Our children played in that wood. They made forts and fought villains. They did nature searches. Sometimes they just mused. Calling them home required no more than a loud whistle—the rule was that they couldn’t go so far that they couldn’t hear my whistle—so the wood acted as a large, inviting, and relatively safe play yard.

A few years ago, the owner of the property died. He was a gruff old man whose response to telephone inquiries about buying the property was “Did you see a ‘for sale’ sign on it?” after which he hung up. I don’t know why he wouldn’t sell. I’ve heard from neighbors that it was because this had been his family’s farm and he didn’t want to see all of it developed. Since the rest of the original farm (near Fort Utah and at the point where the first conflict of Indians and pioneers in Utah Valley occurred) was developed long ago, that didn’t seem like a good reason. I suspect the story about his farm was our gossipy invention, but it was the only reason we had, so we repeated it.

After the owner died, his daughters decided to develop and sell the property. The developer divided it into five lots along the street and made most of the acreage common property for the buyers. I don’t know whether that decision was dictated by creative insight or federal wet lands regulations, but it was a good idea, for it left most of the wood intact even if now inaccessible. Some people in the ward still feel all right about traipsing through the yards of the new homes to get to the wood behind them.

Everyone on the street was startled by the subdivision. It wasn’t that we expected no change. We had rumored amongst ourselves for years over what would happen to it, and “large condominium complex” was our worst fear. But expecting the development wasn’t the same as seeing it. Seeing it made us feel that we had been robbed. It took several years for the lots to sell, but once they did, houses went up immediately. The houses were big and expensive, and though the developer insisted on keeping as many trees as possible, their building required cutting down most of the trees that had formerly shaded the street, pushing the tree line eighty feet or so away from the road and toward the river. The new houses took away “our” wood and the character of our street.

It would have been easy to be put out by the change. The problem was that the people who moved into the new houses were a nice addition to our ward, and going from two or three teenagers whom we never saw to eight or ten elementary school children riding their bikes back and forth brought life to the street, life that we hadn’t seen in a long time. We were torn between disliking the new additions—carping about the architecture, the size of the homes, their cutting of trees—and liking the people who lived in them.

For Janice and me our carping and mixed feelings were resolved completely when one of our sons bought the fourth house. Grandkids knock on the door for a visit or to practice the piano. We try not to be busybody parents and in-laws (with how much success only my son and his family can say), but I love looking up from my desk to see our grandchildren on their bikes or in their yard, and I think it is great that I have only to walk across the street to visit with about one-third of my grandchildren. I love hearing them tell about their adventures in the wood. One day Sam, the oldest, brought over a beaver skull he found, though I don’t think he’s seen any of the beaver yet. The muskrats are out in the day more, so he’s more likely to see one of them. Snakes and tadpoles will be easy. The woods are ours again.

I have loved looking at these photos again and talking about them with my children and grandchildren. I have felt closer to them by doing so. However, seeing those pictures reminds me of times I had forgotten. And sometimes seeing them makes me sad, within range of crying. “Nostalgic” might be the right word for me except we speak of nostalgia as the desire for a previous time, an idealized time that never existed, and I don’t think that is what I’m feeling.

Part of what makes me sad is seeing the faces of all these people whom I knew and loved and who are no longer part of my world, most because they have passed on, some because they have moved on. Part of what makes me sad is the disconnect between the little boy I see and the adult that I am. He was the child of poor parents in a Border State, descendants of long lines of sharecroppers and dirt farmers. I am a bourgeois professor of philosophy. At least I am passing as one.

I don’t want to return to the days of bathing in a wash tub or pumping water from a well, but I need there to be more unity between me and that boy. I feel the need for my life to be a whole, but I cannot find one. Though the boy I see in the pictures is not alien to me, I am alien to him.

For me the sadness of nostalgia isn’t longing for something lost, but need for something that has never been

I’ve never been very impressed with a lot of educational fads. “Learning outcomes” is a new reworking of a fad that just keeps returning from the dead, but like many other fads in education, I think it often mistakes education with the transfer of information. Another current fad is learning-centered teaching. I have a difficult time imagining what teaching is if it doesn’t have learning as its result, so I think the name is mostly a public relations game: rename the thing and perhaps people will take renewed interest in it—not just Tide, but new and improved Tide, even if the only thing different is the box. Nevertheless, in spite of my jaundice, there is something in the learning-centered teaching movement that I like and that I think may be genuinely new: explicitly looking for ways to get students to take responsibility for their learning.

Ideally the teacher is a guide who helps students learn, but that ideal is seldom met. Most of the time teachers decide the course, set relatively arbitrary criteria, and evaluate the students by giving them grades according to the criteria. At least as it has worked itself out historically, that way of teaching has produced a system in which students play a game called “getting good grades,” and teachers play the game of using grades to sort students into piles. And in the end, university education amounts to little more than an extended and only marginally accurate IQ test. Almost everyone knows the rules of the grade game. I know them so well that, within a few days after class starts, I can tell which students are most likely to “win.” If I could get people to bet on student grades, I could make a good living as a bookie. The problem is that when we are playing the grade game, learning becomes something that happens “on the side” rather than at the center of class, since getting good grades and sorting students out is at the center.

In the past, I’ve tried to find ways away from the game and toward learning, with only qualified success. For example, in my beginning philosophical writing classes, and sometimes in other classes, the final assignment is to use the feedback from papers through the semester and any other relevant evidence to argue for the semester’s grade. If I am convinced, the student gets the grade he or she argued for. If not, I average the grades over the semester, including the grade on the final assignment. Of course, it is difficult for students to believe a teacher isn’t scamming them if he tries to avoid the game. They’ve spent at least twelve years in a system where grades are often the only game, and they continue to be the only game in most of their classes. It is reasonable for them to believe that this teacher is also playing that game, regardless of what he says to them (or even to himself). So, my experiments haven’t really gotten very far.

I dream of teaching a class in which students come, decide what project or paper relevant to the course they want to concentrate on, and use the class to help them learn enough to complete their project or paper. (Some graduate seminars begin to do that, but even in them the grade game takes an undue amount of class time.) So, in pursuit of my dream, I’ve tried to set class up this semester so that something like that can happen. Of course, I’m waiting to see. I’m keeping my fingers crossed—and I suspect that I may have to revise the curriculum more than once between now and the end of the semester.

Wish me luck.

She invented the modern bathing suit. She married three times, each more disastrous than the last. She wrote a series of missionary discussions aimed at Jews that was used church-wide. Two of her grandchildren drowned in her swimming pool. She owned the company that sold more bathing suits in the 1950s than any other. She was poverty-stricken in her later years as her fortune was squandered by financial advisors whom she trusted too much. She donated a significant sum to the construction of the Los Angeles Temple; the Relief Society sisters in the area hand-sewed thousands of sequins onto a bathing suit design that was so popular in 1954 that one would-be beauty queen stole it off of a mannequin. She was responsible for a good portion of the shape and form of BYU today. Her children lived for a few years in another country while she worked around the clock to establish her business. She was thanked by Marilyn Monroe as a major source of her success. She redesigned the temple garment at President McKay’s request. She allowed her twelve-year-old daughter to go on vacation to New York City, alone, for a month. She refused to design immodest bathing suits. She was an official, set-apart missionary for two decades, serving the church by sharing the gospel with everyone she met while running her stunningly successful business.

She, in short, lived an amazing life and may still be the most famous LDS woman ever.

Happy Birthday, Sister Reid.

Source: Rose Marie Reid: An Extraordinary Life Story

I love a lot of things about Italy, driving on a two-lane road that, when passing, locals use as if it had three, the smell of my neighbor’s wine at dinner, the sexy, musky aroma of the truffled cream sauce on our pasta, the texture of a linen bath towel, hearing Italians speak Italian, trying myself to speak a rudimentary form of it, cicadas strumming their own form of the language. But from the very beginning I’ve especially loved Italy’s colors: fields like golden sand bordered by tall, airy, green trees, dark hills surmounted by red and brown churched villages, rust tiled roof tops supported by farm house walls the color of the fields and their gray stones. Mostly, however, I’ve loved the sky.

Jet-lagged and unable to sleep, I open the window of my room at the very beginning of dawn. Across the valley on Mount Subasio is Assisi, a block of luminescence against the dark of the mountain. And above Assisi, the Mediterranean sky cresting and coloring the blue and gray hills, giving light to the mountain and to Assisi, the fields of sunflowers, the red and brown villages and the green copses, a light that after the sun rises will be clear and bright yet seldom harsh.

In Perugia, five hundred years later, I see what Perugino saw, what he placed behind each of his Virgins as well as in their robes and faces, and what he taught Raphael to see.

Learning to cook isn’t just a matter of learning the science of cooking. It is also and, in fact more so, learning the behaviors of a cook and the lore of cooking. It is becoming part of a community of practice. Almost (can I delete that “almost”?) everything we do we do as part of a community of practice. Even science is a community of practice, with specific language and expected behaviors that are not absolutely correlated with the objective facts about science, laboratories, etc. In other words, even scientists “salt the water before cooking.”

However, not everything members of a group do is necessarily one of its practices. Salting the water before cooking is a practice of cooking; throwing spilled salt over your shoulder isn’t, even though a significant number of cooks do. Even they recognize that it is, instead, something outside the practices of cooking.

So, what kinds of practices make us uniquely who we are as Mormons?

“But this free flow of information has also provided opportunities for us to learn and grow. The Church has many websites devoted to helping us grow our testimonies of Jesus Christ and becoming better people. You may also know that the Church publications are available online for the growing internet populous. You can find these through lds.org and mormon.org. In addition to these resources there is Mormon blogging community, the Bloggernacle, who, in realtime, discusses gospel topics, similar to your Gospel Doctrine classes. They can be found at ldsblogs.org. Brothers and sisters, we must utilize these resources for good, we must build these communities in order to combat the overwhelming influence of evil in this world today.”

Yeah, yeah, I know, this would never happen, President Hinckley would probably just direct everyone to Nine Moons, but let’s put that aside and assume he refers the entire Church membership to our little community.

What happens?

What would happen Immediately? After three months? After a year? After five years?

The natural birth advocates will tell you that everything from epidurals to c-sections have risks that you should avoid. They are half right. Epidurals and c-sections have risks. But not having an epidural and/or having a natural birth have risks, too. They just have different risks. You should make your decisions not with the delusion that you will be able to minimize all risks, but that you can minimize the risks that you most want to avoid. For example, you are more likely to end up with an infection if you have a c-section. You may want to avoid that risk at all costs. More power to you, sister. But a c-section (especially if your baby is large) will lower your risks of future urinary and fecal incontinence considerably. You will also avoid a considerable amount of labor and postpartum pain. You will also be able to schedule your delivery. To some women, these things aren’t important. To others, they are. I think there is a vestige of paternalism in the idea that anyone (whether doctor, mother-in-law, or natural birth advocate) can weigh these risks for another woman and inform her which option is “safer.” (It is hard, for example, to imagine a male cancer patient not being given a choice between chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery when each would have different risks and benefits in his case.) I am also very concerned about the downplaying of women’s pain as inconsequential. Again, you don’t see men rallying around the banner of the Natural Dentistry Movement.

Similarly, home birth minimizes some risks (your risk of being in a hospital, your risk of losing control of the situation, your risk of other medical interventions, your risk of sleeping in a strange bed and not eating what you want to eat) and increases others (your risk of delay for additional treatment if something does go wrong). Again, weighing these risks is a very personal issue and I fully support any woman who chooses a home birth based on her own assessment of the risks.

I do, however, have some problems with how that risk assessment is happening. First, many women have a negative perception of c-sections because their experience with them is something like this: they were laboring along just fine, thank you, when all of a sudden a bump on the monitor meant that all hell broke loose and they were hustled in for an emergency c-section. Scary–all that rushing around and changing of plans right in the middle of things. Not to mention that they got to recover from labor and a c-section, which statistics suggest is the hardest recovery of all. So a woman who has had an emergency c-section may not be the most objective source of information.

I also have a problem with the assumption that a c-section is something foisted on an uninformed or deceived woman by a lazy or malpractice-paranoid doctor. Undoubtably this does happen. But many women choose c-sections based on an informed assessment of the risks (see above).

You may be curious about my personal background: I had a poor experience with natural childbirth followed by two very successful elective c-sections. If I am blessed with another child, I would without hesitation choose another c-section. It isn’t the right choice for every woman, but it is for some. I hope that at some point, prenatal care will involve women being provided the data concerning the risks of various birthing options so that they can make their own choices and that their health care providers will then support them in their choice of home birth, natural childbirth, medicated childbirth, or c-section. We need better data for this to happen. (For example, very few studies bracket purely elective c-sections, so the data makes it look as if c-sections are actually much riskier than they are because they do not account for the underlying situation that led to the c-section. There is also a terminology problem even in the medical literature: sometimes ‘elective c-section’ is used for people like me who walk into an OB/GYN and say, “I want a c-section despite having no medical need for one” and other times it is used to mean the opposite of ‘emergency c-section,’ meaning that the doctor decided before labor began to perform it [for any or no medical reason].) But this article is a start. This is also interesting, as is this.

A final note: I welcome comments from natural birth advocates, including links to data. Please present us with as much information as you can find on risks and benefits. Just refrain from weighing those risks and benefits for anyone but yourself.

As it turns out, I don’t believe in big, government conspiracies, or big, NGO conspiracies either. Why? Well, lets let a commenter on one of Clark Goble’s threads explain:

having seen people try to do thing in concert, without concern for secrecy, makes me doubt that anybody could act in concert in secret, keep it a secret, and actually bring about the desired result

Exactly. Take church work for instance–until you try and coordinate a church activity, you haven’t lived.

Yet the Book of Mormon clearly teaches that “secret combinations” had a real effect on undermining Nephite society. These weren’t just open robber bands, either. They look, smell, and quack like what we’d call conspiracies.

How to explain the contradiction? The Church’s peculiar combination of a lay, revolving ministry and an underpaid bureacracy, I suggest, deliberately teaches us a false lesson about the competence of large organizations. It’s all part of the plot.

Update:

Hey, knuckleheads, that was my neighbor you just shot, not me. My office has my name on the door–can’t you read?

Threat:
if you want to talk 9/11 Conspiracy Theories, I have conveniently given you a link to Clark Goble’s threads. Don’t comment here. It’s comment deletion season, and I have a license.