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.
There are forty students enrolled in my third hour class. Thirty showed up today: one had been suspended, nine others were truant.
For the previous two classes, their homework—as explained at the beginning and end of each class and posted on the board—was to get a copy of a novel from a list I’d given them, and merely to bring it in to class today. The list included authors such as Mark Twain and Ray Bradbury (and, for that matter, J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer) among two dozen others, the only other requirement being that the book they choose be at least 250 pages long. I told them that our school librarian had a copy of the list and could help them find a book. Obviously, they had a few hundred books to choose from.
Out of the thirty students in class today, only ten had a book. A few others probably had a book but left it at home. However, the vast majority of the unprepared twenty clearly hadn’t put forth any effort at all, hadn’t bothered to write down or remember the assignment, and had lost or thrown away my handout list. They didn’t even care enough to try to do it. Keep in mind that the assignment was merely to have a copy of the book with them. That was it.
And only one-fourth of the kids in that class will get credit for it.
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.
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.
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.
My experience ministering at church has shown me that there is one large demographic whose quiet sense of loss in their community is rarely understood by those around them: women with inactive husbands.
There are certainly men who go to church but whose wives are unsupportive, but that’s relatively rare. Far more common are women who strive to get to church as much as possible, often taking kids with them, but whose husbands refuse to get up and come along. I’m not talking about women with non-Mormon husbands–those women knew what they were getting into when they got married–or even women whose husbands have never been very involved in church.
What still shocks and discourages me is just how many men become inactive after marriage and then put their wives in an impossible position: these men may think that they’re not making their wives choose between them and church, but these poor women are still living in a gray twilight zone, trying to trudge along the thorny path of discipleship but doing so without a partner with whom to share her burden, unlike most of her friends at church. Her husband may think that his non-involvement is purely neutral, doing no harm, but that doesn’t help when the kids ask why they have to go to church and Dad doesn’t.
There is a great inequity in justice in our public school systems. I refer, of course, to the fact that some students have higher grades than others. This can only be the result of institutional disenfranchisement, and must be corrected by government intervention. Besides, our nation’s future faces catastrophic academic failure if we don’t artificially prop it up now.
By which I mean, the failing students need a bailout.
All of those kids who are only half as likely to do any kind of studying or homework as they are to even show up at all will be granted a special dispensation from the Department of Education, something in the neighborhood of, say, 800 billion points. (Though, what with corruption, unforeseen needs, and poor management, that total will likely exceed a trillion points.)
So every slacker who sat there and chose to finish a class with a 2% grade will now get to graduate, which is perfectly fair. Uncle Sam will guarantee the success of every student in America. After all, what with the obesity epidemic, most American kids are “too big to fail.”
Anybody else notice that the first address in each of the last two General Conferences were about provident living? (Here and here)
In my ward, we’ve taken to calling our ward emergency preparedness specialist by a new designation: the provident living specialist. The idea came up in a welfare meeting, courtesy of the brain trust that is the Relief Society Presidency, that just as the Church has shifted from a focus on a year’s supply of food storage to focus instead on preparing in smaller steps for shorter time periods, we try to move out of the mindset that we need to be stockpiling for a catastrophe and into one where we focus on a holistic view of preparedness: budgeting, reducing expenses, living within our means, rotating storage, increasing education and job skills, etc.
You know, basically the same stuff the Church has had on its fantastic and vastly under-utilized Provident Living web site for years.
We’ve been organizing firesides and activities along these lines recently, with great success. Our community is coming together, rallying behind this more expansive vision of preparedness; as financial guru Dave Ramsey says, “The paid off mortgage is the new BMW.”
And it doesn’t hurt that our ward’s “provident living specialist” is an incredibly dedicated, proactive lady. Pretty foxy, too. My wife!
So the passage of President Obama’s stimulus package–the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009–has passed, to the tune of $789 billion, and fiscal conservatives around the country are howling mad. “Tea Party” protests are sweeping the nation. One blog post I happened across this week featured a graphic of a tombstone for the United States, giving the “death” date as November 4, 2008, the day of Obama’s election. (You’re late, by the way–I had the same idea months ago.)
But is that really the day that history will remember as the tipping point towards financial ruin for our republic? Did Obama suddenly come in and drastically change course for the government, or is he just continuing business as usual?
Or better yet…where were all those tea party protests before now?
Where were the protests on October 3, 2008, when the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 ($700 billion) was signed into law? Shouldn’t that be the date on the tombstone?
Where were the protests on September 30, 2008, when the “Big Three” automakers got a $25 billion loan?
Where was the coordinated network of national protests on September 16, 2008, when the Federal Reserve gave insurance giant AIG a $75 billion bailout?
Last year, the house across the street from me went into foreclosure. They were decent people, and I don’t know what exactly put them in that position, but I can’t help but notice that their house has two satellite dishes on it. There’s probably a lesson in that about fiscal responsibility…
Is this a Las Vegas thing? A week never passes without a student coming into class to declare that they’ve been absent for the last two or three days, and then stare at me expectantly. I try to draw out some civil cooperation from them by saying something like, “And…..”
Then they will usually ask for all of their make up work. When I explain that covering two or three days’ worth of instruction, examples, and assignments will take more than the ten seconds available right before the bell rings, they tend to look put out. My insistence that they come in before or after school to review their works irks them to no end.
Even worse is the dgeree to which we facilitate such a mindset. My school district allows students to take a form around to their teachers that essentially says, “My parents are taking me out of town for whatever reason next week. I’ll be gone for three days. Please give me all my work now.” Like most teachers, I tell them that they’ll just need to do most, if not all, of that work when they get back.
What, don’t I plan in advance? Of course, but this community seems to have it in their heads that school work is just a bunch of handouts that can be given and done whenever is convenient. No thought is given for discussion, performances, participation, questions and answers in class, etc.
When the majority of “make up work” is done poorly and gets a low grade, kids seem baffled.
Lean in closely because I’m going to whisper, OK? This is not a correspondence school! If you could simply fill in worksheets and get credit, we wouldn’t need school at all. If you think you can skip a week and be fine, catching up with no real effort on your part, why not just cut to the chase and get your GED? That appears to be what a lot of people really want.
This mentality bleeds over into college. In those classes, especially freshmen classes, they’re indignant that I require attendance, and enforce the department’s loss of credit policy for excessive absences. And yet, when they ditch class, they expect to turn in whatever work they want, when they want, for full credit, to be excused from assignments they weren’t here for, or to have the curriculum adjusted to be comfortable with their absences.
I hate having to teach responsibility, but if that’s the skill they need…
Where’s the outcry from the parents? Where’s the demand for high standards–no, adequate standards? When we enable a lower level of maturity for our students, don’t be surprised when we end up with a society full of people who never show up for work, but who get huffy when they don’t get paid.
1 Here’s a fun experiment: drive around a bad part of your town–you know, where the government-subsidized projects are, as well as the highest crime rates–and count how many of the run-down old houses have satellite dishes on them. As you try to keep track of the spiralling digits, do be polite enough not to smile at memories of all the blowhards who have ever whined about how the “disenfranchised” poor need to be “given their fair share” with which they would wisely enter the middle class.
A few weekends ago, my wife and I did this and our estimate of satellite dishes came to about one out of every three, a number which might need to be adjusted since we saw several neglected dumps that had more than one dish on the roof!
2 On the subject of grossly bloated government bureaucracy, here’s an argument for it: like an inner city high school, it’s a good holding pen. After all, if we didn’t have a needlessly huge government, what would we do with all the people who work for it? Do you really want to see any of these clueless clods in the private sector?
Frankly, they’re doing less harm at the DMV than they would be managing a business or negotiating the waters of retail. I suppose most of them would end up on welfare, creating a need for vast government support…and we’d be right back where we started. : )
3 Reading about the ongoing travesty that is Texas’s assault on parental rights (also known as the polygamist compound raid), I’ve been reminded more than once of the Waco siege. I recently spent an evening folding laundry and watching the excellent documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement, which I hadn’t seen in years.
The parallels were telling. I felt myself getting agitated again that a government agency could so undeniably rip up the Bill of Rights and get away with it. There is a lot of great material about Waco out there, but if you haven’t seen this (it was even nominated for an Oscar), you’ll be amazed by what you learn. Here’s the first few minutes:
4 The new issue of New York’s City Journal is in the process of posting articles on their web site. I can’t say enough just how much I love reading this. Their research, their understanding of the causes and relationships between key issues, and (most especially of all) the clear and vivid writing from each and every one of its authors make it by far the most valuable political periodical in the world. (Even among the dazzling echelon of its gifted wordsmiths, the contributions of Brit doctor Theodore Dalrymple stand out as some of the best prose currently being produced anywhere in Shakespeare’s mother tongue.)
I’ve read it for years and I’m sure browsing its archives for a few hours would produce a better political science education than any university in the country could provide in a few years. http://www.city-journal.org/
5 Two popular Internet jokes are dead-on-target and make their points about political policies and trends far better than any raving diatribe ever could.
First, the revised and updated fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper:
CLASSIC VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool, laughs, and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.
MODERN VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool, laughs, and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.
CBS, NBC and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.
America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when they sing “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”
Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the group singing “We Shall Overcome.” Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grass- hopper’s sake.
Al Gore exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his “fair share”.
Finally, the EOC drafts the “Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper Act,” retroactive to the beginning of the summer.
The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.
Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill appointed from a list of multi-generation welfare recipients. The ant loses the case.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him because he doesn’t maintain it.
The ant has disappeared in the snow.
The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.
Second, a simple economics lesson, with shades of Ayn Rand at the end:
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59. So, that’s what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. “Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.” Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men – the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
“I only got a dollar out of the $20,” declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,” but he got $10!”
“That’s true!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!”
“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
