TO DO OR TO BE

 During this election season, there has been little talk about education, perhaps our country’s most challenging and most enduring problem. If education is mentioned, it seems to float around in terms of how many millions or billions and not get at the heart of the matter. Voters need to know exactly what that money is spent for. Such costs as school busses and hot lunches we take for granted, but what exactly do the teachers offer?

 When I learn that a young person wants to prepare to be a teacher, I want to shake his shoulders and scream at him to study the liberal arts first. Today we have two kinds of degrees, one that teaches you how to do something and one that teaches you how to live. Perhaps you can earn a degree in basket weaving and you may earn a satisfactory salary. (I really mean wages.) But such a degree does not teach you how to live. It takes the liberal arts for that. And what are they?  

 The liberal arts are (in alphabetical order) architecture, art, ballet, drama, language (foreign and your own), history, literature, music, philosophy and religion. It isn’t that you learn how to design a cathedral, or to preach sermons, or write the great American novel, but you learn about them, appreciate them, support them, discuss them and they enrich your life. When you are teaching third graders you might tell them the story of Narcissus from Greek mythology, who fell in love with his own reflection in the water (as a matter of fact, just yesterday I heard the word “narcissist” as a description of one of the presidential candidates. How nice to know what the speaker meant.) Then there is Procrustees from mythology who cut off the legs of visitors whose legs were too long for his beds. Of course, I do not mean the third graders should necessarily hear the entire myth with possibly gory details, but just the heart of the story.

 When I was in the lower grades in Tennessee, the superintendent of schools, Mr. James, paid us the occasional visit when all six grades gathered to hear the story he told us. He had a great gift of telling stories and I remember hearing Hawthorne’s “The Great Stone Face” without any horror in it. He was there on business, I suppose, but he took time to tell us a wonderful story every time he visited us. He had a business job to do, but he knew something of the Arts too. He was showing us how to live.

 I once knew a high school drill instructor who bragged that she had not read a book since she was in school, whatever level she meant. When I quizzed her about the literature we all studied in high school at the time, she could not identify any Dickens character, or name a Shakespeare comedy. How could anyone forget Madame Defarge? Or Silas Marner? Or Elizabeth Bennet? Or Heathcilff? Or Lady Macbeth? Or Hamlet? And if you know these characters they must have taught you something to live by. This may be different with each person. But it certainly does depend on the quality of the teacher. I knew a teacher who started a phonograph record to play Julius Caesar and left the room for the duration. You don’t leave a class of tenth-graders alone with Shakespeare! You teach Shakespeare and don’t depend upon an unsupervised recording to do that for you. You stand there and stop the machine to explain what the bard meant.

 But literature is only one of the liberal arts. I have a special affinity for it, of course, but I know something about all the fields of liberal arts. It's almost safe to say that all the subjects of the arts are related to each other, but it might be difficult to convince someone of the kinship between architecture and ballet, but  if one studies the two fields deeply enough, the relationship will probably turn up.

 Before any young person enters the study program in Education (to become a teacher), I suggest he spend at least two years in the study of the Liberal Arts. It can make all the difference. You will enjoy life more and learn how to live it.

A SLOW START FOR 2016

Here it is the third day of the new year and I still cannot work my computer. But tomorrow I expect to talk with my tech and learn a bit more. Windows 7 is so much more complicated than the old machine, an XP I think it was called. And I hear Windows 10 is much worse than the 7. There is no good reason for hiding a PRINT button, but that is what this one does. You might think, with all this time away from printing something for some purpose, I must be reading War and Peace. Yes, I have turned the page once! I haven’t reached page 400 yet. New deadline: the end of June!

 Now it is the fourth day of 2016 and I’ve talked with the tech and have added one more Blog. But Pete (my computer) would not print the whole blog in one size font! That is crazy. Right in the middle of my trying to get it spaced just right, comes a big ad for Windows 10. I think I’ll look into SCREEN MAGIC and see what that company offers.

 On another plane, thousands of Americans watched “Downton Abbey” last night, beginning its sixth and last season. At MorningStar was a morning tea called “Downtown Abbey Tea” in the printed day’s bulletin. I stopped by the front desk to see if there were any leftover daily bulletins. I found two and proceeded to scratch out the second “W” in the Abbey’s name. I said to the new girl on the desk, “Can you imagine an abbey’s being downtown?” She said, “That’s for today.” I said, “I know that. This correction isn’t for us residents. It’s for you girls who work this desk and print the bulletins.” She likely thought I did not know what I was talking about. But I hope she learned I was right.  

FRANKLIN GRAHAM, A FAVORITE OF MINE

If you watch Greta Van Susteren’s program every day, you will know the name Franklin Graham. He recently showed some of the shoeboxes his company, Samaritan’s Purse, gives at Christmas–boxes filled with goodies and toys--to thousands of children who would not have any Christmas otherwise. The money for these boxes comes from people all over America and perhaps other places, and total in the millions of boxes by this time. Of course, the boxes also contain Scriptures from the Bible.

 But on a recent show of Greta’s, Graham, who happens to be a son of Dr. Billy Graham, stated in essence that what this country needs particularly this Christmas, is a national call to prayer for our country. We have never experienced a political election as the present one that is full of turmoil. He is right, of course, and deserves the Nobel Prize for Peace. But the Norwegian Nobel Committee does not usually award the prize to such a Christian as Graham. That is a sad outlook on life.

MORE DETAILS

 
The word needs to get around that I was awake all the time someone was in my apartment. I want others to know someone did this, though not necessarily need know the name of the culprit. It should remind others not to leave their doors unlocked.

 It occurred to me tonight that the would-be burglar might have planned to use the can of room spray as a weapon against me, to my eyes for example, to make her get away.

 One of my friends said she did not know her apartment had a safe. She has a two-bedroom suite, as I do, and I advised her to check the second bathroom for it. Her highly intelligent son (who passed away) might have left something in it.

 This bit of action would not make enough to serve as backbone to a story. People ask me if I plan to write it up as a story. I say no. I need more time to finish the one in progress.

 Merry Christmas to you all!

 

THE REST OF THE TRUE STORY

The Director did come to see me about the would-be burglar. It was good to learn that these safes here do not open to a burglar’s key. It takes a code number by the resident and if that fails, the director will get the safe opened, but I will not say how. I suppose I knew this when I moved in but had forgotten it since I was not into safes. The suspect might not have known this either. 

 

A TRUE STORY

Have you ever been at home alone in the wee hours when you suddenly realized someone else was in your house? This happened to me, not in a house alone, but with hundreds in the building. Read on.

Last Wednesday night I did not sleep one minute, not the first time in my life for this ridiculous action. I was nursing a bruised right arm caused by a hematoma near the armpit and had trouble getting comfortable. About 6:30 (I later learned) I thought I just might finally drop off to sleep when I began to hear metallic  sounds that were emanating from a source inside the apartment. I became instantly alert without making a sound of my own. Then the bright ceiling light in the second bathroom turned on. I could not see into the bathroom but could see a slender strip of light from ceiling to floor about which there is no doubt. I looked and looked, and listened to the tinkling metal sounds. By instinct I knew the sounds came from keys, not a handful of heavy keys a janitor might wear on a chain, but small completely-flat-on-both-sides keys, such as those manufactured to unlock a box of trinkets. Make-believe keys I call them.

My first suspicion was that Geraldine had come to work earlier than usual and was going to start up the washing machine. But I did not have clothes ready for her to wash; so why was she staying so long in the bathroom with the bright light on? I looked out a window and saw it was still quite dark. Gerry did not arrive on her days here till 8:30 and it was always getting light by then. Now I began to be concerned about the drama playing in my territory. Then the bathroom light went out. I heard nothing. I waited for Act 2, with my eyes glued to my bedroom door. Then it moved. Yes, the door moved. It was ajar about a distance of 15 inches, because I had left a lamp burning in the living room for Gerry's arrival. I also had unlocked the door for her around 6:00 and went back to bed, and hopefully, to sleep. I did not sleep. My thoughts ranged that it was a woman intruder but finally settled on a man. He was quick and silent except for the keys. And he really knew what he was doing. He probably thought the resident here needed a light to sleep by and just forgot to lock her door! Man, if he knew the truth about these presumptions! Anyway, because he almost closed my door but not quite, he allowed a breeze from the windstorm outside my open bedroom window to blow the door fully shut and it made a sound. I could no longer see into the other rooms. I got out of bed in the dark and in silence and went into my bathroom to see the clock there. I got back into bed and when I felt the man had gone, I went into the living room and turned on lights, and into my study, and the second bathroom. I saw nothing amiss. The only thing he could have been tampering with was the safe in the wall. How glad I was he was rewarded with its emptiness! When I checked the closet the safe was in, I found one thing out of place: a can of room deodorant lay on the floor. He probably left in a hurry after the wind closed the door and didn't take time to pick up the can dropped on the floor.

There are so many appointments and such, I haven't had the chance to talk with our director about this. I hope to see her tomorrow afternoon in my apartment. I think the authorities should make a check for fingerprints.

EACH DAY A NEW BLAST

Today it's another attack on someone who criticized him. Can you imagine a daily White House attack on a head-of-state who is fed up with such childishness and effrontery from a buffoon? There is one hope possible: perhaps the polls for him are filled with votes by Democrats who are not going to vote for him. He could therefore, put Hillary into office. There might not be much difference between the two blatant mouths.

Where is there a real statesman for office? There is one running for this position. His name is Dr. Ben Carson. With the proper key selections for his Cabinet, he would be the perfect president of the United States.