From Core Value Series - Talk to Student Body about Respect for our Elders

From my earliest memories, I can remember both of my parents telling me to respect my elders.  My elders, they explained, were other adults - aunts, grandparents, teachers, the house cleaner, or any other adult deserving of my respect; and for my parents, that was just about everybody, no matter their race, social status, or religion.

Respect for my elders developed first from my respect for my parents.  Obedience and polite, respectful talk were always expected of me.  There was to be no talking back or arguing.  That didn’t mean it never happened, but when it did, I was immediately corrected.  I was always told to address every adult as ma’am or sir, and I had my chores to do. Make my bed, clean my bedroom, not leave the bathroom a mess, take out the trash, set the table for dinner, etc.  Fortunately, I had two younger brothers who had to assume some of those duties once they were old enough.

There were times, especially as I came into my teenage years, I didn’t want to obey my parents or listen to their advice  I wasn’t really interested in respecting my elders.  I would be polite, but when they wanted to tell me something , it always sounded like a lecture that went on and on and on!.  Just like many of you, I thought I knew what was best for me and I was determined to do things my way.

However, when I didn’t listen to the advice of my parents or the other adults in my life, things didn’t work out as I had planned. At Vanderbilt University, my favorite professor told me NOT to take two of his courses in the same semester. But did I listen? No, and by mid-semester I was failing both courses.  I ended up with a B and a C, but only by the grace of God and the most studying I had ever done in my life!

So through my own mistakes, I came to understand that my parents and other influential adults in my life had much to offer me in terms of solid advice and wisdom.  Fortunately, I did not suffer any serious consequences before arriving at this “great” insight.  I saw the wisdom in respecting and listening to my elders once again.

Unfortunately, our culture today tells us to ignore our elders and the wisdom they can share with us. 

There really was a time when children always spoke respectfully to adults, when a younger person would offer a seat to an older person, when a young man would willingly and without pay mow the yard for the aging widow next door. These were and still are the right ways to behave.  But today, children believe they are somehow owed the same amount of respect as an adult.  I’m not saying adults should not treat children kindly, they most certainly should; but respect is something you earn in life - through accomplishment, life experience, and the way you conduct yourself publicly and privately.  Unfortunately, much of our culture disregards this idea of respect.

Just look at the TV shows and commercials that make dads look like idiots and buffoons.  You’ve seen it. Dad’s a goofball, sort of what I call a man-child who shows less maturity than his children. His children are in the car or around the breakfast table rolling their eyes at him and making snide remarks.  The TV show or commercial subtly teaches that dads are idiots and don’t deserve respect.  

So, it’s very easy to adopt these kinds of attitudes:

• If you don’t act respectfully and your parents call you on it, they’re mean!
• If your teacher requires your respect, they’re either picking on you or don’t like you.

In fact, in both situations, just the opposite is true.  By always reminding you to be respectful to your elders, your parents and teachers are teaching you how to be likeable.  As you get older and go off to college and then enter the workplace, you’ll quickly discover that people don’t like rudeness.  They like people with good, respectful attitudes.  Respectful people are pleasant to work with.

Our elders will always have something to teach us about life.  They have greater wisdom than we do. They want us to learn how to be successful and avoid many of life’s mistakes. But if we don’t treat them with respect, they will not waste their time on us.

For example look at what happened to Rehoboam, King Solomon’s son.

We read in I Kings 12, “Rehoboam went to Shechem, for all Israel had come to Shechem to make him king.”  To make a long story short, the people asked their new king to cut their taxes, because King Solomon had raised taxes for all of his building projects, including the Temple in Jerusalem.

Rehoboam told the people to give him three days to think about it.  He first went to his elders, those who had served with his father.  “And they said to him, ‘If you will be a servant to this people today and serve them, and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants forever.’” Pretty good advice if you ask me!

Then Rehoboam went to his buddies, the guys he had grown up with.  They said, “Thus shall you speak to this people who said to you, ‘Your father made our yoke heavy, but you lighten it for us,’ thus shall you say to them, ‘My little finger is thicker than my father's thighs.  And now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.’”

Rehoboam rejected the counsel of his elders, increased the tax burden, and lost 10/12ths of his kingdom in a civil war.  Not too smart!

One of my greatest mentors was Mr. Henry Walters, my headmaster here at St. Thomas’.  After I finished college, he hired me to take over the STE pipe band program.

Many, many times, when band was over at 5 p.m., Mr. Walters would be sitting in his office, the office I now sit it, and he would give me his undivided attention for as long as I needed it.  He would counsel me on certain courses of action.  If I was discouraged, he would show me the big picture and cheer me up.  If I made a mistake, he would tell me and advise me how to correct it.

Mr. Walters became one of the great elderly influences in my life.  I had others of course - my parents and two particular piping teachers.  But unknown to either of us, God was using Mr. Walters to prepare me to take on the role of headmaster of this great school.

If I had not shown him respect by asking him for advice, my life might be very different.

What does God have to say in the the Bible about respecting our elders ?

• Exodus 20:12  “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you.”

• 1 Peter 5:5  “Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.’”

Leviticus 19:32 (My favorite)  “You shall rise up before the grayheaded and honor the aged, and you shall revere your God; I am the Lord. So how should we show respect for our elders? Address them properly - No “What’s up dude!” Shake hands Speak clearly and without slang Make eye contact and smile Offer assistance whenever possible Give them your time and attention Always use good manners! One day, Lord willing, you will be considered an elder and you will expect young people to respect you.  Respect your elders now, set the example for others, and, when the time comes, teach your children to do the same.  You will never regret it; plus the Lord will bless your lives, your families, and our country.

From WSJ: How We Should Be Teaching Math

Achieving 'conceptual' understanding doesn't mean true mastery. For that, you need practice.

By

Barbara Oakley

Sept. 22, 2014 6:47 p.m. ET 

One of my engineering students recently approached me with a mixture of anger and befuddlement, thrusting toward me a quiz sheet covered with red pen marks: "I just don't see how I could have done so poorly. I understood it when you taught it in class."

I smiled encouragingly, but inside I sighed. The semester was just beginning. I hadn't had time to disabuse the student's naïveté. He still thought that because he "understood" the material, he was all set.

I'm now a professor of engineering, but in my mid-20s I was an artsy language lover who had flunked her way through elementary-, middle- and high-school math and science. What I discovered when I started over at age 26—first tackling remedial middle-school math and then working my way toward a Ph.D. in systems engineering—is that a conceptual understanding only gets you so far.

Conceptual understanding has become the mother lode of today's approach to education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics—known as the STEM disciplines. However, an "understanding-centric approach" by educators can create problems.

Today's Common Core approach to teaching STEM is at least superficially appealing. The goal of placing equal emphasis on conceptual understanding, procedural skills and fluency, and application is laudable. But as with any new approach to teaching, the Common Core builds on the culture that's already there. And the culture that has long reigned in STEM education is that conceptual understanding trumps everything. So bewildered math teachers who are now struggling to teach the Common Core are leaning on the old thinking, which has it that if a student doesn't understand—in the "ah-ha," light-bulb sense of understanding—there's no way she or he can truly become expert in the material.

True experts have a profound conceptual understanding of their field. But the expertise built the profound conceptual understanding, not the other way around. There's a big difference between the "ah-ha" light bulb, as understanding begins to glimmer, and real mastery.

As research by Alessandro Guida, Fernand Gobet, K. Anders Ericsson and others has also shown, the development of true expertise involves extensive practice so that the fundamental neural architectures that underpin true expertise have time to grow and deepen. This involves plenty of repetition in a flexible variety of circumstances. In the hands of poor teachers, this repetition becomes rote—droning reiteration of easy material. With gifted teachers, however, this subtly shifting and expanding repetition mixed with new material becomes a form of deliberate practice and mastery learning.

True mastery doesn't mean you use crutches like laying out 25 beans in 5-by-5 rows to demonstrate that 5 × 5 = 25. It means that when you see 5 × 5, in a flash, you know it's 25—it's a single neural chunk that's as easy to pull up as a ribbon. Having students stop to continually check and prove their understanding can actually impede their understanding, in the same way that continually focusing on every aspect of a golf swing can impede the development of the swing.

I'm a big proponent of active learning in the classroom—allowing students to interact with one another, and with me, to experience that light-bulb-going-on effect. But I'm also fully aware that just because a student might think he understood an idea in a classroom doesn't mean that he truly understood the idea. It certainly doesn't mean the student will retain that idea. And it absolutely doesn't mean that he has mastered the idea.

My angry, befuddled student, and many like him in my class, went on to take quiz after carefully designed quiz—all on the computer, and all designed to help students get the practice that would allow them to gain true mastery. When the semester ended, and evaluations on the class came (with an average of 4.9 out of 5 for a 65-student class), one comment typified many: "I really enjoyed this technique. At first, I wasn't too sure about it. Then it was tedious. However, then I realized how well I was doing on the online quizzes and the in-class quizzes and knew that something must be working!"

Understanding is key. But not superficial, light-bulb moment of understanding. In STEM, true and deep understanding comes with the mastery gained through practice.

Ms. Oakley is an engineering professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., and the author, most recently, of "A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)," (Tarcher/Penguin, 2014).

YOU HAVE TO HAVE BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE TO BE A GOOD READER

Common Core’s push for “close reading” goes awry when it ignores the reader’s background knowledge, writes cognitive scientist Dan Willingham on RealClearEducation.

"As I’ve seen it described, close reading has three critical features. First, we assume we will spend a good deal of time with a text. We will not simply read, but reread, and likely reread again. The first reading may be devoted to straightforward comprehension, but further readings will uncover other layers of meaning, allusions, techniques of authorship, and so on.

Second, the extended time spent on a text will be devoted mostly to the author’s words. We will pay close attention to the particular words used, to the structure of the argument, and so on.

Third, we will view a text as being self-contained. We will only draw conclusions that are defensible via the author’s words. In fact, we will read the text as though we know nothing about the subject at hand; the author’s words will be not only necessary for our interpretation, we’ll consider them sufficient."

That last part is crazy, writes Willingham. “Pretending that one’s knowledge is not relevant to interpreting a text conflicts with how writers write and with how readers read.

Researchers Eli Gottlieb and Sam Wineburg showed the importance of background knowledge when they asked clergy, scientists and historians to read George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789.

"Clergy and scientists focused on Washington’s invoking the “providence of Almighty God,” and other religious phrasing, with clergy applauding the Christian tone, and scientists upset by it.

Historians, in contrast, focused on what the document did not say; it did not mention Jesus, nor salvation, nor Christianity. They saw the document as Washington’s self-conscious attempt to craft a statement that would be acceptable to the diversity of religions practiced in the United States, and in so doing send a message of religious tolerance and separation of church and state. That Washington knew his audience may be adduced from the fact that clergy at the time protested the lack of overt Christian references."

"No amount of close reading restricted to the text would lead present-day students to this interpretation."

Reading in a knowledge vacuum makes no sense, Willingham concludes.

HT JOANNE JACOBS

- See more at: http://www.joannejacobs.com/2014/09/whats-wrong-with-close-reading/#sthash.uE5cepEj.dpuf

From Core Value Series - Talk to Student Body about Respect for Classmates

Respecting Classmates

Sometimes it’s easier to respect people we don’t know more than the people we do know.

• If you were to come across your favorite athletes or music stars, you would probably treat them very respectfully, because you are in awe of them.  
• However, if you think about it, you don’t really know them. You only know the impression they present through the media.  You don’t if they’re really nice people or not.  You don’t even know whether or not they are good people.  If fact, we’re finding out some of our favorite football players might not be the role models we thought they were.  That doesn’t take away from their accomplishments, but it shows us there is a side to them about which we know very little or nothing.

Now with people at school, our friends and others, we might know of their accomplishments, but we also know their faults.

• Unfortunately, most of us us tend look for faults in others, whether they be real faults or not.  Sometimes our classmates have habits we don’t like.  Maybe we don’t like the way someone laughs.  We might hate the fact that someone wants to answer all the questions in class, thinking they’re being show-offs, when in fact they might just love to participate in class as an athlete does in sports.
• Maybe we are jealous of them for some reason - appearance, personality, intelligence, the size of their home, the type of car they arrive to school in, etc.
• There are also many times when we are pressured by our friends not to be a friend to someone else.

In Mark 12:28-31 (KJV) Jesus gives us the two commandments that show us the importance of how we should revere God and treat our friends.

28 And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all?

29 And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:

30 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.

Love thy neighbor as thyself.  Our neighbors are everyone besides ourselves.  How many of us can truthfully say we always uphold this commandment?

No one attending chapel this morning wants to be excluded, laughed at, embarrassed, told we’re stupid, or lied to.  For some reason, (hint - it’s pride) we expect others to treat us respectfully, but we don’t reciprocate that respect.  After all, we can come up with all kinds of self-justifications for why we don’t always treat people nicely:

• I’m busy, don’t bother me.
• I didn’t sleep well last night.  How else do you expect me to act?
• My parents are on my case and I’m in a bad mood - deal with it!
• I had a fight with you know who.  Would you defend me by sending them a mean message on snapchat or instagram?

Sometimes, we enjoy making people uncomfortable; I call it pushing people’s buttons.  We know just what to say to certain people, whether they be our parents, siblings, friends, or non-friends that cause them to react in a certain way that gives us pleasure.  

Why do we do this?

• We get a misplaced sense of enjoyment in watching others’ discomfort.
• We gain power over others.
• It makes us seem better than they are -  we feel superior.
• Maybe we just like to find fault with others.  This is something my own mother constantly chided me for.  I can hear her now saying in not too gentle a voice, “Michael, quit always finding fault with people!”

Jesus tells us we need to take care of our own issues before we try to fix everyone else’s.

Matthew 7:3-5 English Standard Version (ESV)

3 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

The log and speck are metaphors for our faults.

We will find it easy to show our classmates respect, when we deal with our own faults first.  And believe me, each of us can stay busy enough working on our own faults to keep us from focusing on our classmates’ faults!

One more thing - in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us to “...Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”  If someone treats you badly, pray for them.  Don’t pray that God will “fix” them, but pray for them as you would for yourself.  Ask the Lord to bless them.  You will be surprised by the changes that the Lord will bring in your relationship with that person.