No Time for Beauty

On a cold January morning world famous violinist Joshua Bell entered a metro station in Washington, D.C., during rush hour as part of a social experiment conducted by the Washington Post. The Post wondered if people would perceive beauty in an unexpected context or stop to appreciate it.

Armed with his 3.5 million dollar violin, Bell, who just two day earlier had played to a sold out theater in Boston where seats averaged $100, played six sophisticated and difficult pieces by Bach for 45 minutes. The Post calculated that 1,100 people traveled through the station during Bell’s performance. Most were on their way to work.

A full three minutes went by before anything happened. A middle-aged man turned his head but continued on his way without stopping. Thirty seconds later someone threw a dollar into Bell’s hat and hurried off. Finally, six minutes later, someone stopped, leaned against a wall, and listened. After checking his watch, he too continued on his way.

In the 45 minutes that Bell played, loudly and with great emotion, seven stopped at least for a minute to see the performance; twenty-seven donated money, mostly as they passed by—Bell collected a little over $32; $20 was donated at the end of the performance by someone who recognized him and felt embarrassed by his lack of attention.

In all 1,070 people that morning completely ignored one of the world’s finest violinists playing some of the most beautiful music that has ever been written. Many passersby were only three feet away. Few even turned their heads in Bell’s direction.

"It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . .ignoring me." Bell laughs. "At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cell phone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change.”

Interestingly, children noticed Bell and stopped to listen. Without exception, their parents pulled them away and forced them to rush off.

And just as interesting, yet far more disheartening, is that 100 feet away from Bell stood a line of folks, sometimes 6 people long, waiting to get lottery tickets. In 45 minutes, not one person turned around.

It’s easy as I sit here at my desk on a quiet evening at home to think well of myself. Surely, I would be different. Certainly, I would make time for such rare beauty. But, would I really?

Most of the people in the subway station that morning were rushing to work or to school. Would I be any different? Was it that the subway passengers truly did not recognize beauty or was it that the beauty was simply irrelevant to them? Far greater concerns pressed upon them that morning.

That’s the saddest part of this story to me. Our lives are so busy that we have no time for the very things that bring meaning and joy to our lives.

Click here to read the full story and to view the video footage.

Aesop Got It Wrong!

In the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” Aesop teaches us that steady, persistent hard work is better than natural talent, overconfidence, and a poor work ethic. That part is true. But the “slow and steady” moral of the fable has its limits.

Parents and teachers looking for slow, steady incremental improvement in their students will be frustrated and discouraged. Children—and adults for that matter—don’t learn “slow and steady.”

Try teaching a child to read. Faithfully, the teacher drills phonics flashcards every day. On Monday the student gets every flashcard correct. On Tuesday the student not only can’t remember the phoneme in question, but will often passionately argue that he has never seen it before in his life! By Wednesday, he is reading whole sentences flawlessly. But as soon as the teacher starts congratulating himself on little Johnny’s reading improvement Thursday rolls around and Johnny can’t remember half of his flashcards again. By Friday the teacher is convinced that either he is the worst reading teacher in the world or something is seriously wrong with little Johnny.

But nothing is wrong with Johnny or with the teaching. This is simply how kids learn. Little kids, big kids, it’s all the same.

Some days I wonder if my high school student is learning anything. He reads his books and I ask him questions and then torture myself that he just doesn’t seem to be “getting it.” A few days later he without prompting offers me his comparison of the current American political crisis and ancient Rome. I stare at him with my mouth open and wonder, Where has this kid been?

He’s been the hare. And he’s been asleep. And now he’s sprinting!

When it comes to learning, children are not tortoises. They are hares. They sprint and they nap and then they make mad dashes and leap ahead. In education, the teacher is the tortoise, slowly and steadily teaching his students, persevering even when his students seem mentally asleep. But in this scenario the tortoise and the hare aren’t racing, they are travelling companions heading toward that same finish line.

On those days when we can’t wake up our hares, we need to keep plodding along toward that finish line, confident that they will catch up. And unlike Aesop’s fable, our hares will ultimately pass us and we will consider that our victory.

Everything Old is New Again: Thoughts on the Constitution

A few days ago I stumbled onto a conversation about politics and world affairs. It didn’t take long before someone made the oft-repeated remark that the world is such a different place from when the Constitution was written. The Founders could not have imagined the world we live in, she argued. She stopped short of saying it outright but the implication was that since the world is a different place than the 1780s, the Constitution is irrelevant.

The first problem with this attitude, of course, is that once we reject the law of the land—for whatever reason—anarchy quickly ensues. But leaving that problem aside, I’d like to examine the truth of her statement. Is the world really so different today?

We tend to romanticize the past, especially the time of the founding of our country. We underestimate the incredible difficulty of establishing a new form of government, as if the early Americans had peace and prosperity and very few worries and the idealism of the Constitution was forged in a simpler time and therefore has little relevance in the complex modern world. But a close look at the early days of the Republic provides a very different picture.

Economic Woes

At the end of the Revolutionary War, the fledgling country was faced with a serious economic depression caused by a massive war debt. The government tried to spur on the economy by printing more paper money, which resulted in skyrocketing inflation. The country was broke!

Additionally, banks were foreclosing on homes and property. Outraged citizens who believed that the government was conspiring with banks to abuse the populous did more than “occupy” Washington, D.C. They marched on the town with weapons and intended to overthrow the government.

Foreign Affairs

The early Republic also relied heavily on foreign trade for its economic survival. The truth is there has never been a time when the US was not involved in a global economy—a current popular catchphrase used to distinguish modern America from its allegedly simpler economic past.

To complicate matters, the perpetual European warfare constantly threatened American economic interests. There were some who, as is the case today, insisted that the young country go to war to protect its interests, but the majority preferred diplomacy. It’s nothing short of miraculous that the Founders crafted a foreign policy that was both concerned with avoiding war and with protecting our economy, livelihoods, and safety.

Terrorism

Furthermore, within a few years the fledgling country was faced with attacks from Islamic terrorists. Barbary pirates attacked Americans and the US was drawn into its first foreign military conflict.

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? Of course I suspect that when people speak about how different the world is they are really talking about technology. The girl confirmed my suspicions when she said, “The fact that we are having this discussion on Facebook shows what a different ball game we are in.”

Really? The existence of Facebook negates the US Constitution? I don’t understand why people insist that technology changes enduring principles. Technology does not alter human nature. People are still people and throughout time people have always wanted the same things: personal peace, prosperity, the good life. Technology changes none of that.

If anything, the existence of technology that can destroy multitudes should make us cling even more to the guiding principles of the Constitution. We need more wisdom from the past, not less.

There is no issue confronting our country right now that was not at least in principle in the hearts and minds of those who crafted the Constitution. We may debate how to best apply those principles, but we disregard their wisdom at our own peril.

The Blessings of Adversity and Learning through Failure

As I’ve been thinking through my educational goals for 2012, I find myself reflecting on my days as an athlete. I’ve been on several teams that were undefeated in conference play, and I was always perplexed when my coach would schedule games against superior teams that were not in our conference.

“But you are endangering our perfect record,” I’d complain. He always responded, “You don’t learn anything from playing teams that are weaker than you. You always learn more when you lose than when you win. Your weaknesses are exposed and then you can get better.” He’d conclude, “I’m much less interested in having a perfect record than I am in winning the championship. To do that, we have to know where our weaknesses are.”

To a culture that teaches that preserving a child’s self-esteem is paramount, intentionally creating opportunities for failure seems counter-intuitive. But it worked. One of two things always happened when we played teams much better than we. When we got beat, we discovered our vulnerabilities and could work to improve them, which we did. And other times (far more times than I would have thought) we played better than we knew we could. We dug deep and responded to the challenge, shocking both the other team and ourselves.

The same principle applies to education, and especially to homeschooling. One of the great strengths of homeschooling is the recognition that in education one size does not fit all. We learn who our children are and what their learning styles are and we teach them the way they learn.

But this benefit of homeschooling, if not balanced, can become its greatest flaw. If we exclusively cater to our children’s strengths, they will never learn to overcome their weaknesses. John Stuart Mill once said, “A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can.”

The ancients, as David Hicks points out, understood that adversity is a virtue. Completely rejecting this idea, moderns avoid adversity at all costs. Success, they say, breeds success. But this isn’t always true. Parents everywhere know that the only way for a child to learn to walk is to first fall—many times.

As teachers and parents, we should be mindful of the Scriptural admonition not to discourage or frustrate our children. It’s good to know what our children’s abilities are. At the same time, a steady diet of age-appropriate assignments and learning-style specific tasks will ensure that your child never exceeds expectations—yours or his.

As a team we knew we didn’t stand a chance to win some of those games, but when we tapped into some unknown source of strength and ability, when we played beyond ourselves, those were the games that made us a championship team.

Mindful of that lesson, I’ve been giving my students more and more assignments that are a little out of their league. Sometimes they fail and we both learn what areas we need to work on. But sometimes, many times, they rise to the challenge and shock me—and themselves. Those are the moments when they grow and mature by great leaps; suddenly realizing that they are much more capable than they imagined.

We all want our children to succeed. But sometimes success comes from failure, and the greatest success always comes from overcoming adversity.

Creating Family Culture through Reading Aloud

This is an article I wrote back in 2010 that appeared in Home Educating Family Magazine.


The modern family is fragmented and disconnected.   This fact is so obvious that it hardly warrants being stated out loud.   Children are isolated and disconnected from their siblings and alienated from their parents.  Families find themselves pulled in a hundred different directions at once.  And the age-segregated peer culture further divides family members from one another.  Experts call it the Generation Gap; I call it sad and disheartening.

How did we get this way? The answer to that question is complex, but one thing is for sure.  The Generation Gap is a modern phenomenon! The 1920s gave birth to the modern youth culture, and suddenly parents and children seemed alien and foreign to one another.  Children had their own culture, completely different from that of their parents—their own clothes, their own hair styles, their own language, their own music, their own books, their own pastimes, their own pop icons …  Sound familiar?

And yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. And for thousands of years, it wasn’t.

One of the reasons that parents and children struggle to connect is that they do not share a common culture. In other words, modern parents and children largely do not love the same things.   The answer to the fragmented modern family and the Generation Gap is to create a unique family culture.

Sharing with our children the things that we love and teaching them to love those things as well. This is the path toward family unity. Obviously, the most fundamental shared love in a Christian family is a shared love of God.  Families who daily worship God together and speak often of the stories of God’s people will find themselves bound to one another in the deepest and most significant way.  Reading together the stories of the saints in the Scriptures is paramount, but don’t stop there.

When I began homeschooling my children eight years ago, I knew all about the academic superiority of home education, and I was well versed in the spiritual implications of training up my children myself.  However, I was completely unprepared for what has become the greatest blessing of educating my children at home: we like each other—a lot! We are bound to one another and connected to each other in ways that I could not have imagined.

When I reflect on how we got here, how this connectedness developed, I keep coming back to one thing: all those hours and days and now years spent together reading out loud.

We have read countless books together: classic children’s literature, Shakespeare plays, stories of the martyrs and saints of the past, fairy tales, fables, classic novels, Bible stories, tales of historical heroes, poetry.  And at the risk of sounding like a Hallmark commercial, we have literally laughed together and cried together over these books.  We’ve been on the edge of our seats in intense suspense; we’ve been deeply saddened, and we’ve been deeply encouraged.  We’ve seen evil and we’ve seen goodness.  We learned about the world we live in, and we learned about each other too.

These books and our discussions of them have created innumerable threads the bind our hearts together and create a common framework in which to interpret the world.  These stories that we’ve encountered have become our own little personal inside jokes.  My thirteen-year-old son recently said to me, “When I talk to my friends, I always think of jokes that are Shakespeare references. I know none of my friends will get the jokes, so I save them for you.”  He saves his jokes to share with me! How wonderful.  These inside jokes connect us to one another.  Rather than feeling like the typical teen who laments that his parents just don’t “get” him, my son knows that there are some aspects of himself that no one outside of his family “gets.”

The books we read together also provide us with our own unique family language. Every time we see someone who is very pessimistic, we look at each other and say, “Puddleglum.” And my son knows that when I ask him if he’s being an Achilles or an Odysseus, I am really asking him if he is being self-focused or considering the needs of others.  And all of my children have labeled the action of tricking a friend into doing something as “pulling a Tom Sawyer.”

And yet, it’s not just that we have a common language. It’s that we have a common framework to interpret reality. Having discussed at length the pessimism of Puddleglum in the Chronicles of Narnia and the glory-seeking of Achilles in The Iliad, mentioning either of their names becomes much more than family slang, it becomes a shorthand reminder of a greater spiritual truth.

We live in a time when children barely even know their parents. Family homes function as hotels with children checking in for a bed and an occasional meal.  There is hardly time for passing greetings between parents and children, much less opportunity for meaningful interaction.  It’s hardly surprising that most children claim not to like their parents much; they don’t even know them.

Reading aloud together provides a wonderful antidote to this disturbing reality.  When I share with my children a book I love, I am teaching them who I am.  And when they learn to love what I love, they learn to love me too.

While it is certainly true that the family that prays together, stays together. It is also true that the family that reads together will find itself inextricably bound to one another.  In learning to love the same books, we mysteriously learn to love each other as well.

Why Christmas Trees?

Interested in knowing about the origins and meaning of the Christmas tree? Wondering if Christians should decorate trees for Christmas?

Hop over to the CiRCE blog and read my post "Why Christmas Trees?"

I Read Dead People

Just a reminder that I have a post on the CiRCE blog every Wednesday.

Here's this week's post: I Read Dead People