Why I Wear It

This pendant is a small scale version of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's "dissent collar."  I bought it a few days after her death in 2020.  Since only the Trumpiest of MAGA folk would ever think of me as a liberal, it might seem strange that I would wear something that honors a woman with whom I disagreed so frequently.  I bought it and wear it to remind me of some things that I think are important in our divided culture.

1. I owe her a lot. Without Justice Ginsberg, my life as a female would be very different than it is.  I am a 48 year old single woman with no plans of marriage.  When I bought my home 18 years ago, I did not have to have my loan cosigned by my father or brother or any other man.  This was not true when Ruth was born and in fact, only became possible two years before I was born. Because of her work (and the work of others like her), I am able to live the life God has call me to live.  I wear this tribute to her to remind myself that I stand on the shoulders of giants.
2. She lived a life of thought.  I weirdly have a memory of the first time I heard of Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  As a college student home for the summer, I happened to be watching tv on the June day that Bill Clinton announced his nomination of the tiniest woman I had ever seen.  There are two things I most remember about his speech.  First, she had been unanimously approved to the position she had prior to her nomination to the Supreme Court.  While things were not quite as divisive then as they are today, that was still an unlikely feat; and it communicated to me how immensely qualified she must be.  The second thing I remember was that he described her as thoughtful, but he was using it in a different way than I had ever heard before.  I had only heard the word thoughtful as a synonym for caring. And while she certainly was that, he was using it to mean "full of thought."  He was describing her as an intelligent woman who put a great deal of thought into her rulings.  Since then, I have read some of her writings, and they are filled with deliberation rather than simple ideology.  I have so much respect for that, even when the end result of that thinking would be different than the end result of mine.  I don't want to be a person who just believes the party line without asking myself serious questions first, and I appreciate that about her character as well.
3. She lived a life of kindness and humor.  If you have never watched the segment that Stephen Colbert did with RBG, do yourself a favor and watch this 6 minute clip.  While Justice Ginsberg took her job very seriously, she didn't take herself too seriously.  She joked about her online cult following having dubbed her Notorious RBG, saying "It's not all packed auditoriums and standing ovations." Even the fact that she wore this "dissent collar" showed a subtle cheeky side to a serious thinker.  By all accounts, she was an extremely kind woman.  She did the work she did for the community and for those less fortunate than herself.  She said "To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you, that’s what I think a meaningful life is. One lives not just for oneself but for one’s community.”  Since she saw anger, envy, and resentment as a waste of energy, she invested in loving those around her, including those with whom she disagreed.
4. She showed us that an opponent was not an enemy.  This may be the most important reason I wear this necklace.  Do you know who the closest friends of the Ginsburg family were?  You may be shocked to find out that it was the Scalia family.  I don't mean they were generally cordial.  They bonded over their love of classical music and food.  Their families went on trips together.  There is legitimately an opera based on their friendship.  Most importantly, they both respected that the other was devoted to the constitution, in spite of the fact that they interpreted it in completely opposing ways.  I wear this tribute to a woman with whom I disagreed to remind myself that disagreement doesn't have to mean disrespect.

We are affected by the culture in which we live, but we are also responsible for creating it.  If we remember to be kind, humorous, full of thought, loving to those we disagree with, and remember that we leave a legacy for the future, we will live better lives.  

How can you remind yourself of these things today?  How can you communicate then to your students tomorrow?  

Losing Our Mental Stamina

Last week, I wrote about how we don't use our minds as much as we should because it is so much easier to rely on emotion, instinct, and memory.  I referenced the kerfuffle about Karen Swallow Prior on Russell Moore's podcast.  This week, I'd like to address how hard it is to sustain prolonged use of our minds, a thought that started in my mind while listening to that same episode.  Russell talked about how difficult it is for us to focus on Bible reading because it has become difficult to sustain focus on anything.  It's easy to blame this on the pandemic (and I'll return to that soon), but I think we have to back up several years before Covid to really diagnose this issue.

When I was in college, professors sometimes referred to "the Sesame Street effect," suggesting that our attention spans were shortening due to the way children's television shows were filmed, including rapidly changing angles and scenes, bright colors, and lots of sound stimulation.  While I don't think any scientific research had been done on this thought, the logic seemed pretty sound.  And, man, did they have no idea what was coming.  

The early internet was slow to load images and mostly screens of text.  But as transmission speed increased, our patience decreased.  We started expecting things to load instantaneously, correct our errors for us, and show us what we wanted to see when we wanted to see it.  We began consuming news in video clips, reading blogs and articles rather than books, and scrolled past anything we didn't care to see.  Twitter's character limitations took away all sense of context or nuance because there just wasn't space for it.  It bled outside of the online world; I have impatiently tapped my fingers waiting for the microwave to cook something in four minutes.  Mind you, this is something that would have taken an hour just a few decades ago and would have required the building of a fire in prior centuries.  

Enter the smartphone.  Any reliance we had on others evaporated in a matter of months.  Take the wrong exit while driving?  No need to stop and ask for directions anymore.  Can't remember a fact, you don't need to be near a book, a knowledgeable person, or a computer because the computer is in your pocket.  Want to listen to a song while watching a video and reading a news article simultaneously, no problem.  At least with Sesame Street, you were limited to what the directors/editors had produced; now you could change scenes at your own control.  While adults fretted over what this would do to their children's attention span, they ignored what it was doing to their own.  And in short order, they handed them to their children and let them take them to school.  Let it be the teachers' problem to out-engage this extremely consuming technology.  

Some parents did have limits on "screen time," but they implicitly sent their kids the message that screen time was valuable by making it a reward for everything from chores to grades to good behavior.  The pandemic didn't help; screen time limitations went out the window.  I'm not judging parents here, by the way, because I cannot imagine what trying to work from home while having kids would have been like.  My own screen time was enormous as I taught virtually.  When it first started, I thought I would do a lot of reading since I was at home all of the time, but I found that my eyes didn't want to focus at that distance after a day online.  When we started back to school, I just didn't have the mental bandwidth for anything other than getting through the day.  Then I came home and watched Stephen Colbert and an episode of Would I Lie to You while playing online poker.  The human brain isn't capable of multitasking, so I was just training my brain to consume things in shorter and shorter chunks.  We all did.  Consequently, traffic is more upsetting than it used to be, and waiting in line for anything annoys us more than ever.  I haven't even addressed that we were being politically stoked at every turn during this time, but our patience for other people's opinions is down to zero.  

Okay, we know we have a problem.  What do we do?  It has to start with wanting to do something.  It's not enough to complain about it or think of it as someone else's problem.  Older generations like to talk about it as a Millenial or Gen Z problem, but there were a number of people texting DURING the Tony Bennett concert I attended in February of 2020 (a concert in which I was the youngest person by quite some margin).  At a family event, one of the grandparents showed me a meme on his phone bemoaning the fact that kids don't play stickball or something.  I don't remember because I was distracted by the fact that he was showing me a meme. . . on his phone.  With no sense of irony whatsoever, he used tech to complain about tech.  They used to say recognizing that we have a problem was half the battle, but I'm not sure if that's true because we recognize it as a societal problem rather than one in ourselves.  

The second thing we need to do is make a plan.  Choose a challenging book and plan to work your way up to it.  I'm not saying jump into Steinbeck or Dickens right away, but make it something worth your time and move your way up from your current reading length from now to some goal date.  Treat it like training for a marathon or weight lifting; increasing your mental effort each day or week.  Watch an entire television show with your phone in another room.  Do you really want to challenge yourself?  Leave your phone at home for a day.  I promise you won't die, and neither will your children; you will just have to remember to pick them up from soccer practice without a reminder alarm.  Do the work to memorize something - a scripture passage, the Hamlet soliloquy, or the Gettysburg Address.  It doesn't matter, just exercise those parts of your brain to help you sustain mental effort for the future.  

Do something.  Do anything.  Work out your brain.  

Losing Our Minds

This post is going to start out with the appearance of political meddling or cultural observation, but if you will stick with me, I'll bring it around to education at the end.

This week, I was teaching my 8th graders about kinetic theory, which states that all matter is made of small, indivisible particles that are in constant motion.  It is an important concept in understanding the physical properties of each state of matter and explains why a golf ball keeps its shape as you move it from one location to another while water takes on the shape of its container.  What is interesting is that it was first proposed by an ancient Greek philosopher, and no one asked him to prove it.  Why?  Because proving things simply didn't exist yet.  Imagine going your whole life and never hearing anyone say, "Can you prove that?"  It wasn't an expectation.  If you followed Aristotle, you were Aristotelian and, I presume, agreed with his musings.  Maybe if you disagreed, you become Pythagorean.  I don't know.  

My students always find this strange (rightly so), but they usually indicate that we would never do that today.  Since they are in the 8th grade, they still get to possess this level of naivete, but soon they will find that we absolutely still do this.  People pick their party, their candidate, their guy - and that's the end of their thinking.  Whatever he says, it's totally fine.  I'm not just picking on one side here.  I've seen people defend Trump for things they would have been horrified if Obama had done.  I've seen people bend over backward to excuse Biden for things that they would set their hair on fire to criticize Trump for.  They've picked their side, and then they didn't need their minds anymore.  I am trying desperately to fight this trend, but it can be hard.  I used to describe myself as conservative, but now you'd have to ask me about a specific issue for me to know.  I am still mostly conservative on many issues (life, taxes, small and local government - although I'm not sure most people who call themselves conservative still believe in small government), but there are issues on which I am a raging liberal (voting right and immigration should both be as easy to do as possible).  I have also come to realize that there are some issues on which I will never be qualified to have an opinion (large-scale economic issues, most of foreign policy) because it is just too complex.  While I never cast a straight-party ballot, I did think voting was relatively simple until a few years ago.  I now find it to be a complex mix of economic issues, social issues, support for different causes and people, and all of the other things that might reveal a candidate's moral character.  This requires more research than I have ever done before and more thought than I think most people wish to engage in.

There's something I have learned from all of the reading I do into cognitive science research.  Thinking is hard, and our brains try to avoid it.  Daniel Willingham discusses this both in Why Don't Students Like School and Outsmart Your Brain.  Thinking is both slow and energy-intensive, so we rely on memory, shortcuts, and a variety of tricks to save time and blood sugar.  That doesn't mean we can't think, but that it isn't our first instinct.  In politics, it is easy to rely on emotional responses rather than thought, but we can be adults if we decide to be (after all, isn't that the rationale for having a voting age of 18?).  In an attempt to think things through more carefully than I used to, I listen to a few different podcasts that try to either present both sides of an issue or forge a middle ground.  One of those podcasts is Truth over Tribe.  Another is the Bulwark.  In a recent episode of the latter, Charlie Sykes said, "We are losing our minds."  He did mean we had literally gone insane, just that we had given ourselves over to not using our minds.  We had given ourselves permission not to use our minds by choosing a party, reacting purely out of emotion, and turning off our brains.

Recently, Pilgrim's Progress was trending on Twitter.  I've seen some strange things trending on that site, but Puritan literature is by far the oddest.  It turns out that the reason it was trending was because people were hassling Karen Swallow Prior.  This is hardly new as women like her and Beth Moore are lightning rods for the obnoxious TheoBros online.  Karen had appeared on an episode of the Russell Moore podcast, and Russell said he found John Bunyun morose and difficult to read.  Karen responded that Pilgrim's Progress was kind of a drag, that her students loved to hate it, and she loved to show them that there is value in things they initially hate.  This is a teacher's answer if ever there was one, but the people attacking her on Twitter left out the context and simply attacked her for saying it was a drag, which it objectively is.  Lots of great things are difficult to enjoy.  Even if Pilgrim's Progress is your favorite book, you would have to admit that it is a slog because Puritans wrote differently than we do.  I would describe Casablanca as slow, in spite of it being one of my favorite movies.  Some really great music is challenging to listen to.  But, in the world we are currently occupying, people don't want to think these thoughts.  They want to spew their emotions into their keyboard without thinking.    

I promised I would bring this back around to education, so here it is.  Teachers, we are the front line of turning this tide.  We MUST teach our students to think.  We can overcome this by modeling thought for our students, asking them for their thoughts, correcting them when they speak emotionally rather than logically, pointing out areas of context they may be missing, and allowing them to hold us accountable for the same.  Teachers are so often accused of having agendas, whether we do or not.  This is one we absolutely must have.  Cultural shifts start in our classrooms, and teaching kids to keep their minds rather than losing them is our most important job.

Do Your Methods Match Your Mission?

Last year, I did a whole series of posts on my school's mission statement.  All schools have a mission statement.  All churches have a mission statement.  All businesses have a mission statement.  At this point in America, I think it is possible that all individuals have a mission statement.  As a reminder, the mission statement of GRACE Christian is

"GRACE Christian School is a loving community that spiritually and academically equips, challenges, and inspires students to impact their world for Christ."

Mission statements are good to have and to put on t-shirts and coffee mugs, but what is more important is to use your mission statement as a filter.  Do you take the time to ask yourself whether your goals, objectives, or even methods align with your mission statement?  I think most of us are good at making goals from it, but I'm not sure that most people filter our methods through it.

I confess that it took me until last year to ask myself that question.  I knew our school's mission statement and I was fully committed to it, but I don't know that I intentionally constructed my classes around it.  So last year, after deciding to be almost obnoxious about it, I set out some student goals based on the specific mission of my school.

Equip:  Make you the informed thinker you need to be to make good decisions.  Ultimately, I want my students to make good decisions.  Whether that is choosing the right classes to take or exercising integrity in difficult moments, students must be informed. 

I teach them science, but I also tell them as many things as I can about as many ways as God gives me.  I show them that I love art and literature because it shouldn't just be an English teacher thing.  If they are interested in something, I learn what I can about it.  From baseball to theology to music, if you are going to make wise choices, you must be informed.  I can't teach them everything, but I teach them as much as possible and model for them that I am always learning. 

Challenge:  Ask you to perform better than you think you can at things you don't think you are good at.  If there is anything that two decades of teaching have taught me, it's that kids are capable of more than they think they are.  I teach eighth grade, so they enter my class with seventh-grade skills.  They have to leave my class with high school skills so they will be ready to learn more deeply.  For that reason, I use a lot of class time training.  I don't give them a study guide.  I teach them three ways to make their own.  I don't provide a "word bank" for tests.  I advise them on how to create good flashcards for themselves.  I spend a lot of review time showing them how to eliminate wrong answers in multiple-choice questions, a skill they will need for at least the next four years and possibly longer. 

Many of my good students perform lower in the first quarter than they are accustomed to.  It frightens them, and they want me to go back to their comfort level.  Sometimes, their parents want that too.  It would certainly be easier to do so, but I know that isn't right.  We would never take a toddler who falls down after their first few steps to go back to crawling, and we should tell kids who fall at their first few self-improvement attempts to go back to their old ways either.  We should comfort, encourage, and support; but we should not allow them to revert to their old ways.

Inspire:  Ask you to look beyond the grade, the curriculum, and the tests to see what you can do with your education.  This is the part of the mission statement I know I cannot accomplish.  God inspires, and he uses the many teachers a child has (including academic teachers, parents, culture, coaches, and even friends) in their lives as tools. 

So many of us are focused on grades and how learning applies to a job that we forget the purpose of education.  It's nice that we can get jobs related to our education, but it isn't the point.  The point is that they become more human.  A robot can be programmed to perform a job task or given the knowledge (data) needed to complete a calculation.  Part of being human is interacting with other humans who are different than we are, people with different skills, values, and interests.  The multidisciplinary approach to education helps them become better at those interactions.  When I have
this conversation with students, I say, "What if the ONLY thing I could talk about was physics.  Would you want to spend time with me?"  Of course, the answer is always no.  What if scientists only married other scientists?  What a boring life that family would lead.  Being interested in things makes you more interesting.  It allows you to interact with more people.  It allows you to serve more people.  Don't lock yourself into one thing.

Reacting to Someone Else's Thoughts (You May Be Wrong)

I am going to start with a story that happened while I was in Boston for the Learning and the Brain Conference.  This has nothing to do with the conference.  It happened while I was walking from my hotel to the convention center at 7 am on Sunday morning.

I am a single woman, walking alone at an unusual time in a city with which I am not familiar.  For that reason, I was experiencing a little nervous energy.  I wasn't super anxious or afraid; it was just that low level of nerves that makes you alert to your surroundings and likely to evaluate every sound, shadow, and person on the street.  If you are a man reading this, you may not understand, but women do this any time we are out alone.  This level of alert vigilance is a gift of God that helps with our safety.

I was in this process of heightened evaluation when a man who I was about to pass on the sidewalk came to a complete stop.  My anxiety level spiked from the low level that makes you alert to the level of "I don't know what is about to happen, and it could be very, very bad." I quickened my step to get away from this situation a little faster, and I heard behind me a very irritated, "You're welcome."

Why am I sharing this story?  There are two reasons.

First, it is an interesting illustration of the differences between men and women.  When a man is walking alone, he is trying to get to a destination.  When a woman is walking alone, she is trying to not get attacked.  Women are not being paranoid; men are not being reckless.  It is just a function of how our experiences and environments differ in the world.  We probably can't understand this about each other, but we can accept it anyway.

Second, I think this could have a valuable application in our classrooms.  Let's revisit the thought processes of the two people in this story.
Context
- I was a single woman in an unfamiliar city and was, therefore, on the lookout for danger.  This was a thought that was already in my mind as I walked down the street.
- He was walking home on a Sunday morning.  There were no thoughts on his side that I might pose a threat to him.

Motivation
- He was attempting to do something nice (although I will say I think that is undercut by his expectation of being thanked for it).
- I was attempting to get to the convention center unharmed.

Assumption
- I assumed he had the potential to be dangerous.
- He assumed it was clear to me that he was not a danger (if he thought about it at all).

Timing
- It took me an extra 0.5 seconds after I passed him to realize that he was, in fact, stopping for my benefit.  I had to reverse directions in thinking and that takes a moment.  I would have certainly thanked him at that point if I had been able to.
- He already knew his motivation, so it took 0.0s for him to decide I was rude.

So, how does this apply to the classroom?  When conflicts arise, the reactions of both teacher and student are always based in context (which we usually think we are sharing but might not be), motivation (which are different between the two parties), assumptions (which we may or may not be right about), and timing (perhaps it takes the student an extra half-second to process what you meant, not just what you said).  Just like this man on the street and I had very different reactions to the same experience because neither of us knew what was going on in the other's mind, students and teachers may have very different reactions to each other.

Did you know that there is a part of your brain solely responsible for helping you construct a representation of other people's thoughts?  It helps you know when you have upset someone or see that the boy in your class likes you.  When it is accurate, it is quite helpful; but it can be wrong.  Sometimes, we process the input from a student incorrectly, and they interpret us incorrectly as well while both of us absolutely believe we are right. 

As the adult in the room, I am the one responsible for moderating my reaction.  I have the maturity to act, rather than just react that my 8th-grader may not have yet.  Perhaps, I should slow down and ask a student why they are reacting the way they are.  It will give me insight into, not only the conflict of that moment, but it might help me avoid future conflicts as well because I will have a better understanding of how they think.  Let's have the humility to doubt or own rightness is every situation.