now isn’t THAT nice.
We may have to contend with a lot of noise in our culture and even our own extended families, but when it comes to raising “confidently independent, mentally healthy” kids, the best current knowledge is on our side. And our additional hope of keeping our kids in charge of their own worldview decisions comes along in the bargain.
Conservative religious parents have to close their eyes and swim hard upstream against this research consensus, following James Dobson et al. back to the Paleolithic. But liberal religious parents, who share most of my parenting goals, have the same advantage I do. They can even claim one of the foremost advocates of attachment theory as their own — William Sears, a sane and sensible Christian parenting author who opposes almost every major parenting position of James Dobson.
I bang on and on about how and why to let our kids intersect with religion. They’re good and important questions. But every one of those questions rests on the much more fundamental question of confidence and security. Build that foundation first, and the rest is icing.
The easy ones and the hard ones
Preparing a talk on critical thinking and ethics reminded me of this post from three years ago.
“Omigosh. Some of these things are soooo easy, but this one is totally hard.”
“What things?”
“These Question Book questions. Some are just so easy they’re dumb.”
Delaney [then 7] has been reading Gregory Stock’s The Kids’ Book of Questions on and off for a few weeks now. Two hundred sixty-eight questions to ponder. And she’s right — some are so easy they’re dumb.
“Like this, listen,” she said. “Number 110: ‘If it would save the lives of ten kids in another country, would you be willing to have really bad acne for a year?’ That’s so dumb!”
“So what’s your answer, then?”
“Of course I would do it. I mean, it’s their lives, Dad.” She paused, crinkled her brow. “What’s acne?”
“Pimples.”
“WHAT?! That’s even stupider. I thought it was a bad sickness or something. Who would let ten kids die just to not have pimples?!”
I thought back to junior high school, trying to recall how many strangers I’d have whacked in exchange for clear skin, and decided her question was rhetorical.
“But this one is really hard. Listen — Number 50: ‘If everyone in your class but you would be killed unless you sacrificed your own life, would you save everyone else or save yourself?'”
Long pause.
“I don’t know! That’s soooo hard! I really love to be alive. But so do they!”
She seemed genuinely tormented by the dilemma. It’s precisely the sacrifice that makes the Christ story so compelling. The willing sacrifice of one’s own life is just so hard to fathom. Until you add the heavenly out, at which point I suppose Christs and hijackers alike gain a decided advantage in nerve.
Laney, having no such advantage, prefers to live.
Coming up…
A quick rundown of the next few weeks:
The Parenting Beyond Belief WEBINAR!
Thursday Jan 26, 3-4pm EST
Want a taste of the Parenting Beyond Belief workshop but haven’t been able to catch me on the road? Join me this Thursday at 3 pm Eastern for the first in a series of one-hour Parenting Beyond Belief live webinars. The first one will touch on the seven top questions of secular parents and ends with a 30-minute live Q&A. The rest of the series will tackle one topic at a time.
To register, contact PBB Web Events Manager Noelle. Limit of 25 participants, so click quick.
A secular parenting breakfast and chat with Valley Skeptics in LA
Sunday Jan 29, 9:30am
I’ll be in LA for another meeting, but while I’m there, I’ve been invited to pop up to the Valley to have breakfast with one of the Foundation’s volunteer teams, Valley Skeptics in the Park. This one’s a private affair, but I thought I’d mention it anyway to make you all sad and hungry.
PBB in San Francisco
Saturday Feb 25, 1-4:30pm
How I love the Bay Area. Went to UC Berkeley in the 80s, destroyed my knee in the SF Marathon, got married in San Francisco…sorry, where was I. Oh, join me for a half-day workshop at Prometheus CrossFit. Register here!
Talk at University of the Pacific: “Do the Right Think”
Tuesday Feb 28, 7:00 pm
The idea that ethics can be and should be directly connected to critical thinking is weirdly controversial. I’ll put an end to the controversy once and for all in my talk at UOP’s DeRosa University Center. Come early for socializing at 6:30.
More to come…
When Science Goes South
My daughter wants to be a scientist. It’s all she’s ever wanted to be. And though she’s only nine, I have a pretty strong feeling she’s going to end up there.
When Charlie’s Playhouse announced an Evolution & Art Contest last fall, she was all over it. Imagine an island with a unique environment. Choose an existing animal to put on the island. Fast forward a million years or so and imagine how the animal would evolve as a result of that environment. Draw a picture of the evolved animal. Awesome.
Soon the sketches were flying. Finally, with just days to go before the deadline, Laney showed me her entry.
“The island has purple polka-dotted trees and bushes and quiet predators,” she explained. “And the only food is hard nuts. So after a long, long time, the monkeys evolve to have purple polka dots, huge ears to hear the predators, and sharp teeth to crack the nuts.”
She might not know an allele if it jumped up and mutated all over her, but her grasp of natural selection outstrips that of most adults. And she got this grasp not through lectures but by observing the results of natural selection all around us, and caring enough to think about it.
I described our approach in Raising Freethinkers (p. 17):
If I’m out on a walk in the woods with my own daughter and we see a deer with protective coloration, I’ll often say, “Look—you can barely see it. What if I was an animal trying to find a deer to eat? That one wouldn’t be very easy to find. And its babies would have the same coloring, so I’ll bet they’d be hard to find, too.”
[Then] imagine a poor adaptation. “Hey, what if it was bright pink? I think I’d have a pink one for supper every night, they’d be so easy to catch.” I step on a twig and the deer bolts away. “Ooh, fast too! I’ll bet I’d have to eat slow pink ones every night. Soon there wouldn’t be any slow pink ones left because I’d have eaten them all!”
When she does eventually encounter allele frequencies, cladistics, the modern synthesis and all the rest, it’ll glide into place on the foundation she’s laid for it. The key for now is to keep her engaged.
Winning the contest didn’t hurt that one bit. She nearly passed out in excitement. We let her teacher know about it, and he showered her with kudos, then forwarded the news to the front office.
Last week we received a call. It was Ms. Warner, an assistant administrator at the school. Becca answered. I didn’t know who she was talking to, but it was obviously good news of some sort.
Until it wasn’t.
When she hung up, she was clearly upset.
“Laney’s going to be interviewed by the principal on the Eagle News” — that’s a closed-circuit TV program that starts each school day — “about winning the Charlie’s Playhouse contest.”
I waited.
“But Ms. Warner said they’re not going to call it an ‘Evolution & Art’ contest — just an ‘Art’ contest. When I asked why, she said, ‘Because evolution is not in the curriculum.’ I said yes it is, it’s in the high school curriculum, and she said, ‘But it’s not in the elementary curriculum, so it’ll just be described as an ‘Art’ contest.'”
The heat started in my neck and spread to my ears, then into my face. Becca began swearing a blue streak. I sat down and wrote the most fabulously profane email of my life to a friend. Venting is good. Not sure if I was madder about the ignorance or the cowardice or the dishonesty — or the fact that this educator was dismissing the truly exceptional nature of what Laney did.
It wasn’t an art contest, you see. Delaney’s accomplishment had been scientific, not artistic. The drawing is dandy, but it’s just a way of expressing her grasp of the science. To have her school — savor that for a moment, her school — not only disregard her achievement, but send her the message that it’s something to be hidden, to be ashamed of…
I know what you’re thinking. Yes, this is Georgia. But as I’ve said before, in the four years we’ve been here, I’ve had far more opportunity to be pleasantly surprised than not. In addition to living in an area even more culturally and religiously diverse than the one we left in Minneapolis, our kids are getting an incredible education in top-ranked schools.
After many years in the national basement, Georgia’s latest science standards are excellent. And when it comes to the teaching of evolution itself, it ranks in the top tier of the Fordham study (see maps) — above Oregon, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and 24 other states.
Science standards don’t have to be in the South to go south. As Lawrence Lerner put it in the NCSE Journal,
although there is a disproportionate concentration of ill-treatment of evolution in the Bible Belt, geography is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for such treatment. Georgia and South Carolina, for instance, treated evolution very well while New Hampshire and Wisconsin did not.
The most relevant anti-science spectrum in the US (and elsewhere) is not North-South, but urban-suburban-rural. The suburbs of Atlanta have more in common with the suburbs of Philadelphia than either has in common with the small towns in its own state. The quality of science education tends to drop in sync with population density.
But that’s on paper. As Ms. Warner and Mr. Taylor clearly show, individuals in the system will do their level best to undercut even the best standards.
A deeply depressing Penn State study released two weeks ago found that only 28 percent of high school biology teachers consistently implement National Research Council recommendations calling for introduction of evidence that evolution occurred. About 13 percent of biology teachers explicitly advocate creationism in the classroom, while 60 percent use at least one of three strategies to avoid controversy: (1) pretending that evolution applies only on the molecular level; (2) telling students it does not matter if they really ‘believe’ in evolution, only that they know it for the test; and/or (3) “teaching the controversy,” which one researcher noted “tells students that well-established concepts can be debated in the same way we debate personal opinions.”
According to the researchers, these conflict-avoiders “may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists.”
The Principal of the Thing
I like to keep my posts to about 5 reading mins, so last week I posted only that part of the story and promised two more. But the (understandable) outrage began to spread like wildfire in minutes. Since I’m trying to make the case for a certain kind of approach, I didn’t need an online tsunami. So I’m going long today so you can see that it gets better. Then it gets much, much worse. Then better again. But that’s for next time.
I did the whole Mr. Taylor thing by email, which I now think was a mistake. Email lacks tone and visual cues, so it tends to read more harshly, especially in these situations. I decided to do this one in the flesh.
Becca suggested I talk to the principal, Mr. Robinson, rather than Ms. Warner. He’d be interviewing Laney, for one thing. It isn’t about Ms. Warner as such, but about seeing to it that Laney’s accomplishment isn’t misrepresented. Finally, he is among the most skilled, reasonable, and student-centered of the weirdly high number of principals I have known. A likely ally.
I asked for a quick meeting.
I knew that the best approach would be to focus on our shared interest — in this case the students and the educational messages they receive — so I started with the cool fact that a nine-year old girl in his school wants to be a scientist. She entered this contest to demonstrate her understanding of evolution and won. “Sandy Warner called and said you’d be interviewing Laney, but said it would be called an ‘Art’ contest rather than ‘Evolution & Art.’ When my wife asked why, she said evolution was not in the elementary curriculum.”
(I still can’t type that without shaking my head in amazement that anyone would try an explanation quite so obviously silly.)
It’s certainly in the middle and high school curriculum, I said, handing him a highlighted copy of each. If a third grader won a national calculus competition, no one would say, “Dagnabbit, if only that was in the elementary curriculum we could celebrate it!”
“I’m sure you’ll agree that’s not the reason anyway,” I said. “She was trying to avoid conflict. That’s an understandable impulse, but not when it damages the educational environment.” I handed him a summary of the deeply depressing Penn State study suggesting that conflict avoidance is the strategy currently doing the most damage to the scientific literacy of our kids.
Then there’s my kid, and the interview the following day. Among many other problems, I said that Delaney would be completely unable to answer his questions in any terms but evolutionary ones. Even a question like, “So tell me about this monkey” would lead to a description of the three adaptations she devised, since that’s what the contest was about.
He was nodding vigorously. “Absolutely. There’s not the slightest reason for her to hide any aspect of her accomplishment. But the curriculum is irrelevant in any case because…”
Oh my word, he was going to say it himself. Before I could even mount the slam-dunk argument against Warner’s ridiculous attempt, he would say it himself.
“…it’s student-initiated. Teachers have to stay within the curriculum, sure, but if a student initiates a project or has an outside accomplishment, they are absolutely able to talk about it freely without any regard to curriculum.” He explained that he is trying to encourage even more of this, to get the school celebrating outside accomplishments of all kinds to integrate the students’ outside lives into their school life. “This fits into that perfectly.”
See? Principals tend to know things. Actual educational policies. Court precedents. Best practices.
Total elapsed time: 7 minutes.
Now step back a minute and see what happened here. We (GOOD GUYS!) sent notice of Laney’s contest win to her teacher, who thought it was fantastic and submitted it for inclusion in the broadcast. GOOD GUY!
A middle administrator attempted to screw it up (both out of a misplaced sense of her responsibilities and, I have reason to believe, a reflection of her own point of view). BAD GUY!
The principal immediately recognized that the middle admin had screwed up and put it right. GOOD GUY!
Pretty good ratio, eh? But we often take our cue from the one person who did something dumb and respond with a scorched-earth policy that engulfs potential allies and puts everyone in a defensive crouch. Once I do that, they’re only looking to survive the attack. They can’t hear what I have to say, much less see that they have more in common with me than with the perp.
More often than not, the perp is surrounded by people who agree with you that the act was wrong, people who can join you in condemning the act and fixing the problem if you let them.
I’d like to say that’s the end of the story. (Continue to Part 2)
Let’s try that again
Okay, that was dumb.
I am in the middle of a delicate situation with my daughter’s school. Things are going very well at the moment, despite some serious bumps. When I posted a first installment this morning, several people had exactly the reaction I had — absolute fury — and expressed a desire to spread the outrage fast.
But THE LAST THING I NEED right now is a huge, angry online reaction. You’ll see why when I post in full.
Most of the people I’m dealing with are doing exactly the right things. That’s one of the main points I want to make. An explosive response will torpedo that, muddy the waters, and potentially expose my daughter to bad adult behavior.
So please, sit tight, let me see this thing through for a couple of days, and then I’ll put it all in a single post.