Category: Youth Ministry
Teaching & Tech
Here is an interesting article from The New York Times about how classroom teachers and technology. My synopsis: teachers are arguing to keep teaching rather than becoming “IT” professionals in the classroom. I had good teachers, exceptionally good, and coach Cain that meant well, but knew more about football defense than biology. As I read this article I remember the problems with the Texas School Board and their revisionists history, Christian nation ability to redact what professional academics have written in text books. The fight for the classroom is who get’s to decide what is academically accurate and taught. Is this home schooling brought to the tablet? Education has become another consumer product and political wedge issue.
Teachers Resist High-Tech Push in Idaho Schools
by Matt Ritchel | The New York TimesThis change is part of a broader shift that is creating tension — a tension that is especially visible in Idaho but is playing out across the country. Some teachers, even though they may embrace classroom technology, feel policy makers are thrusting computers into classrooms without their input or proper training. And some say they are opposed to shifting money to online classes and other teaching methods whose benefits remain unproved.
“Teachers don’t object to the use of technology,” said Sabrina Laine, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, which has studied the views of the nation’s teachers using grants from organizations like the Gates and Ford Foundations. “They object to being given a resource with strings attached, and without the needed support to use it effectively to improve student learning.”
Searching for a Liberal Church
A few Facebook friends and my RSS feed pointed me to this article, “The Liberal Church Finding Its Mission: It’s Not About You.” These thoughts from a Unitarian Universalists minister are applicable to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and our lack of denominational clarity about who we are and what our expression of Christianity stands for or for whom. It begs to question what a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world means?
A couple of paragraphs and a link.
The Liberal Church Finding Its Mission: It’s Not About You
by THE REV. PETER C. BOULLATA | Held in the Light BlogAt one point he said to me, “You know, I should tell you this story. I have a thirteen-year-old son who has been asking a lot of religious questions lately. I was raised Catholic, but we’re not involved at all, and haven’t really given him a religious education. One day, my son was with me in the car when we drove by another Unitarian Universalist church. He asked me, because he knew that I had done some work for them, what kind of a church it was. When I told him, he asked what Unitarian Universalists believe. So I told him, ‘Well they don’t really believe anything specific. It’s a religion where whatever you think or believe or feel is what the religion is all about.’ And my son said, ‘That’s the kind of church I want to go to!’”
But my pleasant façade betrayed the bomb that had just gone off in my head. Oh dear God, it’s true. We have institutionalized narcissism. Here was a person that was not involved in a Unitarian Universalist church, and yet knew something about us. As an outsider, the message he received about what we stand for is: It’s about whatever you want it to be about. It’s all about you.
There is a contradiction inherent in liberal religion. We are free, autonomous individuals in community with one another. Tension exists between freedom and connection, autonomy and community. There is no getting around it. Our calling is to live gracefully in that tension, holding them with equanimity, without being weighted as we are now toward individual freedom and autonomy. Our capacity for being a transformative presence in the world is diminished when we neglect the communal, connected, covenanted aspect of our life together and when we focus primarily on the individual and their freedom. Our institutions suffer.