about math

So I've been looking at all these different math curricula, trying to choose one for Colin (and possibly Marky). The Well-Trained Mind suggests several as good choices, and one of them is A Beka.

I was taught A Beka math in elementary school. And I hated it. HATED. IT. But just in the past few years I've realized that it's not the curriculum that's to blame. As I was reading Susan Wise Bauer's assessment of it, she mentioned as a point in its favor that it uses lots and lots of drill. Meh, I thought, That doesn't sound like a point in its favor to me.

And then it hit me. Drill is supposed to be for practice. Drill is supposed to be for practice.

See, at my elementary school, they didn't offer speed drills for practice. They administered them as tests. And graded them as such. And sent them home with students for parents to sign off on. And I was punished for bad grades (because I'd tested as gifted, you see, and so if I brought home bad grades I just must not have been trying hard enough, and by God I was going to receive some serious motivation to try harder).

So every time we had a speed drill, here's what would happen: The teacher would pass out the "test." She would start the timer. I would tackle the first problem and if the answer didn't immediately pop into my head, I'd start thinking about how I couldn't possibly finish in time, and I was going to make another bad grade, and then I would have to take it home and get a spanking (with a BELT) and I'd get nauseated with fear and frustration, and then any chance I had of concentrating would really be gone.

So my school's egregious misadministration of the curriculum plus my parents', ah, ill-advised policy of punishing me when I didn't perform up to expectations created a nice little perfect storm of math frustration for me. It was awful, and crippling. Even though I consistently hit the 97th percentile or so on standardized math tests, I didn't cease to fear math until college, and by then it was too late for me.

I'm not sure why I'm even blogging about this. Catharsis, I suppose. Elementary school math was over 20 years ago and I still had tears in my eyes while writing parts of this account. It was just all so damned unnecessary.

One lesson I sure as heck did learn. No matter what math curriculum-- or any subject curriculum-- we end up using, terror is not going to form any part of our encouraging our children to academic endeavor. I'm praying for deliverance from this. It's a hard slog. I just hope I can show more grace to my own children than was shown to me.

already standing on the ground

"A equal partnership based on mutual respect" used to sound boring and unromantic to me.

Then I endured a relationship where that wasn't the case, where it became clear over time that no matter how smart or accomplished I was, I would never be admitted into the Special Super Secret Man Clubhouse. For years I was sore hearted about it, thinking that somehow the deficiency was in me-- that if only I had been somehow better read or more attractive or cooler I would have been admitted to real emotional intimacy with the guy.

When I moved from Texas to Virginia, one cultural difference that blew my mind was that some men-- including Peter-- actually respected women as their equals. This was not just lip service to the idea-- Peter actually considers me an equal, an intellectual peer. He asks for my input on things. Our emotional intimacy involves us sharing our whole selves with one another, not only a particular part reserved for the opposite sex. There's not this tiered arrangement where my relationship with him is secondary to his pursuit of some Aristotelian ideal of a Manly Friendship.

We are not only spouses and lovers, we are truly partners and best friends. And that's the most romantic thing I've ever known.

how not to read the Bible

Kimberly just sent me a link to this article.

"You send me these things on purpose, don't you?" I asked. And she replied,

"I do, actually."

What can I say? She's a good friend. She knows what will get me fired up.

The troubling thing (one of 'em, anyhow) about this guy's approach to Scripture is his attitude toward it.

Is that weird, shocking and borderline unbelievable? Well, yes. But books like Daniel make clear that various aspects and meanings of scripture are ‘locked up’ for a time. I.e., they mean nothing until the context of events gives it to them. Such is the case with the Bible codes also — a phenomenon which has gained the highest scientific credibility after first being dissed.

The Bible is not some compilation of codes and secret meanings that we only get to figure out if our generation happens to be the one who gets the secret decoder ring in our cultural cereal box.

Sure, there's tons of cryptic metaphor in books like Daniel and Revelation; some of that is related to our loss of the cultural contexts in which they were written; some of it is because what God's promise and future actually is is so far beyond what we are capable of conceiving and communicating that at a certain point language itself begins to break down.

And then there's the unbelievable Americentrism that causes people to assume that whatever meaning is to be ferreted out of those passages, it must be something that has to do with US. If a Democrat is in office, they must be talking about an AMERICAN leader. If a Republican is President, they must be talking about the leader of AMERICA'S ENEMIES (I haven't forgotten growing up dispensationalist in the eighties, when everybody knew Gorbachev was the Antichrist).

I think the worst part about this attitude toward the Bible is that is causes us to miss what's actually there: the story of God's redemptive work throughout human history, and our hope in the fact that Jesus Christ is the Risen Lord of the whole world-- not just the United States.

an interview with Colin

What makes your mommy happy?
Loving us.

Awww.

What makes your mommy sad?
Hurting.

Kind of a generic answer, but sure.

What is your mommy good at?
Coffee!

Well, yes. Yes I am.

What is your mommy not good at?
Meat.

Perhaps he's been more observant than I realized of recent grill fiascos.

What is your mommy’s job?
Working.

Another generic answer. Hmm.

How tall is your mommy?
That tall. (accompanied by an unintelligible gesture)

What does Mommy like about your Daddy?
Love.

Can anyone deny that this is my child? Mr. Lives In A World Of Abstractions.

What does your mommy always say?
No. You say "no."

Ouch.

an interview with Marky

What makes your mommy happy?
Uh...something that is nice.

What makes your mommy sad?
Shouting.

What is your mommy good at?
Cleaning.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

What is your mommy not good at?
Umm...I don't remember.

Clever child.

What is your mommy’s job?
Cleaning.

Hrmpf.

How tall is your mommy?
Big. (raising his hand high above his head)

What does Mommy like about your Daddy?
Last night I dreamed about a dinosaur named Edwina who makes chocolate chip cookies.

What does your mommy always say?
I think I don't know.

I am so not surprised by this answer.

the source of empathy

So, I just read Kimberly's post where she referenced Veronica's post that made very funny fun of this ridiculous article.

And I was put in mind of a conversation we had the other day with my friend, N., who was born and raised in DC, but whose parents are Nigerian. She was remarking that it is only her American friends who make remarks like, "I never understood what it was like to have kids until I had them." Part of it is culture and upbringing-- in N.'s extended family the younger folks were expected regularly to involve themselves in the lives of the small children of their siblings and cousins and so forth. N. has been babysitting since she was eight, and still frequently watches her cousins' children. She has never, even as a young single professional, seen fit to cleanse her life of children.

But N. is unusual in America, I think. So many young professionals-- especially in the ambition-soaked DC area-- go weeks and weeks at a time while having no contact with young children, even in a restaurant or other public place. This is partly because they live in expensive urban centers which are unaffordable for most families, and partly for other reasons.

But I think the larger issue here is about the failure of the moral imagination.

During that same conversation with Kimberly and N., N. brought up the remark common in feminist circles, some variation on, "Well, I know I couldn't possibly presume to understand where you're coming from because we have different experiences of the world." N. called this a cop-out, and I agree with her. Mostly it's earnestly meant, arising from a desire not to over-impose our own interpretive grid on someone else's actions or words.

But. The reason I think that attitude is also a cop-out is that the source of empathy is not shared experience, or at least not primarily. The source of empathy is the imagination.

This is why reading and hearing good, engaging stories from a young age is so important (or part of why, anyhow)-- allowing ourselves to be involved in the lives of characters with lives very different from our own cultivates the habit of mind wherein we learn identify with the Other. We do this primarily with our imaginations.

So when Roiphe drones on about how uninteresting mommy talk is, what she is doing is refusing to exercise her own imagination. Interest, like taste and like affection, is not something that we either have or don't, or something that we passively receive-- it is acquired and cultivated. As members of a community, we are to some extent ethically obligated to cultivate an interest in the lives of others. This interest, along with a well-trained imagination, is what leads to empathy.

Similarly, when I hear or read the childless whine about having to endure the screams of someone else's child on an airplane or in a restaurant, I always want to say, "Babies are only more upset when they sense their parents are upset. If you really want to defuse the situation, try OFFERING TO HELP instead of grousing and stressing them out further."

Well, that, or "You better watch where you wave that there sense of entitlement-- you're liable to poke out an eye."

Because entitlement is also what this is about: the idea that we are always entitled to dinner party conversation that we find immediately interesting, or silence on an airplane, or only pleasant muted noise in any given public sphere. Or whatever. When we cling to that sense of outraged entitlement, and refuse to put ourselves for a moment in the place of another, we are seated firmly at the center of our own universe.

What a miserable place to be.

where is Jesus now?

N.T. Wright on the ascension and heaven:

...the ascension demands that we think differently about how the whole cosmos, so to speak, is put together and that we also think differently about the church and about salvation. Both literalism and skepticism regularly operate with what is called a receptacle view of space; theologians who take the ascension seriously insist that it demands what some have called a relational view. Basically, heaven and earth in biblical cosmology are not two different locations within the same continuum of space or matter. They are two different dimensions of God's good creation. And the point about heaven is twofold. First, heaven relates to earth tangentially so that the one who is in heaven can be present simultaneously anywhere and everywhere on earth: the ascension therefore means that Jesus is available, accessible, without people having to travel to a particular spot on earth to find him. Second, heaven is, as it were, the control room for earth; it is the CEO's office, the place from which instructions are given. "All authority is given to me," said Jesus at the end of Matthew's gospel, "in heaven and on earth."
The idea of the human Jesus now being in heaven, in his thoroughly embodied risen state, comes as a shock to many people, including many Christians...often it's because our culture is so used to the Platonic idea that heaven is, by definition, a place os "spiritual," nonmaterial reality so that the idea of a solid body being not only present but also thoroughly at home there seems like a category mistake. The ascension invites us to rethink all this; and, after all, why did we suppose we knew what heaven was? Only because our culture has suggested things to us. Part of Christian belief is to find out what's true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture.

and

The early Christians, and their fellow first-century Jews, were not, as many moderns suppose, locked into thinking of a three-decker universe with heaven up in the sky and hell down beneath their feet. When they spoke of up and down like that they, like the Greeks in their different ways, were using metaphors that were so obvious they didn't need spelling out. As some recent writers have pointed out, when a pupil at school moves "up" a grade, from (say) the tenth grade to eleventh, it is unlikely that this means relocating to a different classroom on the floor above...
The mystery of the ascension is of course just that, a mystery. It demands that we think what is, to many today, unthinkable: that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or a bout a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time. We post-Enlightenment Westerners are such wretched flatlanders.

Both excerpts are from Surprised By Hope, Chapter 7.

pop quiz!

Of whom are these words written?

...sometimes on no stronger evidence than the suspicions of an informer nursing a grudge, men were taken from their homes in the dead of night, thrown into dungeons, and held without explanation or communication with the outside world. Writs of habeas corpus were denied, including those issued by the Supreme Court of the United States. By the same authority, or in the absence of it, he took millions from the treasury and handed them to private individuals, instructing them to act as purchasing agents for procuring the implements of war at home and abroad.

a meme. whee.

Eight Things I'm Looking Forward To

1. Reaching my goal weight. I'm getting there, slowly but surely.
2. Colin learning to read.
3. Marky being potty trained.
4. Having another baby (but only after #1 and #3).
5. Finally finishing Shelby Foote's Civil War narrative.
6. Finding a new curate for our church.
7. Visiting my family in Texas for almost the whole month of June.
8. The wedding of my friends Alex and Carrie in September in Pennsylvania.

Eight Things I Did Yesterday

1. Went to Wegman's. I love Wegman's.
2. Departed from my custom of buying the boys a scone or muffin at the Wegman's coffee shop and allowed them to have giant lollipops instead. NEVER AGAIN.
3. Went to the Father's Blessing service at Church of the Apostles.
4. Wore the shoes I got myself for Mother's Day. It was the first time Peter had seen them. "What do you think?" I demanded. And he said, "They're...formidable."
5. Read over the leadership profile for the curate candidate we're interviewing today.
6. Swept the kitchen floor AND damp mopped it. This is an achievement. Usually Peter does the floors.
7. Made chocolate mini-cupcakes and a small chocolate cake.
8. Made plans with my friend Julia to hike the Manassas National Battlefield Park this afternoon. I hope it doesn't rain on us.

Eight Things I Wish I Could Do

1. Remember all the Latin I learned in high school and again in graduate school. Ah, well, if all goes as planned with the classical homeschooling I'll be learning it again in short order.
2. Trust other people with my children more.
3. Simultaneously have the time, money and energy to see more films in the theater.
4. Magically turn our mortgage right side up. :(
5. Learn to like fish by sheer force of will.
6. Set a better example for my kids with respect to general tidiness.
7. Quote, at will, any passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey. In Greek. One of my graduate school professors could actually do this. Probably more than one, now that I think about it, but Dr. Sweet was famous for it.
8. Go to seminary. Also, complete my PhD in Literature. Also, get a PhD in Philosophy. And so forth.

Eight Shows I Watch

most of these I watch twice a year, when I visit my parents, whose home is inhabited by more televisions than people

1. Law & Order
2. Law & Order: SVU
3. Law & Order: Criminal Intent
4. Dr. G: Medical Examiner
5. Untold Stories of the E.R.
6. City Confidential
7. Mystery Diagnosis
8. Iron Chef (the old school Japanese one)

No tags. If you want to do it, just do it. But leave a comment, so I can read it.