FAKE NEWS intentionally misleads

One of the sad things about this horrific political season is the spread of "fake news" cites.  These sites have taken in my friends of multiple political persuasions.  The really frustrating thing is that these fake news sites reinforce what we already WANT to believe.  Here is an example of what I mean.

Over the course of this distressing political seaon I have posted about my personal walk through the land mined terrain. I have not posted unless I fact checked, I have posted when I thought the post might be helpful for thoughtful consideration and discussion. One of the most disconcertaing things about this election has been the amount of "fake news sites" that have promulgated false information with the intent of stirring the pot of hatred and fear. My friends on the right and my friends on the left have been prey to these sites. If you would like to see more click here to read my blog with memes and videos and citations. 

To my friend who sent this awful video suggesting that Obama is trying to create a WORLD ORDER that would supercede the United States I wrote the following, "You are absolutely right -- he said these words. just not in this order or context I am posting a link to the Washington Post's article about this speech which has the full transcript. it is what he actually said ...not an edited version lifting words in a way that makes them say exactly the opposite of what he meant --- please read the speech so you can see just how people for whatever purpose can take a video and use it to make someone say something they never said."  There is also a link to the real un-edited footage of the 35 minutes speech in this article.

From the other side....

This website suggests that Pence said Michelle Obama is the most VULGAR 1st lady we have ever had.  He didn't!  Always fact check.  Try to look at things from both sides.Whenever possible use primary sources and ignore the rest!

An open letter to Paul Ryan and conservatives who think that feeding children for free at school is wrong.

Paul Ryan, a young leader, who holds family values dear spoke at the CPAC convention this year and attacked the government's feeding programs at schools.  My district last year offered free breakfast to ALL students (one way to keep the stigma of being a free and reduced lunch program kid).  Here is what he said.

He repeated a story Eloise Anderson, who serves in the cabinet for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, had related.  She once met a young boy from a poor family. And every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. But he told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch — one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids’. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him.
He went on to say that “the Left” doesn’t understand this desire for dignity, not just comfort.
He went on to say that “the Left” doesn’t understand this desire for dignity, not just comfort.

 Dear Mr. Ryan;
I don't like labels, but I confess, that you would label me as a liberal because I believe that working together (my civic understanding of government is just that) we can provide what a child needs which includes a full stomach.  I have worked with children all of my adult life, and I know that without a full stomach a child will have an empty brain. I acknowledge the idea that is expressed above, knowing all too well that a child desperately needs to feel that s/he is important to another living soul.  Mr. Ryan, stop suggesting that people who YOU label liberal do not understand dignity.  That statement only drives us further into camps that attack one another.  Teachers spend a lot of time focusing on a child's dignity whether they vote Republican or Democratic. The food is not intended to fill up the child's soul.  It is meant only to make the child comfortable enough to learn and find the support and friendship that is available in the school to fill his soul.

You see, Mr. Ryan, school is filled with people who's souls are overflowing. The child has to be open to receive that overflow.  Teachers, counselors, librarians, and others there have chosen a life of service to children.  They are conservatives, liberals, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and yes, even Atheists who know the value of love and offer opportunities to their young charges to grow in love and caring.  Children have a natural desire to help one another.  I have watched as they accommodate a child in the classroom who is homeless and acting out in destructive ways.  I have seen teachers and parents who bring clothing and caring to the school to support these children.

Mr. Ryan you are quite right.  A full stomach doesn't fill the soul.   That job happens after the child has a full stomach.  It happens when teachers, parents and children come together to provide the love that is missing in a young life.  NONE OF THAT WILL HAPPEN IF THE CHILD IS HUNGRY!  If we (the government-- we the people) feed hungry children it is not an evil, soul destroying event!  It is not a panacea for a societal problem.  It is an opportunity to intervene and offer hope.

An ear for truth, George Washington was the 8th president of the United States?

One of the joys of being an elementary librarian is awakening and nurturing the questioning skills that kids need to be good thinkers and good citizens. The  dark side of questioning is answering.  How can students obtain ACCURATE and UNBIASED information in today's technological information silos? 

This was the question when  my morning news team presented their Interesting Fact on the last day of school.  Neal  proudly announced that George Washington was not the first President, but rather the 8th. Usually, I see their script the day before broadcast, but in the chaos of the last days, I had not seen it until 5 minutes before air time.

I knew that Neal found this fact on the internet, (that is where all digital natives go) and so we looked together to check for veracity by googling his statement.  I did not believe it to be accurate.  I explained to him that during the time between the revolutionary war and the ratification of the constitution  (March 1, 1781, and April 30, 1789) we had the ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION which meant that the 13 colonies in most ways operated idependently. I was not sure that the position of "president" even existed.  But cetainly, the leader during this time would have had very limited powers.

As so often is the case, digging into history is complicated and a simple answer does not exist. The google search brought up ten articles which all concurred with Neal.  Beginning with Wikipedia. So we went to air with his "fact."   It was only later when I had time to do MY 'due diligence" that the truth was clear.  This illustrates why teaching about research and sources is crucial!   We need to discuss the value of crowd sourced reserch like Wikipedia (I am a proponent and editor).  But we also need to acknowledge its limitations. Let me describe how I approached this question. 

As a librarian I eliminated any of the articles that were ".coms" from initial consideration.  There are perfectly good dot coms but I wanted scholarly, refereed sources as well as the actual document itself.  That left just two of the ten sources to be viewed.  One was the Constitution Society.  Before I read their article I nosed around to see if I could find out if they had a bias.  This usually means checking a statement about who the organization is, its purpose, and goals, and determining where their funding comes from.  This group's self-description included the fact that it educates, and also litigates.  For me, that elliminated them from my initial run through (I already knew that they concurred with Neal) so I moved on. 

What propelled me to continue searching something that seemed overwhelmingly correct was the simple question, "Why would all our history books list George Washington, as our first President if this weren't true?"  That is a question I am sure the conspiracy theorists have an arcane answer for.

A really good article from the Department of State outlines some of the debate surrounding the articles themselves.  It turns out that John Hanson, was President of the Continental Congress in 1781.  In this position he was not The President for his powers were so limited he could not even appoint the secretary of state.  At least I knew now where the term "President" had come from.  But I needed more.  Did the people of his time consider him the president of the United States?

The definitive article on this issue came from Digital History, a University of Houston website with valuable primary sourced information and commentary by scholars.  It clearly illustrates the difference between the kind of research real historians engage in and what I was doing.  (They go to  primary sources, discuss among colleagues the opinions they are forming about their meaning, and rigorously vet their information prior to publication).  Here is a part of the article:

"It The Articles of Confederation created a national government composed of a Congress, which had the power to declare war, appoint military officers, sign treaties, make alliances, appoint foreign ambassadors, and manage relations with Indians. All states were represented equally in Congress, and nine of the 13 states had to approve a bill before it became law."   

The Articles created an alliance of thirteen independent and sovereign states who agreed to "enter into a firm league of friendship with each other" This sounds more like NATO than the United States!  In fact, in the Articles,  at the beginning of almost all the statements issuing power to do anything come the words, "No State, without the Consent of the united States, in congress assembled..."   So it was not surprising to find that John Hanson held the office known officially as "President of the United States in Congress Assembled" In other words he was the president of the Congress or its presiding oficer.  He had none of the powers we associate with our president.

 The University of Houston article continues, "Under the Articles, the states, not Congress, had the power to tax. Congress could raise money only by asking the states for funds, borrowing from foreign governments, or selling western lands. In addition, Congress could not draft soldiers or regulate trade. There was no provision for national courts.  The Articles of Confederation did not include a president. The states feared another George III might threaten their liberties. The new framework of government also barred delegates from serving more than three years in any six year period."

Indeed, going between the original Articles and then reading scholarly analysis helped me understand where all the 10 articles that Neal found went awry.  With today's internet being a place where anyone can publish information and look official, we must be more vigilant. I was confident I had solved the question at hand.  I could say that George Washington was in fact the 1st president of the United States, and that John Hanson held the office  known officially as "President of the United States in Congress Assembled"    I then felt free to explore the internet to see what I could learn.

Googling the phrase "John Hanson president," I discovered one site that confused John Hanson with the African American and asserted that Barack Obama was not the first African American President!Upon googling "John Hanson, first black president" 830,000 articles appeared!  Some of these eve had photographs of John Hanson!  (Photographs only go back to about 1840)  I did not go too deeply into this absurdity --- because it was clearly in the realm of conspiracy theory, but it illustrates again the difficulty in getting good sources for our students.  The idea that whatever we perceive as truth is truth is a dangerous one and we need to help our students learn to ferret out facts while they are young, so that when it is time for them to vote they will have an ear for truth, but as we have an ear for good grammar.

Commodifying Public Education: How did this happen?

Learn more about this here

A shout of jubilation went up as teachers heard the announcement that we would not administer the final part of the TN Ready test this year.  I did not join in the celebration. I will not celebrate until we defeat this culture that relentlessly continues the march toward the destruction of public education. 

Over the past 30 years I have watched as people use the words, of our founding documents (words that I believe in) to destroy the very things the documents set forth.  We could start with their edited version of the preamble ---they would turn that paragraph into two simple phrases: We the People of the United States in order to insure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense do ordain and establish this constitution of the United States. In their understanding this is the only purpose for government.   For a history of how this happened read this fine article by a Canadian, Dan Laitsch "Smacked by the invisible hand: the wrong debate, at the wrong time with the wrong people." 

While it focuses on education it exposes the subtle way in which words were manipulated by a group with an agenda.  Among the discarded ideals is that which states that everyone benefits from the success and education of all.  The idea which replaces it is that everyone must be accountable and responsible for themselves.  If they fail to get rich or get a good education or have access to healthcare or other services it is their fault because they made bad choices.  TRANSLATE everything that has happened in their lives is their fault.  I'm on board the personal responsibility train!  I spend a lot of my time as an educator helping kids become more responsible.  The problem comes for me when the interpretation is unrelenting and unforgiving.

This "neo-liberal economic philosophy" sees "Government" as an evil that should be limited whenever and wherever possible.  Government regulation is always bad because it decreases PROFIT. What would our world look like without government regulation and oversight?  Wealthy people whose money works to increase their wealth would fare well.  They would have access to everything they need in their gated communities.

For the rest of us, who "labor" for a salary or an hourly wage - not so much. HERE IS WHAT WE WOULD HAVE 

Food industry --- FOR PROFIT means --  no control over what is in the can you buy including pesticides and contaminants such as the little snake head in a recently opened can of green beans. 
Healthcare industry FOR PROFIT means -- continuing HMO-type care where you have less contact with a personal physician (who is limited to 15 minutes with you) and you are just a cog, a part, in a profit oriented system.
Insurance industry FOR PROFIT means -- they take your money BUT it is not pooled for your benefit, they will use it to hire people to deny your claims and keep you from getting money from the coverage for which you paid. This will increase their profit and pay their investors!
Education -- continued expenditures for publicly funded private schools - (charter schools) thousands of programs and software options over actual education expenditures.My school alone spends more than $12,000 a year on I-ready a software subscription which steals good education time and uses games to try to "improve" student performance on the test.  Thousands of tech companies eager to sell districts the latest and greatest gadgets (we have vendor fairs all the time so we can be exposed to the latest sales pitch)  Estimates of companies being able to garner billions in educational funds while my library languishes without proper space, furniture or computers for research is obscene!  Teachers should be replaced with programs which students can use to educate themselves -- gone is the common ground of what we as American's believe.....If you want to teach that the dinosaurs were put in the fossil record by Satan to confuse Christians --- you can do that in your private school -- but I resent my tax dollars going to that "education!"

Let's also think about some other areas where we traditionally share costs for mutual benefits -- Transportation - Museums---Parks and other public places are all headed for privatization with one goal in mind --  to make money --- We can stand by and watch the Disney-fication of our culture or we can elect people who are thinkers and who ferret out the truth rather than accept what the think tanks (propaganda mills) tell them!

If you want to understand how we got here and who has been driving the bus since the 1970's  read the article, It is long (25 pages) -- but some things cannot be said in 140 characters!

Bathrooms as Sacred Space where the Book of Common Prayer was the Readers Digest

We had one bathroom and next to the stool was a basket of reading material. I never questioned the oddity of that as a child. As an adult I do not think of the bathroom as the best place to read, but as a child I thought of this basket as a gateway to adult interests. There were always National Geographic magazines and Readers Digests. I liked the National Geographic very much, but it was big and the articles with pictures were long. Reader's Digest on the other hand was just the right size for a child, and it had jokes and puzzles in it! I adored Word Power and was delighted that it still exists.  It is where I built my vocabulary until I learned to write down and look up new words in the dictionary.  So despite the fact that my teachers eschewed the superficiality, light weight and skewed nature of the Readers Digest I was drawn to it. My brother and I often escaped to the haven of the bathroom at times when we were supposed to be engaged in our chores. Constipation was always a good rouse for avoiding the time of evening dishes.

This stalwart conservative-leaning publication was a cornerstone of my education. I had not read it for years, when it caught my eye as I waited in line at the checkout stand at my supermarket. Still Proclaiming itself in Times New Roman glory, with slightly altered format for the index, there it was with its intriguing articles. "35 extraordinary uses for ordinary things" was the title that caused me to purchase the once ubiquitous magazine. But what really snared my attention upon closer inspection was the article "The Darker Side of the American Lawn" It should be required reading this spring before anyone goes to the golf course, park or considers a trip to the local big-box purveyor for "lawn food!" Here are a few of the statistics from this venerable bastion of conservative thought ( in case you just thought this was another one of the tree-hugging, latte sucking articles).

• Americans have become obsessed with grass.  When you add up the country's 80 million home lawns and over 16,000 golf courses you get close to 50 million acres of cultivated turf in the U.S.
• Americans are spraying 67 million pounds of synthetic chemicals on their grass every year.
• More that 170 Canadian cities have banned lawn pesticides -- especially on public spaces.
• Denmark, Norway and Sweden have banned 2,4-D ( a common chemical -- often known as agent Orange in lawn herbicides)
• In 2009, the European Parliament passed laws banning 22 pesticides that can cause cancer or disrupt human hormones or reproduction. 
• Conservative estimates suggest that 72 million birds die in the U.S. of pesticide poisoning each year. 
• Wood Thursh is down by 48%, Bobwhites by 80%, Bobolinks by 90% and we almost lost the Bluebirds -- but thanks to recent efforts by individuals to provide nesting boxes and assist them they are slowly coming back.  

 It is important to note that not only do these lawn chemicals kill "weeds" like clover which naturally sets nitrogen in the soil, but their use requires the addition of artificial sources of nitrogen to be added which in turn run off into the lakes and streams causing other problems like algae blooms that in turn suck the oxygen out of the water causing fish and plants to die and creating huge dead zones. All of these events have cascading effects which often cannot even be predicted.

If we want to save our planet, its pollinators and ultimately ourselves we need to start putting in native plants that will make your yard a haven for caterpillars, butterflies and birds.  For us in Tennessee that means plant joe-pye weed, rudbeckia and other species like Black-eyed Susans that bloom all summer long, Button-bush, Butterfly Weed and swamp milkweed.  We need to put in vegetable gardens and experience the joy of fresh natural organic vegetables.  Consider feeding the birds until we get enough native plants for them to live on again.   Their populations have been decimated over the past decades of habitat destruction and poisoning. Don't eradicate a weed until you are sure that it doesn't happen to be the one plant a single species of butterfly relies on.

Read the rest of the article and learn how to bring back beneficial insects, plants and animals into our environment.  Read the article and let its information change your behavior.  and if you really must kill a weed -- skip the Round Up and use this natural formula.  

1gallon of vinegar
1 cup of salt
1 Tbsp. of soap

This simple spray works as well as the toxic versions -- just be sure to spray it on a dry day when it will have time to work -- if it rains it can become to dilute to have effect!

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com This is a great application for teaching kids parts of speech in a fun and creative way. Especially during poetry month, this would be a fun to let kids work on both poetry, parts of speech and imagery! They will love it. You do have to have an account to generate an embed code or save it and email it to someone. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this!

Unpacking the TN READY Communication from the TN DOE

Commissioner McQueen has published two pieces to try to calm the wave of bad publicity that is washing over the DOE on the basis of what parents are seeing and hearing from students and teachers about the paper TN READY test which replaced the failed computer administered version.

I first read her blog for parents: Classroom Chronicles which is an explanation for parents about the failure of TN Ready an attempt to calm fears about the paper tests.  She says, "We too are frustrated and disappointed by our inability to provide students with an online test this year and by the logistical difficulties. We have been working tirelessly to provide a positive testing experience as much as is within our control and to reduce anxiety."  Really?  Will the DOE have their salaries cut or be fired because of their failure on the testing front?  They tie teachers success and failure every day to things that are beyond that teacher's control! Why not apply the same standard to yourselves?

Then  Dr. McQueen provides a form for parents to give them a sense of significant participation.  The form however only asks how the parent would like to receive their child's test scores.   Parents are asked to weigh in on crucial issues such as whether to report data in smiley faces, arrows, or symbols!  This appears to be a simple way to make people feel that they are part of a process.  In truth, it is like asking a man on trial for familial abuse, "when did you stop beating your kids."

What I DO KNOW is this:  I know NO teachers who:

1.  think this test is a good measure of student learning 
2. participated in its formation. 
3. have ever felt free to participate in a frank conversation it with any forum where their names and places of employment are readily seen. 

The second Classroom Chronicles blog post is supposed to dispell any of the issues raised by students, parents and teachers.

She addresses the issues raised by a number of concerned educators that the content was not appropriate for the students.  The following is a quote which further illustrates just how far removed the people who designed the test are from children!

"A very small number of questions on Part I require students to have had exposure to other mathematical content that may not actually count toward their score. For example, students may have seen a word problem that mentions a concept that they will learn more about later – like angles or ounces– but students will not be scored on their knowledge of this content. These concepts may just be used to provide context for a computational skill (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division). Additional questions may require students to pull from previously learned content knowledge. As this is content that is below grade level, it would not appear on the grade level specific blueprint."

Imagine back to your eight-year-old self.  Much of what your teacher is teaching is just not too interesting to you, but you know there is this TEST coming up and you really should care about learning this stuff because it is on the test and your teacher is stressed about how you are going to do and your parents talk about how if you don't do well on the tests it will ruin your life.  Imagine for a moment that you are now reading a test question in which something right there in the midddle of it suddenly looks like a foreign language.   Do you have the intellectual ability to read the rest of the question and calm yourself sufficiently to determine that the question is not about the DNA helix but is a simple addition problem?  You get my point.  Yes if it is asking you to use cm instead of inches to measure and you have in the standard learned to use inches and you are an adult looking at the picture of a little ruler next to the question in cm you will understand how to solve the simple problem.  BUT THESE ARE CHILDREN!!

Most of them do not have the experience in solving problems to know how to approach this.  They will feel a sense of panic and collapse under the weight of the foreign words "angles" alone!  Add to that that nowhere does it say in the directions we heard read to the children (remember the administrator can only read the directions --- they cannot offer explanations because that might taint the test) to help children understand the question is considered leading the child to the right answer. NOWHERE IN THOSE DIRECTIONS DOES IT TELL CHILDREN THAT, "Hey, some of these questions may be on stuff you haven't had and those won't even count or be graded!"  How reasonable is it to assume that when you cover your classroom walls to hide every possible thing a kid might use to do well on the test -- and everyone is in a lock-down version of life (guarding test booklets, pencils and answer books as though they were radioactive) Does anyone think that a child is going to consider for a moment that some of the questions won't even count?  REALLY?

Dr. McQueen goes on to explain how reasonable the actual test was.  NEVER mind that the answer document (they called it a document, in the directions- now that is a word kids use every day, right?) looked almost identical to the test document! The whole thing was confusing to children from beginning to end.  MOST especially the vocabulary used in the directions..From an adult point of view Dr. McQueen is quite right --- it would be difficult to get mixed up about what answer went with what question.  These are CHILDREN not adults and I, as a proctor, can attest to the fact that the 3rd graders I was with were confused.  My last point is simple.  WHAT ARE THE TESTS designed to do?  If it is to help us see where to improve our instruction fine I'm good with that, but tests are misused to judge children and teachers everyday. 

They discourage educational innovation and good practice because my colleagues are always worrying about the specific things that must be covered on the test.  So with the garden in full grow mode, with the wild creatures and native plants that inhabit the perimeter of my campus budding and growing, with the night sky waiting, and the life bursting forth all around, we will be in the classroom drilling instead of out in the world writing, reading poetry, planting, wondering, exploring, and asking those impossible childhood questions.

 I AM CALLING FOR AN OVERHAUL in how we hold PUBLIC SCHOOLS accountable.  I AM CALLING FOR AN OVERHAUL that lets teachers be teachers so they are able to do what they do best with children.  Yes, that may even look different from one teacher to another teacher!  YES, teachers are as individual as students. They don't all teach the same way, understand the same way or participate in the universe in a monolithic pattern of teacher behavior!    PLEASE Dr. McQueen, I know you are young and you think you have these things down --- but listen to some seasoned educators on this topic!  Are you listening!! 

What is a hero?

Third Grade wanted to merge two concepts for Black History Month.  Students could research famous African Americans and then measure them against a rubric of what makes a hero. I could not in good conscience do a simple webpage with the people on their list. So instead I tried to accommodate by broadening the site and creating a Good Citizen Rubric as well as a Hero Rubric.  Heroes come in all colors was the result as was the accompanying Symbaloo for African American History Month. 

In our current culture we conflate the hero with celebrity. We carelessly toss this word around and in so doing we we weaken its meaning and message. When we call everyone who has served in the military a hero we risk including skin heads, bigots and those who have committed war crimes on the same list with those selfless souls who have given their lives and bodies in the service of humanity.

If, as Campbell suggests, the hero myth is designed to lead us to our better selves then the hero returns home carrying something of  the treasure.  It is the  "treasure that has the power to transform the world as the hero has been transformed."

This is why we yearn to teach the hero story to our children.  We want the world to be a place where power is distributed and the well being of all creation is the ultimate arbiter of our actions.   Sometimes in a world where kids pick Beyonce, and Kanye West as their heroes I tremble.....

Taize service at West End UMC -Deuteronomy 11:26-28

"See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse— the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God." 

Perhaps it was the intersection of the year's end and reading the Magna Carta by Dan Jones that set me thinking about this text, more ancient than the 1215 'great charter.' Spending New Year's Eve at a Cathedral-like building singing Latin texts could have done nothing but add to these thoughts. That scripture coupled with Genesis 12:2
"I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing." informed my early Christian development.  I can only be blest to be a blessing if I am honoring God in my living. AND it is clear that this is the intention of God; that we bless his creation.
 
So here it is - Will we make 2016 (800 years after the Magna Carta) a year full of blessing or will by our passivity allow it to be a year of curses? Just how much are we captives of our collective past?  How much are we willing to examine to understand the reality rather than the myth of that past?

Medieval looking doors of West End UMC

One of the insights I gained from reading the Magna Carta is that the document has nothing to do with democracy in its original form.  As Jones points out,"One of the great paradoxes of the Magna Carta is the fact that the less relent most of its words become to modern life, the greater the reverence attached to its name. 'Magna Carta' is today used as a byword for all types of aspiration to freedom, liberty, and (quite erroneously) democracy."  But to deny that is also absurd.  The Magna Carta was the beginning of the wresting of power from the very foundations of Feudal society -- (the King and Church) and in that respect it does have something to do with freedom and democracy.

Since we now have both these things I am allowed to  rewrite the scripture above slightly. 

See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse— the blessing of democracy if you obey the commands of the Lord that you act out of intelligent, thoughtfully researched and true information for the common good.   The curse will be a return to slavery and the destruction of your home. If you disobey my command and act out of your feelings and what you want to be true refusing to look fully into your own darkness you will receive that curse.  

So if we act on this admonition, we try to live our lives in consonance with out beliefs.  It will cost us.  It will cost us more money to buy humanely produced, local, fresh produce and meat.  It will cost us the convenience of throwing everything away. It cost us in taxes if we take care of our world and its inhabitants.  It may cost us in friends who think we have lost our senses. It is not comfortable or easy to take up the cross that knowledge lays at our feet.  Receiving a blessing is not easy. The question is will I choose the blessing or the curse.

Students learn from the past in the present....

1st grade students have been learning about the pilgrims.  From their research they constructed an alphabet book using our computers and their hand illustrations. 

Learning about  something is not the same as experiencing and understanding it.  So our cleaver 1st grade teachers in conjunction with the library designed centers to let kids see what it would feel like to live in the 1600s.  First we turned out the lights and used candles (the oil lamp seemed a bit too flammable for comfort).  We started the morning in the garden harvesting root vegetables.  Back inside they learned to clean them, write with a real quill pen, sew using cards and shoelaces, take pop corn off the cob and prepare it for popping, and make butter.  They also got to go on a virtual field trip to Plimouth Plantation.

The Tennessee Agricuture Museum has a great box filled with things that would have been used in colonial America and the kids had an opportunity to handle them and ask questions.  After lunch the students got to sample the feast we made from their harvest that morning.  These children ate what I imagine was their first beets, and they declared them good.  We added Indian pudding made from cornmeal and molasses, apples, and homemade bread on which they liberally spread the butter they made.  Some liked the butter so much that they asked if they could just eat the butter!

We started the meal with a prayer that the pilgrims might have used and a chorus of "We Gather Together." It was a joyfilled day and one that the children will likely not forget.  This kind of learning is hard to measure and even more difficult to understand!  You can experience some of the things they did by using our  Live like  Pilgrim Page.


 

Paws for Reading

One of the joys this year in the Library is weekly visits by Otter our reading buddy.  He is part of a  national program, Paws for Reading , in which children read to a therapy dog.

The dog makes no judgment as to the fluency or accuracy of the reader, but the dog's human partner does.   I hear her hearty laughter at the silly stories that many children love to read.  The warmth of that laughter says,, "I am enjoying your reading. You are a becoming a capable reader and I look forward to hearing you each week."  Otter, after just a couple of weeks, recognizes his friends which also provides a positive message to the kids as they respond with joyful giggles, hugs and yes sometimes even a lick or two!

We are blessed with faculty members who find exciting things for their children.  This particular program was brought to us because of one such kindergarten teacher who loves animals and children.  Her persistence reaps benefits every Thursday as children cycle in and out reading to and loving Otter.  

Lest you think that reading to a dog is silly, let me point you to research found on the Paws website.

It’s well-known (and scientifically proven) that interaction with a gentle, friendly pet has significant benefits.

 Physical Health:

• lowers blood pressure
• improves cardiovascular health
• releases endorphins (oxytocin) that have a calming effect
• diminishes overall physical pain
• the act of petting produces an automatic relaxation response, reducing the amount of medication some folks need

 Mental Health:

• lifts spirits and lessens depression
• decreases feelings of isolation and alienation
• encourages communcation
• provides comfort
• increases socialization
• reduces boredom
• lowers anxiety
• helps children overcome speech and emotional disorders
• creates motivation for the client to recover faster
• reduces loneliness

 Reading: (PAWS for Reading)

• helps children focus better
• improves literacy skills
• provides non-stressful, non-judgmental environment
• increases self-confidence, reduces self-consciousness

What happens when I do reserach on the common core....the rabbits warren of research...

Thus far we have focused on the literature and sites which expose the Common Core as an evil. In this post I will focus on the actual common core standards and some examples from classrooms which demonstrate the common core in practice. Because of the breadth and depth of the core we will look at 1st grade to get a sense of what it is and what it is not. 1st the core sets standards but doesn't dictate curriculum. This gives each state, town, school a lot of latitude to teach those things that are near and dear in that region! Doesn't sound much like government control does it?

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and the appointment of William Bennett as Secretary of Education, monumental changes have driven the educational practice.  Bennett published "A Nation at Risk" in 1983.  This report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, a Reagan created commission, largely indicted our entire educational system. It was based on a perception that our educational system was not able to compete with education offered in other countries. Here is a brief history of the department of Education.

In no small part because of this frenetic pace of experimentation and change brought on by this report teachers can expect yearly changes is what they are to teach, how they are to teach, what measures are used to determine if they succeed, and the philosophy driving their teaching.  I can think of no other profession which has been subjected to this constantly shifting philosophy. 

One of the teachers who came to my school after graduating from a premier college of education, believed that she knew better than those older teachers how to teach has succumbed to this pace of change and the frustrating impossibility of keeping up.  She is starting to sound like one of the older teachers.  I did not hesitate to point this out to her since she used to readily stand in judgment of the poor practices of those teachers whose skills were out of date.

As I began thinking about this I had questions.  It is what happens when you do research.  Sometimes it seems like your questions are leading you down a rabbit's warren. You must follow these leads to increase your scope of understanding.  Ideally this is what the common core leads students to do.  The whole goal is to create curiosity and encourage sound development of a students ability to question, seek answers, and determine what the best choice is.  It also helps students learn that answers will continually be refined as new information presents.  What could be bad about that!?

Indeed this is the reason I support the core.  For the years following Sputnik when we had emphasis on math and science (sound familiar?) a push was born to modernize public education which culminated in raising the Department to a cabinet level position, which ironically is where it began in 1867.    One of the things the Core fuels in those who fear it is that the core is a Government takeover of education.  What it really means is the federal government is offering incentives (or bribes if you prefer) to work toward the overarching goals (standards) set by the committee which foes claim were not even educators.  After checking that out I learned, as those who support the core rightly suggest,  that they were educators.

Yes, actually the majority of those who wrote these standards were members of faculties of university departments of education.  That means that they were most likely K-12 teachers at one time, but in any case they were deeply involved in the quality of education and preparing teachers to teach!
In the next post we look just at the standards themselves.

Part II - Thinking Critically about the Common Core -

This piece on why the common core is bad is impressive. It had me agreeing with it by the time the young man from Knox county completed his attack on the core.
Even the two experts who helped create the core, according to this video speak out against the final product.  But once again when you dig deeper this claim is not what it seems. Bits and pieces, partially true, are culled out and used in slightly twisted form to elicit your agreement and lead you down a very manipulative path. For example the two educational experts mentioned were not part of creating the standards, but are rather part of the vetting process at the end.  In the case of the math standards This article artfully explains the fallacy of Dr. Milgram's vocal objections. 

The fellow who created this video is a Canadian, living in Japan (which immediately sent up "red flags" about why he was interested in the common core and made me look at his entire body of work).  I determined that he is one of the group of folks who see conspiracies to create a "new world order" in many things.  

He vilifies Bill Gates who gave millions to help create the Common Core suggesting he had an ulterior motive.  While I personally prefer that we fund education from our commons (taxes) rather than relying on philanthropy, I don't believe that there was any evil intent behind the money Gates gave for the common core development.  The google search I did on Common Core (hereafter dubbed CC) yielded conspiracy stuff all over the map.  There are those that think it s carrying forward an evil United Nations agenda and others who think it is leading to tracking what your children think so that the government can control your mind.  

One of the skills I learned in school was about vetting sources by recognizing the bias of those who wrote the material. Even someone who seriously wants to learn about the CC presents real problems. In large part when you do a google search you will see things Goggle has decided to show you based on the algorithms of your previous searches. Google analyzes your search history and presents you with what it thinks you want to see.  This results already skew your data to your preexisting biases.  I get different results from the same search so how do I know I have "valid and good" information?
Google further puts what it decides you want to see in order of what other people who are like you read.  So you see how difficult it is to ferret out the "truth" of anything.  Thus, items by conspiracy theorists rise like cream to the top of the google search for the person who google thinks might be interested in this kind of thing over scholarly studies from universities.  Site after Site are posts by groups like right-reason.com, Freedom Works.org, Karen Bracken (a talk show host is leading an impeach the President and save our country effort) most of these and others are self-described tea party patriots"  who see everything as an attack on freedom.  The people in these groups tend to see everything as black and white. 

They take a specific anecdote, and apply it as though it is happening everywhere.  Let me give you a specific example from one of these websites. "An elementary school librarian told the group that elementary kids in her school "are being forced to read technical books instead of stories and they don't like it.  They said the books are boring and they are losing interest in reading."  The Librarian said she was instructed to tell the kids they must learn how to read these manuals if they expect to get a job at Volkswagen (VW has a facility in TN)."

Let's unpack her comments.  First teachers are being required to use non-fiction (not technical manuals) but a technical manual would qualify as non-fiction.   Indeed, as a librarian I am purchasing more non-fiction than I used to.  I believe this is good -- Many kids who never wanted to read fiction are captivated by non-fiction.  It is more difficult to read non-fiction because you must learn factual material instead of just remembering a story line.  It is also easier to teach critical thinking from a non-fiction text as you tear into it pulling out the most important fact and the supporting data.   Do I believe elementary students were reading technical manuals? 

No!  They might be exposed to reading real technical manuals.  The teacher  might have been told to tell kids they need to learn this skills so that they can read technical manuals -- and get a high paying job at a place like VW -- probably.  I often tell kids that I taught myself to play the guitar because I could read a "technical manual" in the form of a how-to book!  Once unpacked this anecdote sounds a lot less ominous.  Also, let's be honest, the people in our communities have accused schools of teaching irrelevant material for a long time and it seems reasonable that we would be justifying what kids are learning not only to the kids but also to the general public showing how one could get gainful employment from it.

We must learn how to look at things to find the biases and then how to find good unbiased information.  That will be the next post. 

Critical thinking for adults in a world flush with "information" and conspiracy theory about the common core!

One of my teacher friends sent me this link.  She had received it from a friend on Face Book and was quite rightly confused by it. It said that Lily saw the common core as the same curriculum she experienced when a child in Maoist China.  I listened to the whole thing trying to find out how the CURRICULUM WAS LIKE that of communist China. I learned that it was not the curriculum that was like the curriculum of Maoist China.  What Lily feared was that anything that was a government program that collected data about you could be used to hurt you.  AND in Communist China that certainly was true.  She sees the data collection (which we use in school to drive instruction) would be used to turn us into silent subservient slaves to a central government.  Here is the link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilaSvC9PGKk
 

What Lily misses is an important difference between our government and the government of communist china.  Our government is US ---we regularly vote people into office and out of office.  We have constitutional issues we vote on.  IN TRUTH the common core may be tossed out before we find out if it is good or not because their is so much conspiracy theory out there about it!  I hate to be the bearer of these tidings, but Lily, the government already knows you are a citizen and the IRS has your number in case you to do not pay your taxes (the price of belonging to this great club we call The U.S. and having public schools, garbage collection, roads, social security, libraries, public colleges and land grant institutions etc....all goods that we share in common and support with our TAXES.)  Yup who knew -- TAXES can be good especially when they fix the pot hole down the street!

My friend found this post disturbing.  Did I know anything about this?  Well, no. But as a librarian, it is my job to find out! I immediately began to search for information on that great heap of TREASURE and TRASH that is the internet.  What I found was a lot of conspiracy theory and virtually no real information about what is actually in the common core in the first pages of my google search!  People get a buzz from being angry or upset, while peaceful thoughts don't boost the blood pressure.  What fun is that?!  

I am going to dedicate several posts to this since it deserves more than a cursory look.  So today I would like to focus on who we believe when we are looking for information.  I will be showing you some things that on the surface seem very reasonable and only upon deeper inspection send up red flags as the authors move deftly from fact to fantasy.  Stay tuned if you are really curious about what Common Core is and whether we need to tweak it or throw the baby out with the bathwater  Of course,  this is ALL from my analysis and point of view.  You see we cannot divorce ourselves from the baggage of our experience, education, reading, friends, and the time in which we are born and raised!! AT best we are aware of our bias and struggle to understand and combat it! That is the first important fact.  If you want to know what biases I have you might want to check out who I am .....am I trustworthy?  Am I widely read?  Do I know a lot of people with different viewpoints or do I have only friends who reflect my personal belief system? Do I have experience with the subject I am writing about? These are valid questions and need to be asked whenever we read information.  By the way teaching this skill is one of the common core objectives...hmmm 

When I was growing up the news was separated (in as much as is ever possible) from opinion. There was the editorial and news.  News attempted to be dispassionate.  Example #1  - You could not interject something like this article from the Heartland Institute does.  Let's take the first bit of its reporting about the common core. 

"Montana legislators are debating a proposal that would repeal the state’s implementation of the Common Core State Standards, a set of requirements for what elementary and secondary school children should know in each grade in math and English.
On November 4, 2011, Montana was the last of 46 states to adopt Common Core. Other states, such as Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia, never adopted the standards, and a recent nationwide backlash has led to successful repeals in Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Carolina."  so far it is only factual reporting with a foreshadowing of where we are headed since the article is focusing on repeal already.

Common Core supporters say implementing standards that are both high and unified with other states will jumpstart the U.S. education system and improve student achievement on a mass scale.   Still factual -- but wait here it comes...."A study from the Brookings Institution contradicts that claim, instead finding government-mandated standards fail to correlate with student achievement. For example, every state has had its own set of standards for many years, yet variation in achievement is four to five times larger within states than between them, despite the quality or rigor of the standards."  source https://www.heartland.org/policy-documents/research-commentary-montana-common-core

This is a tame example.  So first things first -- who is the Heartland Institute and the nice thing about this particular cite is that their site has an about feature which lets you learn about them.  Following it you find out that this is an organization dedicated to " discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems."  Armed with this information I can pretty well guess where they will land on any number of issues --- like environment, constitutional reform, healthcare, taxation and government....but at least we start with an understanding.   NOW AS ACTUAL INFORMATION --- NOT SO MUCH!  I need to first LEARN about what is actually in the common core.  To do that I need to go to a website like http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/.  Here I found Information about what the core is, how it came to be, and I can even link to specific curriculum.  So this is where I began my exploration.  Is this site without a viewpoint.  NOT HARDLY --- these guys spent years of work creating the common core.  Think they have an investment in getting you to understand and appreciate it.  You bet they do.  Tomorrow we will explore that!

Teaching Young Naturalists

What is really exciting about our new partnership with Percy Warner Parks Nature Center is the heightened interest by faculty in learning about our natural world.

Tomorrow we will take a "field trip" to our garden and students will each select something special to observe in old fashioned naturalist  tradition.  They will be carefully drawing what they observe, framing their observations and questions, learning how to think like a scientist.  They will model on the great naturalists from the past.  I hope to get some of our kids and teachers to read - The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate.  It's the perfect book to set young students on the path to be naturalists. Calpernia is a young girl at the turn of the last century whose curiosity leads her to be a naturalist in a time when girls rarely did these things. Her relationship deepens with her grandfather who opens this wonderful world to her as she struggles against the traces of being a girl in a boys world. While those themes may dominate in some readers minds, the beauty of this book for me is that it gives children today, not only a glimpse of life in a different time, but also gives them a glimpse of how they might look at the real world at this moment!

Another book that helps students see the world and how interacting with it can change us is One Beetle too many! If for no other reason than its author, Kathryn Lasky, it is worth reading.  Lasky never misses an opportunity to help kids gain insight into what motivates people.  She carries us along as we see how Charles disappoints his Dad, but remains true to what is stimulating his curiosity.  Why are there sea shells on mountain tops?    What makes plants and animals of the same species so different in different parts of the world?  The book is a mixed-media treasure trove for kids to explore.

  Kathryn Lasky undertook a biography of John Muir, arguably America's greatest environmentalist.  Like all naturalists he begins with a love of the land.  The book traces his ever growing commitment to the land in all its variety.  As the founder of the Sierra Club in 1892 he was
 influential at a time when other naturalists were beginning to frame the idea of preserving land for its own sake.  This book is full of stories from his childhood that lead him into the path that changed our understanding of the wilderness.  I will be starting a Young Naturalist's book club afterschool soon, and I invite you to follow our exploits, journaling, as we inspire our students  to love this precious planet.

Of course for me, though I will not purvey this to my students, this involves my deep experience and understanding of our Lord who calls us to be stewards in His garden.  "Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it."  Genesis 2:15 (JPS Tanakh 1917)
Here is a link to Jean Ritchie singing the old Appalachian song Now is the Cool of the Day Now is the Cool of the Day- 
 

Hebrews 10:26 - How working in a garden changed my life....

1st graders harvest what they planted and roast the veggies!

Since 2008, when we first started the school garden, I have been on a deepening path of trying to live out my principles relating to conserving and leading a healthy life.

As early the 70's it was clear that fundamental change to our consumption patterns was necessary.  After Reagan became president I gave up on changing things. His strong opposition to government regulation rendered large swaths of environmental legislation  impotent. (This is not a republican/democrat issue - EPA and the Clean Air Act were Nixonian--remember) I couldn't even teach about Earth Day in the public schools. To do so brought accusatory phone calls from parents who believed that mentioning it was teaching a communistic world view.  There was no reasoning with these folk that planting seeds, growing food, or using less plastic was a simple recognition that resources are finite. No matter how I talked about these issues I could not convince these parents that teaching about this was an act of patriotism. 

Read how school gardens make strong minds and healthy bodies!

When we began the garden it was mostly about student health, food security and healthy outdoor life-long activity.  When over time, I saw the soil go from being dusty, dead dirt to being an exciting living community of organisms.  I realized that I did not need commercial fertilizer if I used composted  cafeteria waste to enrich it each season, nor did I need to use herbicides or pesticides if I was careful about complimentary planting and weeding.  So we became an organic garden.

Memories flooded back from childhood in the garden with my parents and grandparents, in thickets on Sunday afternoons by the side of the road, walking down the canes and getting scratched up as we picked the plump sun ripened berries that soon became cobbler with home made ice cream melting on top!  These berries were part of a common wealth growing as they were in hedgerows and bar ditches!

I got to know other people who were also on this path, and together with Chef Martha Stamps, a leader in the slow food movement here in Nashville,  we spent an hour a week becoming more aware of the many perspectives about the importance of local, fresh food to our health and well being.  We learned about agribusiness and how our food was being grown and transported around the world with HUGE  carbon impacts.  We learned about how animals were being raised, slaughtered and processed with the huge polluting of watersheds.  We learned about overfishing, the acidification of the oceans, and the added pollution by farmed seafood and the impact of plastic waste aggregating there! 

I was stunned to see animals bred so that they could not even support their own weight and were contained for the entire short miserable lives in metal crates. Knowledge is a terrible thing.  As a Christian I was well aware of the scripture from Hebrews 10:26 "Dear friends, if we deliberately continue sinning after we have received knowledge of the truth, there is no longer any sacrifice that will cover these sins." 

It became critical for me to find local farmers who raised their own animals humanely without hormones and antibiotics, who raised their vegetables without pesticides, herbicides, and artificial fertilizers.  These things cost far more than the heavily subsidized agribusiness of Smithfield or Hormel, but I chose to pay these prices and found myself wasting far less food and eating less meat.  I learned from these farmers and the food that I put on my plate took on a new meaning.

By now, I believed that there would be no movement on the major issues relating to these issues, but as for me, I was going to live out my deeper understanding in as much as possible.  I was committed to help children learn to taste the difference between the food they bought at the grocery store and what was grown in the garden.  I learned that they will eat and enjoy tasty vegetables especially if they help grow them!  We made spinach salad, roasted vegetables, and fried green tomatoes.  The children helped cook in the library, and declared everything to be tasty!  I knew I was on the right track last spring when I saw a flock of children descend on the garden and eat (unwashed mind you) pea pods filled with sweet English peas.  In 2009 children would regularly say, "EWE that has dirt on it"  and sometimes they didn't want to eat it even after washing it (the vegetables in the store afterall are shiny with wax and packaged in wrap)!

So where do we go from here?  I'm open to suggestions.

Good Book and Good Food Go Together!

Sara Weeks, author of Pie, inspired four girls to give baking a try in the true tradition of the book.  It is a satisfying story of  Alice whose Aunt Polly leaves her award winning pie crust recipe to her cat and then leaves the cat to Alice!   I admit that the kind of story that Weeks writes is one that I encourage my students to read and take to heart.  It is about shared family ties, friendship and doing what is right. Charmingly written it has a pie recipe at the beginning of each chapter and each turn of phrase tastes good on the tongue.

Making things from scratch might not be a familiar experience for most  my friends and soon flour, shortening, butter, and salt to create the crust were everywhere.  Most people today just buy ready made crust or use a mix.  Fortunately, flour is easy to clean up.  After we rolled out the pie crust we started on the filling; peaches canned last summer.  As we were measuring out a cup of sugar one of the girls asked why we weren't using "that sugar" pointing to the sugar packets that were in a basket from the Garden-to-table dinner from the night before.  "Think of how many of the packets we would have to open to make one cup of sugar."  I replied.  "Yeah, but that is better sugar."   I asked her why she thought that and learned that in her world "restaurant" meant good.   Our children have learned to eat processed foods and fast foods and restaurant foods and believe that homemade, homegrown is not as good.

We also had a recipe book that I found in an old bookstore from 1881.  It was great fun to open it up and see if we could follow a recipe that was 130 years old.  When we opened the old binding several recipes and clippings feel out.  These were dated November 17, 1912 and were in themselves instructive, illustrating how different times were.  None of us would build a fire in our stove to make a pie for example, and one of the line drawings in these newspaper clippings were prompted a discussion about racism.  You never know where things will lead when you embark on a journey.  But in the end we had a satisfying experience and on Monday shared a berry pie that I had made and good conversation over what often brings people together -- food and good books.       

Singers come from around the Southeastern U.S. to Junaluska, N.C. every fall. This beautiful spot nestled in the mountains near Asheville is awash with the hues of fall for Choir Weekend.

I do storytelling in worship, usually as one of the scripture readings.  This year I was tasked with doing something around the creeds and storytelling.  I thought, OH MAN, the creeds are things that are considered inviolate and people have been put to death over changing even a jot or tittle of  them.  The early followers of Christ felt the need to address heresy by creating a clear statement of faith (a creed that could be recited in worship).

Growing up in the church I could recite the Apostle's by the time I was in 1st grade.  I remembered from my confirmation class the heresies that the Nicene creed, (the first major creed following the Apostles creed) addressed.   Beyond that I knew little so I did the first thing that any good librarian does,  research.  As is often the case, I started thinking about this in traffic between home and school.  If the church were writing a creed now what would the heresy of our time be?  As I was pondering this at the light where I often wait through three light changes my phone started to ring.  The screen lit up as it played a ring tone telling me it was my husband.

In a flash of insight the heresy of our time came clearly into focus.  It is that we deny the real for the virtual.  We prefer images on a lighted screen to the reality of those sitting directly across from us at a dining table.  Over the past few years, I have noticed that children do not possess even the simplest fine motor skills when they arrive at school. The only skills they have revolve around poking an icon on a screen.

While these skills are important in our world,  the child who has mastered them often has no awareness of the real world.  When I take them into the garden for the first time, I often ask what they hear.  They hear the sounds of cars and and other human activity.  I then point out the insect sounds, the sounds of birds, the wind through the white pine next to the garden. These sounds are perfectly audible, but unrecognized by them. 

Next we line up at the cafeteria door as though we had just come into the building from the garden (in other words they form a backward conga line).  Then we take one step back at a time until each one has passed from darkness into the "golden light of the sun."  I learned this little trick from my favorite West Texas art teacher who used the experience to teach students the power of light to warm a landscape.  I stole the activity to teach the power of sunlight to give life to a garden!

Next we move to the cabbage patch.  Most people grow cabbage as a vegetable.  I grow it primarily as host to the cabbage moth.  I ask the students to look carefully at the plants to see if they can find a caterpillar.  It is utterly astounding to me to learn that even though the plants are covered with the caterpillars the students do not see them (what an opportunity to teach camouflage!).  When I point one of the little critters out there are squeals all around as one after another the see ALL of the caterpillars right in front of their eyes.

All of this to say, the heresy of our age is not technology, but our failure to use it wisely!  If technology replaces real experience and real relationships it is heresy.  If we use it to amuse ourselves to death, we are not only fools but heretics.

Samuel stood at the check in computer.  He looked around and noticed the trees and snowmen decorating the library.  "Do you celebrate Christmas?" He followed that quickly with, "I hope not!"
Samuel is an ebullient child who is Jewish.  "Samuel, I do celebrate Christmas, but I also celebrate Hanukkah, Ramadan and Dwali and I would be deeply saddened if I weren't able to share the joy of all of them."

What he was really saying to me was I hope you are part of my tribe.  It touched my heart.  I know that for children of faith backgrounds other than Christian The season of Advent and Christmas can overwhelm them and make them feel isolated.  Even for those of us who are Christian, Christmas in the commercialized way that it is celebrated, often overwhelms us, too.    Little Samuel's comment made me deeply joyful and sad at the same moment.  How often do we do something that draws a circle of exclusion, without intention or even awareness? 

This weekend I saw part of a movie on one of the "Christian" T.V. channel about the "war" on Christmas,  Indeed the movie mixed patriotism and advent ending with a pagent where a flag was carried into the manger.  It sent a chill up my spine.  If we wrap the baby Jesus in the American flag we draw a circle of exclusion, for all the other countries around the world.  We also draw a circle of exclusion for those Americans who are not Christian.

When I was a teenager, Glide Memorial United Methodist Church took the cross out of the Sanctuary.  It was a move that caused a firestorm of controversy in the denomination and since we were United Methodists it was a point of discussion around our dinner table.  .  The minister suggested that the congregation focus on life  and he viewed the cross as a symbol of death.  At the time Mother was outraged for her the cross as a symbol of eternal life and I totally concur, but I also know that it doesn't mean that to everyone.  It doesn't mean that to little Samuel, and because I understood that long ago, I stopped wearing the simple gold cross that my husband gave me shortly after we were married to school.    Now I think the reason to take the cross out of Glide's sanctuary might simply have been to keep from excluding people who would be put off by it. 

Pulling Weeds

"Ever since the eclipse of our native cultures, the dominant American view has been that we should cultivate the self rather than the community; that we should look to the individual as the source of hope and the center of value, while expecting hindrance and harm from society. We have understood freedom for the most part negatively rather than positively, as release from constraints rather than as a condition for making a decent life in common......We have a Bill of Rights, which protects each of us from a bullying society, but no Bill of Responsibilities, which would oblige us to answer the needs of others."                                from The Web of Life by Scott Russell Sanders

Just as I was about to pull up these weeds in my school berry patch this little guy landed. He made me ponder the quote above.  It was part of a Northwest Institute Course I have been taking with 6 other stalwart people on Wednesdays  nights at church.  The course, called Discovering a Sense of Place, has helped me understand a bit more about my relationship to Middle Tennessee.  It caused me to pause.  Should I pull the thistle up because it is my right to have a beautifully manicured garden or should I leave it for my beautiful Goldfinch friends as one of their primary food sources?  I know what my native American friends would have done.  They left most of the natural world as they found it.

This thistle is a natural source of food, unlike the meal worms I provide when we fledge bluebirds.  We diligently try to assist them in their attempts to survive pitted as they are against the invasive house sparrows brought to this country by immigrants 300 years ago.   How ironic.  Do I pull out a natural food source and then go buy niger seed for the finches?  You tell me