My Most Favorite Part of the Speech Tonight

The striking image and power of story of those three amazing, accomplished, influential though unelected, intelligent, compassionate, complicated, and yes, beautiful pro-choice (AND pro-life, pro-liberty, pro-pursuit of happiness) women sitting together in the gallery:
Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden with Victoria Kennedy between them.

Now that’s integrity of public and private life.
Great stuff.

Handy-Dandy Public School Test For Constitution-Waving Conservatives Who Think The President Is Our Problem

Watch closely for evidence that the presidential speech protesters have real principles, or if it’s mere propaganda behind their outrage over public school indoctrination. Cock of the snook to Lynn, our high priestess of evangelical excess as “education” —

Take Me to the River, On the Public School Bus, Never Mind My Parents, Coach Is God or Near ‘Nuff:

The head football coach at Breckinridge County High School took about 20 players on a school bus late last month to his church, where nearly half of them were baptized, school officials say. The mother of one player said her 16-year-old son was baptized without her knowledge and consent, and she is upset that a public school bus was used to take players to a church service — and that the school district’s superintendent was there and did not object.

. . .Superintendent Janet Meeks, who is a member of the church and witnessed the baptisms, said she thinks the trip was proper because attendance was not required, and another coach paid for the gas.

The Meeks shall inherit the earth, indeed! 😉

Wonder if their coach blasts Al Green at practice and on the bus to keep them plugged into his matrix and dependent on his control when they can’t literally go to his river or pray in a circle on one knee during school events:

Take me to the river
Drop me in the water
Take me to the river, dip me in the water
Wash me down, cleanse my soul
Take me down by the dirty stream, dip me in the water
Hold me
Wash me in the water
Keep me satisfied
[screaming with a beat you can dance to, segue into Soul Train]

Of course Take Me to the River is powerful power of story for all kids in the South, not just for sports stars but even for those who will outgrow the indoctrination to be scholars (like Doctor JJ!):

In the mid 1960s, when I was 8 or 9, I did get born again. At a southern Baptist church in Texas, I felt the tug of God and responded to the altar call, and several weeks later got baptized.

Blame This Shocking Photo on Lynn

She made me do it.

Patching the Evangelical Soul or Just Bearding It?

UPDATE: Parents’ Advisory before you open the comments! — if you are naive or painfully prudish, or just “not in the mood” today, don’t. 😉

Why All the Little Beards? at Killing the Buddha:

How is the emerging evangelicalism likely to differ from the old?

One difference stands out at first glance. Picture [Saddleback’s Rick] Warren alongside several other emerging leaders. . . They share a clear mark of distinction from the old guard: a patch of facial hair around their chin. . .

But what is the intended significance of this makeover? Why change the visual representation of America’s most influential religious tradition in this subtle, stubbly way?

Young Son’s Other Shakespeare Scene: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Most people don’t realize Richard the Third was also Demetrius. 🙂

Demetrius and Helena, KPA's A Midsummer Night's Dream

Text of President Obama’s Planned Speech to Schoolkids

Just released here.

I like the commentary at Time Magazine’s political blog Swampland:

Rather than any lefty, neo-socialist, communitarian brainwashing, President Obama’s speech to your kids reads like a paean to individual striving and free market capitalism, the sort of thing that Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater might have signed onto. At root, Obama’s message is one of individual responsibility, a disquisition on the freedom of each American youth to fail or succeed on their own tenacity and merits. . .

What’s in a Name: Beetleness and Daffodility

and whatever it is humans are made of, too.

Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World,
adapted from “Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science” by Carol Kaesuk Yoon, 2009

Taxonomy is dying. But it is by classifying nature that we come to know it in all its beetleness and daffodility.
. . .The past few decades have seen a stream of studies that show that sorting and naming the natural world is a universal, deep-seated and fundamental human activity, one we cannot afford to lose because it is essential to understanding the living world, and our place in it.

THIS PROFUSION OF HUMMINGBIRDS is from the book “Kunstformen der Natur,” by Ernst Haeckel, 1900. The names of the birds, like Topaza pella, or crimson topaz (third from top), and Sparganura sappho, or red-tailed comet (with forked tail), seem as lush and elaborate as their coloration.

I read this NYT Science Times out somewhere waiting for a child, the dentist’s office I think, having grabbed my Tuesday newspaper from the driveway as we hustled to be on time, then left to my own thoughts in an artificially hushed and lighted and cooled faux-living room way-station in which life is in fact suspended, not lived, which I therefore couldn’t quite categorize according to established taxonomy. 😉

But I had good quiet-time fun trying, particularly because on some level the piece is also about how artificial human systems screw up natural human systems and language is both natural and contrived, how in the end even naming itself is complicated by naming itself! Given the time and inclination to let yourself play around, such ideas connect in expanding-universe style and draw you in ever-deeper, like some M. C. Escher Hogwarts-staircase world . .

relativity poster by M. C. Escher

So I brought the Science Times home for blogging this “what’s in a name?” power of story punch on different levels and connecting it explicitly to a bunch more. I wanted to fully enjoy it, do it justice in my own mind and yours. But since then, real life has intervened repeatedly.

Any Wisdom About Wisdom Teeth for Favorite Daughter?

Guess what we’re doing today?
Hint: it’s surgery under anesthesia and shockingly, have-to-charge it-and-pay-it-off-over-time expensive (thousands of dollars) and all out of pocket, not a dime covered by our already very expensive health insurance plan.

I shouldn’t complain though. Favorite Daughter has the leading role in this life drama. Her dad and I just support her while she rises to its challenges and makes the roles her own. 🙂

Being me, I’ve been wondering about the evolution of wisdom teeth. FavD tells me that they were once important because by the teen years, cavefolk had knocked out or otherwise rotted away several other teeth. Wisdom teeth came in years after all the other teeth, and grew inward to help move remaining teeth to the front so effective chewing could be maintained a few more years. Now that all our teeth stay in the mouth, there’s no need nor any room for wisdom teeth — and teenhood surely no longer equates to older and wiser under modern life expectancy 😉 — so they’ve gone from being natural denture to natural dysfunction.

She has no idea where she got this idea and I have no idea whether it’s scientific or just a good story. Maybe someone has already studied this and other Thinking Parents out there can enlighten me? — but for the moment I think I’ll just think about it. Assuming for the moment it’s true and following it down one possible path of logic, does

Logical Fallacies and Propaganda “Christians” Have Been Known to Use

Cock of the snook to Lynn’s comments for this, where I found Christians warning other Christians about “spiritual abuse” and interpreting wikipedia’s fallacies and propaganda techniques to arm people against it.

(They read like the current public discourse on everything):

Frequently used propaganda techniques in Spiritually Abusive groups

Teen Brain Research May Baffle Our Old Brains

See Time Magazine for The Teen Brain: The More Mature, the More Reckless:

For now, these theories are just speculation, and the researchers concede that the interaction of white and gray matter is so complex that hard conclusions remain elusive.

“We have a new piece to the puzzle here,” says Emory’s Monica Capra, one of the study’s authors. “But we don’t have it all together.”

I’ll think more about this but my first reaction is that I matured early in every other physical way so my brain likely matured early too. And I did in fact experiment with a few risky-behavior boundaries, which I never could explain to myself as making any sense. When Favorite Daughter became a teen, all I could tell her was that in those years sometimes “your brain gets sucked out” so watch out! Real scientific huh? 😉

Also the power of this story sort of connects to brains and sleep in the NYT weekly science science section, the idea being that our brains could be telling us they want to be busy and productive by keeping us up at all hours, and putting us to sleep when they figure we’d be better off quiet and out of the way. 🙂

Cobbling Together the Best Real Learning We Can

“Learning happens throughout the entire day. Some of it counts as formal schoolwork and gets logged for “accountability” purposes. Other things don’t. Is it all pretty arbitrary? Sure, but I have to work within the constraints of the situation I’m in. Isn’t that a big part of life?”

That’s something CW said here followed by something Lori found and linked, which taken together moved me to write today for Thinking Parents everywhere, as another new season of learning begins.

Sacred or secular isn’t the big issue I see. When it comes to learning and thinking, if it’s School rather than Education then I say we can do better and we ought to get to it. Both at home and as public policy.

On the heels of examining how Sonlight’s curriculum teaches kids to think and whether that’s suitable for secular home education or just for church school at home, I hope to remind us all that Church and State have a common educational interest both public and private, in controlling how kids learn to think and inquire — indeed in preventing much of it.

And that means the hidden curriculum of both Church and State is similar in effect, thus more Schooling or even Training (shudder!) than true Education.

I’m not one for absolutes and can’t imagine any learning program could be all one, none of the other. Learning is always somewhere in between School and Education, but