all the same, this is some exciting news : ).
Blessings to you, our beautiful daughter!
"I have the vocation of an apostle. I would like to travel over the whole earth to preach your name and to plant your glorious cross on infidel soil. But oh, my beloved, one mission would not be enough for me, I would want to preach the Gospel on all five continents simultaneously and even to the most remote isles. I would be a missionary, not for a few years but from the beginning of creation until the consummation of the ages."St Therese of Lisieux, who said this, entered the Carmelite convent at age 15 and died at age 24. She is a Doctor of the Church and is the patron saint of missions. Talk about Kairos! .... a moment, or a succession of them, that turn into a cascade. She was the one that said as a small child "I choose all!" and God heard her. In following a Little Way of doing small things with great love, she is an icon for Our Lord's words:
My grace suffices thee; for my power is perfected in weakness.
“I must say that all of us have moments when we can lose heart in the face of the great many things there are to be done and of the limitations of how much we can really do. This is also true of the new Pope. What things should I be doing at this very moment for the Church, with the many problems, many joys, many challenges in regards to the universal Church? Many things come up from day to day and I cannot answer in relation to them all. I must take my part, and do what I can, but I search for the priorities.”He goes on:
“The time put aside for prayer is not time wasted from our pastoral responsibilities – it is a proper pastoral work to pray for others… It is proper for a pastor that he be a man of prayer, that he stand before the Lord praying for others, even taking the place of others, who perhaps don’t know how to pray, don’t want to pray, don’t find time to pray.”St Therese wrote:
Simple.... not easy, though. I have been struggling with love. Easier to move through the day in routine, easier to follow old patterns and choose things because they are comfortable and convenient, easier to get out of balance and affected by things outside of myself. .
“I understood that the Church had a heart and that this heart was burning with love. I understood that love comprised all vocations.”
So the MRI research shows that an early adolescent brain -- age 12 to 15 -- undergoes another flourishing of synaptic connections similar to early childhood's -- before a pruning and consolidating takes place in later years. This flowering and consolidation help explain why a young person can seem so mature in some ways and yet make drastic misjudgements. The Teen Brain -- "A Work in Progress" -- mentions the same phenomenon.
by the time a child reaches the age of six, the brain is 90 to 95 percent of its adult size. But massive changes continue to take place for at least another fifteen years. They involve not just the familiar “grey matter,” but a substance known as “white matter,” the nerve tissue through which brain cells communicate — literally the medium that delivers the messages. White matter develops continuously from birth onward, with a slight increase during puberty. In contrast, grey matter — the part of the brain responsible for processing information, or the “thinking” part — develops quickly during childhood and slows in adolescence, with the frontal and temporal lobes the last to mature.
And this is the crux: the frontal lobe, or more precisely the prefrontal cortex, is the home of the so-called “executive functions” : planning, organization, judgment, impulse control, and reasoning. The part that should be telling the sixteen-year-old not to dive off the thirty- foot cliff into unknown water. The seat of civilization.
Time-lapse MRI images of human-brain development between ages five and 20 show the growth and then gradual loss of gray matter, which consists of cells that process information. (Red areas contain more gray matter, blue areas less.) Paradoxically, the thinning of gray matter that starts around puberty corresponds to increasing cognitive abilities. This probably reflects improved neural organization, as the brain pares redundant connections and benefits from increases in the white matter that helps brain cells communicate.Cognitively, then, people are still in the development process past early childhood, into the adolescent years and perhaps beyond that. If you've worked with young people or been one, you've probably noticed this yourself. One thing of interest is that it's often during the "pruning" stages that a young person seems to show the most obvious cognitive leaps. When you are parenting, you often notice a "disorganized" time in a child's life and then a developmental surge somewhat after that. I am wondering whether the "disorganized" times are when the synapses are connecting and the quieter times of more obvious development are pruning times. Just a thought.
As early as the 1960s research began to show that only a small minority of the pathways through adolescence were characterized by storm and stress.He goes on to talk about the "5 C's" of successful teenage living, which look much like the C's of successful adult living, in fact:
The 5 C's are competence—not just academic but social, vocational and health competence. Confidence. Then character, that it's fundamentally important to do what's right. Connection, or working collaboratively with parents, peers, siblings, teachers, coaches. Finally, caring, a sense of compassion or social justice.
These examples astound us in our day and age, but this is because we view life through an extra social category called ‘adolescence’, a category that would have been completely foreign to men and women just 100 years ago. Prior to the late 1800s there were only 3 categories of age: childhood, adulthood, and old age. It was only with the coming of the early labor movement with its progressive child labor laws, coupled with new compulsory schooling laws, that a new category, called adolescence, was invented. Coined by G. Stanley Hall, who is often considered the father of American psychology, ‘adolescence’ identified the artificial zone between childhood and adulthood when young people ceased to be children, but were no longer permitted by law to assume the normal responsibilities of adulthood, such as entering into a trade or finding gainful employment. Consequently, marriage and family had to be delayed as well, and so we invented ‘the teenager’, an unfortunate creature who had all the yearnings and capabilities of an adult, but none of the freedoms or responsibilities.This perspective from teenagers brings up one of the main things that I noticed while weeding through these linked articles, and several others that I didn't link to.
Through programs that embrace three characteristics: sustained relationships between adults and young people, teaching knowledge and skills to navigate the world and—this can be the most difficult—allowing kids to use those skills in valued community and family activities. Let your kids plan family vacations with you. Let them help set the menu for dinner. Or, if the parents give resources to charity, let young people help make that decisionI am not knocking his ideas for remedies, because I am finding out while writing this how difficult it is to treat a vast subject in a few words. I'm merely using this as a jump-off point for my own point, which is: While admirable in some ways, these remedies don't seem to address what seems to me the central point. Do you remember being a teenager? I do. Are you around teenagers? What do you think of them? To me, they are first and foremost people. Putting them in a class of their own, with special "programs" devoted to their expansion of potential, seems patronizing to me. While I don't know what Lerner's solutions would look like -- I admire JT Gatto's ideas about education, and it could be that these would be similar -- I do think there is always a possibility that good solutions, in the hands of second-rate practititioners who get control of "teens" as a "group", can end up just as band-aid fixes, and usually expensive ones.
I also think that each individual in a group, a homeschool or church or other group, plays a role. If social capital can be an evolving, grassroots kind of thing, then changing a negative into a positive is best done on an individual basis. One person making a change, then another and another. To promote the Good Things of social capital.A few more posts that I didn't want to drop off my "shared items" list without noting:
Putting myself in His hands day by day is the only thing that makes sense. I don’t understand the mystery of the present moment. The future doesn’t exist. Only by looking at the past can we sometimes see a pattern. But I believe, as a writer and as a Catholic, that if I seek to tie up each loose end at the end of a story, then God must plan to do the same. And when we reach “The End,” there will be not only a cessation of tears, but a deep sense of satisfaction in the readers of the Great Story.
I like to focus on the good things - these are the things I like to pass on. To me, they're like sunshine and fresh air: they help me grow. My newly neatened learning room is a good thing; my overgrown laundry pile is, decidely, not.
While I might love and respect Martha Stewart, I wouldn't want to be her. I'd really rather be me, even though I'm far from perfect. But I don't think any of us are meant to be so. I do think we can try to be our best. (Operative word try.) But remember, my best is not yours and vice versa.
To have Christian hope means to know about evil and yet to go to meet the future with confidence. The core of faith rests upon accepting being loved by God, and therefore to believe is to say Yes, not only to him, but to creation, to creatures, above all, to men, to try to see the image of God in each person and thereby to become a lover. That’s not easy, but the basic Yes, the conviction that God has created men, that he stands behind them, that they aren’t simply negative, gives love a reference point that enables it to ground hope on the basis of faith (Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth).The Joy of Learning, from Quiddity. This excerpt is long, but it is really worth it. The whole post is even better.
Is there a theme here? Something about connections?Of course, we only have that joy of learning if we ask questions. It follows that if we want our students/children to continue to grow in their own joy of learning we have to listen more to their questions and spend less time giving them information they aren’t ready for. The latter will not only fail to promote the joy of learning, it will confuse the child into thinking that learning (which he hasn’t experienced, though he may have been told he has) is boring. Which it is, by definition, because he just learned something he didn’t want to know.
Sometimes the moments are quite glorious, the result of days, weeks, years, even decades of inquiry and contemplation - the resolution of an ongoing mystery, the settling of an unending issue, the discovery of a vital piece of information that completes the puzzle, the connection between ideas that seemed to contradict each other.
When that happens, the joy can be overwhelming.
I just had one of those moments, and its particularly compelling to me because the epiphany I’ve just experienced explains why epiphanies bring so much joy.
The reason is because the soul of man in its intellectual function (which doesn’t mean that part of us that goes to college to unlearn how to relate to people; it refers to that part of us that seeks understanding, which is the energizing force of the two year old’s mind) is impelled to move in the first place by a need (not a mere desire) for harmony.
......The quest for harmony is, quite literally, the thing that makes us think in the first place. Survival may make us act, but survival is a practical application of harmony. We want to be in harmony with the world we live in. If it trips us or runs us over, our harmony is broken. While the pain bothers our body, the sense of a broken relationship bothers our souls even more.
The quest for harmony moves the mind. When we see it in a person, we call it integrity and we admire it. When we see it in a painting, we call it beauty and we love it. When we hear it in music, we call it beauty, and we weep. When we see it in the government, we call it justice and we rejoice. When we see it in math, we call it equality and we exult. When we feel it with another person, we call it love and we live.
Now the body is not a single part, but many.
If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?
But as it is, God placed the parts, each one of them, in the body as he intended.
If they were all one part, where would the body be?
But as it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
‘I will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me like flies. "There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.’
Students wonder why games fascinate them because they do. It is because they behold there something that need not exist, that could be otherwise, but which exists according to the rules, according to the drama of the game. We do not know how it will turn out. Our lives themselves are exactly like this if we think about it.
So play is both an introduction to ethics — play fairly — and to metaphysics, to the fascination of the things that are but need not be. Msgr. Sokolowski often makes the point, as does Pieper, and Aquinas for that matter, that the world need not exist, but does. Games need not exist but do. Life cannot be properly lived and games cannot be properly played unless we know their order, how they proceed. As spectators we behold something unfold before us, how things will turn out, according to the rules of play that need not be, but are.
..... Aristotle says that games are not so exalted as drama, but none the less they are like unto it. They take place in freedom. We can see in them that there really are things that are worthy for their own sakes," we suspect that there might be other things even more worthy."
"We emphasize reading and seeing more than writing. We do not demand that the children write until they are mature enough to have something to say and some reason to say it in writing. Consequently, writing comes much later for them than it does for the conventionally schooled. It astonished us to see how much writing the schools demand of young children these days. .....
We've done some tutoring of middle school students and we see how often these students confront more writing assignments than we think are healthy for a middle schooler. They show us notebooks with homework assignments to quotations from Herodotus, essays on "picture prompts", book reports and more. The little middle schoolers produce what is demanded of them as well as they can, usually cranking it out in simple declarative sentences without attention to style or concrete details. One such student came to our daughter Bridget, pleading, "Help me to be more creative! My teacher says I need to be more creative."
For us, writing is not a subject assignment but an ancillary part of other activities....
"Weekly debate practice included impromptu practice, in which they had three minutes to organize a five-point speech in response to a quotation. This practice gave them the skills and confidence to compose essays under time pressure, for testst, college admission, scholarship applications, and the like.. In turn, memorization of good models of rhetoric quicly improved the way they spoke and wrote. We suspect that the pressure on student in to write early may be as damaging as the pressure to read early. In any case, our patient and tactical approach seems to have served our children well."As for us, we do not have access to debate clubs in our area, and I do not think our kids would thrive in that environment. In our home, our "writing curriculum" seems to consist of reading and discussions, starting with picture books and pursuing "why" questions that the little ones ask about the book content, repeating lines from favorite stories or sometimes making up our own stories. It carries through read-alouds of chapter books and small research follow-ups and conversations after the chapters are read. During this time the children usually try their hand at simple keyboarded creative stories which they usually share with the family and sometimes with friends and relatives as well. It proceeds all the way up to the pre-college level where the children read books that have been major influences in the lives of their parents, and we have some great discussions. At that point, the projects get more ambitious. One child wrote a novel, another wrote extensively for newsletters and online story forums. Even now, when my son who is a senior in college calls on the phone, I often end up discussing books with him, or literary theory. He is even writing his senior dissertation on a topic related to literature.
- Now, for one conscious vacancy of sense,
- The stream is gathered in a deepening pond,
- Not a mere moving mirror. Through the sharp
- Correct reflection of the standing scene
- The mind can dip, and cleanse itself with rest,
- And see, slow spinning in the lucid gold,
- Your liquid notes, imperishable Time.
- --Christopher Morley