What happens when a family heirloom gets passed on to you? In my case, it not only became part of my wardrobe, but connected me even more closely with a key event in our nation's history.
It Keeps on Ticking
One of the most famous advertising slogans is that of Timex watches. The expression "it takes a licking and keeps on ticking" used to be everywhere, and although I would happily to attest to the accuracy of this blurb, it is a Hamilton watch from about 1908 that blew me away a few months ago when I received it from my mother, gave the stem a few twists, and listened as the mechanism happily ticked away the time.
At first, we did not know much about it, other than that it had been given to my mother's grandfather by his wife, had passed to one of his sons, and that his son had wanted me to have it. After looking at its internal workings and hopping onto a Hamilton watch forum online, we discovered a bit more.
It is a Hamilton, grade 927, model 1, class 4 pocket watch. It is a size 16s, 17 jewels timepiece, but what was of most importance to my mother and me was that it was manufactured around 1908, which means that at the earliest, my great-grandmother Della McClellan would have given it to her husband, Oatis McClellan, five years before his death in 1913. Now, this article is not a family tree or the beginnings of my autobiography, but something of a bit more historical significance.
National Treasure
The 2004 movie National Treasure has grossed hundreds of millions of dollars with its adventure story centered around the Declaration of Independence, yet the real treasure for our nation is that document itself, along with our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and it turns out, my family has an intimate connection with them.
On December 13, 1952, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were moved from the Library of Congress to join the Bill of Rights at the National Archives, and Delmar McClellan, my great-uncle, was part of that historic moment. He is the younger, dark-haired man in the following photographs and, along with Alvin Kremer, was responsible for preparing the documents for their transfer
An entire album of pictures from that day can be found on Flickr, and a video with silent footage as well as audio with a speech from President Truman (starting 3:18) can be seen on YouTube. Additional silent footage can be found at archive.org, and you can read an article on the event at the National Archives website.
What has this historic moment to do with a pocket watch? Sometime between 1908 and 1913, Della McClellan gave that watch to her husband Oatis, and after he died, she gave it to one of her sons, Delmar McClellan, who would go on to play an important role in the moving our nation's most important documents. He eventually gave the watch to his son, Denny, who then passed it on to me. I wear the watch on special occasions, and now when I do, I will be even more keenly aware of the touch of time.
Golf is a challenging game, but the perfectly hit shot, one that causes the ball to explode from the sweet spot of the club face, is one of the most satisfying and exhilarating of feelings. No one needs to write one more piece about how challenging teaching is. The internet is filled with such articles. But when everything comes together in a day of stunning academic experience and student ability on display, that needs to be shared and celebrated.
To The Stars Through Antiquity
Apollo 1 Exhibit at Kennedy Space Center
Ad astra per aspera. To the stars through difficulties. The path to the stars has indeed been a difficult and a long one, perhaps longer than many realize, stretching back as it does to the age of classical antiquity. We recently completed a unit in our Latin II classes that saw our high school students reading selections from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero about space, along with parts of the first science fiction novel, True History, written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century A.D. To get the full story on this unit, which saw students translating and discussing ancient works on outer space, being introduced to ancient technology through the Antikythera Mechanism and ancient mathematics through the calculation of the earth's circumference by Eratosthenes, and exploring the music of the spheres with NASA's discovery of the sound of black holes and the classical music of Gustav Holst, check out our short documentary.
One part of the unit about which I was particularly excited came at the end. After three weeks of deep study in ancient readings on space, our students met a friend of mine via Zoom. Neil Jenkins and I go back to first grade in our friendship, but I did not bring him in for us to discuss our fondness for '80s music and Miami Vice. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Alabama and is an amateur astrophotographer, although you should not let the title "amateur" mislead you into thinking his work is second rate.
IC 1805 The Heart Nebula in the Constellation Cassiopeia Event Horizon Astrophotography (c) 2021
The Great Orion Nebula M42 Event Horizon Astrophotography (c) 2022
He talked with the students about quantum physics, laser physics, and astrophotography, along with how his Christian faith and work as a scientist fit perfectly together. When students were asking for his email, asking me for copies of his slides, and staying after class to discuss further the wonders of space, I knew this had been a meaningful event.
Duces Discipuli Facti
As soon as the last bell of the day had rung, another small group of students came to the room for a leadership meeting about a Latin club event. My intent was to let them handle everything, and I doubt I could have added much that afternoon anyway. My mind and heart were already too full from the Zoom class with Dr. Jenkins. As it turned out, I was not needed. These student officers led with such efficiency they could have given a lesson to many adults. They worked together, listened to each other's ideas, yet did not become stuck in the mire of indecision. Just when I thought my heart could take no more of being impressed with students, I was overwhelmed by their display of leadership skills. In Book 1 of the Aeneid, Vergil describes Queen Dido by saying, dux femina facti, the leader of the deed was a woman. In this case, the leaders of the deed were students, and I could have offered nothing that would have made their work better. On the drive home, I called my wife and more or less babbled. I could not find the words to describe these extraordinary young people and was reminded of the a scene in Contact, the 1997 movie featuring Jodie Foster as Dr. Ellie Arroway, who takes a trip through a wormhole to another part of the universe. Stupefied at what she sees, all she can say is that instead of a scientist, they should have sent a poet.
Life's Rich Pageant
For many people, the phrase "life's rich pageant" is familiar because it is the title of R.E.M.'s fourth album, although it has a much longer history. I reach for that phrase often, for it captures perfectly what is my typical experience of the academic and educational life. Have I known the sorts of stories that are driving so many people out of the education profession? I have, but they have never been the norm. When given the opportunity, young people will astonish with the depth of their thought and their ability to do something with it, and I saw that once again just the other day.
Update
Two weeks after publishing this post, I came across an amazing, new discovery. The star catalogue of Hipparchus, long thought to have been lost, has been discovered, in part, as a palimpsest at an Egyptian monastery. The following images are from the article about this amazing find in the Journal for the History of Astronomy.
Detail of f. 53v, beginning of the first column of undertext (Syriac overtext in dark brown, and faint traces of a few letters of the undertext).
Detail of f. 53v (multispectral image, by the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library and the Lazarus Project of the University of Rochester processed by Keith T. Knox: the enhanced Greek undertext appears in red below the Syriac overtext in black).
An excellent article in Nature puts this amazing discovery into context. As we continue to learn more about the ancient world, we also find new ways to combine modern technology with fields of study such as archaeology, linguistics, philology, science, and more. Putting together a passion for classical studies, computer imaging, and astronomy, for example, can lead to an exciting career, and as the Roman playwright Terence once wrote, "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto." "I am a human being: I think nothing human alien to me." (Heuton Timorumenos, 77)
When is it right to remove the training wheels from the bicycle and let a child ride freely? What is the appropriate stage for students to stop working with paradigms and established formats and begin to create? Parents and teachers alike wrestle with such questions, and most adults working with children tend to cling too long to the one or to rush the other, yet both are needed in anyone's development in any endeavor.
Guiding a Child's Gait
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1553-1592
I have often quoted from one of my favorite works, Montaigne's essay "On Education," in which he wrote, "[I]t is the achievement of a lofty and very strong soul to know how to come down to a childish gait and guide it. I walk more firmly and surely uphill than down," (Donald Frame translation). Among the reasons why it is such a difficult task "to come down to a childish gait" is that teachers have moved beyond it. We are excited about the breadth and depth and all the richness of our subjects and cannot wait to get into the good stuff with our students. What teacher who loves writing and is an author wants to spend time on the structure of the three paragraph essay? What Latin teacher in love with the pyrotechnic rhetoric of Cicero and the poetry of Vergil, whom Tennyson described as "wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man," wants to stay in endless verb and noun drills?
One answer to this is to forgo such elementary work entirely. Throw students straight into the deep end of the creative pool, some would say. Yet any coach will tell you that athletes must be taught the fundamental movements and rules of the game before it makes sense to run complex plays during practice. Part of what teachers are called to do is to restrain their own yearning to get into the deep material before their students are ready for it. They must learn to walk firmly and surely downhill as well as uphill and not feel that they are the less for doing so.
Beyond The Charted Boundaries
And yet, students must be exposed to the deep, rich matters of their subjects to inspire them and give them a vision of where they are going, else the elementary work becomes even more drudgery as it seems to serve no purpose. I was reminded of this recently when I watched the 1951 film The Browning Version, starring Michael Redgrave. The entire film is available at archive.org, and it is more than worth the time to watch, but the scene that struck me and stayed with me long after the film had ended was the following.
In this scene, Andrew Crocker-Harris (Redgrave) is giving a tutorial to one of his Greek students, a boy named Taplow, who is translating the Agammemnon of Aeschylus.
Taplow: We marvel at thy tongue. How bold thou art that you...
Crocker-Harris: Thou.
Taplow: Thou can...
Crocker-Harris: Canst.
Taplow: Canst boastfully speak...
Crocker-Harris: Utter such a boastful speech.
Taplow: Utter such a boastful speech over the bloody corpse of the husband you've just slain.
Crocker-Harris: Taplow, I presume you are using a different text from mine.
Taplow: No, sir.
Crocker-Harris: That is strange, for the line as I read it reads "etis toin dep andri kompazeis logon." However diligently I search, I can discover no "bloody," no "corpse," no "you have slain." Simply "husband."
Taplow: Yes, sir. That's right.
Crocker-Harris: Then why do you invent words that simply are not there?
Taplow: Well, I thought they sounded better, sir. More exciting. After all, she did kill her husband. She's just been revealed with his dead body weltering in gore.
Crocker-Harris: I am delighted at this evidence, Taplow, in your interest in the rather more lurid aspects of dramaturgy, but I feel I must remind you that you are supposed to be construing Greek, not collaborating with Aeschylus.
Taplow: Yes, but still, sir, translator's license, sir. I didn't get anything wrong, and after all, it is a play, and not just a bit of Greek construe.
There it is. To construe or to collaborate, that is the question: whether 'tis nobler for teachers and students to suffer the necessary work of learning a craft or to take what has been learned to create. Just as there are those who would move too fast to the more exciting projects of creation, so there are teachers who would linger too long in the stage of construal. I addressed this at the end of an article I wrote years ago about a disputed passage in the textual tradition of Vergil's Aeneid. Renowned Classics scholar G.P. Goold, who served as the chair of Classics departments at Harvard, Yale, and University College, London, over the course of his distinguished career had made a statement with which I profoundly disagreed.
"'An elementary teacher, to reach in due season the end of his
curriculum, must every hour turn a Nelson eye to serious problems
and refrain from pursuing truth beyond the charted boundaries of
the textbook' (Goold, 115). I would argue that the true magister
can never be so bound, but must, along with the students, pursue
the truth, no matter how anfractuous the path."
In the end, teachers must know what their students need, whether that be the acquisition of facts and basic skills or the development of creativity once those have been mastered. Both are necessary for a student's complete education, and one should not be pursued longer than necessary, nor should the other be rushed before its time.
Funeral procession for Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II
In the middle of September in 2022, much of the world focused on the funeral rites of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, rites that brought formality and pageantry to center stage for many days. As a Christian and an educator, I could not help considering formality and pageantry with regard to the life of faith and the life of learning and have begun discussing this with friends. What follows are some early thoughts.
Both/And
Except in the areas of sport and entertainment, we in the 21st century United States seem generally opposed to any kind of formality and pageantry. Perhaps it smacks too much of hierarchy, which in turn recalls images of oppression. Yet the bland landscape of the lowest common denominator, while, perhaps, providing some corrective to the abuses of hierarchy, has led to its own, sad effects. At this point in history, misuse and abuse of formality and pageantry hardly need to be described, nor do the benefits of level, egalitarian approaches to just about everything. The former are simply accepted de facto as bad and the latter as good. And yet, a garden hoe is a wonderful tool when it is used in planting vegetables. It is horrible weapon when it is used in committing murder. So it is with most things, most events, most systems, and most people. Almost everything has its good and bad aspects. In the course of this piece I want to examine the benefits of formality and pageantry and the less desirable consequences of the bland and the level.
The Text That Started It All
What follows is part of a text thread among some close friends and me.
Friend: For what it’s worth, I wanted to share with you guys some thoughts I had while watching the Royals funeral yesterday. Typically, I’m totally not into any of that stuff. For the longest time, I ridiculed the monarchy, and questioned its relevance. Nevertheless, the pageantry and reverential respect I saw yesterday really moved me. My main impression was that God had somehow written royalty on our hearts. All throughout Scripture, from beginning to end, we see images of royalty. There are thrones, a Royal Court, crowns, scepters, etc. There are subjects who bow and lie prostrate before the King. God refers to us as “a royal priesthood.” In the Lord’s Prayer, there’s the line, “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.“ It seems to me that there are components in heaven that are duplicated here on earth. I believe the monarchy is one of those elements. I believe God has allowed it to continue even in our time as a reminder of our eventual home and eternal reality. It really moved me unexpectedly yesterday. The longing God has placed in our hearts is real and palpable in every way. May we be found worthy to be in the King’s Court!
Me: My brother, I heartily concur. In fact, those very thoughts had been going through my mind. I’m so glad you gave voice to them. And when I saw them returning her crown, scepter, and orb to the altar at St. George’s Chapel, I was struck by how that symbolized that all authority comes from God, just as Jesus said said to Pilate in John 19. That authority may exercised in accordance with or in opposition to His will, but it originates with Him. Thank you so much for saying this.
And, I would add, that the loss of such pageantry and majesty in our social and religious life has contributed to the results of that survey about evangelicals not believing Jesus is God. Yes, such pageantry can become empty of meaning and constricting of life, just as it did with the Israelites and has in many high church expressions through the ages. But swinging the pendulum to the far extreme of pole barn churches with everything sung and taught in the lowest common denominator has brought forth its own sad effects along with any restorative work it may have done to counteract the former.
Friend: Amen, brother. The days are dark and the time is short. This is the church’s last shot at impacting the world. Orthodoxy is dying. We need to stay connected and stand firm. Blessed to be doing it with you guys!
Pole Barns and Cathedrals
I wrote above that I would not rehash the negative consequences of formality and pageantry and the positive effects of the bland and the level, but so ingrained are they in the public mind and so quick are we to defend our positions, that I am led to acknowledge, once again, that I know all this. I know the arguments, for example, against elaborate church architecture and in favor of multi-purpose worship spaces, and I would remind those who already are arming themselves for rebuttal by rehearsing those arguments that it is not necessary. I know them.
What my friends and I were observing in our text thread is that there is something good, something salutary, something edifying in the architectural and artistic glories of a grand church. Coupled with eloquent and poetic liturgies and rites, these glories in and of themselves teach something that is impossible, or at least quite difficult, to do in a bland, multi-purpose space, namely, the majesty of God and our relationship to it and Him. A recent survey has revealed that in 2022, 43% of evangelical Christians do not believe in the divinity of Jesus. It is not immediately clear what definition of "evangelical" the survey used, but any percentage of any group claiming to be Christian yet not acknowledging that Jesus is God is startling. Neither my texting friends nor I would say that the sole reason for this is either the bland architecture, doctrinally shallow worship music, or less than robust biblical teaching and preaching of many churches, but combined, these have undoubtedly shaped how Christians understand and relate to their Lord. Consider what is being said in the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and hymns such as "Holy, Holy, Holy," "The Church's One Foundation," and "O Worship the King." Imagine those ideas being expressed in space designed to lift the heart and mind above the mortal coil and into the realms of the sublime. Those steeped in such regular worship could certainly choose to reject Christ Jesus as God, but it would take a bit of effort.
Temple of Saint Sava, Belgrade, Serbia (photo credit: Brad Mitchell)*
The Pink Floyd Effect
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave them kids alone
Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone
All in all it's just another brick in the wall
All in all you're just another brick in the wall
"Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" from the 1979 album The Wall by prog rock band Pink Floyd captures the driving force behind the lack of formality and pageantry in most schools today. These are linked in the minds of many with rote, drill-and-kill methods that sucked the life from education more powerfully and completely than a black hole. And yet, in an attempt to unleash the inspiration of Parnassus in our schools by doing away with such things and making student choice the order of the day, it is more often the case that Bedlam has been let out. Bill Day, an award-winning teacher from Washington, D.C., discussed this in a podcast several years ago. Routines and rituals are vitally important in a child's development and, if implemented well, need not be stifling and restrictive.
One of the first things visitors to our Latin classroom notice is the wall of bookshelves. There are more than twelve hundred books in our room, and while all are available for anyone's use, they serve a function beyond research. They, along with the various busts and works of art, send the quiet signal that this is a place of serious learning. Certain rituals that start and end each class convey this as well, even as ebullient laughter is the sound most often heard within our walls.
In his 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities titled "The Vindication of Tradition," Yale theologian Jaroslav Pelikan famously observed, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name." Rich traditions with formality and pageantry can, when employed rightly, lead us beyond ourselves, which should be the goal of any act of worship or education. Their absence too often leaves us in a bland, desolate landscape with little company other than the unholy trinity of me, myself, and I.
*My friend Brad Mitchell, credited above with the photograph of the Temple of Saint Sava in Belgrade, shared these pictures of from the Sinaia Monastery in Prahova County, Romania, as well. Since they so beautifully complement the theme of this post, I wanted to included them.
A search for space aliens and antiquity will take you into some of the stranger parts of the Internet, but is the idea of intelligent life on another planet merely a staple of modern science fiction? As it turns out, humans have been giving this some thought for more than 2,500 years.
Philosophy and Science (Fiction)
Lactantius, c250-c325
While preparing for one of the most exciting units of study I will have ever entered into with a high school class (MUCH more on this here), I ran across a quotation from Lactantius, the early Christian author who was an advisor to the Roman emperor Constantine at the time of his conversion to Christianity. A quick search for the Latin text at Documenta Catholica Omnia, one of the greatest text repositories on the Internet, turned up the quotation and a bit more.
Xenophanes...dixit, intra concavum lunae sinum esse aliam terram et ibi aliud genus hominum simili modo vivere quo nos in hac terra vivimus. Fuisse Seneca inter Stoicos ait, qui deliberaret utrumne Soli quoque suos populos daret. Sed, credo, calor deterrebat ne tantam multitudinem periculo committeret. (Institutiones Divinae III.23)
Xenophanes said that there was another earth inside the hollow bosom of the moon and that there another race of humans lived in a similar manner as we we live on this earth. Seneca said that among the Stoics was one who deliberated whether he should also attribute to the Sun its own peoples. But, I believe, the heat deterred him lest he commit such a great number of people to danger. (Divine Institutes, III.23, translation mine)
It is amusing how Lactantius dismisses the unnamed Stoic's idea of a population on the Sun by suggesting he didn't want even in theory to condemn a race of people to such burning heat, but pause to consider that someone was even thinking about this in the time of Seneca, which was the first century A.D. Even more striking is that Xenophanes, a Greek philosopher who lived from about 570 to about 478 B.C. kicked around a notion of another planet full of human beings existing inside the moon more than two thousand, five hundred years ago. Lactantius scornfully disregarded that idea as well, but what is striking to me is how imaginative these ancient thinkers were.
Research Rabbit Trails
One of the things I love about academic life, whether lived out principally in elementary and secondary schools or at the undergraduate and graduate levels, is the discovery that comes from research rabbit trails. While preparing for a new unit in a second-year Latin, high school Latin class, I chanced upon a quotation in a footnote that caught my attention. That quotation led me to the original text of a Latin author from the third-to-fourth centuries, which in turn revealed the amazing imagination of a man named Xenophanes, who lived two and a half millennia and half a world from my own time and place. As I have said countless times in talks and in writing and as has formed my Twitter background for many years, education is a shared journey of discovery.
Our Latin students at Guerin Catholic High School explore a verse of the Bible in Latin each week, and this week the first-year students took a look at John 1:14, which reads, "And the Word became flesh and lived among us." It is a verse that, especially when take with other verses from the Fourth Gospel, speaks to the divinity of Jesus, and we discussed that earlier in the week, but today we examined another aspect.
After the students spent some time reading the verse aloud to practice their Latin pronunciation, I told them to think back to the book of Genesis and then asked, "In whose image are we made?" They quickly answered, "God's," and I pointed out that this was a pretty big deal. After all, God could have created donkeys and then said, "Let us create man in the image of the donkey." And then I suggested that what John 1:14 has to say is an even bigger deal than that.
From there we took a look at the work of another John, the English poet John Donne (1572-1631). I pulled up on our large screen Holy Sonnet XV, and we spent a few minutes with the second half of the poem. You can read the full sonnet at the link above, the but the lines on which we focused were these.
And as a robb'd man, which by search doth find
His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again,
The Sun of glory came down, and was slain,
Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind.
'Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.
I invited the students to turn to the faith section of their notebooks and to jot down their thoughts on what it means to them that God became one of us. Often this will lead to a sharing of ideas, but this time I told them that their thoughts would remain their own. This was to be a time of private reflection.
After they had taken their time to ponder, I told them a story, one that came from a third person named named John. In Season 2, Episode 10 of The West Wing, a character named Leo McGarry, played by John Spencer, encourages a colleague by telling him the following parable.
This guy's walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can't get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, "Hey, you! Can you help me out?" The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, "Father, I'm down in this hole. Can you help me out?" The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a friend walks by. "Hey, Joe, it's me! Can you help me out?" And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, "Are you stupid? Now we're both down here." The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out."
Before moving on with the grammatical lesson of the day, I suggested to the students that when they are overwhelmed in life, they should reach out to the One Who has been down here, with us, before. He knows the way out.
I recently wrote about some of the institutional madness that is crippling American education and invited parents to say something about it. One reader left this comment. "Your call to action for parents has me feeling ambivalent. I have read the minutes of local school board meetings that consist of parents shouting about masks. [W]hat troubles me is the manner that parents have gone about these conversations. We are all collaborators in the education of our children. Why can't we approach disagreements with genuine curiosity?"
There is a simple key to making our civic discourse more civil and filled with the kind of curiosity this reader and countless others desire, but while it is simple, it seems difficult for many to put into practice. We all know the old adage, "Listen more and talk less," and although this would indeed move the level of communication in the public square toward the humane end of the spectrum, there is something else that, if implemented, should clear things up in a hurry.
Good Morning, Eastside High
In the 1987 movie Good Morning, Vietnam, comedic legend Robin Williams portrayed Adrian Cronauer, a radio personality for the Armed Forces Radio Service. Despite the genius that Williams brings to the movie, hilarious performances are also given to us by Bruno Kirby as Lieutenant Hauk and Noble Willingham as General Taylor. In one scene the lieutenant explains to the general why he thinks a bit that Cronauer did on air regarding Vice-President Richard Nixon was disrespectful, noting that the former V.P. is a "good man and a decent man." The general disagrees in some rather salty language, modified here for more sensitive readers. The original script can be found here.
General Taylor: Bull! I know Nixon personally. He lugs a trainload of manure behind him big enough to fertilize the Sinai. Why, I wouldn't buy an apple off the man, and I consider him a good, close, personal friend.
Just two years later we saw the Morgan Freeman movie Lean On Me in which Freeman plays high school principal Joe Clark who takes over struggling Eastside High School in Patterson, New Jersey, in an effort to make it an institution of true education once again. His heavy-handed tactics, however, land him in hot water with the superintendent, Dr. Napier, portrayed by Robert Guillaume. In a tense verbal altercation, the superintendent lays down the law.
Dr. Napier: End of discussion! Debate is over! You will write a formal apology for your treatment of Mrs. Elliott and Darnell and for your thoughtless insult to the women of this community! Get used to it! It's the way of the world! If you're so hot for discipline, then start by accepting mine! Come on. Let's get something to eat.
Bullshit!|I know Nixon personally.W
He lugs a trainload of shit behind him|that would fertilize the Sinai.
Why, I wouldn't buy an apple from|the son of a bitch, and I consider|him a good, close, personal friend
What do these scenes have in common? They both portray the ability of people to disagree, yet get along. They show that it is possible for one person to call another out for being wrong and yet for the two of them to remain friends. They give us a clear picture that dispute and civility, disagreement and amiability, can live side by side in our hearts, words, and actions. The question, of course, is how this is possible.
#1 Rule of Engagement
Neither give nor take anything personally in discourse about ideas. There it is. That is the number one rule of engagement that makes discourse civil, which is usually if not always a prerequisite to pursuit of curiosity. To reference just one more movie from the '80s, consider a scene from the Patrick Swayze action flick Road House. Swayze's character Dalton takes over security at a Missouri road house where the customers have become used to getting out of hand. At his first meeting with the bar staff, he tells them not to take insults from inebriated customers personally. One of the bouncers questions whether or not a particularly vulgar appellation is personal or not, and Dalton replies, "No. It's two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response." Unwilling to let the matter go, the bouncer continues.
Bouncer: What if someone calls my momma a whore?
Dalton: Is she?
Shakespeare it's not, but the scene illustrates a vital point in public discourse. Don't take things personally. Ideally, don't dish out anything personal either, as that amounts to nothing more than an ad hominem attack, but even if someone else does not know the rules of civility, you still have the choice of whether to respond.
There is a widely accepted belief that we must answer every taunt and insult in kind, or perhaps even go it one better. Why? Why is that necessary? Someone calls you a name or insults something or someone you hold dear. What, exactly, is gained by your doing the same in response? To return to Road House, another bouncer tells Dalton when he first arrives that he had heard he was really tough, but then adds, "You don't look like much to me." Dalton merely responds, "Opinions vary."
The Path To Killing Cats
It is said that curiosity killed the cat, and that may well be true if the feline confused the ball of string with a ball of electrical wire, but for humans curiosity is the key to learning. The person who commented on my other post asked why we can't approach disagreements with genuine curiosity, and too often the reason is that we have violated the first rule of engagement. Curiosity and exploration many times come to dead ends and wrong conclusions. That is part of the adventure and, dare I say, the fun. Sometimes we need to be told rather directly that we are wrong, but if we take everything as a personal slight, we can never have the meaningful engagement that genuine curiosity and learning require.
To end with one more reference to a dramatic scene, consider an episode from the television series The West Wing, which ran from 1999-2004. John Amos, who superbly portrayed James Evans in the '70s sitcom Good Timesand Kunta Kinte in the miniseries Roots, gives equally powerful performances as Admiral Percy Fitzwallace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In season 1, episode 3 of The West Wing, the President's chief-of-staff is about to hire a young, African-American man as personal assistant to the President. He asks Admiral Fitzwallace if he would have a problem with it, since the young man would occasionally have to carry the President's bags.
Admiral Fitzwallace: You gonna pay him a decent wage? You gonna treat him with respect? Then why should I care? I've got real battles. I don't have time for cosmetic ones.
If we take a page from the admiral's book, we will be more likely to engage in civil discourse, and this allows curiosity to flourish and true learning to take place.
Venus Petitioning Jupiter on behalf of Aeneas, 18th century
In Book I of the Aeneid, Jupiter describes to Venus a coming age of peace for the as yet unfounded Roman people. One of the features of that peace was that Madness
saeva sedens super arma, et centum vinctus aenis post tergum nodis, fremet horridus ore cruento.
Upon its savage weapons and bound with a hundred bronze knots
Behind its back will frightfully roar with its bloody mouth. (Aeneid I.295-296, translation mine)
But what if those brazen chains were created by insanity itself? Surely those bound would also roar frightfully, and so they do in the halls of many American schools.
When Teachers Talk
I recently attended a conference during which those in my session shared some of the evaluative practices in their schools. As soon as one teacher mentioned having to provide documentation of various instructional practices for year-end evaluation, the others almost unanimously chimed in to share their own experiences of the sort of top-down hamstringing of educators that is all too common. I immediately thought of the scene in the movie Gladiator in which Maximus exclaims to his trainer, "Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome, Proximo. This is not it. This is not it!"
Imagine Pope Julius II requiring Michelangelo to document how he involved the painters on his team in the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Imagine the great painter being forced to provide evidence for the different approaches to fresco he had employed. Wouldn't it have been better simply to gaze at the finished ceiling in awe and wonder?
This insanity of binding our teachers with chains of bronze stems from treating education like a quantifiable natural science, which it is not. It stems from the belief that such control improves learning. It stems from the belief that a pseudo-scientific veneer will give credibility to a maligned profession. It stems from the need to justify various administrative positions created to orchestrate this circus of bedlam, a word used here in its original sense as a colloquial pronunciation of "Bethlehem," the famous mental hospital in London.
If This Bothers You
I do not suffer from such professional indignity, such deliberate obstruction of true education, at the school where I currently teach, but far too many of my friends and colleagues in other schools do, and this is one reason private, public charter, hybrid, and homeschool models have the freedom to operate more nimbly and efficiently. As I once told a friend who was on the school board of the public school district in which I taught, this should bother you, but the response should not be to shackle non-public educators in a similar way, but rather to remove the ridiculous restraints from all teachers.
A good friend of mine who is not in the field of education replied after I had told him about the experience with my conference colleagues mentioned above, "Bureaucrats will, by nature, legislate the life out of innovators and entrepreneurs -- leaving organizations highly regulated but without a pulse." Any good teacher at the primary, secondary, or university level can testify to the truth of that statement, and tax-paying citizens should know that this is what is happening in their schools. Would you rather the teachers of your children spend their time designing creative ways to help their students learn from the past and prepare for the future or in keeping track of artifacts to prove whether a particular approach to teaching was used the correct percentage of time?
Living in the Land of Sokal
In 1996 Alan Sokal, physics professor at NYU and University College London, published an article in Social Text, a journal of postmodern culture studies. The article was titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" and proposed that quantum gravity was nothing more than a social and linguistic construct. The article was sheer nonsense, and Sokal's aim was to expose academic publishing for the Emperor's New Clothes that it too often peddled. The article was published, and a few weeks later Sokal revealed the whole thing had been a hoax.
I am willing to bet that most teachers today will recognize the academicese of Sokal's article title. Consider for a moment the following paragraph.
"If one examines precapitalist deappropriation, one is faced with a choice: either reject constructivist capitalism or conclude that art may be used to marginalize minorities. But Marx uses the term 'precapitalist deappropriation' to denote the paradigm of postsemantic sexual identity. A number of discourses concerning deconstructivist neocultural theory exist."
To the teachers reading this, I ask how similar that sounds to something you were supposed to read for a professional development session you have attended in the past few years. It is precisely the kind of thing we are used to, and yet that paragraph came from an article that was intentionally created as pure nonsense at elsewhere.org/pomo. The creators of the site use a tool called the Dada Engine, "a system for generating random text from recursive grammars." As they note on their website, "The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodern Generator." They describe the background for this in an actual, non-nonsensical article here.
Hofstadter is a brilliant and inquisitive person whose work takes him through philosophy, cognitive science, computer science, linguistics, and more. Many years ago I had the pleasure of taking him to dinner and, as I wrote in another post, he was no fan of jargon.
Years ago I had the opportunity of taking Douglas Hofstadter to dinner before he gave the inaugural lecture in an annual series a colleague and I had developed at our high school. This Pulitzer-winning author who works in cognitive science, philosophy, computer science, and seemingly everything else, spoke on what may have seemed a strange topic for him. His talk was titled "Is Modern Poetry Complete Rubbish?," and in it he took issue with poets who write in such confused ways and on such esoteric topics that no one reads their work. In fact, he found the poetry of "Surrey With a Fringe on Top" to be of more value than much contemporary work, which he considered little more than prose with a ragged right margin. Even in discussing other more heady topics, he had a particular abhorrence for jargon. In that he reminded me of the character Margrethe Bohr, who in Daniel Frayn's play Copenhagenpersistently asked her husband, Niels, and Werner Heisenberg to put their theories in plain language.
No Vermicelli With Red Sauce
A fellow graduate student asked me one day years ago if the lunch I was heating up in the office microwave were vermicelli with red sauce. It was rather obviously just spaghetti, yet "vermicelli with red sauce" apparently sounded more sophisticated. To educators everywhere, resist the urge to use jargon and the pseudo-scientific collection of data as if doing so actually improves teaching and learning or gives any respect to our profession. It doesn't. It is merely laughable. Teaching is a difficult calling. Those who cannot understand and respect that...well, that's on them. Posturing merely hinders the work of teachers who are leading their students on the shared journey of discovery that is education and working to correct the true causes of failing education.
To parents, do not be fooled by lofty language and jargon about time spent by your children's teachers on some of the practices of their job. One of my students' parents used to ask me about what teachers were being asked to do in the school where I taught. She was involved in what was going on in the lives of her children, as she should have been. If your "Spidey senses" begin to tingle when you hear what is happening in the lives of your children's teachers, if you begin to sense that "something is rotten in the state of Denmark," then dig a bit deeper. If it turns out that those teachers are being bound by the brazen chains of madness, help them to break free by telling administrators and school board members that you will not accept it. Good schools see their enrollments increase and teaching positions easily filled. Bad schools do not.
What happens when someone challenges a young man's paternity? Should he take up the challenge and prove his accusers wrong, or should he use a different approach? And what is the role of pagan mythology in a Christian school?
Jesus Teaches Logic Class
In Books I and II of his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid tells the story of Phaëthon, who was challenged by his friends regarding whether the sun, personified as Sol, was in fact his father. To prove his lineage, Phaëthon asked Sol for permission to drive his chariot, which pulled the fiery ball across the sky. Chaos ensued when the young man was unable to control the horses as they soared high above the earth, causing the tops of mountains to freeze, or dove too close to the earth's surface, burning the areas that became deserts. In the end Zeus was forced to intervene by hurling a lightning bolt that killed Phaëthon and allowed Sol to regain control.
There is an interesting parallel between this famous story of Greco-Roman mythology and an episode we find with Jesus in Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-12. After having fasted for forty days, Satan tempts, or tests Jesus regarding His identity as the Son of God. In the first two of the three tests, Satan begins by saying, "If you are the Son of God." For the sake of this piece, we will only look at the first of the three tests, the one in which Satan challenges Jesus to turn stones into bread. His exact words are, translating literally from the Greek, "If you are the Son of God, speak to this stone so that it may become bread."
Whereas Phaëthon sees the challenge to his paternity as a simple matter to be proven, Jesus recognizes that there is more going on and that Satan has in fact presented Him with a dilemma, which runs as follows.
If you are the Son of God, you will turn this stone into bread.
If you turn this stone into bread, you are doing what I tell you to do and thus are subservient to me.
You have only two choices. You will either turn the stone into bread or you will not.
If you do not turn the stone into bread, then you are not the Son of God, but if you do turn it into bread, then you are doing what I tell you and thus are subservient to me.
It would seem that Satan has trapped Jesus on the horns of a dilemma, but Jesus deftly avoids the logical trap by, as we say, going through the horns. He simply refuses to accept either of the two unacceptable options, admitting to not being the Son of God or admitting to being subservient to Satan, and cites Deuteronomy 8:3, which says that we are not to live on bread alone in the first place but on every word that comes from God. As we read so often throughout the gospels, Jesus simply will not be taken in by the verbal trickery of others, and this can be a good reminder to us as well that just because people may try to trap us in argument, we do not have to respond in the way they expect. By keeping our eyes fixed on God and His word, we will respond in truth and need never fear the conversational dilemma.
Christians and Mythology
It may seem that Christians should not bother themselves with reading and studying pagan mythology, and some Christians have taken just such an approach to learning, relying on no less redoubtable a supporter for their position than St. Augustine. In Confessions I.13 he wrote,
Quid enim miserius misero non miserante se ipsum et flente Didonis mortem, quae fiebat amando Aenean, non flente autem mortem suam, quae fiebat non amando te, Deus, lumen cordis mei...?
For what is more wretched than some wretch not pitying himself and weeping over the death of Dido, which happened by loving Aeneas, but not weeping for his own death, which happened by not loving You, O God, the light of my heart...?
Augustine rightly saw that it is folly to delve so deeply into the lives of fictional characters like Dido and Aeneas from Vergil's Aeneid while ignoring our own spiritual condition, but this does not mean that we must approach literature and faith as an either-or proposition. Contrasting the story of Phaëthon with the episode of Jesus and Satan, we gain an even greater understanding of and appreciation for the boldness of Christ's response to His enemy. It helps us see more clearly how we can respond to our own temptations as we endeavor to stand strong in imitation of our Lord.
What works of fiction have helped you grow in your walk with Jesus? How has Scripture allowed you to critique and read differently the novels and plays and poetry and movies that enter your life?
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