"The world is run by extraverts"

The worst things about teaching didn't happen in the classroom. They were in-service meetings involving "brainstorming" and whiteboards and vast amounts of wasted time. Alan Jacobs explains the real reason these things happen:

...[I]n 2005 a very thoroughly researched and well-argued scholarly article was published that demonstrates, quite clearly, that group productivity is an illusion. All those brainstorming sessions and group projects you’ve been made to do at school and work? Useless. Everybody would have been better off working on their own. Here’s the abstract of the article:

It has consistently been found that people produce more ideas when working alone as compared to when working in a group. Yet, people generally believe that group brainstorming is more effective than individual brainstorming. Further, group members are more satisfied with their performance than individuals, whereas they have generated fewer ideas. We argue that this ‘illusion of group productivity’ is partly due to a reduction of cognitive failures (instances in which someone is unable to generate ideas) in a group setting. Three studies support that explanation, showing that: (1) group interaction leads to a reduction of experienced failures and that failures mediate the effect of setting on satisfaction; and (2) manipulations that affect failures also affect satisfaction ratings. Implications for group work are discussed.

Has the puncturing of that “illusion of group productivity” had any effect? Of course not. Groupthink is as powerful as ever. Why is that?

I’ll tell you. It’s because the world is run by extraverts. (And FYI, that’s the proper spelling: extrovert is common but wrong, because extra- is the proper Latin prefix.) Extraverts love meetings — any possible excuse for a meeting, they’ll seize on it. They might hear others complain about meetings, but the complaints never sink in: extraverts can’t seem to imagine that the people who say they hate meetings really mean it. “Maybe they hate other meetings, but I know they’ll enjoy mine, because I make them fun! Besides, we’ll get so much done!” ....

...[E]xtraverts of the world, I invite you to make a New Year’s resolution: Refrain from organizing stuff. Don’t plan parties or outings or, God forbid, “team-building exercises.” Just don’t call meetings. (I would ask you to refrain from calling unnecessary meetings, but so many of you think almost all meetings necessary that it’s best you not call them at all.) Leave people alone and let them get their work done. Those who want to socialize can do it after work. I’ll not tell you you’ll enjoy it: you won’t. You’ll be miserable, at least at first, because you won’t be pulling others’ puppet-strings. But everyone will be more productive, and many people will be happier. Give it a try. Let go for a year. Just leave us alone.

Thanks to Mollie Hemingway for the reference.

Hey Extraverts: Enough is Enough | The American Conservative

Remembering those we have known and loved

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

and never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

and days of auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my jo,

for auld lang syne,

we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

for auld lang syne. 

Peggy Noonan on the song many will sing tonight:

"Auld Lang Syne"—the phrase can be translated as "long, long ago," or "old long since," but I like "old times past"—is a song that asks a question, a tender little question that has to do with the nature of being alive, of being a person on a journey in the world. It not only asks, it gives an answer.

It was written, or written down, by Robert Burns, lyric poet and Bard of Scotland. In 1788 he sent a copy of the poem to the Scots Musical Museum, with the words: "The following song, an old song, of the olden times, has never been in print." Burns was interested in the culture of Scotland, and collected old folk tales and poems. He said he got this one "from an old man"—no one knows who—and wrote it down. Being a writer, Burns revised and compressed. He found the phrase auld lang syne "exceedingly expressive" and thought whoever first wrote the poem "heaven inspired." The song spread throughout Scotland, where it was sung to mark the end of the old year, and soon to the English-speaking world, where it's sung to mark the new.

The question it asks is clear: Should those we knew and loved be forgotten and never thought of? Should old times past be forgotten? No, says the song, they shouldn't be. We'll remember those times and those people, we'll toast them now and always, we'll keep them close. "We'll take a cup of kindness yet." ....

Noonan: Days of Auld Lang What? - WSJ.com

Historical ignorance

Every test of the historical knowledge of Americans reveals appalling ignorance. It is apparently the same in Britain. A British history teacher explains what has gone wrong with the teaching of history there — and the idiocy struck here some time ago too.

.... The main tenet of a child-centred view of history teaching is the idea that pupils should not be "passive" recipients of a teacher's knowledge, but "active" individuals empowered to find things out for themselves. As a result, "chalk and talk" teaching from the front is heavily discouraged. After a senior member of staff observed one of my lessons, I was told that my role was to be the "guide on the side" rather than the "sage on the stage".

Instead of learning through listening to teachers or reading books, pupils are expected to do so through projects. It did not take me long to work out why pupils are so ignorant of British history, despite spending over a year studying it (as laid down by the national curriculum). To study the Norman Conquest, pupils would re-enact the Battle of Hastings in the playground, conduct a classroom survey to create their own Domesday Book, and make motte-and-bailey castles out of cereal boxes. Medieval England would be studied through acting out the death of Thomas Becket, and creating a boardgame to cover life as a medieval peasant. ....

Such tasks allow pupils to learn about history in an enjoyable and engaging way—or so the theory goes. In reality, all content and understanding of the past is sucked out, and the classroom begins to resemble the playground. An unfortunate side-effect is that pupils are frequently confused by the inevitable anachronisms involved in making history "relevant." ....

Proponents of child-centred education are impervious to such criticism because progressive teachers have long denied the importance of knowledge in the first place. Instead, skills are seen as paramount. When I first visited my current school, the assistant head asked me how I intended to prepare for my new career. I responded that I was going to spend a few weeks boning up on my general historical knowledge. "I wouldn't worry about that," she said. "History is a skills-based curriculum. You should really be able to teach it without knowing anything at all." ....

Progressive educators tend to cast skills and knowledge as a dichotomy, when in reality they are a sequence, and knowledge must come first. Trying to exercise historical skills such as source analysis or understanding causation without a solid grounding in a historical topic is impossible. ....

.... Great history teachers draw upon a passion for and knowledge of the subject to tell stories, explain ideas and bring the past alive. They do not have to rely on nonsense "learning activities" to make the subject engaging, for discussing the story of humankind is interesting in its own right. In short, they teach from the front. .... It is the anti-teaching, anti-narrative and anti-knowledge dogmas within state education that make history boring. ....

Enormous amounts of time are wasted doing "projects" which actually aren't interesting to students and which send the brightest students up the wall. Story makes history interesting and makes large dollops of fact tolerable to almost every student. The biggest problem is the ignorant teacher who doesn't know enough to make the subject interesting — and time-consuming "student-centered" projects are also attractive to the lazy teacher.

History Lessons for the 21st-Century Classroom | Standpoint

Dawkins is embarrassing

Peter Higgs [of Higgs-Boson fame] is inclined to think that Richard Dawkins goes rather too far in his claims about the incompatibility of science and religious faith:

.... On one side is Richard Dawkins, the celebrated biologist who has made a second career demonstrating his epic disdain for religion. On the other is the theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who this year became a shoo-in for a future Nobel prize after scientists at Cern in Geneva showed that his theory about how fundamental particles get their mass was correct.

Their argument is over nothing less than the coexistence of religion and science.

Higgs has chosen to cap his remarkable 2012 with another bang by criticising the "fundamentalist" approach taken by Dawkins in dealing with religious believers. ....

...Higgs argued that although he was not a believer, he thought science and religion were not incompatible. "The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that's not the same thing as saying they're incompatible. It's just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

"But that doesn't end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past."

He said a lot of scientists in his field were religious believers. "I don't happen to be one myself, but maybe that's just more a matter of my family background than that there's any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two." ....

Peter Higgs criticises Richard Dawkins over anti-religious 'fundamentalism' | Science | The Guardian

"In the Bleak Midwinter"

At the center of history

 

As if to shame the mightiest human efforts and achievements,

a child is placed at the center of history.

A child, born of humans: a son, given by God.

That is the mystery of the world’s redemption.

Everything past and everything future is encompassed here.

The infinite mercy of almighty God comes to us,

condescends to us in the form of a child, his son.

That this child has been born for us,

that this son has been given,

that this human child, this son of God, belongs to me;

that I know him, have him, love him,

that I am his and he is mine –

my very life now depends entirely on all these things.

A child has our life in his hands.

The Mystery of Holy Night

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"He came from His blest throne..."

My song is love unknown,
My Saviour’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I, that for my sake
My Lord should take frail flesh and die?

He came from His blest throne
Salvation to bestow;
But men made strange, and none
The longed-for Christ would know:
But Oh! my Friend, my Friend indeed,
Who at my need His life did spend.

Here might I stay and sing,
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King!
Never was grief like Thine.
This is my Friend, in Whose sweet praise
I all my days could gladly spend.

Samuel Crossman, 1664

God in Man

"This single Truth"

No love that in a family dwells,
No caroling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

John Betjeman

"To lay aside His crown..."

Filippo Lippi, Medici Nativity, 1455-59

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
[Luke 2:6-7]

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul
What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
To lay aside His crown for my soul, for my soul,
To lay aside His crown for my soul.
What Wondrous Love is This

"To save us all..."

God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,
Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day;
To save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.
O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy;
O tidings of comfort and joy.

C.S. Lewis's science fiction trilogy

Via Brandywine Books:

If you have an e-book reader, you can get C. S. Lewis' classic space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, for $1.99 each for a limited time.

The links are to Amazon for Kindle versions, because we get a cut of our linked Amazon sales. But if you've got a Nook or Kobo, you can buy the books through the Harper & Row site here. ....

Purchasing through the links should benefit the original post by Brandywine Books.

Brandywine Books

Tiffany

 

The Museum of Biblical Art in New York currently features "Louis C. Tiffany and the Art of Devotion.":

Louis C. Tiffany and the Art of Devotion considers the array of church decorations and memorials that Louis C. Tiffany (1848-1933) produced beginning in the early 1880s. For 50 years, working under a variety of company names, Tiffany oversaw production and marketing of a vast assortment of decorative elements for many of America’s leading congregations—Protestant, Catholic and Jewish. Tiffany employed designers, draftsmen, and craftspeople who produced decorative wall treatments, mosaic floors, lighting, furniture, altarpieces, pulpits, candlesticks, and liturgical vestments. ....

I have friends who collect pictures of stained-glass church windows. Tiffany windows are probably the best American examples of this art. Stained glass windows with secular themes were also common in homes of the era. If I were anywhere near NYC I would be sorely tempted to go see this exhibition.

Note: The illustrations I've chosen are representative of Tiffany but not taken from the MoBiA exhibit site.

Louis C. Tiffany and the Art of Devotion | MOBiA | Museum of Biblical Art

"Of the Father's love begotten"

Of the Father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see, evermore and evermore!

He is found in human fashion, death and sorrow here to know,
That the race of Adam’s children doomed by law to endless woe,
May not henceforth die and perish
In the dreadful gulf below, evermore and evermore!

O that birth forever blessèd, when the virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving, bare the Savior of our race;
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed His sacred face, evermore and evermore!

O ye heights of heaven adore Him; angel hosts, His praises sing;
Powers, dominions, bow before Him, and extol our God and King!
Let no tongue on earth be silent,
Every voice in concert sing, evermore and evermore!

Christ, to Thee with God the Father, and, O Holy Ghost, to Thee,
Hymn and chant with high thanksgiving, and unwearied praises be:
Honor, glory, and dominion,
And eternal victory, evermore and evermore!

[Prudentius, 5th Century]

"What our good God for us has done"

Via Justin Taylor, Allison Krauss and Yo-Yo Ma:

"Even little people are capable of large deeds"

Ashley Crouch has seen The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and it has inspired reflection on the nature of heroism:

.... As Gandalf says, heroism is found not through a grand deed but in “the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keeps the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.” Suddenly, we are offered an achievable standard. We are invited to shift out of our narrow prism to conceive the possibility that heroism is found in small deeds, to reexamine our own seemingly miniscule decisions and, in them, find significance and heroism. In our support of him, we implicitly agree that even little people are capable of large deeds.

Through Bilbo’s journey, we stare in the face our own perceptions of inadequacy and are encouraged to rethink them. Like Bilbo, we fear our capacity to provide anything of value. “I know you doubt me. I would have doubted me, too. I am not a hero or a warrior,” says he. Yet, we long for the opportunity to prove ourselves, caught between a tense pendulum of fear and paralysis on the one hand and valor and greatness on the other; Bilbo typifies this internal struggle. ....

As the credits rolled, I found that my answer to the question “what is heroism?” echoed those of Thorin’s: “When I called upon them, they answered. Loyalty, honor, a willing heart. I can ask no more than that.” Tolkien’s answer to the gentle question—what is heroism?—puts us in the uncomfortable position of asking ourselves what role we are going to play in the saga—in what ways are we going to be the hero. Suddenly, heroism for the average person is achievable. ....

I've read the book - I'll see the first of the films tomorrow.

What Does Bilbo Teach Us about Heroism? « Acculturated

Santa

A little of what Kevin DeYoung writes about how we got Santa Claus:

.... Luther rejected the saints’ days, believing they were built upon legends and superstitions (and a virulent strain of moralism we might add). In Germany, Luther replaced Saint Nicholas’ Day with a different holiday, Christ Child, or Christkindl. Ironically, Kriss Kringle which derived from Luther’s Christ Child holiday, has become just another name for St. Nicholas.

The cult of St. Nicholas virtually disappeared in Protestant Europe, with the exception of one country: the Netherlands. If you love Christmas with all the trappings of Santa Claus and stockings and presents, thank the Dutch. If you despise all that, try to ignore my last name for the time being. The Puritans had done away with St. Nicholas and banned Christmas altogether. But the Dutch held on to their tradition and brought it with them to the New World. In the Netherlands Sint Nicolaas was contracted to Sinterklaas. ....

At any rate, it is easy to see how Sinterklaas evolved in America to Santa Claus. Santa Claus became the Santa we know in the United States only after the poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas” was written in 1823. Possibly the best known verses ever written by an American, the poem has greatly influenced the tradition of Santa in the English speaking world and beyond.

How should Christians relate to the traditions of Santa Claus? C.S. Lewis embraced them and so included Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Other Christians, fearing syncretism, stay clear of Santa, reindeer, and a tree full of presents. I’ll leave it to you and your family to form you opinions on observing the Christmas holiday (see Rom. 14:1, 5-6). ....

But if you have a lot of Santa Claus around, why not use him to your benefit and talk about the real St. Nicholas. We don’t know a lot about him, but we know he lived and was revered. According to legend—one of those stories that probably isn’t true, but should be—when Nicholas was little boy he would get up early in the morning to go to church and pray. One morning, the aging priest had a vision that the first one to enter the church in the morning should be the new bishop of Myra. When Nicholas was the first to enter, the old priest, obeying the vision, made the young boy bishop right on the spot. But before he consecrated Nicholas a bishop, the priest asked him a question. “Who are you, my son?” According to tradition, the child whose legend would one day become Santa Claus replied, “Nicholas the sinner.” Not bad for a little boy. .... [more]

Who Was St. Nicholas? – Kevin DeYoung

"Teach my dullness, guide my blindness..."

Via David Koyzis, "Gustav Holst: Psalm 86"

Send, O send relieving gladness

To my soul opprest with sadness...

Never failing help to those

Who on Thy sure help repose....

Teach my dullness, guide my blindness,

That my steps Thy paths may tread

Which to endless bliss do lead.

Hypocrisy

Another very good post from Kevin DeYoung:

.... Many Christians fear that doing the right thing without the right feelings makes them hypocrites.

But is this really hypocrisy? Another word to describe this behavior might be “maturity.” Children only do what they feel like doing. Adults learn to do things they are supposed to do though they may not always be excited about it. Of course, as Christians we want to grow so that we feel good about what is good. But the Christian life is full of instances where the doing and the feeling do not exactly match—sometimes with feelings ahead of obedience and sometimes with obedience ahead of our feelings.

Hypocrisy is not the gap between doing and feeling; it’s the gap between public persona and private character. Hypocrisy is the failure to practice what you preach (Matt. 23:3). Appearing outwardly righteous to others, while actually being full of uncleanness and self-indulgence—that’s the definition of hypocrisy (Matt. 23:25-28).

The hypocrite is not the Christian who struggles against sin, fights against temptation, and keeps doing what is right even on his worst feeling days. That’s a hero. The hypocrite is the Christian who uses the veneer of public virtue to cover the rot of private vice. He’s the man living a double life, the woman fooling her friends because she has church clothes, the student who proudly answers the questions in Sunday school and just as proudly romps through immorality the rest of the week.

The sin of hypocrisy is not that we are more messed up than we seem. That’s true for all of us. The sin is in using the appearance of goodness to cloak the deeds of evil.

What Is Hypocrisy? – Kevin DeYoung

Handwriting

I rarely write anything anymore. Apart from the occasional need to write my signature [most recently, when I vote], cursive has just about disappeared from my life. And writing my signature is becoming increasingly awkward. I recall—probably at about age twelve—attempting to create a distinctive way to sign my name, and, once I had, practicing and refining it. And now, through lack of practice, I'm losing facility. This is from a review of a book about the end of handwriting:

The Missing Ink is [a] casually elegant look at a “modest, pleasurable, private skill” that “is about to vanish from our lives altogether”: the art of handwriting. Philip Hensher...is steeped in his subject. He once wrote a 300,000-word novel by hand. As a boy, he saw the signature of Elizabeth I, with all those zigzags descending beneath. It was “love at first sight”. He recalls first seeing his own father’s signature, which resembled “a knife in a wound”.

He notes that the teaching of handwriting has been sliding down the agenda since the 1980s. Hensher was taught it in the 1970s – the amiable, rounded, child-friendly style developed by Marion Richardson in the 1930s – but he “found faint disappointment in the no-nonsense f’s”. He gives a lively account of the handwriting movements allied to the development of paper commerce in the mid-19th century, namely Copperplate (which was built for speed, resembling handwriting in a wind tunnel) and its more upright successors.

Hensher finds it telling that Sherlock Holmes was a student of graphology, it being “a fantasy from an urban world, where almost everyone is a stranger, and almost anyone could be dangerous”. In the 1970s various mental health associations decreed graphology to be of “zero validity”. .... But he concedes that handwriting can reveal character, even if not according to fixed rules. (Why else do we write letters of condolence by hand?) Hensher finds virtue in the slowness of handwriting, and he cites evidence that if you improve a child’s handwriting, you improve his literary skills.

As a boy, Hensher drew meaningless wavy lines in anticipation of learning cursive handwriting. I myself did the same. Perhaps it is a characteristic of budding authors, in which case any parent uncovering pages so scrawled in 2012 should be worried. Their child ought not to have too much of a stake in the future of reading and writing in this frightening, fraught “late age of print”.

How we read - FT.com