Tag Archives: Teacher

Even A Blind Squirrel Finds A Nut Once In Awhile

Posted on by Standard 108

My daughter Rebekkah recently wrote a post entitled An Answer For Everybody which was her response to all the differing opinions offered up to my post An Answer For Arkenaten. Since she has graciously allowed me to borrow her laptop since mine died a truly horrible death, I have been reading the comments to her post to her over the phone.

The battle of comments rages on even now over these two posts, and tonight Arkenaten wrote the following:

“Reborn Christians are some of the most uneducated of the Christians sects, having little or no true understanding of the history of their faith or the bible, and are even less inclined to ask pertinent questions.”

Now, on the one hand, I find this statement to be merely an opinion thrown out to insult the person he was debating with. But, when I read what Ark had written to Rebekkah, her response was, ” That’s true.” I was very taken aback when she said that, chastising her a bit for her seeming callousness. But when she explained why she felt this was a fair statement, I had to reluctantly admit that she was right. But not before I snarked back a little. I hate all-encompassing stereotypes. I really do. I did mention I am the Queen of the Knee-Jerk Reaction, remember?

I don’t agree that Arkenaten has thrown out this tidbit out of any real knowledge or wisdom, but like we Southerners like to say, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. So at last, he finally gave me something to think about.

One of Rebekkah’s points that I couldn’t argue with is the severe lack of knowledge of what the Bible says and where it says it. A few years ago, Chef was working at a restaurant in a corporate park, and some of the people who would frequent this place were students of the Rhema Bible College, located here in Tulsa.

Now, I absolutely do not want to insult any Christians. I merely want to get people to ask themselves if they truthfully know why they believe what they believe. If this message doesn’t pertain to you, please disregard it. Not everyone falls into this category. I speak only to those who tend to rely on other people — teachers, preachers, friends, parents, books.. — but have not studied the Word of God for themselves. With so much in print, both in books and on-line, added to televised media, we are inundated by information. But all of that information needs to be secondary…The Bible needs to be the First and Last Word on everything.

I had numerous conversations with people in that restaurant, and many of them were with people attending the Bible school. And while they seemed ready to hit me with some form of “Shock and Awe” theories designed to impress with dry quotes of philosophers and some real twisting of random verses, they seemed woefully lacking in the basics of the Bible. For instance, I have been instructed in detail how we were already living in Jesus’s 1000 year reign, but that same person couldn’t tell me why he believed this. He quoted professors, and offered up some random bible-sounding stuff, but when I inquired about where these verses were in the Bible, he said he would get back with me. I never saw him again. One woman tried to tell me that Mary was not a virgin, and went into a long diatribe about her theories on that little tidbit. That one made me sad, because you simply can’t cherry-pick what you want from the Bible and then throw the rest out. There seems to be a real wave of Cherry-Picking theologians coming out of Tulsa right now, and I find this really, really disturbing. But doesn’t the Word say in Hosea 4:6:

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…”

Knowledge of what that Bible says is paramount to our walk with the Lord. A person who truly knows why they believe the way they do is not easily shaken from their beliefs. And satan is a worthy enemy. He knows how to attack us in our weakest points. By knowing the Word of God, we close down a lot of his abilities to attack us using our own minds; hence, the Word of the Lord is how we are able to carry our Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Ephesians 6:17.

Over the years, I’ve had many, many conversations with many, many Christians, and I would have to say that it is only a small amount of them that seem to have a firm grasp on what they believe and why they believe it, with scriptural references to back their beliefs up.

There are many excellent teachers of the scripture, both in the real world and here in Blogosphere. But as Romans 9 instructs us to do, we should study to show ourselves approved. An unbeliever should never know more about that Bible than a Christian does, unless a Christian is just starting out. But for those of us who have been followers for years, the Bible should be written on our hearts, a quiver of spiritual arrows, ready for any surprise attack satan would launch at us.

I don’t necessarily agree that Christians are the most uneducated, or that we don’t as a whole, ask pertinent questions, or know our faith’s history. But I do believe that there is always room for improvement, and seeing that the days of the end are getting near, I would encourage all of us, me included, to brush up on our Biblical knowledge, or if necessary, begin anew to commit God’s words to your heart. I don’t mean to randomly memorize verses, but instead, read the Word of God as a whole, so that the Holy Spirit will be able to bring to remembrance His instructions to us when we are really in need of it.

Tonight, when I read 2 Timothy 2, I also found these verses, and they seemed a clear instruction to me on how to handle the many, many debates raging on those two posts on my site:

14 Remind them of these things, and solemnly charge them in the presence of God not to wrangle about words, which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers.

15 Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.

16 But avoid worldly and empty chatter, for it will lead to further ungodliness,

17 and their talk will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus,

18 men who have gone astray from the truth saying that the resurrection has already taken place, and they upset the faith of some.

19 Nevertheless, the firm foundation of God stands, having this seal, “The Lord knows those who are His,” and, “Everyone who names the name of the Lord is to abstain from wickedness.”

That tells me that these sorts of conversations are not useful for me, and I am fine with leaving them to other people.

I hope you all have a peaceful evening!

– Bird

 

The Gift of Determination

Posted on by Standard 10

English: A 2010 Girardin MB-II school bus belo...

I have to admit that while I’m happy with how my brain turned out now, it was more of a love/hate thing back when I was first getting started in life.  Our relationship began to have real trouble when I was in the third grade. Evidently, I was unable to keep up with the class when it came to math, and I was dispatched, to my utter dismay and humiliation, to a mobile classroom on the outskirts of the school for an hour each day. While the rest of my class stayed put, I would have to scoop up my flagrantly different math text-book, exit the class with my cheeks burning, walk the long distance to the Special Ed building, all the while feeling stupid,  and meet a sugary sweet teacher who would talk to me like I was not only mathematically challenged, but also having trouble understanding the English language. The whole experience was completely appalling to me, and I decided that I’d work extra hard on my own so I could get out of the Special Education Math Class.

To me, my circumstances have always been something that I felt I could change, if I could just figure out a plan of action. While I may have been lacking in the mathematical area, I more than made up for it in the determination area.

Evidently, I have always been a control freak.. :-)

My plan was to get better at math immediately. Back then, though, there were no home computers, much less the World Wide Web, so I was a tiny bit unsure about how to go about becoming a mathematical genius overnight. Luckily, my mother had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica‘s, and I began my quest right there. Everyday after school, I would begin my research into a quick, sure way to improve my brain’s performance.  Often, I would get distracted from my mission, running across something entirely unhelpful, but way more interesting. And in time,  I found a little excerpt from an old research study that stated  how the brain worked in general, and had come to the conclusion that people who write with their left hands tended to have better mathematical abilities. Ah Ha! I thought.  All I needed to do, in my own estimation, was to teach myself to write with my left hand. This, I surmised, would “wake up” the right side of my brain, and I’d be a mathematical wiz…Good-bye, Special Ed Math. Hello, Popularity and Wealth. Actually, I didn’t really care about the popularity and wealth thing so much..just getting out of that humiliating class.

I had this gut feeling that I’d just stumbled on to a little known cure, and that soon, I’d leave my classmates in my mathematical dust…

So, I did exactly that. I practiced writing with my left hand for weeks, then months, and then years. To this day, I will occasionally write with it just to make sure I still can. I have so blended my left hand/right hand capabilities that I made myself somewhat ambidextrous.  :-)

But did it help my math abilities? I did catch up in math during my fourth grade year, and then later, in high school, I was able to hold my own, and to get good grades. I scored higher than average in math on my SAT’s, though I always find English grammar, literature, and the like easier to learn and understand, and those scores were higher than my math scores. I ended up working most of my life in accounting.

I have no idea if my little quest tricked my brain or not. Maybe, because I believed that it would make me smarter in math, it did. All I know is that I’ve learned that the brain is exceedingly magnificent and complicated, and we can train it to do what we want. Too cool!

One teacher that I admired and respected once told me that I was unusually logical, always breaking everything down to its simplest forms, which was actually a mathematical skill, and he thought it was unlikely that I was ever behind in math, but instead just wasn’t being taught in a method that I could learn from. Back then, in the 1970′s, the multiplication tables were taught by memorization, and he theorized that this method would not have been something I could have kept up with. A bunch of numbers memorized for reasons I couldn’t explain would not have been easy for me to retain. Instead, had the teachers shown me what exactly was actually being done when you multiply 2 by 2, I would have kept up just fine.

I remember thinking that I liked that teacher’s theory about my brain, but a tiny part of me wants to believe that in elementary school, I figured out a way to trick my brain into being smarter in math due to a little extra shot of determination. :-)

– Bird

The One Time Losing My Temper Worked Out In My Favor

Posted on by Standard 30

I thought I’d tell you a story about how I won a partial scholarship to Texas A&M, and how it really started with an

Buckholts Dry Goods

Buckholts Dry Goods (Photo credit: chickadee23) My mom actually worked for a little while at this store.. :-)

argument I had with a Home Economics teacher in Buckholts, Texas my very first day at this new school. Most of the stories that include me losing my temper end rather badly for me, but this one had a good result.

As I may have mentioned, my stepfather was (and still, is) a high school sports coach by profession, and growing up, he moved us upwards of 36 times. Sometimes we returned to towns we’d lived in before, but for the most part, I’ve gone to a ton of different schools, and rarely stayed long enough at any of them to put down real roots or to even bother remembering the teacher’s names. The two exceptions to this rule was Harlingen, Texas, where I would always return to the Christian private school, and Buckholts, Texas, a tiny town with a tiny public school. I went to my first day of high school in Buckholts, and unusual for us, I actually stayed at this same school for two whole school years. Buckholts was the keeper of a lot of my “Firsts” memories…first boyfriend, first kiss, first time I shaved my legs, etc. You get the idea.

Ask anyone who knew me in Buckholts back then, you’ll probably find that most people only remember me in connection to my football/basketball/track coach stepfather, and very few will have any direct memories of me. I had long figured out how to blend in the background, and added to the horror show that was going on in my family life, I was just fine with being overlooked. There are a few exceptions, of course, but I wasn’t a blabber mouth then like I tend to be these days, and I always felt self-conscious about people noticing me. So, I was pretty forgettable.

Being a tiny little school, my choice of electives my freshman year was a pretty short list– Home Economics or Agriculture. Now, as tough as you might get the impression I am,  being a biker chick and all, make no mistake. I’m a girly girl. I like girl stuff like pretty clothes, fingernail polish, hair ribbons, and when I was little, playing house. I could keep up with the boys when it came to climbing trees or playing tag, but my preference was always to have tea parties and wear aprons. So, it was kind of a no-brainer which one I picked…Home Economics. Agriculture sounded like I would have to get dirty, and that wasn’t all that appealing to me.

The very first day, the Home Ec teacher, I forget her name, instructed us to write a bit about ourselves and our families and then read it in front of the class. Now, it was obvious that this was her very first teaching job, and she was youthful and exuberant about launching her chosen career. Frankly, I think she let all the new-found power she felt about locking down her first paid teaching job go to her head, and that coupled with the fact that she was probably at best, 8 years older than us, just set up the perfect storm for our first ever interaction with one another.

I wrote a generic piece about my family, choosing to not share any intimate details about my own father, or the crushing divorce that wounded my very soul, or how my mom’s remarriage had all but taken her away from me too…on and on. I, instead, wrote names, ages, where we had lived, and stuff like that. Nothing personal or detailed. My family life wasn’t a story I ever shared with anyone. Period. Just too heavy for a “What I Did This Summer” kind of assignment. That’s how I saw it, anyways. The Home Ec teacher, though, was expecting my full and unbridled participation….

The Home Ec teacher, who was a big, somewhat notorious town gossip, had already heard the scoop about the new coach and his family over the summer, and she already had in her mind what she was expecting me to say. When I didn’t go into the gory details, not mentioning the divorce at all, she called me out immediately..and very publicly.. about not telling her and the class about my real father and how Coach was just my stepfather. She grilled me about my real father, a subject that had long been forbidden to talk about at home, right in front of the whole class!! I could feel the tears and hot embarrassment climbing from the pit of my stomach up towards my face. I could feel all eyes looking at me, and the shame at the thought of breaking down crying in front of these people was intense.  She accused me of being  misleading and dishonest in my report and she didn’t appreciate me not being more open with her and my fellow classmates. She was trying to sound authoritative, but all I could hear was that snarky, gossipy whine in her voice, and I could feel the rage building up. Seriously. What stones…!!!!

I think you know exactly how I reacted. First, I hated attention, so getting called out by the teacher in front of a bunch of kids I didn’t know,  on my very first day of high school was distressing, to say the least. Second, I don’t owe anyone an autobiography of the mess that was my family, and especially not about the dad I had installed on a pedestal in my mind, and who I had been forbidden to talk about at all, and third, if she made me cry in front of these people, I would die of humiliation..Just what exactly did any of my life history have to do with baking a damn cake or sewing together some random pieces of material into a quilt?? My mind groped for what this teacher could have possibly been thinking to get so incredibly personal with me, and in front of all these strange kids,  when we didn’t know each other at all, but nothing came to mind that could explain this behavior. My mind still reels at the audacity!

I remember my temper flaring up in what can only be described as Blackout Range, and I went off! I can’t even remember exactly what I said, but I do know that I was yelling, mainly because she had embarrassed me, and I wrapped up my tirade by dramatically ripping the stupid report in half, throwing the pieces on the floor, and telling her next time, she could just keep her nose out my beep-beep business. Then, I marched out of the class room, head held high, quick as I could.  Feeling the blaring red heat on my cheeks, I knew I was about to break down in tears, and not wanting the other classmates to see me cry, I beat a hasty retreat. I didn’t want to have been THAT girl… you know, the one who cried on her very first day of high school, at a brand new school. I’d never rebound after that. I’d be bully- fodder for sure if that got out….

I went straight to the gym and found my stepfather, half crying and half yelling my story out to him, in front of yet another group of kids I hadn’t met. I was making all kinds of first impressions that day. It was a gym, so there was nowhere to go that was private, and my rage was at such a level, I didn’t even care who heard me anymore. He listened, a confused look on his face, and then he escorted me to the principal’s office, the whole time not saying one word to me…As we entered the office, we came face to face with the  insulted teacher, evidently  pouring out her side of the tale before the new coach’s kid could cause too much damage. She sounded just as gossipy then as she had in the classroom, and I could tell from the principal and my stepdad’s faces, they were unsure how this strange incident had gone so terribly wrong in such a big way, and on the very first day of the school year, no doubt.

Now, in the entire time I’ve ever known my stepfather, I have never seen him get angry on my behalf, or even stick up for me in any kind of verbal assault. We aren’t close, and never will be. But this time, he seemed a little bit out of sorts with the nosy teacher, and he became brisk and authoritative. He politely informed the Home Ec teacher that she had overstepped her bounds, and that what we chose to share with people about our family was our business, and not something we owed to practical strangers or something we should be graded on, and he told the principal that he wanted me pulled from that class and put in to something else. Then, he abruptly left the office, leaving me standing with a confused principal and a nervous, panicky Home Ec teacher that had finally realized she’d misread the quiet new girl to a very large degree and maybe let her mouth run a bit excessively for her own good comfort… Not an auspiciousness start to the new school year for any of us, really.

The principal immediately walked me to the Ag Shop, and introduced me to my new teacher…an old man, with a missing digit on one hand. Yes, a total cliché, but completely true. And that was my first day taking Agriculture. For the two years in Buckholts, and the remaining years that I moved from high school to high school, I stayed in Agriculture programs as much as I was able. I raised chickens for FFA, and won Grand Prize, second, and third places at a major stock/rodeo shows, and earned myself a partial scholarship to Texas A&M, plus over $5000 selling the butchered chickens to Golden Fried Chicken in Cameron, Texas. :-)

English: Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 4P

English: Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 4P (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was FFA Sweetheart, twice, and FFA Vice President one year. I used my first home computer in Ag class, and wrote a simple DOS program on a TRS-80 that helped me place in District contests for Agriculture, FFA, and UIL. Later, I would go to tech school to learn computer programming. I ended up learning how to build a table, construct a birdhouse, weld, and most of all, I learned that I am not skilled in the art of building things with my hands, welding, putting together pre-fab birdhouses, or balancing a table. But, I loved every minute of it… I wouldn’t trade those memories for all the world. :-)

So, I can’t stay mad at the nosy, pushy, gossipy Home Ec teacher any more. I have a million wonderful memories attached to FFA, Agriculture, 4H and all those shop skills I sucked so badly at, and I can’t imagine how baking cakes and sewing clothes would ever have been able to compare. All in all, it was one time my temper actually worked in my favor.

– Bird