The following is a piece I wrote for the school newsletter several years ago. The movie in question is now somewhat dated, but the ideas in this piece reflect well one of the strengths of our school’s approach to our culture.
“My books are about killing God.”
Christianity is "a very powerful and convincing mistake."
- Philip Pullman
I can’t say it took me long to decide: when my friend called late one evening and claimed to be needing a post-exam indulgence, I couldn’t resist the temptation to join him at the movies. I had been intending for some time to go and watch The Golden Compass when it first came out – so on opening night a few weeks ago, there I was.
Many of you will have heard of Philip Pullman’s subversive novels and of this movie, based on the first book in the trilogy, His Dark Materials. I had read the book a few years ago, and knew it to be worthy of the accusations: the author clearly communicates his hatred for God and his scorn for everyone and everything that honours Him (the church, the clergy, C.S. Lewis, Narnia, etc.). So why go and see such a movie? Well, for one, I value good story-telling, and I had enjoyed reading Pullman’s novel. I’ve also been mulling over for some time the issue of parents’ duty to protect their children – since Pullman’s works have been so wildly successful among children, I thought the movie would be relevant to my thoughts.
Stories are powerful – far more powerful than most people imagine. Often with the greatest of subtlety, they shape the inner heart; they undermine cherished beliefs, they conjure new ones. Because Pullman’s writing quietly assaults the truths about God that Christians hold dear, they must be kept far from our children. Like letting a snake into a garden, allowing them into our children’s lives would counteract our work of edifying their faith and leading them to know and love Jesus.
Parents who send their children to Christian schools sometimes hear the accusation, “But you’re sheltering them!” The obvious premise here is that sheltering children is bad – or in other words, parents shouldn’t protect their children and shouldn’t act as gatekeepers, discerning which influences will help and which will hinder. But shepherding our children in this way is our obligation! We live in a world that hates the truth and seeks to squelch it in others.
There is, however, an important limitation on this work of sheltering: it ought slowly to disappear. While they are young and their spirits are so malleable, we need to surround our children with that which points to Christ. Then, once they have come to faith and experienced some maturity, we need to train them to engage the world and its ideas – and not to shrink away from danger.
We should look forward to the day when our children are mature enough to read Pullman and Dawkins and Freud and any other subtle or overt antagonists of Christianity. At that time, we should read these books with them carefully and thoughtfully, paying heed to lies and to truth, to goodness and to evil.
For now, when they are young, let us happily read to them those stories that reinforce what we believe – in order that they, too, may believe.
I’ve often heard that making children memorize will dull their minds, curb their creativity, and turn them off of school.
Learning by rote has a very negative connotation in most people’s minds. What was once a valued tool in a teacher’s toolbox of methods is now old-fashioned. It would be a laughable mistake for a school, for example, to put in its promotional ads something like “We employ the rote method of learning”! If you read modern educational literature, you will find virtually no conversation about the place of memorization in the classroom.
But for Christian schools since the dawn of the early church (and for Jewish schools and homes long before then), rote memory work was an essential element of learning. Jews and Christians felt strongly about this approach for a number of reasons, but the simplest one is that the Bible commands us to teach the Bible in this way:
“These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”
But Christian school teachers do not ask our students to memorize the Bible only because the Bible itself commands it (although that would be a good enough reason on its own) – we do so also because this is the right thing to do for our students’ minds. This is particularly true for students in the younger grades, when minds are fresh, impressionable, and inclined to soak things up quickly and easily. I know that in my own case, what I memorized when I was young is still with me; what I memorized last month I’ve already lost somewhere in my mental filing cabinet.
Several years ago, the teachers decided to introduce a new school-wide approach to Bible memory work. We became convinced of the value of coordinating our efforts to teach the Scriptures in a systematic way to our classes. This new system organizes the passages by grade level, so that our students will all learn a predetermined collection of what might be considered the most important passages in the Bible (including the names of the books of the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed). Students carry a folder of work with them through their years at Immanuel, so that by grade nine, a student who has been in the school since kindergarten will have learned 56 selections of Scripture. Some are short; some are quite long. But in the end, our students will have accomplished something very significant – they will have committed to memory passages that will shape the rest of their lives.
(If you would like to see a copy of the list, let me know.)
French entered the mainstream in Canada several decades ago for some very good reasons, most of which have nothing uniquely Christian about them. Many years ago, as a five-year-old French student, I was too young to know why my teachers were making me learn all these funny new words. If they were hoping to prepare me to be able to work in better jobs once I graduated, then their hopes were ultimately realized: the best jobs I had through high school and university required fluency in both official languages. Having children learn French in order for doors to be opened down the road is wise.
However, a far more convincing reason for studying French, I believe, is the positive effect it has on the mind. When we help a child to make sense of new channels of vocabulary, grammar, and expression, we are stretching the mind, making it more open and adaptable. The child who has mastered a new language is far more ready to take on similar challenges – and not just linguistically. I have no doubt that students who learn a second language when they are young find it easier to learn new subjects as they come. There’s a good reason why upper-level teachers tend to prefer the French Immersion classes: their students’ minds are typically better-prepared for chemistry, history, geometry, etc.
But Christian parents are also deeply interested in their children’s spiritual development. Having them learn another people’s way of communicating teaches them a powerful lesson in humility: the child learns to submit to another culture and to admire its many unique values and ways of expression. By studying another person’s language, our students quietly express an interest in them. They learn to care about someone else and to understand what is important to that person.
Moreover, we can certainly hope that God would choose to send some of our students overseas in time, to learn languages and to share the gospel with those who haven’t yet heard.
In prizing French here at Immanuel Christian School, we are preparing a generation of students who will have sharper minds, more hospitable spirits, more open doors – and, yes, better resumes!
On the first day of classes in my first year of teaching, I wondered if I might be in for an interesting year after a colleague witnessed a student pointing at me and directing a friend to “Look at the nerdy new student with the tie!” Because I looked young, it was to be expected that my place as an authority in the classroom would soon be questioned. Sure enough, a few weeks later a young lad in my grade nine class erupted in angry defiance in the middle of an English lesson. His displeasure at my foiling of some plan of his was clearly evident. A few hours later, Leo, our principal, had “Bobby” sit down with us and proceeded to engage him in a dialogue about his reaction in class. The line between principal and counsellor quickly blurred as Leo sought to help Bobby understand how his actions were fundamentally manifesting a problem of the heart. As it turned out, Bobby was deeply upset and angry about his family situation at home, and had developed what Leo called a “fire inside.” When I, as an authority in his life, placed expectations on him that he resented, this fire “burst out” in sinful ways. We engaged with Bobby over many months as we sought to help him deal with what threatened to become a debilitating life-long problem.
At the same time, my wife was employed in a public school elsewhere in Ottawa, and she was dealing with more severe behaviour. After a student threatened to kill her, the principal suspended him for several days and then sent him back to class. In that system, we realized, a little massaging of their problems is all that some students ever experience.
My reason in writing this is to reassure you that we teachers are not here merely to give our young scholars the best academic training that we can, but that we are also here to work, as many schools put it, in loco parentis – “in the place of the parent.”
A Bible passage that has inspired Immanuel Christian School throughout its twenty-six years of operation is a Proverb of Solomon: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (22:6). This school was founded in order to assist you in training up your children as followers of Jesus. For six hours each day, you choose to entrust to the teachers of ICS your work of training your children in the way they should go.
I’m sure it won’t be a shock to divulge to you that our students here are very normal – you all know that from spending time with them at home! Like all other children, they have problems with anger, harsh words, disobedience, lying, and the lot. But I can promise you that we won’t just tell them what’s unacceptable and then reprimand them. Caring as we do about the development of the whole child, we routinely engage in meaningful small-group and one-on-one guidance.
With such an excellent student-teacher ratio, we have the time needed to pursue our students’ real health – health in body, mind, and spirit. I’m regularly able to sit down with students and address problems of the heart. In these conversations, I always try to establish first of all with the child what actually occurred; often a straightforward reckoning of events helps to clarify for them what went wrong. Then we talk about how their behaviour measures up to what the Bible says. I try to think of a Bible verse that addresses the issue. For example, I might choose for a case of dishonesty a verse like, “Those who deal truthfully are His delight.” If wrong was committed towards someone, I then lead the child in solving the problem biblically – that is to say, by asking for forgiveness. Once restoration of relationship has been accomplished, and I’ve had a chance to pray with the child, then I consider the matter finished.
I’m grateful for the trust you have given us, and I encourage you to pray for us regularly as we join with you in training up your children in the way they should go. -MM
One of the main predictors of a child’s future success with math is the ability to do math facts quickly and accurately. Even by grade 5 and 6, math concepts become complicated to the point that slowness with basic math (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) undermines the child’s ability to progress at grade level. Emphasizing what we call “mental math” is especially important when young, because of the foundation that it builds and because they learn it most easily when their brains are still young.
Ultimately, the goal of mental math is instantaneous response: they know the answer automatically, without thinking. As with things like music and sports, the most important way to acquire these math facts is practice. Done properly, the drills can (and should) be fun!
Here are some suggestions:
- Buy or make sets of flashcards. Start easy and then move up. As your child finds cards too easy, pull them out so you can focus on what’s more challenging.
- Play games with the cards. Choose a small set of them, perhaps 20, and time your child going through them. Let them race against Mom or Dad. Keep a little chart of their times, so they can see how their times go down with more practice. Seeing improvement over time is very motivating!
- Use what we call “manipulatives”: little objects that your child can touch and group.
- Do math while going about the ordinary work of life. While setting the table, for example, ask your child to figure out how many utensils are set at the table, using multiplication.
- Pull out a money jar and do some adding, subtracting, or grouping.
- Try doing some mental math exercises orally, perhaps while commuting.
- Try phrasing basic math questions as word problems.
- Find some good websites. www.aaamath.com is a good place to start.
- You can find some other game ideas here: www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/lesson/lesson339.shtml
- Some children react well to incentives. While intrinsic motivation is preferable, if your child works better for candy, it might be well worth it!
- Use dominoes for showing simple addition and subtraction (using the dots on the two halves).
- Maybe set a goal of just 5 minutes of work a day. Try doing it for two weeks straight, then maybe take a week off.
- There’s nothing like praise! Have your child show off for grandma or grandpa!
While it’s best for these skills to be developed while young, it’s never too late to work on it! Children in junior high who are weak in this area will certainly benefit from some extra practice.
“When we work, we work. When we pray, God works.”
- Hudson Taylor
No successful church, school, or family has ever been created or sustained without prayer. All human institutions are inherently fragile: one doesn’t have to live very long before witnessing or experiencing in them some painful strife or division. The only chance we have to make our homes healthy, our churches united, and our school truly successful is by spending considerable periods of time in prayer. I must say I have always considered it fairly mysterious that God would choose to bless us only after we ask Him. He often (but not always) holds off blessing us until we ask. Why wouldn’t He in His goodness and wisdom just automatically work for the growth of His kingdom at all times, regardless of whether people are praying or not? Isn’t it His kingdom? Well, He chooses to wait for us, and I believe that it’s because He genuinely wants to empower us.
Ironically, when we are frenetically busy with our many projects and plans, giving nary a thought to prayer, we accomplish very little. Or we even see our hopes dashed. But when we cease from our harried pace and settle down to ask God’s blessing, we finally start accomplishing things. He empowers us. What a marvellous and gracious thing to be permitted to join in God’s work, to be His very body on this earth! One of my prayers is that we at Immanuel will all grow in prayer, and that our meetings and community life will be characterized by a noticeable conviction about our dependency on God.
- Pray for Immanuel with your children. Encourage them to pray for their teachers. Lead them in praying for any students with whom they haven’t been getting along.
- In your personal prayers, ask God to guide the staff, committees, and board.
- Pray that God would raise up godly and talented people to serve as new board members.
- Ask Him to guide the school, that we may year-by-year become ever more successful in fulfilling our purpose.
- Consider committing to meet at the school with me for a regular parents’ prayer meeting. I would be delighted to book some time each week to join with you in this.
