This morning I awoke with a plan. Go to Panera, get bagels for an afternoon brunch with Joy and Sunshine, and then hang out and work on my Strategy for Transformation there. All was going well right up to the very last part, which I was fully prepared to do, had all of my thoughts clear in my head by some miracle, had some great sources in mind... And then I read the requirements page and realized that since I had last read it, I had completely changed around the nature of the project and so my lovely ideas were useless and would have to be abandoned by the wayside.
Which doesn't help, because not only did I like my idea, but I also have no clue what I'm going to say for the paper and my heart hurts a little bit at having to abandon a preshus. So I thought I'd exorcise that particular brainchild by writing about it here.
When I was in high school, I was always the student in math class who passed with flying colors but wrestled with things because I wanted to know what the point of them was. Why do sine and cosine even matter, and who came up with them anyway? How did they come up with them? Are they flawless concepts that are seamlessly applicable in realistic circumstances or are they theoretical constructs that almost overlap with reality to the degree that they are useful but with holes and patched bits?
The high schooler graduated and went to IMPACT 360. There she had a teacher named Charles Thaxton, who taught about the relationship between God and science and had written a book on the topic called The Soul of Science. She borrowed the book from a teacher and read it over the course of the summer, overjoyed to discover that it talked about the history and thought progression of natural philosophy at its birth and subsequent refinement into specialized areas of study like physics, chemistry, mathematics, and biology. So many pieces were clicking into place, so many things made sense when placed within the overall context of history. And so she was able to rest her mind a little in the comfort of knowing that everything wasn't based on completely arbitrary philosophical constructs from a bunch of disembodied brains.
One of the things that we have lost over the years is a sense of the interwoven connections between all things. We have such clearly defined lines drawn between the various disciplines to the degree that we grow up with a sense that there couldn't possibly be an intersection between mathematics and literature. Obviously there's a sort of person who likes the one and an altogether different sort of person who likes the other. But we forget that all things are born out of minds that interpret the world with a perspective or, in the recently glamorous terminology, a worldview. Because of this, a mathematician and an author might have a surprising amount in common that we can only know if we are willing to consider critically what they have composed and follow it to its logical origins.
A lecturer recently commented on the differences between linear and story-based teaching. It was a passing statement, but it struck me because it helped to unite some questions that had been revolving through my head for the past several years. I did well in every subject in high school (except P.E., but even then I made passing grades), and people would always ask me what my favorite class was. Depending on my mood or the teacher, it could be history one day, pre-calculus the next, chemistry, government and politics, or any number of others. The one that almost always made the top of the list was literature, but by a narrow margin and mostly because I loved to read. But my appetite for books is not limited to fiction, as my book list for the year illustrates. Out of 49 full-length books that I've completed, 28 are non-fiction on topics ranging from grief to sex education to the life and times of Paul Revere.
Still, my literature teachers always commended me for my essays and insights, so I thought with a mental shrug that it was as good a path to pursue as any. But one of them made a comment that, when tied with what Jason said about stories, makes sense of my education. She said that in her ninth grade class they had been reading Elie Wiesel's Night... "And Moshe the Beadle, the poor barefoot of Sighet, talked to me for long hours of the revelations and mysteries of the cabbala. It was with him that my initiation began. We would read together, ten times over, the same page of the Zohar. Not to learn it by heart, but to extract the divine essence from it." When they read those lines, she said that she had finally found a student who was like that, meaning me.
There are two aspects to my revelation. The first is that the unifying factor in all of my classes and in all of my learning was Truth. I am hungry to know it in all its forms, and that often takes the form of playing Hide and Seek with God. All truth is God's Truth, because it is out of and a part of His nature and being. As such, we embrace truth wherever we find it. But one of the most beautiful and ancient methods of transmitting truth is through story. A story illustrates a truth about life that is a far more effective teacher than writing a dry, individual, summarized and synthesized concept up on the whiteboard and expecting bored, disconnected students to understand it.
My broad and apparently misguided strategy for transformation in the area of education (which, now that I think about it, could possibly be tweaked for my paper) was the reconnection and integration of various disciplines together so that they form a fuller picture of the world around us. The primary connection with story is that our history is a story. And just as a body does not function or even look like a body when all the pieces are dissected and bottled up in different parts of the laboratory, so history does not fulfill its function or even look like the real story of our past unless all the pieces are put back together. (To clarify my terms: all learning is historical in that the facts and concepts that we learn were discovered, synthesized, or otherwise composed at a historical point by people whose lives covered a historically grounded span of time with various influencing factors)
Can you tell that I have changed my eventual major to humanities? I once said on a college application that I want to know everything, but I'll settle for as much as possible. It's still true.
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