Algebra 10-12 assignment; Feb. 3

We worked on solving systems by elimination again today.  We also introduced some foundational word problems that can be solved with systems of equations as well.

Homework:  Elimination worksheet #3  #1-10 all

Geometry assignment; April 11

We spent a few minutes going over our homework and making final preparations on the note card for taking the quiz today.  Once those questions were answered, the students then got started on their quiz on areas of polygons.


After the quiz, the students got started on their homework assignment for the weekend.


Assignment:  Area of triangles and trapezoids worksheet  #1-20

View from the Pew

What's it like for a town guy to live in the country?  Everything comes in spades--heat, cold, and, Lord have mercy, wind. But the skies are so abundant, so eternal, never once the same.

Sometimes scary, often breath-taking--sometimes more than a little gaudy. Always towering. Most mornings and most evening, humbling.

Sunday Morning Meds--Wrath

“Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;. . .”  Psalm 37

I once knew a guy who was a mean drunk.  There aren’t that many nights I remember from my own late teenage years, but one I do is the night that this guy just simply went off, and it took maybe three or four of us to calm him down.  Violent, he got.  He threatened everybody and everything around him for no particular reason at all, other than the fact that he was drunk, or so it seemed.  He just lost it, as they say.  I remember exactly where that happened, even where I was standing, trying to keep him from busting loose.  It was late, and it wasn’t pretty.

Not long ago I saw him again, maybe for the first time in thirty years.  He was singing in a men’s group whose claim to fame—or so it seemed to me—was sheer volume.  There’s something inspiring about men singing big, and this group’s repertoire was raising the roof with traditional hymns.  Don’t get me wrong, they sang well and I enjoyed them, but the volume was well-cranked. 

           

The guy was never threatened me, never laid a hand on me; but when, years later, I saw him up there on stage singing hymns, the only memory that returned to me was the night he was drunk and mean. 

Let me change gears a minute. 

Sometimes I wonder what Christians mean when they tell those who don’t believe in Jesus Christ—or have never heard of him—that they should just "read His word." I know there are saints who’ve smuggled Bibles into all kinds of countries, often under great risk.  Almost every motel room I’ve ever searched has a Gideon Bible, as if people who happen to be there overnight might just pick it up and read it leisurely, no matter what version. 

           

I’m not saying anything untoward if I say the Bible is no airport novel, and it’s certainly not a quick read.  If you had never seen one before, nor ever heard a thing about Christianity, just imagine what you might think if you’d open the good book to, say, the story of Jephthah’s daughter, a perfectly innocent young girl murdered by her father because of some promise that didn’t even involve his sweet child.  Bizarre.

           

Then again, some passages—the moral passages—might just hit home, especially if you, like my boyhood friend, were a mean drunk.  Maybe, just maybe, a Gideon Bible would be just what the doctor ordered. Besides, the Holy Spirit does some strange things--just ask Flannery O'Connor.

           

The truth of this single verse from Psalm 37 is weirdly evident in story of the guy who sang the bass line in a men's quartet blasting out old hymns: the vivid memory I can’t get rid of is a single night of his wrath long, long ago.

Friday night some sharpshooting kid driving a black BMW killed six college students in a mad attempt to get back other 20-year-olds for his pain, if his rants on paper and video are to be believed. He spewed hate and, finally, death from three semi-automatic handguns his parents had no idea he'd owned.

           

Friday night makes this single line of perfectly understandable scriptural admonition feel like horrifying understatement, but what it says is no less true than it was thousands of years ago.

On this we can all agree: wrath can make us killers.   

Geometry assignment; Feb. 26

After we went over the homework, we spent a little time reviewing the topics for our chapter 8 test tomorrow.  There is a review assignment out of the book whose answers appear below.

Here are the items to be sure to have memorized for the test.

SOH CAH TOA

shorts cuts for 45-45-90 triangles and 30-60-90 triangles

3 ratio formulas for the geometric means in similar triangles  (SL, LL, SS, LS, altitude)


Assignment:  Chapter 8 review;  page 323-324;  #1-12 all, 13-23 odd


Answers to review assignment:

1.  6
2.  5 times square root of 2
3.  5 times square root of 6
4.  5 times square root of 3
5.  3 times square root of 5
6.  2 times square root of 41
7.  7 times square root of 2
8.  12
9.  acute
10.  not possible
11.  right
12.  obtuse
13.  5 times square root of 3
15.  16
17.  a. 1.5              b.  2/3          c. 34
19.  a.  12/13         b.  12/13          c.  67
21.  y = 57
23.  y = 23

Algebra 10-12 assignment; April 25

After going over our review sheet and entry task, we took the test on our factoring unit today in class.  There was an extra credit opportunity for the students to work on at the end of the test if they chose to.


Assignment:  extra credit option

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Geometry assignment; May 22

We took a look at the first of three coordinate transformations today in class.  Translations were what we did and the students went through several examples with me first before getting started on their homework towards the end of the period.


Assignment:  Translations worksheet

Remembering Frederick Manfred -- 1912-1994 (iii)

Two years later, the staff of the Dordt College Diamond drove north to Luverne, Minnesota, to meet with Mr. Manfred. I was one of them. I remember the Sioux quartzite wall of the sprawling home he’d built into the edge of Blue Mound, and I’ll never forget the cupola up above, an eagle’s nest, 360 degrees of windows and book shelves, including the very definitive collection of his own. I remember him standing there, pointing south, then telling us that on a clear night he could see the radio tower of Dordt’s station. And I remember being comforted by that gesture—somehow we still mattered.

Frederick Manfred was so huge he made me feel diminutive. I remember his immense hands, long fingers permanently crooked from some accident. And I remember his passion, as everyone who ever met Frederick Manfred will. That sheer passion for life stormed over everything and everyone. My fellow staffers had to slug their way into a conversation that wasn’t dialogic at all, but a running monologue that never once grew wearying. The man was a presence. Even those who dislike his writing will say it: Fred Manfred wasn’t so much an artist as a force, like the wind, or the Plains themselves, the world from which he’d come, their emerald edge in Siouxland, where every season’s weather comes in spades.

When we left the place he called Roundwind, we descended the curving, steep road through swaying prairie grasses all around. I’d asked no questions while we were there, and I’m sure I said little on the way home. I’d met a man, a presence, who was unlike anyone I’d ever known.

That night I’d also begun to hear stories I’d hear time and time again through the years—how he had crawled for miles through the prairie so he could feel exactly what Hugh Glass had in the legend that became Lord Grizzly. I listened to him go on and on about running to high school every day—seven miles each way, Doon to Hull, to Western Academy. I heard Calvin College stories, how he’d left Siouxland for Michigan, packing the only two books he’d ever owned—the Bible and Shakespeare.

Even more, I began to understand things about writing, about the necessity of endless research into Native ceremonial pipes and dances and buffalo—and the sheer joy of learning. I looked through notebooks scribbled full of his long-lettered handwriting, interesting names and comic and frightful anecdotes he didn’t want to forget, things he’d use someday, he told us.

I left Manfred’s home in silence that night, having met a writer.

______________________ 

Tomorrow:  Meeting Harry Abma

Remembering Frederick Manfred--1912-1994 (vii)

Twenty years ago, this rich Iowa soil claimed the remnants of a giant, just as, a month or so before, it had claimed the mortal shell of another. The family of the Reverend B. J. Haan, founder and first president of Dordt College, stood in a foot or so of snow on a day that proved to be just as December-frigid as the ones we don’t forget. They huddled beneath a canvas canopy, less a shelter than a wreath around an open grave that was ready to take what was still there of the old preacher's earthly frame.

That winter, out here at the edge of the Great Plains, we put two legends down, the other was Fred Manfred, the most prolific novelist ever to graduate from local schools, a man so given to his own people that he used them unsparingly to probe and examine the human condition from his unique perspective. Frederic Manfred, born Feike Feikema in a farm house just outside of Doon, Iowa, died earlier, fall of 1994, from complications resulting from brain cancer.

The Rev. B. J. Haan died of heart failure, the man who almost single-handedly raised a college on a few acres of land a whole lot of people still think is better suited for corn and pigs. B.J. never left the territory of his beloved Christian Reformed Church; he was the quintessential insider, as talented a politician among his people as you'll find anywhere.

Manfred left that same church within months of his college graduation and never returned, his literary forays, often as not, raising cane among those who found themselves and their kin far too graphically rendered on the pages of his novels. Manfred was a physical giant—6’9” tall, with a deep shock of straw-like hair and hands whose fingers seemed baling hooks. Haan looked more bookish; he was ruddy-faced, a foot shorter, but never really diminutive.

Some might claim that the only characteristics the two of them shared, in addition to growing up in the Christian Reformed Church, was the love of a region and a diploma from Calvin College. Even here--especially here--some locals likely imagine the preacher seated right now in the heavenly choir, while the tall novelist wanders painfully in the lurid, glowing darkness.

But neither of them ever forgot God, and both of them loved the precious gift of life itself. Both of them loved living. Manfred brought to his work a sense of calling as breathtaking as a stormy prairie sky, a sense of task that grew from a worldview which found joy in the smell of new-cut hay or the damp touch of just-turned soil. 

 Almost from the moment he arrived in Sioux County, Iowa, Haan's very vocation was the cause of a distinctive education for his people, Christian education, not as a reaction against public school, but as a mandate from a perspective that insisted that everything on this wide earth was subject to God's rule. Both were, for better or for worse, driven by a sense of purpose they knew to be far larger than they were.

Both giants accomplished remarkable things, but both loved to laugh. On his deathbed, Manfred was still telling the stories that delighted him. Throughout his life, Haan was always one of few human beings big enough to do self-parody, a man who could pull laughs from the dourest of the dour by little more than mimicking himself. He once told me that if he could change anything about the way he'd always done things, he'd have long ago brought more humor to the pulpit because people need to laugh much more than they do.

The use of a phrase linked them too—“our people." They both said it. I don't know that anybody uses those words anymore, in the church especially, where good Christians suppose there’s some kind of virtue in being all things to all people, even when you’re not and they’re not. The Manfred/Haan era began, really, at the end of World War I, and ended, in substance, with Vietnam. In their later years, I suppose, they were both dinosaurs in a time when deconstruction makes us distrustful of the hidden agendas of their individual passions, and multi-culturalism has become such a halo that their proud tribalism is a blushing embarrassment.

But I learned from B. J., that being as strong and profound a believer as he was didn't mean for a minute you had to shun the world; in fact, it meant the opposite. And I learned from Fred that the people both of them loved, for all their eccentricities, were worthy subjects for lifelong exploration.

Years ago, when I first asked Fred to visit the Dordt campus, he said he wanted to see B.J., so between classroom lectures we headed to Haan's office. I was shaking a little, not knowing what Fred was going to say to the man who had not that long ago pulled the work of the renegade novelist from the college's library shelves in answer to protests from one or another zealous group; nor could I guess how Haan would react to Manfred. The fact is, I don't even remember what they talked about once Fred got there. What I'll never forget, however, is the way they hugged like old friends, two powerful human beings who knew and respected each other's stature and each other.

If you take the blacktop that runs west out of town toward the state line, you'll pass an old cottonwood that leans so far over the road that even in winter its branches seem a canopy. It grows dangerously close to the highway because the farmer who lived there when the county paved the road stood in front of that cottonwood with his shotgun in his arms, defiant. He wouldn't let them fell that tree.

Out here at least, trees aren't a dime a dozen. This was a world of grasses when the first white settlers came; every last tree is an immigrant. And don't get me wrong--the open sky is a blessing, a weatherman better than any on TV. But people around here love their trees for standing as they do between earth and sky; and when they go down, we hurt because we miss them.

Still, to some of us, twenty years after the death of those two giants, the grand openness of the prairie landscape seems just a bit more barren, a bit closer to the "Great American Desert" Zebulon Pike once called the region when he marched through on his way to the Rockies. This good earth, this good Iowa ground has swallowed two of our giants.
We miss them both a great deal.
______________________ 
This eulogy initially appeared in the Des Moines Register.

After the storm

Just where do the Great Plains begin? Some say at the 100th meridian, which cuts the continental U.S. roughly in half. Some say somewhere close to the Big Muddy, the Missouri River, which takes a sharp left in Sioux City then splits South Dakota as if were a rectangular cantaloupe. Some say the Great Plains begin wherever there's twenty inches of rainfall.

Siouxland isn't on the Great Plains, but it's dang close. Still, it hands out weather that's as legendary in its ferocity as anything in Kansas or Oklahoma. "This is not an easy place to live," an old woman on the Rosebud reservation once told me, even though she'd been there since she was a child. 

Weather events out here always come in spades. Snow doesn't fall, it slashes. January cold makes your teeth ache and outfits your car in square wheels. July heat offers just about anything you can get in the Southwest-plus, it comes with a sauna. 

An old Siouxlander once told me that we get ten really good days a year. That's it. Ten. That old woman was a seer.

Last night's storms were massive, terrifying. Pilger, Nebraska, was attacked by a pair of tornadoes dropped from an insane sky, a tag team of twisters less than a mile apart. You must have seen the pictures.

Today the whole region is a bath tub. Water, water everywhere. The Rock is twenty feet above flood stage, residents of Rock Valley and Rock Rapids last night--yesterday already--are, like the river, out of their homes. Last night, the rain came in torrents and simply would not stop.

It's just now light outside my window. I expected to see the Floyd had spread over the neighbor's beans, but it was less unruly than I imagined.

The Big Sioux is on a rampage at Hawarden, and the expected crest is still a day or more away.

I'm not about to go out back and check my rain gauge because I'd likely never be heard from again. The whole backyard is quicksand soup.

Years ago, when we were young marrieds, we sat in a nice house trailer with some other couples and tried to talk devotionally while the rain pounded away on that tin roof. The lesson we studied that night is long gone, but I'll never forget the sinking feeling that our basement was becoming a wading pool.

Both of the old houses we've lived in came with storm cellars, dim-lit boxes I rarely entered because they had this awful concentration camp feel--bare naked cement all around. I'll never forget sitting in 'em during storms, water up over your ankles, our kids, toddlers, on our laps, a single light bulb burning at the end of a bare wire jutting out from the wall.

One October, an early snow fell so heavily that leafy tree branches cracked. Standing outside in the snowy moonlight, I listened as the whole town was attacked by what seemed gunfire from maples and lindens snapping all around. 

Weather comes in spades here, all of it.

But the birds are at the feeder this morning, just as they are every a.m. A couple days ago, grackles found this out-of-the-way dive. They know nothing of the golden rule. When they stop by they take over suet and seed; everyone else departs. 

But they're here, their appetites ravenous despite last night's endless rains. For them, little has changed this morning, after the storm, just a little extra mud beneath their toenails.

They're probably doing the same things in Pilger, Nebraska, this morning, dive-bombing all over just as they are here, just as they did yesterday. What?--me worry? What do they care if half the town is destroyed? Just more easy pickin's in a new playground. 

Nature's resiliency is as dramatic as it is unnerving. We'd much prefer the world to weep with us, to offers us tender sadness when we feel so deserving. Where, pray tell, are Elijah's ravens when we really need them?

Last night's catastrophes are recorded by rain gauges, like mine, filled to overflowing. Floods blanket the flat land this morning, river banks seemingly gone. Somewhere deaths are being mourned.

But life goes on just outside my window. Once again this morning, the players are here, even the goldfinch, full of song that's so much bigger than their diminutive selves. 

Once again, the dawn. Here it comes. Another day out here on the edge of the Great Plains. Maybe this one will be one of the ten. 

That would be nice.

Morning Thanks--deus ex machina

Frank Bruni's column in the New York Times yesterday is perfectly frightening. In it, he marshalls out poll data and survey results that in his estimation establish that this country has, in no uncertain terms, lost faith--in government, it the future, in itself, in anything.

Americans are apprehensive about where they are and even more so about where they’re going. But they don’t see anything or anyone to lead them into the light. They’re sour on the president, on the Democratic Party and on Republicans most of all. They’re hungry for hope but don’t spot it on the menu. Where that tension leaves us is anybody’s guess.

He cites, for instance, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that came out amid the Ferguson story and the madness created by ISIS or ISIL or whatever the name is, a poll that got jammed to the bottom of the grocery bag. Listen to this: 76% of the American public feel that the country holds less promise for them than it did for their parents. In other words, three-quarters of all Americans, regardless of age, believe the American Dream simply no longer exists.

It may well be that those most sure of America's promise are it's illegal immigrants, who certainly have not lost faith. The rest of aren't sure at all. It's not hard to walk that statistic back and ask a more fundamental questions--if America doesn't dream, is it America? And it if America isn't America, what is it? Who are we?

Bruni isn't the first to point out the irony in our deep hatred for Congress--only seven percent of Americans feel what happens in that branch of government is of any palpable worth. Yet, 9 out of 10 representatives and senators consistently win re-election, time after time after time. Is that crazy or what?

“'People are mad at Democrats,'” John Hickenlooper, the Democratic governor of Colorado, told me," Bruni writes. “But they’re certainly not happy with Republicans. They’re mad at everything.” And yet, almost shockingly, the unemployment rate in Colorado is waaaaay down, 5.3 percent.

Go figure. There's something really wrong here. The stock market is going gangbusters, the economy is healthy and prime, but America seems to have resigned from something called faith. A full sixty percent of us believe this nation is in decline.

This morning's headlines somehow follow, don't you think?  The New York Times runs a front page story about a man named after one of America's WWII heroes: Douglas McArthur McCain was killed this week in Syria, while fighting for ISIS or ISIL, who make Al Qaeda look like cub scouts. He carried an American passport, grew up a suburb of Minneapolis named New Hope (I'm serious), was known as a joker and a rapper and a big-time basketball fan.  That's him up top.

But he never finished high school, and during his early adulthood, found his way onto the police blotter with ease and frequency. Eventually he "reverted" (his word) to Islam, where he found the Lord (that's an evangelical phrase, but it may well be helpful for us to think in those terms). “Allah keeps me going day and night," he wrote on line. "Without Allah, I am no one.” And this: "The Koran is all I need in this life of sin."

He went to San Diego, lived there for a time, visited Canada and Sweden and then left for Syria, where somehow he joined up with the most heinous of Islamic militants and last week was killed with two other ISIS members when they ambushed a rebel Syrian army unit--in other words, a band of fighters who might well have been fighting the same enemy. Does that make any sense at all? 

The terror of Bruni's essay is that we don't believe in anything anymore. Anything. 

Oddly enough Douglas McArthur McCain appears to have agreed. That's why he went to Syria. He wanted so badly to believe.

I told myself that this week the blog was going to return to thanksgiving, to finding something everyday for which to be thankful. Garrison Keillor wasn't wrong--if all of us would give thanks for something every day, this world would be a better place. I've been doing that--off and on--for almost ten years. 

But this morning, Bruni in my head, McCain in my soul, it was a real chore. 

But just now I stepped outside my door into this revelation to the east--deus ex machina.

This morning, after thoughts of death and unbelief, I'm thankful for the divine landscape on a heavenly canvas just outside my door. 

Sometimes the heavens preach, David said, sometimes the heavens declare.

Wasicu at Chankpe Opi: A White Man at Wounded Knee VI

There’s more. You must have noticed because you can’t have missed what’s right in front of us—what’s been there the whole time we’ve been watching what happened. Be careful as you walk around on that promontory because a crumbling block foundation, scattered with crumpled beer cans and trash, marks the outline of what was once a Catholic church, right there where those Hotchkiss guns rained death on the council circle. It’s crumbling, as things do that are not preserved. 

The church that once stood here was destroyed in the 1973 Wounded Knee conflict, when, once more, violence occurred not far from where we’re standing. Men and women who held radically different views of Native dignity squared off against each other in this very valley. That dispute brought in U. S. Marshalls and turned deadly, when armed wasicu, here, once again, dug in like the cavalry. For many, those government marshalls were here to defend tribal leaders some thought violent, despotic men who’d long ago sold their souls for fools’ gold.

It isn’t pretty—this crumbling shell. There’s nothing to suggest that what once stood above ground here represented—even offered—the Prince of Peace. 

In Coventry, England, you can walk within the skull-like remains of a cathedral destroyed by Nazi bombs during World War II, a remarkable memento of Brit suffering during relentless air strikes. Coventry Cathedral is what much of Europe looked like after Hitler. That foundation is immense, its walls rise and fall jaggedly. But its perimeters are festooned with plaques and flowers and all kinds of memorials neatly commemorating suffering and heroism.

No walls still stand on the foundation half-buried in the crest of the hill where we’re standing. No memorials—just graffiti—decorate what’s there. No one keeps the place up, so what’s left deteriorates in the abusive hands of changing prairie seasons. You can walk into that foundation, if you dare. The empty shell of the church that once looked over the field where hundreds died is nothing at all like the monument at Coventry.

And yet it is. It’s just not sanitized. But then, nothing is at Wounded Knee. Today, there is very little to mark the spot, beyond the sign on the road and the old monument behind us. There is a circular visitors’ center down the hill to the east, the pit toilets stand just outside. The center itself is black, and it’s likely you’ve parked beside it before you walked up the hill to the burial monument. In the summer, the place is open. You can wander into its dark confines, where various displays will tell part of the story. But most of the year you’ll find a padlock on the door, which means you’re on your own at Wounded Knee.

Algebra 10-12 assignment; May 14

We continued working with the quadratic formula today, going over how to approximate values for the roots and to use the formula when the not all the values for a, b, and c are known.  We did three problems together and then worked the rest of the period completing the homework assignment.


Assignment:  Quadratic formula worksheet #2

Algebra 10-12 assignment; March 17

We got our test back today that the students took on Friday.  Test corrections are due on Thursday on a separate sheet of paper.

We started working on multiplying polynomials today by reviewing the distributive property and also using the FOIL method of working with polynomials.  FOIL stands for first, outside, inside, and last.  It involves the way in which a polynomial can be multiplied together.  The like terms are then combined and the answer is complete.

Assignment:  multiplying polynomials worksheet

Algebra 10-12 assignment; March 5

We reviewed exponents and scientific notation again in our entry task today, as well as when we went over the homework.  Our topic of study today focused on the basic parts of a polynomial.  We went over how to name a polynomial  (monomial, binomial, trinomial, etc.), how to identify terms and coefficients, and how to collect like terms.  After the notes, we took a short quiz on exponents before getting started on the homework.

Assignment:  Polynomial introduction worksheet  #1-39 odd

Remembering Frederick Manfred--1914-1994 (i)

It's now been twenty years since Frederick Manfred died, a "force of nature," some called him, a celebrated American novelist from Siouxland, who never really left the region of his birth.  In his honor, I'm reprinting an old essay of mine that outlines his influences on me. He was a friend.

I met Frederick Manfred in a bookstore in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, in late November of 1966. I wasn’t looking for him, but I stumbled across his name, a name I wouldn’t have recognized a couple months earlier, before my first trip to northwest Iowa, a region Manfred, a native, loved to call “Siouxland.” I don’t know what I might have been looking for that day, but it wasn’t his name or the book I found, a paperback novel titled The Secret Place. I bought it, then left the store, that book in an inconspicuous brown paper bag, its own secret place, you might say.

Just a few months earlier, I had gone to northwest Iowa and enrolled at Dordt College, in Sioux Center, primarily because I thought I wouldn’t be quick enough to make the Calvin College basketball team. At Dordt I thought I had a shot. In 1966, college choices—at least in my family—were considerably narrowed by tribal identity: Dordt, like Calvin, was one of our schools, a place where good Christian Reformed kids were encouraged to attend, sometimes even required. For me, high school classes in literature or history or foreign language had been little more than starting blocks to get to the gym or the practice field. When I left for college I had no greater aspirations than to become a coach someday—teaching, well, whatever.

In a dorm room full of rowdy guys, I heard the man’s name for the first time—“Manfred,” some guy said, sneering a bit because he claimed the name was phony. “His real name is Feikema,” alocal kid said, “Feik Feikema, and the guy writes dirty books.”

Adolescent male snickering.

“There was this sign along 75—used to say ‘Doon—home of Frederick Manfred,’” another kid said. More snickering. “Somebody cut it down. They don’t like him much.”

How come?

Shrugged shoulders. “You know—dirty books.

He’s from here? I said.

“Yeah, from Doon.”

Where’s Doon?

Thumbs up and over the left shoulder, pointing north.

I’d never heard of a writer, a novelist, actually being born and reared someplace close. Besides, writers lived in books and novels, not in dirt and harvest and the shady ambience of compost. Writers were city folks—educated. Snobs. The best ones were prophets. Writers didn’t milk cows.

Then I went home to Wisconsin, waltzed into a bookstore, and found this novel, The Secret Place. “Frederick Manfred.”

I’m sure I didn’t show my parents, who wouldn’t have understood the attraction; if they had, they wouldn’t have approved. They likely would have seconded the hostility of those upstanding, sign-dumping Doon-sters because my parents preached righteousness as fervently as they opposed dirty books. Meanwhile, their son was 19, and the Sixties were happening all around me. I had my own enthusiasms. 

________________ 

Tomorrow: The Secret Place

Pioneer women

There are two women in this story, two women and 125 years. One of them, this one, Renske, immigrated to America at the end of the 19th century, came here with a husband and a child. 

The other, 96 years old, knew her once long ago. "Aunt Janet knows something about Renske," a friend of mine told me. "She says she worked for her as a teenager." He told me that Aunt Janet lives in an apartment in town, across from the church. "Aunt Janet is almost 96, still lives on her own, and is very sharp," he said in a note.

Renske Hiemstra may be long gone, but her letters back home to Friesland got under my skin when I read them, under my skin and into my heart. Her's is just another 19th century immigrant saga, a pioneer woman who for a quarter century wrote her sister faithfully once the entire rest of the family left the Netherlands, all of them dreaming of homestead promises in Dakota Territory. 

In 1930, in Ponca City, Oklahoma, an oil magnate and ex-governor erected an indomitable, 17-foot bronze figure in a sun-bonnet, holding--leading--her son through a frontier she too saw as an avenue to a better life, an imposing statue called "the Pioneer Woman."

That she and her family displaced the thousands of Native people who called the land their home doesn't mean she and the women she represents don't have a story. She does, because white settlers on the Plains--Yankees or European immigrants--almost always found creating a life out here difficult, even terrifying, especially women, especially mothers. 

Renske Hiemstra didn't fall into the lap of luxury once she and her husband started a new American life. Farming was perilous, offered far more lean years than fat; and death stalked her like a unforgiving enemy. She and her husband Albert lost three children in their first ten years. 

The first, Lieuwe, was a joy, already two. "Nearly 24 hours he was so short of breath--oh, it was unbearable to watch," she says to her sister. "Oh, to see that lamb suffer so. . that breaks my heart. . ." They'd been here for just three years.

Nine months later, the second child, another boy, lived for just two and a half days. "And now, dear brother and sister, what is to be said about such things?" her husband writes, Renske probably unable to put a pen to paper. "We sometimes ask our Lord the reason for such things, but our God does not answer." 

And four years later, a third child stillborn. "This is now the third time that the Lord has taken such a hope for the future from us," Renske writes. "How this touches a parent's heart cannot be understood by those who have not undergone such an experience." 

Still, stubbornly, she clings to faith:  "Nonetheless, the Lord governs, and what answer can we give the Lord and how shall we meet him? He gives and takes away that we may even in this praise his name."

It's her testimony, her refusal to question the Lord God almighty, that grips my heart in her folded hands.

Three children.  And then, twenty years later, in 1921, Albert dies: "we hope to see one another in the paradise of the later-life, where there are no troubles or worries.  It is better for Albert."  

Soon after, the letters home simply end. 

I wanted to know this Renske Hiemstra better, wanted to know that that stubborn, proud faith didn't wither through the painful seasons she passed alone. I wanted to know what she was like when the letters ended, when she grew old.  

And Aunt Janet remembered her.

When I pulled up to Aunt Janet's apartment, she was standing outside, waiting, in nearly 90-degree heat. I shook her small hand politely, and we went inside. She told me how she had never forgotten walking across the pasture to the Hiemstra place 83 years before. Her visitations there were, in a way, a weekly mission of mercy because her mother had told her that Renske was very weak and needed help. Janet was just a girl, thirteen years old. It was 1931, mid-Depression, just about the time that rich man in Ponca City put up that memorial statue. For doing all the housework, one day a week, Aunt Janet said she was paid a quarter.  
I told her why I was interested.  It's a story about faith, I said, and I told her that Renske Hiemstra had lost three children and a husband long, long ago, lost all of that but as far as I knew never lost her faith. 

Aunt Janet didn't know about the children. They were gone before she was even born. Besides, she was just 13 years old, and, she said, "you know what you're like when you're 13." Still, it seemed to shock her that she hadn't known.

But she didn't simply want to tell me what she knew, she wanted to show me. So the two of us left for the country on a tour of the neighborhood where, eighty years ago she'd been a girl--and a look at the Hiemstra place just across the pasture. 

There's likely nothing on the yard that might have belonged to Renske Hiemstra and the son who lived there in those years, maybe an ancient hen house; but once we got out there, Aunt Janet could barely stanch the memories. And why should she? Once she found the place back, there was no stopping her, and I loved the stories.


What Aunt Janet related made it clear that Renske's life, after her husband's death and her only daughter's departure for California, was not at all what she and her family had envisioned when, forty years before, they'd left the Netherlands.  Nothing. Everything Aunt Janet remembered of the place was raw and dismal, even despairing--no food, no refrigeration, no strength.  Aunt Janet says Renske Hiemstra never moved from her chair in the kitchen, rarely even spoke. Aunt Janet was still a child, but the depressing story in that darkly lit kitchen she remembered very well.

I wasn't surprised, but the picture she drew wasn't what I wanted to hear because I would have much preferred hearing her, once again, even yet, extolling the love of God.  Aunt Janet remembered no such testimonies.

I would have much preferred Renske Hiemstra to be the powerful pioneer woman in Ponca City.

She wasn't. The life she'd lived in the new world of the prairie wasn't the story I wanted to hear or to tell.  It ended in a darkened kitchen, with no food.

The two of us circled the place, looked at it from every angle, as Aunt Janet kept telling stories, kept remembering growing up next door, walking a mile and more to a little Christian school that folded when she was going into the eighth grade. There was no money.

When we got back to town, she asked about my family and I told her about our kids, our grandkids. And then she told me, "You know, I've lost two boys."  One to cancer, one, just 18 in an accident. 

Sometimes you start to think that there's so much you don't know. 

When we came back to her apartment across from church, when we pulled up to the front door and I got out to help her out, I couldn't help but notice tears. She seemed to be crying. Her voice as she said goodbye was not at all unsteady, but the tears just kept rolling down her cheeks. 

I don't know why. It's a mystery I would like to understand because I felt both responsible for them and helpless at the way they fell. I'd been the one to bring all of that back, after all. I was the one who wanted to hear, to know. It seemed to me that she'd loved the telling, the remembering, the places so rich in images she'd not pulled from her memory for so very long. I thought she'd loved it. I really did.

Still, when I left there were tears, more tears, Aunt Janet's unexpected tears.

There are two women in this story, two women, 125 years, and just plain all too many tears.  

Geometry assignment; March 20

Our classes were very short today, so we spent the time to go over the homework answers and then remind the students of an algebra topic that they will need in this final section.  The topic involved factoring a quadratic equation and then solving for x.  We went over a few examples together before I gave them a short review assignment.

Assignment:  factoring quadratics review worksheet  #1-10 all

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Geometry assignment; March 14

We went over our quiz together that the students had taken earlier in the week to start the class off.  We then continued working with inscribed angles today, showing the last concept of how these angles are used in solving problems.  The students then started work on their 2nd assignment from this section.

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Morning Thanks--Four men from Berwyn

The old Timothy Christian School 

Late Sixties images should include a gallery of burning cities all over America, images most of us would rather forget. People died in violent street protests. People were killed. Shot. In the middle of the horror in Vietnam, National Guard troops were called up to police burning streets in Newark, Detroit, LA, cities all over America. The nation was torn asunder by racial hatred. 

In Cicero, Illinois, a small, community-based Christian school, faced its own racial crisis when African-American parents from one of its supporting churches asked to have their children enrolled in what had been an all-white school in an all-white section of the city. The board agonized but finally refused, claiming that admitting the black children to what had been an all-white school would put the entire student body and the school itself into jeopardy--no, into danger that was very, very real. 

Fifteen or so years before, a black family attempting to move into Cicero, came home to discover everything they owned stacked up in the street, a mob of 4000 having formed to make sure they understood African-American people were not welcome in Cicero. Animosity is too lean a word; hate is what motivated that mob, hate fueled by the fear the white and ethnic population of Cicero saw on a slippery slope: if there's one black family, next week there will be a half-dozen. A year from now there'll be a score. 

Many of them had experienced similar neighborhood transitions, often difficult, often violent, in other Chicago communities. They didn't want black people in the neighborhood because they were sure that, soon enough, black people would be the neighborhood. 

When the Timothy Christian School Board determined those black children would not be enrolled, they argued that those black children could not be enrolled because the fever of racial hatred--which is to say racism--in the neighborhood was so high that every last dear little child--white and black--would be in danger at the hands of the same mob who had piled that black family's belongings in the street outside their home. Warnings were given--shots would be fired, the school would be torched--bloody threats were made. The board decided they could not risk the torch of hate.

All of that happened almost fifty years ago, but I remember it because I was convinced, and I was not alone, that what happened at Timothy Christian School, Chicago, was the outing of inherent racism in my own ethnic and religious community.  I was a college student with decidedly liberal leanings at Dordt College, a very conservative place.  My father--a wonderful Christian man--considered Martin Luther King an "agitator" who couldn't be trusted because he'd frequented the company of known communists. King wanted war, not peace, my father would have said. Wherever King went, racial animosity didn't diminish, it grew, like a fire.

Timothy, to me, proved beyond a doubt that my people were racists.

Just a few weeks ago, at a restaurant in Berwyn, Illinois, I listened to four retired white men remember that era in their lives, four men who were part of the community that rejected those black children, four men who still attend Berwyn Ebenezer Christian Reformed Church, four men who were, back then, accused of the sin of racism by people like me because those men sided with the board's refusal to admit black children. 

Two of them cried when they recounted those days. All four spoke passionately.  Even though almost a half century has passed, they look back on that crisis as horrifying in every detail. The tensions, the threats, the impossible decision, and the hate that decision created, all of that constituted a moment in their lives like few others.

I'll tell you what I expected to hear from them: I expected confession. I expected these retired men to say they were sorry for refusing admission to black children. I may have even expected tears wrung from heartfelt repentance.  

There were tears, but I was wrong. Each one claimed that if he had to determine an answer to the request of those black parents again back then, if he had to relive all that hate, his answer would be the same because each of them was absolutely sure that horror would result, not from African-Americans, but from their own white neighbors. That's how much hate they witnessed and feared.

I listened to their stories, as did our whole committee, a committee composed almost totally of people of color. It's important to know that the white folks--me included--sitting around that table were a minority. 

There we sat, a church committee, a denominational committee, whose most pressing concern is racial reconciliation, listening to four white men tearfully recount the horror they'll never forget in all its heart-rending detail, but sticking with a decision that made them look and sound, back then, just like their own racist neighbors. 

It was a powerful and tearful moment, a precious moment I'll never, ever forget.

Back then, were they right? 

I think not. But there's far more hesitation in my voice when I say that, fifty years later. Today, I know them. Today I understand them far better than I did when I was twenty because I've heard their memories and their life stories both before and after the Timothy crisis. I listened to their testimony of faith. I saw tears. I felt in all of those stories the very real humanity of those men, which is to say, by way of my faith, I felt the image of God right there in them as they sat and talked around that breakfast table.

The work of racial reconciliation is never easy, but it is blessed; and this morning, I am greatly thankful for those four men, for what they told us, for how they opened their hearts and filled ours.

Algebra 10-12 assignment; May 2

We went over our homework and reviewed the different topics that we studied this week before taking our quiz.  The quiz was over simplifying, multiplying, and dividing radicals.  After the quiz was over, the students then got started working on their assignment for Monday.


Assignment:  simplifying radicals worksheet #2

Geometry assignment; April 21

We went over our quiz from last week before getting started on today's lesson.  We continued to work on finding the areas of sectors and the lengths of arcs today.  We focused on using the areas of sectors to find the radius values of circles and various other areas inside of a circle and an inscribed triangle.  The students got started on their assignment at the end of the period.


Assignment:  Section 11-6 worksheet   #1-12 all

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Who do you trust?

I don't claim to know much at all about Bowe Bergdahl, but I tend to believe most anything David Brooks says, and he says President Obama did the right thing, just screwed up terribly on the hype. That may well be true.

I don't know whether Bergdahl was a deserter or a collaborator, or whether he, like Cacciato in Tim O'Brien's great Vietnam-era novel, just simply decided to walk home. I don't know.

But I do tend to believe the people I trust, and, for better or for worse, I trust his preacher. Why? Because the man is OPC--that's Orthodox Presbyterian, a tiny denomination whose biggest churches, I believe, are in Oostburg and Cedar Grove, Wisconsin, where I grew up. I went to grade school with whole gangs of OPC kids. Few of them were flaming liberals. 

The OPC had only recently broken ties with the mainline Presbyterian Church, their quarrels led by a learned prof named J. Gresham Machen, who left Princeton Seminary in the Thirties fearing what we used to call "modernism," which questioned most anything truly miraculous in Bible, from the parting of the Red Sea to the Virgin Birth.  

J. Gresham Machen wasn't about to allow empty orthodoxy to rule.  

Christian experience is rightly used when it helps to convince us that the events narrated in the New Testament actually did occur; but it can never enable us to be Christians whether the events occurred or not. It is a fair flower, and should be prized as a gift of God. But cut it from its root in the blessed Book, and it soon withers away and dies.

I've been to Synods of the OPC, where men--which is to say, men only--fight long and hard over theological questions so obscure you need an M.Div. degree to read the scorecard. When it comes to theology, OPC preachers are precise. They're not lefties, believe me. 

So it turns out that Bowe Bergdahl and his family are OPC, and that a OPC preacher named Pastor Phil Proctor has been mentoring the family, on and off, for the five years that have passed since young Bergdahl left his post and got himself interred by Afghan Taliban. How does Rev. Proctor see the whole story? 

"This whole thing is the dog of politics wagging the tail of the conservative Christian conversation," he told Christianity Today. "Folks are failing to recognize that this is a political football and was from the beginning. The Bergdahls are just the flavor of the week, and next week it's going to be a different scandal. That's politics."

Wow. I think I can hear coals popping to flame beneath him on Fox and Friends. 

Rev. Proctor isn't finished.

But these are brothers and sisters in Christ. We can have political views on whether Bowe should be in prison, or whether Bob should say the Arabic version of "shalom," but to adopt the rhetoric of the day and use it to guide conversations among Christians about another self-professed Christian--I'm saddened by that.

If you find all of that shocking, you should remember what lots of Christians are saying these days: we live in an evangelical world in which theology is far less important than politics, where talk radio makes heartier converts than the church down the block. 

But here's Pastor Proctor on grace and peace:

We live in the grace of God and as we are immersed over and over again in appreciation of his grace to us in Christ; it lives out in peaceful relationships. I would hope that we as believers can be more eager to pursue peace.

CT asked him if he thought Bowe Bergdahl was a deserter. "I honestly don't know," he said, and drew an analogy:  "If we saw a Christian couple whose daughter had gotten pregnant or whose son got caught with a bunch of cocaine, we would cry with them and we would help them to walk through the valley," he said. "Right now, we're watching a lynch mob, and Christians are getting engaged in the lynching. In any other situation, we'd be hugging the parents and weeping with them."

I got history with the OPC.  I trust them. 

I don't trust Steve Doocey, and I don't trust Rush either.  Sorry.

No I'm not.