Sunday night, the stay-up-late-reading part of my family was reading through The Fellowship of the Ring. Everyone should read about Tom Bombadil while sitting around a fire pit. Bombadil is one of those characters that separates real Rings fans from novices. He is not in the movies. He is a mysterious force of nature—or maybe he is nature itself personified. He helps the Hobbits as they are fleeing from Black Riders on the way to Rivendell. It has been a few years since my last reading of the Rings and this time I was blown over by something that slid right past me on the other reads. Frodo gives the Ring of Power to Bombadil. This Ring, the One Ring, has special powers. It corrupts and destroys all who hold it eventually turning them into creatures like Gollum who shakes his fist at the sun and retreats beneath the mountains (asking them to fall on him) or they turn a more powerful being into something like the Dark Lord himself. This corruption comes from all of the evil power vested in the Ring.

 

Recently, I met with a leader in Lancaster County public education. He graciously had agreed to talk with our board of governors concerning preparing kids for global competition. He made a great presentation. Interestingly, he pointed out some facts that are quite frightening. He admitted that he is preparing kids for jobs that do not exist yet (i.e., the economy is changing so rapidly that the jobs that our 9^th graders will be doing are in industries that have not yet come into being). Because of this, the technical, vocational approach to education is being questioned in some thoughtful corners of public education.  (In others, kids are still being heavily tracked into vocational fields—which is a bad idea.)

As readers of this blog know, I am not a big fan of many of Barack Obama’s policies. I did hear a story recently, however, that made me want to write in praise of Obama—not Barack, but Michelle. She started a garden at the White House. This has led to gardening craze across the country or so the story said. In Lancaster County this has trend has gone unnoticed because we have been gardening for a while now. Her goal is that her family would have good, homegrown vegetables. Some might quibble that it makes little difference concerning saving the planet or that this is just some political nod to the radical ecology left. Maybe, but I hope for more. Having never really liked fruits and vegetables until I moved to Lancaster County, I think it might just be because homegrown fresh fruits and vegetables taste so much better. The story on NPR said that because of this new emphasis on gardening a farmers market has opened just up the road from the White House. Having enjoyed our Central Market so much, I wish the same on our Representatives in DC. Pushing them one step closer to the sources of our life—the food that we eat can not be a bad thing. So, hats off to the First Lady.  

 

Ok, I had a story to post on the blog, I was going to send you to links and everything, but I went to the online version of the paper and the story is missing. I will continue to try to find it. It is in the September 15^th issue of the paper. It is a small story on the left hand side of the front page called—“SATs Decline at County Schools.” It is not posted online (!?!?!?!). 

The sum and substance of the article was that the SAT scores in the 16 public school districts in Lancaster County had dropped slightly from last year. This is bad news for everybody. Too often, parents who make the sacrifices to send their kids to private schools or Christian schools can be congratulatory when stats like this come out—“See that is why we made the decision that we did.” Of course, I am for sending kids to Christian schools. I am for it even if things like SATs did not exist. The problem with being self-congratulatory, however, is that we are still bound together as a community. Problems in one school—or in one part of the community—means problems, eventually, throughout the community. A disease in one part of the body can (and often does) destroy the rest of the body if left untreated. We can salve our consciences perhaps by hoping that our kids will—like spores from a giant dandelion—float off to some other community and not have to pay for the problems of our community. This, however, is not a happy thought for me—I would love it if my kids lived close to me. I want to see my grandkids. Also, I think that there is little hope that our kids—wherever they would move—that they would move to any place better than Lancaster County.  So, I am happy to simply take the problems of this place as my problems. By this all, I am saying is that when Jesus asked the Pharisee, “Who is your neighbor?” the right answer certainly was not “Hey, wait I did all that I was supposed to do in my little neck of the woods and if everyone behaved like me there would not be crime or people beaten and laying on the side of the road.” Bad news for our community is simply bad news for us. The problems of our community and its schools are our problems—this does not mean that I can or will agree to the mind numbing fixes that are normally foisted on us concerning problems in our schools. These fixes usually involve some new program that will “make tomorrow bright and shiny” or simply applying more money to the problem.  

 

We had a blast at Back to School Night Last Night. Here are my comments just in case you were not there:

This “Word from the Headmaster” marks a time of real change at Veritas Academy. Much of our Parental Memo will be migrating to our new ParentsWeb website. You are really going to enjoy it. There will still be words from the Headmaster (many will say that I can hardly avoid this). Also, I will posting more regularly to my blog, The Leaky Bucket. You can read these posts by clicking on the bucket icon on the homepage of the school website (www.VeritasAcademy.com).

 

Today was the first day of the 13^th year of my adventure here at Veritas Academy. I was still nervous. I got up at 3. If I looked punchy at the Convocation, it was that enough caffeine had mingled with the natural nerves that I was jumpy. The rest of the day went well. There were a few issues, but it is so encouraging to have the kids back and the faculty back. I missed them so much this summer. A school without kids (like we are in the summer) is like a farmer’s field without the harvest. By the way, these kids are great! Sure they have problems, but they are more fun than normal kids and they work hard and many of them have interesting senses of humor.

 

 

Recently, the missteps by the White House have been roughly equal to its steps. (I still have visions of Arlen Specter at Town Hall Meetings burned into my mind.) So, what do you do when you have been kicking the can? Well, you fall back on something easy—photo ops with kids. Easy, right? Wrong! Again, this White House exposes its naivety and it hubris by overreaching. They transformed something easy into a disaster. It made me think. What is at the root of the furor around this latest botched event? I am going to start with a presupposition that this opposition on recent missteps like healthcare and the Welcome Back to School Speech is a symptom of some sort of highly organized (Nazi run) conspiracy.  (This turning the guns on the people is the worst evidence of pride because it reveals a condescending attitude toward what seems to be a large cross section of the electorate—those people who are the boss of the Chief Executive.)

 

This morning my Old Testament reading was in Exodus. I read about the plague of hail. It did not read as I remembered it. The plagues, of course, were punishments on the Egyptians because of Pharaoh’s hardness of heart. The Egyptian people suffered because their leader failed to bow to the Lord. In the plague of hail, however, we see that God is merciful even to those He is punishing. He announces the hail in advance. Any Egyptian who heard and heeded Moses’s warning could save his livestock and his servants. God’s judgments discriminated not just between His people and their captors. It differentiated between Egyptians that would heed God’s word and those who would reject it. In reading through the plagues, it is harrowing to see the judgment of God and to consider what judgments He can bring against a nation. It was wonderful to see, however, that His wrath is not like ours. Even in His judgment He does not forget mercy.