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Teachers do more than simply give lessons on people, places, and dates to memorize. And though they teach us the fundamentals of how to read, write, and solve equations, some also go beyond the basics. Teachers are some of the most impactful people in their students' lives. Dan Gill, a social studies teacher at Glenfield Middle School in Montclair, New Jersey, takes the opportunity to positively impact young minds very seriously.
After 52 years of teaching, he knows a thing or two about how to get through to his students. “One of my jobs is to take complex ideas and make them meaningful to kids,” he says. “Kids work well with symbols,” he points out, which is why he's kept an empty chair in the center of his classroom for the last several decades.
In the 1980s, during a lesson about the Civil Rights movement for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Gill first shared a story with his students about a deeply troubling encounter he and a friend experienced in 1950s. A 9-year-old Gill, white, and his best friend, Archie, Black, went to a birthday part in Gill's New York City apartment building. When they rang the bell, the mother of the child having the party looked at the two boys, and told Gill there were no more chairs. Confused, he offered to sit on the floor or to get more chairs. The woman repeated that there were no more chairs. Finally, both boys realized that Archie was not welcome because he was Black. Gill and Archie both left in tears. It was an interaction Gill would never forget, and drove him to where he is today.
“I put a chair in my classroom so that anybody who comes to my classroom filled with anticipation, like a party, would feel welcome,” he says.
While visiting a friend of a friend in Key West many winters ago, I was smitten by the bookshelves in his living room. The built-in shelves wrapped around a window and ran to the ceiling, obviously the work of an expert craftsman. But from across the room it was the books themselves that dazzled my eye—their spines, meticulously arranged by size and color, made the wall look like a gigantic pointillist painting. When I complimented my host on his bookshelves and asked what he liked to read, he looked at me as if I was one very dim bulb. “I bought those books by the yard,” he said. “Then I arranged them in a way that’s pleasing to my eye. I haven’t actually read them.”
A proud philistine, the man saw books as accessories, décor, objects that derived their value not from their contents but from their appearance. …
The power of books as “signifiers of taste and self-expression” has been inflated by the pandemic. Parsing the background bookshelves of attendees in Zoom events has become a cottage industry, exemplified by the Twitter account @BookcaseCredibility, which collates screenshots of celebrities’ bookshelf backdrops. It has more than 115,000 followers, proof that people have an abiding belief in the power of books to reveal character or an insatiable hunger for the hardware of celebrity. Or maybe a bit of both.
But this kerfuffle is not about the use—or misuse—of books as fashion accessories, home décor, or branding tools. Call me Pollyanna, but I don’t think that Ashley Tisdale and Dior and Gigi Hadid are trivializing books. They’re doing precisely the opposite: they’re reminding us of books’ outsize power to shape our perceptions of their owners. You want to understand someone? Peruse the contents of her medicine chest, her garbage can, and her bookshelf. One’s literary tastes can reveal not just aesthetic preferences but aspects of character. This is because of the investment books require—not only of money, but of time and psychic energy.
(NewsNation) — North Carolina foster dad Peter Mutabazi is being hailed a hero after adopting a 13-year-old boy who was abandoned as a child at the hospital by his adoptive parents.
Mutabazi discussed his journey to becoming a foster parent during an appearance on “Morning in America”.
At age 10, Mutabazi ran away from home in rural Uganda to escape his abusive father. For five years, he survived on the streets of Kampala, a city of 1.5 million, until one man saw potential in him.
“As a street kid for five years, a stranger saw me and he took me in,” Mutabazi said. “He took me in as who I was. I wasn’t the best kid. But yet he saw the best in me.” …
“I wanted to do the same for other kids who needed a home, who needed to be loved, he said. “And also who wanted to belong to a family as well.”
Mutabazi then became a single foster and adoptive parent.
“I had never seen single men look like me adopting kids. So I thought there’s no way they can allow me.” he said. “And as soon as I got to know I can be a foster dad, that day, I signed up.
When Michael Martin accepted the pastor position at Stillmeadow Community Fellowship, he expected he’d preach, pray, counsel, marry, bury, baptize, and otherwise shepherd the flock at the Evangelical Free Church in Baltimore.
He didn’t plan on becoming an urban forest keeper.
“It took a minute,” he said, laughing at the evolution of his ministry.
Gary Koning knows how that goes. What started as a pretty typical stream clean-up effort has completely altered his congregation at Trinity Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
“From one thing it has grown to another and another,” said Koning, now an expert on watershed macroinvertebrates.
The two men don’t know each other and don’t have any common connections. But in their separate churches, and their separate callings, they both found that being faithful in ministry meant taking care of nature. Christ’s call to “feed my sheep” required tending the patch of earth where their churches were standing. While not every congregation, or every Christian, has a literal garden to tend, Martin and Koning’s ministries offer examples of what the sometimes-abstract concept of “creation care” can look like taken seriously.
Amid the pandemic, social upheaval, and generational shifts in church membership, both pastors have seen how the special relationship between God and nature, a communion reflected throughout Scripture, has given new life to their congregations.
This week, a Christian “family camp” at a Colorado Springs church featured Lauren Boebert, who is among the most extreme MAGA members of Congress and an overt Christian nationalist.
Boebert makes a career of being outrageous. For that reason, I’m loathe to write about her. But she’s becoming a headliner in some Christian circles and raising more than a few eyebrows. At the Colorado Springs event, she said she prayed for President Biden using Pslam 109, “May his days be few.” Of course, it went unsaid by the Congresswoman that the next verse reads, “May his children be orphans and his wife a widow,” a line that surely most people in the audience knew. (It isn’t entirely original, either. Psalm 109 was used to pray against Obama as well. I wrote about that in 2009.)
The prayer was bad enough. But she couldn’t resist going further and offered up this take — how Jesus could have saved himself from crucifixion if he’d only had a couple of assault rifles at Gethsemane… [HT: JR]
Veterinarians are calling on animal lovers to stop buying English bulldogs, because of "major" concerns about their health.
The breed, also known as the British bulldog, is "compromised" by a "high rate of health issues related to extreme body shape" that has been bred into them, according to the UK's Royal Veterinary College (RVC).
A new study by the college calls for "urgent action" to reduce the many serious health problems that, it says, are associated with the breed's "exaggerated features," such as their flat faces.
The vets hope the study, which reveals that English bulldogs are more than twice as likely to develop a range of health disorders, will deter people from breeding and buying dogs designed to look this way.
In a press release posted online, the college said: "The English Bulldog has risen sharply in popularity in the UK over the past decade. However, its distinctive and exaggerated short muzzle, protruding lower jaw and stocky body shape has been linked with several serious health and welfare issues, including breathing problems, skin and ear diseases and eye disorders.
"Sadly, many of the breed's problematic characteristics such as a very flat face, deep facial skin folds and noisy breathing are still often perceived by many people as 'normal' or even 'desirable' novelties rather than major welfare issues."
The RVC's VetCompass program compared the health of random samples of 2,662 English bulldogs and 22,039 dogs of other breeds. It found the bulldogs were more than twice as likely to have one or more disorders in a single year than other breeds.
Regarding ^Are Books Accessories"
Dallas Willard wrote, The most often lie spoken in academia is , "yes I've read that book."
I wonder what we would learn by examining Lauren Boebert’s bookshelves, medicine cabinet and trash? . . . . Nah.