I’ve been listening to a discussion between Alex O’Connor, an atheist, and Trent Horn, a Catholic. At one point, an audience member asks Horn a simple question: what level of evil would have to exist in the world for you to think that perhaps it’s an unjustifiable level of evil that thus counts as evidence against the existence of a god. His answer was revealing, so I made a one-minute response video.
Here’s the whole discussion:
My daily update for today:
Students today worked on clearing up some final confusion over our first analytic Schaffer paragraph before beginning our second cycle. For example, the excerpt below has the problem of a very general topic sentence. Once it begins so generally, a paragraph will only go downhill from there.
Afterward, we began working on our second cycle of stories that we will use for our next analytic Schaffer paragraph. We’ll be focusing on the narrator’s point of view and the effect that has on the narrative.
We began with some unusual writing to illustrate the simple fact that what we see, figurative and in this case literally, depends on where we stand.
The “where we stand” element has to do with everything from past experience to religious views, from political views to personal food taste, and everything in between.
Then we read an intriguing story, “In the Family” by Maria Elena Llano (on Moodle). We’ll be using this tomorrow to examine how we can use the point of view of the narrator as an analytic framework and then plan a Schaffer paragraph around it.
Students in sixth period finished their second Schaffer paragraph, the one that’s truly a beast: using quotes from a text as the basis for the concrete details.
We picked up where we left off Friday and worked on our concrete details.
They key to using quotes in concrete details, they discovered, is to mix your words with the writer’s words: the student needs to include information about the context of the quote (the who and when in the story) and then try to slide the quote into the sentence naturally so as to avoid saying things like “For example, the text says…”
Some of the excellent examples they:
created include:
Students in the final period completed their first real Schaffer paragraphs after examining three example paragraphs in various states of disrepair. They had several options to choose from for each paragraph:
Students evaluated the paragraphs first in groups and then alone.
Afterward, we worked on our first Schaffer paragraphs:
Every student had a topic sentence they’d created in groups: “In order to have a great year, students should (1) and (2).” The numbers represented their two best ideas from the list they’d brainstormed. Afterward, on Friday, we made sure that the two ideas from the TS made it to CDs. And today, we worked on completing the two CMs for each CD, thus completing our first Schaffer paragraph.
We’re only two full weeks into the school year, and one of my on-level classes is about 1.5 days ahead of the other on-level class. It leaves me wondering what to do: slow down one class to let the other catch up, or skip some things with the slower class to help speed up the pace.
Neither is a good option. Time for enrichment lessons…
It’s 9:36 in the evening, and our current indoor temperature is 82°. We’ve done the best we could to keep the temperature from rising in our air-conditioner-less house, but though the temperature is falling outside (the real kicker is that it’s currently 77° outside), it’s not falling in our house.
During my evening walk, I developed a theory about this: I think it’s because the temperature in the attic is still undoubtedly very high. Warm air rises. And if it’s got a column of warm air above it, despite the insulation between the two, it’s just going to sit there. Yeah, I know — it doesn’t make sense, but neither does an 82° house at half-past nine in the evening.
Yet thinking about it, one realizes it’s truly a first-world problem. Most of the people living in the hottest regions of the world have never had air-conditioning in their homes, and their homes are materially vastly inferior to ours.
Puts things in perspective. But we’re still tired of being sweaty…
It’s late August — the time of year when cooler autumnal temperatures approach, but sometimes not quite fast enough. Daytime temperatures can still get up into the mid-90s, and summer’s humidity still lingers, making it feel even warmer.
That’s all fine and good if your HVAC system is working well. Sure, it might work a bit more than you would hope. The heavy heat of July is a thing of the past, and although it can be hot, late August usually brings a bit of a break for one’s HVAC system and one’s power bill compared to mid-July. Not much — just a bit.
Still, we have a relatively high-efficiency system, and the difference I guess is no big savings. Five or ten bucks perhaps.
But then the system starts stalling, starts leaking coolant, and the indoor temperature climbs despite the temperature outside. Specialists arrive, investigate, diagnose, and give a $2,200 quote for fixing the system or $800 for a temporary bandaid.
“How long will it last?”
“A few months to a few years.”
Cheap is expensive; lack of information leads to poor decisions. It lasts less than 24 hours. $800 for 20 hours of cooling.
More specialists arrive. They’ll do the fix for about 75% of the other company’s quote. We go for it. The system works for a couple of weeks, still showing some strain and problems but keeping the house comfortable.
And then the whole thing shuts down. Completely. When temperatures return to the mid-90s. And the company we’ve been working with doesn’t work on the weekend, so we’re stuck until Monday. And so you start researching things like this.
It’s always seemed to me that shoes are especially important when you’re outside and will soon be walking through wet grass. The option of taking one’s shoes off and getting one’s socks wet doesn’t seem incredibly pleasant to me, especially when it’s just the second period of the day and the socks would remain wet for hours afterward.
But spotless, white shoes are more important than comfort, I suppose.
It’s a pretty impressive feat of short-sighted hypocrisy that most of the people most opposed to student debt forgiveness are practitioners of a religion that is built upon the idea of a debt being paid undeservedly…
Two images that came through my Twitter feed over the last few days. The first: a rather succinct overview of Trump supporters.
Then a graphic representation of the same idea.
Like an aspic or a bit of blood sausage, pickle soup is one of those dishes that initially makes people say, “Hold on, now — are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Pickles belong on hamburgers and other sandwiches. Some of us even like it on the once-a-year hot dog we might eat. Dill pickle is a good flavor for a chip, especially if you’re already fond of sea salt and vinegar chips. You might skewer a pickle and bit of meat on a toothpick and call it an appetizer.
But in a soup?
Of course — where else? Tangy and sour are notes that pair well with just about any other savory flavor.
The Boy’s first games with his new soccer team took place today. It was a tough start to the season: 0-4 and 0-5 losses. I was expecting him to be terribly disappointed about it, but he was surprisingly stoic: “We have some things we need to fix, but we could be good.”
The Girl’s high school varsity team, for which L plays middle, won their first tournament today.
A day of contrasts.
It’s a quote I’ve used twice here:
[Belief] may be the battle of your life, but emotionally and intellectually, it could also be the most exhilarating one you’ve ever engaged in. Whether you experience God’s reality or are just intellectually intrigued by the idea, God can be a very real force in peoples’ lives – spiritual, emotional, supportive – that almost no other system can offer. But you must gird yourself for a fight and know that you’re going to have to try to reconcile very difficult things. Or at least hold them in suspension and bounce them back and forth and get tired. There’s no quick fix, but we have the benefit of drawing on thousands of years of religious thinking. You can’t learn it over a weekend. It’s an engagement for the rest of your life.
Burton Visotzky
I originally included it while discussing Winifred Galligher’s Working on God, in which it’s originally quoted.
I also reposted the quote on its own a few years later, undoubtedly just to have an easy way out of keeping up some artificial posting streak:
In some ways, I think I admired that quote, but now, I view it so very differently.
Visotzky writes that believers are “going to have to try to reconcile very difficult things. Or at least hold them in suspension and bounce them back and forth and get tired.” I originally read this very ambiguously, not really thinking about what exactly one must reconcile. As I’ve returned to my skeptical positions of the past after a sojourn in faith, I see it simply: you’re going to have to reconcile contradictions or ignore them. Contradictions between faith claims and scientific claims. Contradictions between various faiths’ claims. Contradictions between claims of omnipotence and omnibenevolence and the evil we see around us. Contradictions within traditions’ holy books. You might “get tired,” he suggests. I think that’s what happened to me: I got tired of the continual cognitive disonance.
Far from being a wise quote, I see this now as the dysfunctional heart of faith itself: it’s seeing one thing that has an abundance of evidence and believing another that has little to no real evidence.
The first week is about to enter the books — one week down, thirty-five to go. Some might view it that way, and some years it’s tempting for me: when in the first week of school students are already being disrespectful and incorrigible, it’s difficult not to think wistfully about the far-in-the-future summer. “It’s going to be a long year,” becomes the common thought.
But this year’s first week is not like that at all. The Terrences and Teresas haven’t appeared, haven’t even shown a glimmer of appearing.
Kids staying focused, working together effectively, showing each other respect…
I know it’s still the honeymoon period, but I can’t help but be hopeful about this year.
of the Biltmore house must undoubtedly be the main staircase from outside.
Nana and Papa helping us move from Ashville to Greenville — fifteen years ago.
The Boy had a rough day of it: he’s been in a multi-age classroom for four years, meaning he’s been with the same group of people (mostly) for those four years. Fifth grade, though, doesn’t have a multi-age program, so he’s back out in the general population — and none too thrilled about it. All his closest friends from the last four years — all of them — ended up in different classes. A few of them got grouped together, but none of them are in E’s class. Which makes him less than thrilled about school after this first day.
We tried to help the Boy see things from a different perspective, but for the longest time, he just wasn’t interested. It was going to be a disastrous year, he was sure of it. There was no way it could get better — he was convinced. He might as well just switch to homeschool.
After some time in the pool and a lot of reassurance, he informed us on the way home that “all of Mama’s speeches” had made him a little more excited about tomorrow.
As for the Girl, she sat down in the car after volleyball practice, looked at me, and said, “Guess what we have in English class?” I raised my eyebrows in anticipation. “Articles of the week!”
I’ve been giving my students an article of the week for almost ten years now. It’s one of the most effective tools I use.
“Do you know what this is?” one of the Girl’s friends asked her.
“Yes,” she whispered back. “I’ve been grading them for years.” Which is dramatic sounding, and it probably got a laugh, but it’s not quite true. I’ve had her checking multiple choice questions, adding up the points, and using my scale to determine and write the grade on the paper, but that’s not really grading them.
“Same difference!” L playfully huffed when I pointed this out.