The Dumbing of America

The College Board announced recently that it will take another step backward on its flagship SAT college entrance exam. The SAT, once the dominant test for high school juniors hoping for a seat in a discriminating college, has lost its numerical advantage. On the coasts of the nation, it is still the test of choice in most schools. In the mid-section of the country, however, the ACT has steadily gained numbers so that it now has surpassed its rival in numbers of test takers nationwide.

It cannot be said for certain that the College Board is changing because of the competition from the ACT, but the fact remains that recent changes will bring the venerable measure closer to its younger foe. The real story of what the College Board has done comes into focus with a little historical perspective. The SAT has been gradually dumbed down to accommodate our increasingly less capable high school population. Back in 1994 the College Board succumbed to pressure to remove the devilish antonym and analogy questions. These questions measured both vocabulary and critical reasoning skills, two elements found dwindling among high schoolers. Anyone who works with college freshman and sophomores as I do can attest to their poor vocabulary and paucity of reasoning skill. To protect them from ego damage, the SAT stopped asking them hard questions. I think that is metaphorically called punting (and I don't mean using a long flat bottomed boat.)

The other major change in the SAT is the removal of "SAT words," a term of derision that has been applied to any word that the hearer does not recognize. In other words, erudition is passe; we be down with dumb. The remarks by one high school student concerning the changes are telling. Commenting on the old test which had, "hard words and stuff," she was relieved to know her vocabulary would not need to grow much to score well on the test. I can't wait to get her in Composition class.

On another front there is a furor over Common Core standards in education. Many conservatives are joining the fight against them. Rachel Alexander of the Christian Post makes a false statement typical of many objectors: "Conservatives are in an uproar over Common Core, an educational curriculum being forced upon the states by the Obama administration." First, Common Core is not a curriculum; it is a set of standards. Curriculum is what and how you teach; standards, like Common Core, are the goals you hope to achieve by teaching what you teach. The Common Core is simply a set of concepts that students are expected to know at a given stage in their education. It is up to the local school, even the classroom teacher sometimes, to decide what materials and lessons to use. Second, Obama is not forcing any state to adopt Common Core. Sure, there is federal money available for those who do, but just like many federal programs, states can choose not to take the money.

Alexander also cites Diane Ravitch, a former assistant U.S. secretary of education, saying Common Core has not been proven. That is not true either. Tennessee has vigorously applied Common Core standards along with a rigorous teacher training and accountability regime and their student scores have rocketed toward the top in national rankings. Meanwhile Michigan dithers over what to do and our student scores are rapidly sinking toward the bottom. There may be honest objections to how standards are applied and how and when students are tested, but objecting to standards is like saying you don't care if students learn anything.

We cannot spank them anymore; that would be abusive, so they misbehave with impunity. They might sue if we make onerous demands on them as teens, so they have freedom without responsibility. Schools purport to teach diversity and end up promoting mindless uniformity. Across the country nearly 20% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate. Year after year American students fall farther behind students from many other countries. If I didn't know better I would suspect a sinister conspiracy to produce a generation of mindless automatons who will stand for nothing and fall for anything. That sounds suspiciously like the technique used by the Serpent in the Garden. Surely we wouldn't fall for that again.

A Hill Worth Dying On

April 15 has come and gone once more. Like many Americans I dread its coming, work madly to complete the endless forms (or pay to have someone else do them), and grumble more loudly than usual that I pay too much for needless programs and wasteful spending. I am not going to fight the income tax battle here, but I did notice a couple interesting sideshows in the news that got me thinking.

Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy apparently was willing to pay his dues for the privilege of grazing cattle on federal land up until 1993. Then something changed his mind. Amid all the flag-waving and shouts of government heavy handedness, the true position of Mr. Bundy as a law-breaker may have been lost. Gracy Olmstead has a good summary of the situation in The Federalist this week. Politico reports that Bundy is more than just an aggrieved rancher; he is a radical activist who does not recognize the authority of the federal government. He's sort of like a holocaust denier in that way. I suspect many of the tea party flag wavers who gathered on his ranch this week are ignorant of the real story.

A strangely similar fight has been going on in a completely unrelated arena over Common Core educational standards. According to an article in The Foundry this week, fifteen states are backing out of their association with Common Core. This too is being framed as a battle against federal over-reach, but as in the Bundy case, ignorance abounds. Articles like one on Fox News website chronicle the activities of people who object to Common Core, but offer nothing substantive about their objections. A quick look at the standards themselves can dispel most of the objector myths. (There is a good myth-buster at the Common Core web site.)

What scares me most is not that the government wants to take our money or set standards for educating our children. I fear the kind of people who can jump on a band wagon without knowing where it came from or where it's really going. These are the same people who are swayed by half-truths and misdirection perpetrated by crafty policy salesmen. It is the grifter's trick to get you to look at his right hand while he steals your watch with his left. Only in this case we are not losing our watch, we are losing our freedom.

It is misguided for Christians to be fighting Common Core or the Bureau of Land Management. What we should be doing is taking a majority stand against the tyrannical minorities which are systematically stripping us of our Constitutional rights to practice our religion freely. A handful of atheists got prayer and Bible reading removed from public schools. A tiny minority has insisted that homosexual practices must be accepted as an alternative lifestyle and to disagree is bigotry. Although a Pew Research poll shows that Americans agree 4 to 1 that abortion is morally wrong, it remains legal to kill unborn children.  And I wonder how many people are really offended by Merry Christmas. Really.

The Bundy ranch has no hills worth dying on, but any one of the issues just mentioned qualifies. (OK, not Merry Christmas.) The Great Commission commands believers to make disciples. If we took that charge seriously we could effect the only change that matters in the long (long) run: changed hearts. That is why Jesus died on the hill he knew was worth the cost. The price paid on that hill must move us to pick our battles carefully, but pick them. There are hills worth dying on.

An Open Letter to My Children

The full title of this post is really "An Open Letter to My Children and Anyone Else Who Wants to Hear Clair Blather About the Joys and Disappointments of Parenting". Many years ago when we still had three children living in our home, I lived under the delusion that I was a pretty good parent. It wasn't until the three little birdies left the nest and started families of their own that I began to doubt my self assessment.

Each one of my dear ones has made it clear on separate occasions that they would not have been in unreserved agreement with my measure of my parental perfection. Likewise, each has exhibited some behavior which would cause any concerned parent to have some degree of disappointment. Please do not misunderstand, my children (or you listeners-in); I am still proud to call myself your father, and nothing you have done or can do will diminish my unconditional love for you.

And there it is: the major flaw in my parenting which has been pointed out by you and, at times, by your dear mother. I cannot seem to craft a compliment or statement of praise without inserting a "but" in it. You must hear echoes in the halls of your memory of me saying, "You did a good job! But..." Each of you has received deserved praise from respectable sources throughout your lives. Yet I wonder if I ever said how proud of you I am without sticking my "but" in it.

Perhaps each of you has reason to "hate" me. (I am using the 21st century, Gen-Y version of "hate," not the Bible version or the Webster version.) I know if my father was as you perceive me to be, I would "hate" him. I look back on the situations when I behaved really badly and cringe. I have said and done some really dumb things. And while it may be true that there is no excuse for stupid, there is a difference between stupid-mean and stupid-thoughtless. If I had only thought better...

So now that you are all parents yourselves, I want to encourage you to break the mold (if in fact there is a mold). Let your children know how great they are. Sure, you will correct them at times. But there must be more times when you simply praise them. If as parents we are to model God's love, it is imperative that we remember what manner of love we enjoy, "That while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." When Jesus went to the cross, it was the Father saying,"I love you this much." And there are no "buts" about that. 

A Flood of Questions

I haven't seen the movie Noah, and I doubt I will see it for quite a while. I gave up first run movies in theaters in protest of the price long ago. You can judge how long by the fact that I think I paid the princely sum of $5.00 for the last ticket. My children, who did not inherit the frugality gene, tell me it now costs north of $10.00 for the ticket and the typical drink and popcorn adds another ten-spot. No thanks. As much as I would like to see the flick, it's not worth $40.00 to take my wife and I when it will be $2.00 at Family Video soon, and free later on Netflix if it isn't too big at the box office.

But I do feel compelled to write about Noah, if only because I am hurt that it means I have probably lost my chance to write a screenplay for the novel I have been waiting to have discovered. You may not be aware that I have been peddling my own historical fiction, fantasy adventure romance novel about the life and times of Noah and his angelic helpers. The Kindle version is still available on Amazon, but I think it can be considered "out of print" as my on-demand publisher, Xulon Press, has not received my annual &*@#$24.99 maintenance fee for several years now. (That seems like a scam to me; can it really cost twenty-five bucks per year to keep a digital file available?) Maybe if enough people try to order it, they will "find" the file in some archive. Who knows?

Back to the movie. I did read some reviews. Sophia Lee of World Magazine calls Noah "a dark psychological thriller wrapped up in a horror film."  She remarks that, "Noah makes serious attempts at grappling with deep theological questions.... But Christians shouldn't be surprised that a secular production would miss the most important and critical element of this Genesis story—the gospel of Christ." Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian says the film is "a big muscular movie" that is "bombastic and redundant and subtly disappointing." Bradshaw also says that writer/director Darren Aronofsky has pretty well expunged God from the story line. What a surprise: Hollywood ignores the elementary role of God in a biblical story. Who would have guessed that?

I will wait to see the movie for my final judgment, but I have to give Aronofsky credit for seeing what I saw in the story of the biblical Noah (Great minds...). My motivation for writing a Bible-based fiction/fantasy was the realization that all the characters in the Bible were real human beings with real human foibles and they struggled with real human (and demonic) enemies. Even though Aronofsky is an avowed atheist, he does invest what he calls "personal passion" in the Genesis story (according to Lee). He also claims to have done 10 years of research, which may explain how he ended up with a story idea so similar to mine.

Maybe the best thing about all the fuss over Noah, the movie is the fuss itself. As a wise woman in my Sunday School class said, it opens the door to spiritual conversations. Anything that turns that knob is at least partly a good thing. Maybe I should stop sulking and take advantage of the moment. Maybe I just did.

Who is Discriminating?

Here it is in black and white: Someone is trying to write a law that says it is wrong to force someone to violate their religious beliefs. One wonders how that works under a Constitution that, according to Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute, "The Free Exercise Clause not only protects religious belief and expression; it also seems to allow for violation of laws, as long as that violation is made for religious reasons." Arizona has proposed a law that would give people the right to refuse service to a person if the context of the service involves the violation of a religious tenet. A photographer, for example, would have the right to refuse to do wedding pictures for a gay couple.

An article on TPN rightly points out that, if enacted, Arizona would not be discriminating against anyone. On the contrary, those who oppose the law, claiming it does discriminate, would be stripping one group of its Constitutional religious rights granted by the First Amendment free exercise clause in their effort to protect the "rights" of another group. I put "rights" in quotation marks purposely. It is not clear that a person has a "right" to demand service under every circumstance, let alone one that forces the service provider to violate a religious tenet.

A similar case was recently argued in a New Mexico court involving photographer Elaine Huguenin. Citing a Washington Post article, TPN reports that, "in ruling against Huguenin’s case, New Mexico Supreme Court Justice Richard C. Bosson wrote that while Huguenin and her husband are 'free to think, to say, to believe, as they wish,' the public accommodation of differing beliefs is 'the price of citizenship.'” Bosson's reasoning is frightening. He goes beyond voiding free exercise into the other half of the First Amendment religious language, the establishment clause, effectively establishing secular "religion" as the law of the land.

According to Washington Post article, the Arizona law specifically expands the protected class under the state’s free-exercise-of-religion law to “any individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, religious assembly or institution or other business organization.” Many pastors across state and denominational borders regularly refuse to marry certain couples for a number of reasons. If Justice Bosson is correct, those pastors are not "accommodating" differing beliefs; they are not paying the price of their citizenship. If the Arizona law is found to be unconstitutional, those pastors could be forced to marry anyone who asked for the service.

Many people on the left attempt to compare this situation to the Jim Crow laws in the segregated South. Businesses all over Dixie once followed a "separate but equal" policy which allowed them to effectively discriminate based on race. Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina was the site of a famous sit-in in 1960 that eventually led to the elimination of the separate but equal doctrine. There are those who point out that many southern churches defended racism, including slavery at one time. They claim that the gay rights issue is the same situation: Christians practicing discrimination based on religious teachings.

But gay rights and race rights differ in at least two important ways. First, the Christians who claimed the Bible supported racist treatment were wrong, whereas Christians who claim the Bible labels homosexual behavior as a sin are correct. Becoming involved in a context where sin is not just practiced, but celebrated would be inappropriate for many Bible-believing Christians. Second, homosexual behavior is a choice a person makes, not an inescapable state like race. One cannot choose one's race; one does choose to act on homosexual desires. 

There is a third difference which is not as easily dismissed. Opening one's doors to the public to offer a service may be different from an individual offering a service at his or her discretion at various locations. One can imagine many circumstances which would naturally present a service provider with reason to decline service. If an establishment is open and someone walks in to be served, it may be difficult to refuse service all other things being equal. If the person walks in with a dog (not a helper dog) a restaurant may refuse. If the person walks in shouting and behaving erratically, the restaurant may refuse. If the person is not wearing shirt and shoes... 

The direct parallel to this is the church service itself. I know of no church (except maybe Westboro Baptist) that would refuse to let a homosexual, even a couple, sit down at a worship service. If that couple started necking during the sermon, they might be asked to leave, but then so would a heterosexual couple behaving similarly I presume. As I have said previously, it is not the homosexual person the Bible warns Christians away from, it is the sinful behavior they choose to engage in. To those who claim the Bible prohibits judging people, another previous blog debunks that stand. We must "judge" or discern which behaviors are acceptable and which are not.

Finally, if the Cornell opinion cited in the first paragraph is correct, discrimination based upon sexual preference (a violation of the law) may actually be protected under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. This seems reasonable, since it would be pointless to say the government must allow free exercise unless someone objects to said exercise on any ground short of injury or the restriction of the objector's freedom. In other words, citizens have the right to do just about anything not specifically prohibited as long as it does not infringe on someone else's rights. A photographer's refusal to participate in a gay wedding in no way infringes on the gay couple's right to marry or to seek another photographer.

I hate to keep quoting myself, but I am reminded of the warning by Martin Niemöller I used in another post. If we don't start resisting this rabid political correctness and its intolerant spokespeople, our rights to say anything biblical will be lost or at least criminalized. It is true that Christians are called to submit to the secular authorities, but in our society, we the people are the makers of that authority. The complacency Niemöller warned against will end up costing us our freedom. That will be, to paraphrase Justice Bossson, a price too

high for a substandard citizenship.

Strawberry Hope

It sucks to get old. Someone said the memory is one of the first things to go, but I can't remember what the other things are. I wish someone had remembered that I am not supposed to eat strawberries before I ate that giant sized double portion of strawberry shortcake last night. I totally enjoyed it until a few hours later when I began to experience the gastric distress. It wasn't until the discomfort hit that I remembered why it has been so long since I had eaten strawberries. 

I know; you are thinking how stupid that sounds. It sounds stupid to me too. But then I have always had memory problems as an accompaniment to my ADHD. Until I discovered that I have ADHD I felt stupid most of the time. Lately, I am beginning to think I am adding senile forgetfulness to my usual memory loss. Like the other day when I left the car's fuel door open after filling up. When I analyze my "stupid" actions, I can usually find a reason (not the same as an excuse).

The fuel door incident, for example, was on my wife's car which I only fill up occasionally. The other thing that caused my forgetfulness to catch me is that I was buying a car wash with the fill-up, another unusual occurrence. After hanging up the fill hose, I turned to the pump display to wait for the receipt I needed for the wash. Normally I turn to the car and close the fuel door immediately after hanging up the hose. The formation of a habit pattern is how I have learned to get things done without forgetting necessary elements. The wash interrupted my habit pattern.

The same thing happens if I walk into the house and don't hang my keys on the key rack immediately. I have learned that if the keys don't make it to the rack, they will end up almost anywhere, and I will be left with no idea where they are. When it's time to go out again, the key search begins.

I am wondering if and when I will begin to forget some of the other habits I have formed to counter my ADHD. For example, like many who share my special ability, social skills don't come naturally. Remembering names is almost impossible. I have a habit (if I remember) of repeating a person's name immediately when I meet them the first time. Then I try to comment on it if something stands out. I might ask how it is spelled if it is one of those names with many spellings. Even with this habit, I can forget a name in ten seconds or less. 

The other thing I try to do when meeting a new person is look into his or her eyes. I do this to avoid staring at some feature that might prove embarrassing or uncomfortable if I get caught, like a cheesy mustache or really big ears. Someone is wondering about now how this has anything to do with heaven (which always matters most). Here is the connection: there a

re many things that believers are expected to do which are not natural, like living in faith. We need to remember to do everything motivated by or built on faith.

I heard a great message last Sunday at Capital Church in Salt Lake City that really lit this up for me. The message from Romans 15:13 was actually on hope, but the lesson I heard was that without a belief in what we hope for, hope is impossible. Lewis Smedes says in Keeping Hope Alive that hope is comprised of a wish that I can imagine becoming a reality and believe (have faith) that it may come to pass. Living by faith means I have hope that my life will have meaning, that a family member will find peace, that a friend will receive healing. These are acts of faith.

The problem comes when our hopes are dashed on the rocks of circumstance. The lesson on Sunday was that our hopes cannot be pinned on anything in this world. I need to form the habit of hope, but remember that my ultimate hope is in God, not man. This "habitude" will allow me to weather the storms that reality inevitably brings my way. I must never forget to live by faith, and I can hope that someday I will be able to eat strawberries without fear. 

An Abundance of Things

I recently discovered a blogger I really like: Scott Dannemiller. I don't know if it is a compliment or an insult to say he thinks like me, but it is what it is. His latest post at "The Accidental Missionary" is called Confessions of a Hoarder. Like Scott, I do not consider myself a hoarder, but having recently moved, I went through a similar situation: what to do with boxes of stuff I haven't used in quite a while.

To say I haven't "used" stuff in "quite a while" is being too kind, disingenuous even. There were things in boxes we moved into the condo 16 1/2 years ago that I have not touched since. Just to give you a sense of reality, there were two sets of legs for TV tables that had broken decades ago which I had planned to reuse on some new tables. I never got to that project. I still have a contraption I made for cold air induction on a truck I haven't owned for ten years; I thought maybe another vehicle would need the treatment. There were cans of stain and varnish long since hardened into uselessness, kept for what reason I know not. And so on.

So our move necessitated picking up each of the many boxes stored in our garage or the storage shed we rented when we moved into the condo (Yes, I have sheds to store my useless stuff.) and putting it in the Suburban to move to storage in our apartment garage or the new storage shed I rented. (That's right: one garage and two storage sheds.) I finally decided it was time to "sort" the stuff and give away or donate whatever I could part with. This is when I discovered I probably do have the hoarder gene. I was an emotional wreck. I could not decide what to do with any of it.

A loving wife and caring friends suggested several methods to determine categories like move, store, donate, dispose. I found it easy to dispose of the cans of solidified varnish (now that I have access to a dumpster where I could "hide" the toxic waste.) On each trip to the new apartment I would toss the contents of a box into the community dumpster and heave a sigh of relief. I began to feel something like a sense of accomplishment or the lifting of a burden; all that stuff I had been carrying around all these years was finally getting off my back. Yet much remains to be sorted, and I am still agonizing.

Since the apartment is only a little more than half the size of our condo, much truly useful stuff also had to be reassigned. The furniture and other accouterments of a homestead no longer fitting our reduced lifestyle went to various mission stores for redistribution, hopefully to meet needs of needy people. We had rented a second storage unit to keep some of the furniture in, but changed our minds and donated most of it and released the unit back to the hoarder universe. This too gave a small sense of satisfaction, yet I kept wondering if  that chair or those nic-nacs wouldn't be missed someday.

I know Jesus said that a man's life does not consist in the abundance of things, but the process of moving has revealed to me anew how much my life does revolve around things. Here I am, the owner of not one but two domiciles (we are renting out the expensive condo and living in a cheaper rented apartment.), either of which would be palatial digs to most people in the two-thirds world.  What's worse, I still have six shelf units and the storage loft in the apartment garage full of stuff I felt the need to keep and one remaining rented storage unit that we need to sort.

I have begun to ask myself what I would miss if a fire consumed everything I have in storage. The true answer is very little. Maybe when the temperature gets out of the single digits I will find the emotional courage to do what needs to be done: toss or donate my way to freedom. I have two friends who recently had to go through their parents accumulation when they moved into assisted living; I did it with my Mom's stuff years ago when she died. It was painful. I don't want to put my kids through that. Deep breath; follow Nike's advice: just do it.

I have written the preceding post being of sound mind (ha) in hopes that it will haunt me if I fail to do what I have told myself to do. You are my witnesses.