Why Blog Together as a School

I'm hoping that this place starts to sparkle and become something more than a parade ground for my own eclecticism, idealism, and naiveté. (Idealism is a genetic trait with me. Rather than bring my parents into it, witness this lion trap that my daughter recently designed.)

I do have earnest hopes for this blog and want to share them before returning to my more real (and neglected) duties for a while. If anything develops on here, I'll eagerly rejoin the ruckus. If nothing happens, I'm still well above my target ratio for the month of ten to one failed versus fruitful ideas.

After outlining my thoughts behind this blog proposal, I'll make a modest request.

First, these kids will only turn out as strong and lively as our parent and teacher relationships. Parents who bleed together, succeed together. This blog is a convenient way to laugh and bleed together a little bit more as parents and teachers. These young people need us to succeed at this kind of thing (whether on the blog or elsewhere).

Second, I don't want to face these kids alone. I need correction and support from more adults as I engage these young people. And I think that my colleagues would enjoy it as well. It's not healthy to pontificate for long hours in front of eager or pliable young minds (or distracted and sullen young minds either). And who better to offer some constructive feedback than the parents? In loco parentis requires robust relationships and two-way communication.

Transparency before each other and our leaders should (mostly) be a good thing (in the end). It's not that I'm trying to indoctrinate students with my own positions at every point (or keep teaching all these classes!). However, teaching systematic theology, philosophy, apologetics, world religions, world literature, and senior thesis project involves a lot of input into young people as they leave high school. I want to be as honest and open about my ideas as I can. If you know me better, you can better support and teach your kids at home (in both areas of agreement and disagreement). And our leaders at CCA can better lead us (parents and teachers) if they know more about all of our interests, joys, and struggles (that's me speculating, not them talking).

Although I enjoy theoretical discussion, I don't care if that rarely makes it onto the blog. I want to see what parents and other teachers enjoy and consider important.

Of course, we need some wisdom and can't try to address everything on here. There will be mistakes if we are trying hard enough to share real stuff, but I'm confident in our wonderful school administration (and collective sanctification) to pilot us through the reefs.

So, post questions and ideas. You can't start a fire without some wood. Talk about how to best utilize the blog for developing constructive relationships and dialogue.

Here's my modest proposal. We have seven authors signed up right now. If we can find 14 people who will each post something every two weeks, that would be one post every day. My own feeling is that there should be enough on here for people to feel like they don't need to read it all. Not that I'm in favor of quantity over quality, but I'd like to see a sampling of different things from different people so that we start to get to know each other. I think it would be nice to browse through a diverse selection. But maybe that's a bad model. If you think so, put up other ideas. I've got lots more ideas, but I think that I'd better hold off and let God’s red pen (in your hands) do its work for a while.

Poetry Out Loud 2010 at CCA

Thanks to the many hands who helped with the regional Poetry Out Loud contest this weekend. Nessa and I had lots of fun. (Nessa's criteria may have been a little soft, but she had the final winner pegged even before the initial three-way tie.) The contestants have definitely gotten stronger each year.

One of the three-way winners (before elimination) had several people laughing out loud with his recitation of Progressive Health by Carl Dennis. I thought that his other performance, Beat! Beat! Drums! by Walt Whitman, was the strongest of the first two rounds. The girl who won did The Death of Allegory by Billy Collins as one of her two poems. Stephen Rayner did that last year at our school’s poetry festival, and it was great to hear it again. Gwen delivered a beautiful (but too poised and polished) version of Hush by David St. John. Matthew Fox placed second with a commanding delivery of The Minefield by Diane Thiel.

"Social Justice" at Wheaton College

Changes at Wheaton College concern alumni. From the article...

In the current document known as the “conceptual framework” of the education department at Wheaton College which must be endorsed by each of its faculty, the thinkers cited include among others, the father of the social justice movement, Brazilian Marxist, Paulo Freire and former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

http://townhall.com/columnists/SandyRios/2010/02/26/billy_graham_meets_bill_ayers

Avatar and the Joy of Naming Things

I've not seen Titanic and I wasn't too interested in Avatar (mostly out of snobbery against big-money films) until I read this comment in a NYTimes review by Carol Kaesuk Yoon (while I might not add Avatar to the Netflix list, I'll probably buy a copy of the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects):

To so strongly experience these kinds of wonderfully shocking similarities and dissimilarities among living things is the kind of experience that has largely been the prerogative of biologists — especially those known as taxonomists, who spend their days ordering and naming the living things on Earth. But now, thanks to Mr. Cameron, the entire world is not only experiencing this but also reveling in it.

...I spent much of the last six years working on a book about exactly this, about how inside of all humans there is a deep desire and ability to really see life, to see order among living things, and about the joy that comes with it. So at the end of Naming Nature (W. W. Norton, 2009), I make a plea to readers to go out into the world and see the life and find the order in the living world around them. I may have to amend the paperback to suggest, or you may want to begin by, heading into a darkened room to see "Avatar" and have your mind blown.

Carol Kaesuk Yoon summarizes her book in another article at the NYTimes, Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World:

J.B.R. could no longer recognize living things. He could still recognize nonliving objects, like a flashlight, a compass, a kettle or a canoe. But the young man was unable to recognize a kangaroo, a mushroom or a buttercup. He could not say what a parrot or even the unmistakable ostrich was. And J.B.R. is far from alone; doctors around the world have found patients with the same difficulty. Most recently, scientists studying these patients’ brains have reported repeatedly finding damage — a deadening of activity or actual lesions — in a region of the temporal lobe, leading some researchers to hypothesize that there might be a specific part of the brain that is devoted to the doing of taxonomy. As curious as they are, these patients and their woes would be of little relevance to our own lives, if they had merely lost some dispensable librarianlike ability to classify living things. As it turns out, their situation is much worse. These are people completely at sea. Without the power to order and name life, a person simply does not know how to live in the world, how to understand it. How to tell the carrot from the cat — which to grate and which to pet? They are utterly lost, anchorless in a strange and confusing world. Because to order and name life is to have a sense of the world around, and, as a result, what one’s place is in it.

Today few people are proficient in the ordering and naming of life. There are the dwindling professional taxonomists, and fast-declining peoples like the Tzeltal Maya of Mexico, among whom a 2-year-old can name more than 30 different plants and whose 4-year-olds can recognize nearly 100. Things were different once. In Linnaeus’s day, it was a matter of aristocratic pride to have a wonderful and wonderfully curated collection of wild organisms, both dead and alive.

...We are so disconnected from the living world that we can live in the midst of a mass extinction, of the rapid invasion everywhere of new and noxious species, entirely unaware that anything is happening. Happily, changing all this turns out to be easy. Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound. Give a nod to Professor Franclemont and meditate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. Learn science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own.

Creation in the Image of the Glory-Spirit

In his 1977 article "Creation in the Image of the Glory-Spirit," Meredith Kline sketched out the meaning of imago Dei in connection with God’s overall creative intent to imitate His own theophanic and incarnate Glory. The article was first published in the Westminster Theological Journal 39 (1977), 250-72 and is available in full as part of an online collection of Kline’s writings:

When defining the imago Dei, dogmatic theology has traditionally tended to engage in an analysis of what constitutes humanness. But to answer the general question 'What is man?' is not the same thing as answering the precise question 'What is the image of God?'. If our objective is to discern what the biblical idea of the image of God is, it would appear necessary to abandon the traditional dogmatic wineskins, go back to the beginning of Genesis, and start afresh.

…Under the concept of man as the glory-image of God the Bible includes functional (or official), formal (or physical), and ethical components, corresponding to the composition of the archetypal Glory. Functional glory-likeness is man's likeness to God in the possession of official authority and in the exercise of dominion. Ethical glory is reflection of the holiness, righteousness, and truth of the divine Judge (not just the presence of a moral faculty of any religious orientation whatsoever). And formal-physical glory-likeness is man's bodily reflection of the theophanic and incarnate Glory.

Society For Classical Learning Conference

This year's Society For Classical Learning Conference in Williamsburg, Virginia was placed on the Community Events Calander (on sidebar). Save the Dates: June 24 through 26, 2010 (Pre-Conference June 23, 2010).

The Society for Classical Learning has existed since the mid-1990s to facilitate and encourage thinking and discussion among professionals associated with Christ-centered education in the liberal arts tradition. It is the desire of the Society to provide a forum in which educators can share wisdom, experience and ideas as they deepen their understanding of classical pedagogy and philosophy, stay abreast of developments, and strive to translate classical theory into everyday, real world education. The Society is committed to historic Christianity as expressed in the Nicene Creed and to exploring the relationship of Christ to the broader culture.

The Society of Classical Learning hosts an annual summer conference and publishes The Journal quarterly. In its efforts to support educators, the Society is actively exploring additional membership benefits such as peer consulting, web based search-able databases and communication, and potential sources of continuing education.

Kaufman Field Guide to Insects

"This is the all-around best one volume field guide to insects in North America. It employs retouched photographs for the images and includes representative profiles at actual sizes, which are very handy. The most difficult task for a guide like this is helping you find your way through 2,350 pictures of bugs. Its solution is a rough categorization of 13 body types, which are fairly easy to browse visually, so generally we've been able to identify most of what we find to the genus level."

Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America (at Amazon)
Eric R. Eaton, Kenn Kaufman
2007, 392 pages
$13

Click here for a full review by Kevin Kelly.

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children for the Apocalypse?

This is an old favorite from the (typically not-so-good) Onion:

Church Needs Dudes

"Church Needs Dudes" by Mark Driscoll

Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally

By Natalie Angier (at NYTimes.com)

The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own. "How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body," said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. "We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what's going on." Research in embodied cognition has revealed that the body takes language to heart and can be awfully literal-minded.

(Link to full article.)

Totally like whatever, you know?

This great animated poem skewers the "whatever generation."

Ronnie Bruce created it and posted it online without the permission of the author, Taylor Mali. However, Mali was impressed and now links to it from his own website. Mali's original poem is titled "Totally like whatever, you know?"

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.