About the blog name: "Gently Hew Stone" is a pun on the author's name. Michelangelo said that while carving his statue of David, he envisioned the finished statue inside the block of raw marble and just chiseled away the pieces that weren't part of it. Writing this blog is like that: I picture myself sitting before a hunk of raw possibilities with this keyboard as my chisel, and my labor of love is to reveal the beautiful ideas inside, to hone it to perfection by peeling away layers of ordinary thought and, ultimately, to bring to light the masterpieces just below the surface of it all.
Camera opens on a bus interior from the front; passengers settle in as the bus prepares to start moving. A subtitle shows, “1955.”
A new shot gives a close up of a black woman sitting near the front, looking seriously but distractedly out the window. A voice with a Southern accent off camera says, “You need to give up your seat and move to the back of the bus.” She looks over and up at the man off camera and, after a brief pause, says, “No.” Camera cuts to a side view of bus driver standing over her, grimacing menacingly. Camera cuts back to the woman, who turns her head slowly now and looks resolutely ahead of her. The bus driver’s voice is heard saying, “If you don’t move, I’ll call the police and have you arrested.” The woman calmly says, “You do that.” Camera cuts once again to the back of the bus, where several rows of black passengers look on; camera then shows a few quick close-ups of black passengers nodding in approval.
Fade out and back in: camera now shows the same scene as at the beginning, but this time the subtitle says, “Today.” Several black boys are shown from behind walking down the aisle of the bus. They have sagging pants, bandanas, etc. The bus is mostly empty, but they swagger past every seat to the very last row, where they rough house and yell. Camera pans to the side, showing an elderly black woman sitting near the front. Her head sags a bit and she sadly, slowly shakes her head in disapproval.
Scene moves to the outside of the bus, behind it, showing it pull out and drive away. As it moves, a narrator reads a slogan that appears on the screen: “Don’t move back. Keep moving forward.”
[Note: I realize this is a drastic simplification of Rosa Parks' protest, but it's necessary for brevity.]
I’m not saying that these things will happen, but the way our society is going, I think it’s likely that they might happen.
1. Any straight people who get married will be seen as inherently oppressing gays who can’t marry. This came to mind as I heard recently about a growing slew of celebrities who refuse to get married, saying they won’t do it until everybody can do it. The logical end of that train of thought will be stigmatizing anybody who doesn’t get in on this “boycot.” Cohabitation will explode even further as marriage rates drop drastically.
2. The concept of nationality will come to be looked down on as narrow-minded, old fashioned, and akin to racism. Under the guise of embracing all of humanity and “celebrating diversity,” many will decry those who assert that being an American–or any other nationality–has some intrinsic meaning. Valuing your country over other countries will be the new “racism,” as the more “enlightened” among us will disavow their allegiance to any one nation and declare themselves “citizens of the world.”
I know, I know–the seeds of both of these are already well sown into our society. My fear is that they will become far more prevalent, that within a decade they will be the mandatory mantras of the mainstream, the same way that gay marriage, amnesty, and socialism suddenly became orthodox doctrines during the last ten years.
A perceptive colleague alerted me to this story out of Chicago, where the mother of a boy investigated in that awful student beating recently told reporters that schools should be responsible for monitoring students outside of school hours.
This perfectly illustrates something I’ve seen constantly in my years of teaching. We conservatives worry that schools are brainwashing our kids with government propaganda, just as the mainstream media does, and though there are certainly programs and policies that clearly emanate from the left, this concern is essentially baseless.
If the government’s effectively indoctrinating our kids, then where are the hordes of glassy-eyed teenage zombies chanting, “I love Big Brother?”
No, our children are strongly resistant to any attempt to exert authority over them or persuade them to accept ideas in school…to a fault!
The irony here is that while conservative media gets itself into a tizzy about schools usurping too much authority over American children…that’s precisely what too many parents want us to do!
I’ve written plenty of stories on here about clueless parents who expect teachers to raise their kids. It’s an epidemic. These lazy, incompetent losers make teachers’ lives miserable. Teachers spend a large percentage of their parent conferences trying to convince parents to do the work that a lot of conservatives are afraid we’re actively trying to steal away from them!
Schools taking over the job of parents? Trust me, not a legitimate concern. Now, the fuzzy teaching methods employed in too many classrooms–that’s a real problem to keep your eye on.
…have mostly the same group of kids at the end of the year as they had on the first day of school. If someone moves in or out, it’s a big event.
…have some loud or obnoxious students, but only because they want attention. Inside, they’re all decent people who just need someone to reach out and understand them. None of them are consciously choosing to act like jerks or thugs, and all of them are secretly very, very bright, once you get to know them.
…never have more than one kid having a serious emotional crisis at a time. Once that issue is resolved, another kid can have a problem.
…never have any students who have been mainstreamed into that class due to politically correct special ed policies. They certainly don’t have ten of them.
…never actually seem to do much intensive studying, drilling, or practice. All those feel-good group discussions of emotional discovery someone produce students who achieve very well academically.
…are always full of students who look well groomed, healthy, and alert, despite involvement with broken homes, poverty, gangs, and substance abuse. No student in a movie looks or acts any differently than, say, your average young Hollywood actor. For some reason.
…are always full of curious young adults who, despite being hard-partying hedonists, speak with the kind of vocabularies that, oddly enough, Hollywood screenwriters would have. They all know the difference between Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. They know their times tables. They can read for more than five minutes without falling asleep.
…rarely have students who come to school high. If they do, they’re just good, smart goofballs who do it for a laugh. All ends well.
…never have students who refuse to take the medication prescribed by their psychiatrist.
…never have students who bounce back and forth between the classroom and juvenile hall.
…are staffed by teachers who can magically command attention with a single request, who enjoy instant raport with their students, and whose off the wall teaching ideas always work like a charm. They’re certainly more effective than the crusty, strict teachers, who are invariably the villains.
Tragedy struck Las Vegas—as usual—on Tuesday night when police were forced to shoot a mentally disturbed and drug-addled teenager who was threatening his mother with a knife. I say “forced” because I understand that the police had no real choice to bring about the best possible resolution here—they had to act on what they knew in order to save an innocent woman’s life, even though the mother says they were wrong and now she’s suing them (of course), and even though the mother herself admits that her son was rampaging, high, violent, and uncooperative at the time.
I’ve brought this story up as a brief introductory topic in my classes for the last two days, and have ended with a quick show of hands for who they think carries the burden of most responsibility here. The results are stark and significant. My regular classes—which include kids who perform at grade level as well as remedial and mainstreamed SpEd kids—had sizable portions who blamed the mother (but not the kid); the vast majority of them blamed the police. Many of them openly bragged that they feel every such a situation is always the fault of the police. They laughed as they asserted this.
My honors classes, however, saw things exactly the opposite. Most of them still blamed the mom, many blamed the young man, but only four people blamed the police.
Last Saturday, I heard this one over and over as people used it as their talking point for a radio audition. I’m sure we’ve all heard this reiterated endlessly. It always surprises me how blithely people rattle this one off, with little thought for how vapid the argument really is.
First, this thesis is usually followed by their one and only line of defense for it: “You don’t really know someone until you see how grumpy and grungy they are in the morning.” Seriously? You have to live with someone to know that they’re grumpy and grungy in the morning? Isn’t everybody? And if we already know this, then we don’t really have to live together first in order to learn it, now do we? News flash, folks: that special someone you’re thinking of making a commitment to also has really bad breath when they wake up. And I didn’t even have to live with them first to figure it out! There, I just saved you the cost of some moving boxes.
“But,” interjects our torridly anxious co-habitants, “you need to live together first in order to truly know them and see if you’ll work out together.” This “reason” is even more lame than the first one. When, exactly, do you know if things are going to “work out” with someone or not? After six months? Three years? Ten years? What magic sign of “working out” are you looking for?
I’m no fan of Barack Obama’s platforms or policies, and I admit that I had reservations about his plan to address American school children live, but his speech was a flawless home run. I don’t say this as a teacher or as a parent, but as a conservative.
I did not show the speech in my class–I had a lesson to teach and the students had work to do–but I hope they looked up the text later on in the day, like I did.
Listening to the radio yesterday afternoon and checking out a few news sites just made me sick that so many on the right would indulge in such petty vitriol over the speech after the fact. Bottom line, a Republican could have given that speech and it still would have been great. Be willing to give credit where it’s due.
One complaint that surprised me yesterday is that the speech will do no good. Well, maybe not. But Barrack Obama is the world’s biggest celebrity, a bona fide pop icon, and if he wants to use his status to try to sell kids on hard work, responsibility, and good old fashioned duty, then I say, more power to him. Read the rest of this entry »
It still always surprises me when a student blithely declares anything unfamiliar or which requires sustained concentration to be “boring,” and then dismisses it, as though their snap judgment is all the criteria necessary for rejecting something as unworthy of their effort.
What is it about us that we’re so accustomed to labelling something “boring” so quickly, and then so definitively putting it behind us and never looking back? Why don’t we consider this trend, which developed fairly recently in our society’s history but which now has roots as deep as any cherished value, with any more scrutiny?
Think about this: when we call something boring, what are we really saying? What we usually mean is not that it is too inherently dull, but that it is too difficult to comprehend. (Certainly, that’s what students mean.) But when did it become such a virtue to announce that we are incapable of handling something? Why do we now feel that it’s acceptable to ignore anything that taxes us?
Imagine someone going into a gym and trying to lift five pounds. They find it very hard. Any normal person would think, “Wow, I’m really weak. That’s awful. I need to exercise until I’m stronger.” But if we approached this situation the way many of us approach mental tasks, we’d think, “Wow, that’s too heavy. This is stupid. This is for losers. I’m out of here.”
And thus we become a society of intellectually flabby brain-wimps. Worse, we become a nation of brain-wimps that prides itself on its ignorance, doing so in an unspoken compact where we pretend that our weakness is a virtue, so that we can reinforce each other’s desperation to ignore it.
Picture a kid wearing earphones all the time, wrapped up in his private musical world. At school, he keeps the wires hidden under his shirt or jacket, and he might share one of the earphones with a friend. At home, he likely spends a lot of his free time getting seriously engrossed in the latest video games. He knows all about the game technology and platforms, and is looking forward to the next wave of products, which he already knows everything about.
If the kid you’re picturing is in school today, then he’s just another average kid, exactly the same as most of his peers.
But if this kid was in school twenty years ago–listening to a Walkman instead of an iPod, playing the original 8-bit Nintendo instead of an Xbox–he was a nerd. Those music and game addicts of two decades in the past were a fringe subculture, and just about at the bottom of the social ladder. Anyone wearing earphones or getting enthusiastic about video games twenty years ago might as well have been wearing a pocket protector. They were social pariahs the likes of which today’s kids just couldn’t understand.
So what happened in the intervening years to bring their cherished oddities into the mainstream? An evolution of interest in math and the arts? A burst of genius for Generation Y? Not likely. If that were the case, then where are the all of the after school clubs for writing new program algorithms, and where are all of the kids using their powerful music tools to sample more music than any other group has ever heard (versus overdosing on the same few clusters of popular music from within their own lifetime)?
No, this would seem to be just another victory for the merchandising media. The things that may have attracted those nerds of the 80’s and early 90’s are still underground themselves, but the passive elements of dazzling entertainment–that’s what drove the spread of electronic entertainment beyond the bounds of the AV Club geeks and into the pockets and bedrooms of every normal kid in America. Our kids are no smarter than the non-technologically obsessed kids of twenty years ago…just better entertained.
I’ve seen this clip in two other places in the last 24 hours: at Jr. Ganymede, and at First Things (from whence I stole the title of this post–it’s too perfect to ever be improved upon). In three minutes, Craig Ferguson brilliantly elucidates a thesis that Diana West devoted 300 pages to in her book, The Death of the Grown-Up. This will be required viewing in Mr. Huston’s class next year:
Quick, who can spot the pattern in these two verses?
“Seth lived one hundred and five years, and begat Enos, and prophesied in all his days, and taught his son Enos in the ways of God, wherefore Enos prophesied also.” Moses 6:13
“And Jared lived one hundred and sixty two years , and begat Enoch; and Jared lived, after he begat Enoch, eight hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. And Jared taught Enoch in all the ways of God.” Moses 6:21
This formula is certainly used or suggested elsewhere in scripture: in the Book of Mormon, for example, Nephi starts off by telling us that he had been “taught somewhat in all the learning of my father,” (1 Nephi 1:1), just as Enos begins his story by declaring that he, “knowing my father was a just man–for he taught me in his language, and also in the nurture and admonition of the Lord…” (Enos 1:1), and King Benjamin had three sons whom he also “caused that they should be taught in all the language of his fathers, that thereby they might become men of understanding; and that they might know concerning the prophecies which had been spoken by the mouths of their fathers…” (Mosiah 1:2).
(Maybe this post should have been called, “Fathers must teach their sons the gospel…and, apparently, literacy skills.”)
The relative silence in the scriptures about the training that comes from mothers, or towards daughters, shouldn’t be construed to mean that no such teaching takes place, nor should this emphasis on father-to-son teaching be taken to mean that no other teaching is important in the family. After all, the Book of Moses reminds us that as Adam and Eve started having children, “Adam and Eve blessed the name of God, and they made all things known unto their sons and their daughters.” (Moses 5:12) Adam may have had some personal priesthood interviews with Cain, Abel, Seth, and his other sons, but certainly the first family also had plenty of family home evenings where the teaching was more generally dispersed.
An article in last Friday’s Las Vegas Review-Journal was called, “School district fails to meet ‘No Child’ goal.” Apparently, the culprit behind our city’s epidemic academic failures is obvious to the media: blame the teachers!
Gee, why didn’t they call it “Local students fail to meet ‘No Child’ goal,” since they’re the ones who actually failed the tests? Or how about, “Local parents fail to meet ‘No Child’ goal,” since they’re the ones who have failed to raise more studious children?
Where are the headlines that say, “Doctors fail to meet heart disease goal” or “Clergy fails to meet Sabbath keeping goal?” Aren’t those professions also responsible for the private choices of their constituencies, or is it only teachers who magically control what other people do with the tools and information they offer?
First of all, I like summer school. Its compacted time frame forces it to be rigorous, disciplined, and serious. Tardies and absences get hammered pretty quickly, daily quizzes and grade updates keep the kids on top of their game, and the fact that they (or their parents) had to pay for it creates an immediate investment that improves their own efforts. These kids may have messed up, but their desperation now brings out the best in them.
However, this summer I’ve noticed that too many kids come into summer school in an entirely wrong state of mind.
And I don’t just mean the stoner who asked to go to the bathroom about an hour and a half into the first day of school, and who never came back.
One boy just this morning looked at his failing grades in my class and rattled off his list of excuses, clearly a well prepared and rehearsed litany that he’s used comfortably for years. I can only surmise that he started this class, as he may start all of his classes, intending to “see what happens,” and fall back on his excuses if and when he fails. I just can’t get people like this to be more proactive, to overcome the fatalism that got deeply instilled in them somewhere along the line.
In June, a girl with special ed problems gave me two papers that had been due the week before, both very poorly done, and without any discussion with me about it first. Read the rest of this entry »
After seeing this amazingly inane drivel about teenagers with trendy, extreme body decorations defending their honor in yesterday’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, I thought I’d try to understand the teenage mindset better by letting one of them take this space and explain their fascinating insights into the egalitarian tradition and their innovative adaptations thereof. Our anonymous adolescent offers the following:
Dont be hatin on me! It dont matter if I be getting earrings or tattoos or mohawks or implants or wearin bikinis to school or bitin my toenails in class or stuff like that. Thats just who I am! You cant judge me! Stop hatin!
Im just expressin myself! If I want to cover myself in egg yolk and run screaming through the parking lot, it dont make no difference to you. I was born that way. Its a free country. Dont give me your bad looks. And quit hatin up on me!
You think smearing pig slop on my feet and dancin in front you wherever you go is like bad or somethin? You dont know, you just hatin. You wrong. Thats just the way we is now. We likes to go out in public and fill our mouths with raw fish guts and spit em at each other an yell out catch phrases from this weeks popular movie and thats cool. That dont make us bad.
Its a fact that some of us who likes digging up graves and dragging bodies behind their cars is all goin to Harvard and stuff now. Yeah! Take that! Tons of folks who go around wearing baggy clothes overflowin with maggots is like doctors and lawyers and stuff now. So dont be stereotypin! It dont matter to you–its a free country. You just dont understand, so dont be hatin!
Everything that everybody does is cool now. Aint nothin bad no more. Except the stuff that you old folks like that I dont like. That stuff sucks.
Everybody’s heard the old “fact” that “men think about sex every seven seconds.” Not only is it obviously false–any society where half the population was so obsessed by a single thought that they dwelled on it almost constantly would quickly grind to a screeching halt–but it serves a baldly juvenile purpose: to validate men’s gross overindulgence in sexual desire.
When someone lets themselves go physically, sitting on the couch all day, watching TV and stuffing themselves with snacks, we call them a lazy slob. It’s a bad thing. We understand that relaxing is good, but, like all things, must be done in mature moderation. If someone drinks too much, we call them a lush or an alcoholic. If someone spends every waking moment trying to claw their way to another dollar, or desperately focusing on their appearance with a tunnel vision monomania, we likewise judge them poorly and have stigmatized social labels for them.
Basically, our society still looks down on the seven deadly sins. Except for lust. The only real derogatory terms left for those who give in to overindulgence in this appetite–”horny,” “slut,” “pervert”–are either positives now, or on their way to becoming such. In fact, hasn’t the last generation come up with new euphemisms for unrestricted sex addicts (such as “friends with benefits”)? Western culture seems to have lost all sense of restraint, or even respecting restraint, in sex. The terms for someone who does so restrain themselves–”prude,” “virgin,” etc. are all harshly negative.
