Our Common Rival

In sports, there are many rivalries.  Whether it is UNC and Duke, Alabama State and Auburn, or OU and OSU, there are certain teams that you just care about beating more than others.  Friday night, GRACE Christian and Cary Christian set aside their rivalry for one night.  Don't get me wrong.  Both teams still wanted to win their basketball games.  But, that night, they had a common rival, and that was cancer.

In GRACE's eleventh Hoops for Hope (Play for Kay) event, the gym was absolutely packed.  There was a lot of activity.  Cakes were sold in a silent auction.  T-shirts, jewelry, and child-friendly prizes were available for kids to win in games. 

Coffee and snacks were sold in addition to normal concessions.

There was face painting for kids of all ages.

The National Anthem was played and sung.

Funds were raised that resulted in two faculty members getting pies in the face. 

Kids posed in a photo booth. 

Survivors were honored and prayed for. 

And, oh yeah, there were three basketball games. 

The goal was ambitious.  We had hoped to raise ten thousand dollars from one event.  We did not meet that goal.  With the help of our friends at Cary Christian, we crushed it beyond belief.  Just before the final quarter of the last game, it was announced that we had topped FOURTEEN THOUSAND!  We know much good is being done with these funds.  From better patient treatment to clinical research trials, the Kay Yow Fund is committed to keep working with every dollar raised until a cure is found.

The Humanity of Heroes

When you teach, you get asked strange questions.  From how I pronounce caramel (because he wants you to agree with him in the argument he is having with a friend) to my favorite element (which I don't know how to have an answer for) to my favorite meme (do people have favorite memes), students ask a lot of opinion questions.  Occasionally, I even get asked who is my favorite President.  The answer is Thomas Jefferson, but I know that can be a difficult answer for some people to take.  After all, he was a very flawed and self-contradictory individual, both wanting to free his slaves and writing that "all men are created equal" while fathering children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings.  Similar contradictions are true of many of the founding fathers, so we feel we are left with the choice of ignoring their faults or ignoring their contributions. 

When the movie The Greatest Showman was released, I heard a lot of students speak very lovingly of PT Barnum because the movie had portrayed only his heroic side.  I guess his ownership of an old woman (yes, he purchased her) doesn't make for good content in a musical.  He is the person known for lines like, "A fool and his money are soon parted" and "There's a sucker born every minute."  While it is hard to know if all of the saying attributed to him are true, we can all agree that his character is more complicated than the movie portrays.

There are so many examples of this.  This summer, I decided to read Buzz Aldrin's book Magnificent Desolation to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.  He describes the affair he had with a woman he met while on the world tour, flying back and forth to New York to "keep up his flight certification."  We all know the controversies over monuments to confederate leaders.  Henry Ford was antisemitic as was Charles Lindbergh.  Both Charlie Chaplin and Elvis seemed to be interested in girls we would call younger than appropriate.  If you want to keep admiring singers that you grew up listening to, I don't recommend seeing Ray or Walk the Line.  Since I'm writing this post on Martin Luther King Day, it might be worth noting that he regularly cheated on his wife.  Recently, A few weeks ago, I saw a tweet asking a prominent Baptist leader why he didn't call out George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards for their apparently racist views.  Of course, Twitter's character limit means it is hardly the place for a deeply meaningful discussion, so the answers to this question left much to be desired.  John Piper does a pretty good job of addressing the issue here, even referencing Peter's denials of Christ and God's forgiveness.

Speaking of Twitter, it seems that every day, someone is being "canceled."  It takes one statement or action for the mob response on Twitter to call for us to boycott various celebrities or companies.  In the past year, I have seen cancelation calls for Kanye West,  JK Rowling, the Hallmark Channel, and even YouTube.  I'm not saying some of them aren't deserved, but it is an almost daily event.  Can there really be that many?  (It's also worth noting that it doesn't seem to work.  Kevin Hart may have removed himself from hosting the Oscars after being canceled, but his shows are still as popular as they were before.  And, I don't think the use of YouTube dropped even one percent after being called out as "over" on Twitter.)

If you haven't seen the PBS documentary Hamilton's America, let me recommend that you do.  Even if you aren't into the musical, the presentation of history is compelling.  There are two scenes in it that stuck with me.  One is the scene in which Christopher Jackson, the play's original George Washington, visits Mount Vernon.  While standing in the slave quarters, this African American states that he is trying to reconcile the heroic aspects of George Washington with the fact that he owns slaves.  In the end, he decides that he has to make peace with the fact that he can't make peace with it.  He is a deeply flawed and yet heroic figure.  The other scene that returns to my mind frequently involves a conversation with Leslie Odom, Jr., the actor who portrayed Aaron Burr.  He discusses how, before the show, most of us only knew that Burr killed Hamilton in a duel.  The benefit of the show, in his estimation, is showing the events that led to that moment because we see the complexity of the man, not just his actions on his worst day.  In fact, one of the things I most appreciate about Lin Manuel Miranda is that Hamilton treats each person in our complicated history as a three-dimensional human being, not a marble statue of their best moments or a painting of their worst. 

How do we deal with this, especially when having conversations with our students (who have been immersed in cancel culture for their entire lives)?  The answer is certainly not to ignore faults in order to maintain our hero worship.  The answer is not to ignore the accomplishments of those we look up to because their flaws make them worthless.  The answer to acknowledge the complexity of human beings.  We are made in the image of God, but we are also corrupted by sin.  Even young students are capable of recognizing complexity.  In fact, these types of discussions are the perfect time for Christian school teachers to talk about sin and our need for redemption.  We can be glad that God uses people with flaws since those are the only kind of people there are.  If we want our heroes to be perfect our only option is to make Christ the hero of the story. 

Call Them By Name

Have you read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People?  Point number 3 is 

"Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language."

He uses the chapter to expound on why people love their own name and how it makes us feel when people use it respectfully or disrespectfully.  

In a recent movie rendition of The Crucible, Daniel Day-Lewis plays John Proctor, a character accused of conspiring with witches.  He signs his name to a confession and immediately takes it back.  He doesn't want it to hang on the church door.  The minister asks why, if he doesn't plan to deny the confession.  He cries out, "BECAUSE IT IS MY NAME!  BECAUSE I CANNOT HAVE ANOTHER IN MY LIFE!"  He is willing to hang before submitting his name to something he knows to be false.

Why is our name so important to us?  It is the one thing we own, the one thing that is ours.  For men like John Proctor, it is the one thing he will pass down to his children.  We can lose all we own and replace it, but if our name becomes spoiled by disrespect or disdain, we can do little to get it back.  When it is used respectfully and well, we feel known and valued.

This is why it is so important to use the names of students well.  As a yearbook teacher, I have more opportunity to learn the names of students I don't teach than most.  My staff and I tag every photo that is uploaded so that the Jostens software can track how many times they are placed in the yearbook.  My staff is great at identifying high school students, but the elementary and middle school students are largely left to me.  I spend a lot of time looking intently at individual features of kids in their portrait and comparing it to an activity photo.  "Is that Jenna?  No, here ears are different."  As a result, by this time in the year, I know a lot of kids' names, whether I teach them or not.  When I have door duty, I do my best to greet each student coming in by name.  (When I'm not sure, I fall back on my southern-lady right to call them sweetheart or honey.)  I want them to start their day by hearing what Dale Carnegie says is the "sweetest and most important sound."  I want them to hear it used happily and in a welcoming way.  

I once knew a man who was attempting to discipline a student.  He kept saying, "We love you, Brandon.  We want what's best for you, Brandon."  Given that the boy's name was Landon, he lost all credibility, and the boy didn't absorb the point of the discipline.  Learn a student's name, and use it well.  When you get it wrong (we all accidentally call them by a sibling's name at some point), acknowledge it and apologize.  Then, make a note to intentionally use it well the next time you see them.

One of the big buzz words of education right now is about "classroom climate."  EduTwitter uses the word "relationships" more than it uses any other word.  Using student names with respect costs nothing but time and it creates a respectful classroom climate as it is the first step in building relationships.

Don't Be a Day Counter

On September 1, I started seeing posts with how many days there were until Christmas, and once Halloween hit, I saw a post every day with the number.  As annoying as receiving that information every day, whether I wanted it or not, it sparked in my mind just how many times I see posts about how many days there are until something (the weekend, the next holiday, a vacation, spring break, graduation, summer, football season, the opening of a big movie, the premiere of season x of show y, etc.).  I just googled "how many days until" using quotes and got over 1 million results.  The first few pages of results are sites that will calculate the number of days until an event for you.  I know this doesn't seem like a big deal, but I submit to you that these people are not living their lives.  They are wishing their lives away.

I know we have to be aware of due dates and deadlines.  I'm a yearbook teacher, so I understand the need for schedule management.  That's not what I'm talking about, that's not what these pictures represent.  These are representative of people who think today is not worthy of their attention except for its transit to a different day. 

Working for the weekend means missing five days out of every seven.  More importantly, it means you are unaware of the opportunities God is putting in your path today.  To quote Ferris Bueller, "Life moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."  To quote the Beatles, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."  To quote the gospel of Matthew, "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

I've done this wrong.  There was a year that I was in the wrong job, and I thought that counting the number of school days left would help me feel better.  It had the opposite effect.  It served only to make me more miserable and slowed down each day.  It made me miss out on the impact I could have had on the students in front of me.  It made me miss out on the joys God was putting in my path because my eyes were farther down the road.  

If you are a day counter, here are some thoughts to keep in mind:
- The average person lives about 25900 days (average means some people don't have that many).
- What you do each day is important because you are trading a day of your life for it.
- Each day is a gift of God, and how you use it is an act of worship to Him.  
- God has a plan for your life, but that means He has a plan for your day, for this hour, for the next few minutes, and for each moment.
- He puts people right in front of you that you will miss if you are looking too far ahead.  
- If you knew you today was your last, would you do something different? 

I'm not expressing this the way I would like, but I found a poem that does, so I'll end this post with it.