Trying to follow

I just finished reading the book, Letters to a Young Teacher, by Jonathan Kozol. I’ve read a couple of Kozol’s other books, but this one came a from a slightly different perspective. If you haven’t ever read anything Kozol has written, you need to pick up a book today (Savage Inequalities). He writes about the dismal public education system, and has for many years, giving factual statistics, heart-wrenching personal stories, and honest realities about the disparities in the public education system. One of his recent works, The Shame of the Nation, gives some political insight into the situation as well.

In this book, Letters to a Young Teacher, Kozol uses a personal format of letters he wrote to a first year teacher in the Boston public schools. He addresses a wide range of topics, from veteran teachers to vouchers, in a friendly, concise and personal style. I think it’s an easy read and a great primer on the education system if your looking to be educated (which every US citizen should be).

Here are a few of the quotes I enjoyed from the book.

(this one is a little long, but it’s for context, which you can read the whole excerpt here)

These suddenly fashionable phrases seem to travel the rounds of education workshops with unusual rapidity. (It’s also possible, I guess, that once we hear a term like this, we simply start to notice its recurrent use in other situations.) Only two weeks after you told me this, I was in Sacramento and the same term popped up once again during a luncheon I attended with a group of people who were working as curriculum advisers for the state. In answer to a question I had asked concerning classroom dialogue, a woman with a commanding presence who was sitting across the table from me gave me this reply: “We’re speaking of a meta-moment taking place in interactional time.”

The other people at the table seemed to be as baffled by these words as I was. They tried to change the subject to some other issue of importance they were dealing with. But she was insistent in her wish to keep on telling me about the value of these “metamoments” and, try as they did, they could not shut her down.

This kind of jargon, which relies upon the pumping up of any simple notion by tacking on a fancy-sounding prefix or a needless extra syllable, infests the dialogue of public education nowadays like a strange syntactic illness that induces many educators to believe they have to imitate this language if they want to have a place in the discussion.

One of the most annoying consequences of this trend, as you’ve observed, is a peculiar tendency to use a polysyllabic synonym for almost any plain and ordinary word: “implement” for do, “initiate” for start, “utilize” for use, “identify” for name, “articulate” for state, “replicate” for copy, “evaluate” for judge, “quantify” for count, “strategize” for plan, “facilitate” for help, “restructure” or “reconstitute” for change. The toss-in use of adjectives like “positive” and “meaningful” (instead of, simply, “good” or “real”) in front of nouns like “outcome” or “collaboration” is another common way of trying to pump extra air into a wilted and deflated intellectual balloon.

And…

“Down with concerns about the global marketplace…. Childhood does not exist to serve the national economy. In a healthy nation, it should be the other way around.”

Finally…

“Blaming the victim” is, of course, anathema to those who view themselves as liberals or moderates politically and socially. But “flattering the victim” is a favorite practice nowadays, especially in white-owned media that constantly attempt to spare their segregated cities from the odium that they deserve, and their most valued readers from the guilt they otherwise might feel, by pointing to the slightest signs of cultural or economic self-rejuvenation in the neighborhoods to which their racial outcasts are consigned.

That’s a pretty scathing thought on the last quote. Thoughts?

(note: Originally written my sophmore year of college in January 2003)
Continued from part V (part IV, part III, part II and part I)

Millions die everyday the statistics are appalling. What are you going to do about it? You can sponsor a child or give something at thanksgiving. You can give out of your abundance and still live with everyone of your physical needs and many of your other needs and wants met. Give till it hurts. Give till you can sympathize to even a slight degree with those whose lives are shaped, marked, centralized around their suffering. If any can understand Christ I think they can to a great degree then we know.
The truth is that for many of us we will never really know what that sort of suffering and feeling of hopelessness is to its fullest. If I want flat broke and lost everything, couldn’t find a job and had no place to live, my parents would take me in feed me, clothe me and give me shelter for as long as I needed. If I decided to have no medical insurance and live overseas somewhere, if any emergency occurred my family and my church would pool their resources and get me the medical care and the ticket out of wherever I was in a second. If I go to a country where many are persecuted and killed for their faith, I might have the potential to be martyred. But there is also the strong possibility that because I am American, and those have in a sense the entire US army behind me, many will think twice before senselessly killing me. Do you see how far removed we are from the suffering so many others endure? We will never, know what it is like to wake up in the morning on a dirt floor, not knowing what they day may bring, where are next meal will come from if it comes at all, if today death will knock on our door, or likely somebody else close to us, to curl up in agony because the pain is unbearable and has been for longer then you can remember to count.
So give!!! You can roller blade in heaven! You don’t need your own pair to take out once during the summer. Spend the time you would be playing video games to petition your church leaders to do something about the aids epidemic, and take the money you get from selling your video game system to pay for vaccinations and help educate a village on the problem of AIDS. If you go out to eat once a week make it once a month and spend the time you might have gone out eating frozen pizza and taking that money and send it to Bread for the World. Instead of buying that new pair of pants or shirt you want (not because you necessarily need one, but because your other clothes just aren’t “cool”) take that same amount and send it to an organization in Russia that gives coats to freezing families with no home.

(note: Originally written my sophmore year of college in January 2003)
Continued from part IV (part III, part II and part I)

Back to giving. “The poor will always be among us.” It’s scripture and many use it as a reason to cop out of giving. But the rich have always been among us too. In fact many of us have been made rich, by the simple act of God that we were born were we were born. Now if you think for one minute that blessing was just the luck or happen chance of the Divine, you are sorely mistaken. You have been blessed, praise God. But if you think you have been blessed in this way simply to enjoy more fully the pleasures of this life in your comfy little world you are wrong. You have been blessed so that you can bless others. I think quite possible the promise that the poor will always be among us is God’s divine plan for us to have the joy of participating in His work and experiencing to the slightest degree the type of pleasure he has when He gives. The poor are there so that we can bless them just as God has blessed us in whatever means he has. Never forget the Blesser. The blessings are meaningless apart from Him. But never rest with the blessings, they have been given to you so that you can give to others. I do not say this as a possibility. I speak as fallible human being and a sinner but I speak boldly, you have been called to give. So give till it hurts.

GOOD Mags always awesome videos

N*Danger

Vampire Energy

(Context: This was written in the spring of 2003 while I was a sophomore at Wheaton College. It was written for the Wheaton College newspaper, but they never published it)

Pray for your Enemies

With all of the talk around campus about the war with Iraq it is important to be reminded of a biblical passage or two in which there is very little discrepancy or debate as to their meaning and our response. “Pray for your Enemies.” It is a simple text; a simple task; you pray.
You needn’t look far to see who our enemies are, pacifist and war supporters would agree that if America has dubbed any individuals it’s enemy at least two would be Osama Bin Ladin and Saddam Hussein. So how does the scripture apply to these modern day enemies of ours? We pray for them. We pray for their lives, that God’s will would be done in them. We pray for their well being, their families; We pray for their salvation, that they might come to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. A radical thought, but let me remind you of another radical story. Saul was a persecutor of the church, an enemy of Christ, and the Lord met him on the Damascus road. Is our God’s arm to short that He is not able to do the same thing with Bin Ladin or Hussein? So pray for them! Pray for them like you do your aunt, or cousin, or high school friend that doesn’t know the Lord.
If you need more biblical support look to I Tim. 2:1-2, the same scripture by which we pray for President Bush and the leaders of this nation, “I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone– for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.” We use this verse often to support praying for the leaders of our nation, we’ve done it many times in chapel. Do you know how many times we’ve prayed for our enemies since 9/11? Twice; maybe three times. Yet, “those in authority” include Bin Ladin, Hussein, and any other leader. So, the scriptural command is two fold for praying for Bin Ladin and Hussein: “For our enemies” and “for those in authority.”
If we spent half as much time praying for our enemies as we do debating whether this war is just (and these debates and discussion are not bad things), maybe we would see a radical move of God unlike anything we could have ever anticipated. The discussion on war has been a discussion of “what if” (what if we don’t attack and Saddam does? what if we kill millions? what if Saddam builds nukes?). So, let me present another “what if?” What if by a miracle of God Saddam Hussein becomes a faithful believer in Jesus Christ, and turns from his military wrong doings, and calls to the world to help turn his country around, not only for their physical survival, but so that they might also know Christ as their Savior. Our rational, faithless minds give us trouble even fathoming that.
Now, on a final note I must address those readers who will disregard this message rationally or simply disregard the importance of this command in their daily life. For certainly, there must be an argument that there are some men, evil men, who are not worth praying for. The second option could be much easier; you finish the article, nod in agreement, and do nothing to implement this prayer into your daily life. If you take either of those two routes, you will not be held as ungodly or apostate, yours seems to be the path that the majority of the American Christian world takes on this issue. Besides, there are many ways others and I fall far short of the Lord’s commands as well. In other words, this article is not meant to condemn. But it is meant to convict. We live a Christian life that is comfortable, pleasing and satisfying to us. We obey the law as we feel fit and where it is not to our liking we bend it, twist it, or even break it, but always with justification for our actions. And whether you are a peacenik or a war monger, you stand in a place of extreme blessing. If you get nothing else from this article, tomorrow morning, before you start debating whether this war is just or not, pray for your enemies. “Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves, do what it says.”