Algebra 10-12 assignment; 8/29

We corrected homework today and did a quick review of how to multiply fractions and then reduce the final answer.  The students then took a short practice quiz at the end of the period before getting started on their homework.


Assignment:  Reducing Fraction worksheet side:  Do columns 2 and 4
                     Multiplying Fractions worksheet side:  do the even problems

Sunday Morning Meds--Begging Bread

“I was young and now I am old, 

yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken 

or their children begging bread.”

Psalm 37

“Piety gave birth to prosperity,” Cotton Mather once wrote (or words similar to those), “and the child devoured the mother.”  But then, Cotton Mather really believed that his beloved Puritan theocracy got shipwrecked by the diminished righteousness of the children of New England’s “visible saints.”  The new-found wealth of the second and third generations of the Puritans simply destroyed orthodoxy and faith itself. 

He may have been right, of course, but then, as President Bill Clinton might say, a whole lot depends on what one means by righteousness.

We could twist this verse of Psalm 37 into something entirely different from what David likely intended if we listened to European history or, for that matter, Professor Max Weber, who, a century ago already, argued that capitalism and its myriad excesses descended, in no small part, from the Protestant work ethic. It goes like this: great piety creates a deep sense of calling, commitment to task; but once the piety fades, what’s left the industry, the work ethic; and that work ethic is the dynamo that empowers capitalism. 

Odd to think of Max Weber and Cotton Mather sitting down somewhere and agreeing, but their arguments aren’t that distanced. And those arguments are a far cry from what King David claims to have experienced in his life. The children of the righteous, Mather and Weber might argue, don’t beg, not because of God’s faithfulness, but because they come heir to generous fortunes created by their righteous parents’ commitment to work.

Throughout the psalms, it’s not so common to hear David reflect in the way he does here—as if he’s sitting in Sun City, fingers arched over a keyboard, reflecting on the life that stretches behind him. I like that picture. He’s trying his best to convince us of the basic melody of the whole song—that God almighty loves the righteous fully as much as he hates the wicked. And what’s crucial in Psalm 37 is that you can see it—that’s his point. You can see it all around, if you just look. Observe the plight of the wicked and the prosperity of the righteous, he says. In all my life I’ve never seen the righteous forsaken, or their children begging bread, he says.

End of story.

But even Charles Spurgeon has his doubts about what we might call David’s hyperbolic claim. Spurgeon says that what David sees may well be what he saw during his lifetime, but it’s not what Spurgeon observed. Nor can I say that it’s what I’ve seen. Good people suffer. Good people readily feel forsaken—and often. In hurricanes and floods and wars and persecution, good people are swept out of their homes by tidal surges that seem brewed up only by the Devil, not the loving hands of God. Bad things happen to good people.

But our doubt of the specifics here, or of David’s rhetoric, “does not cast doubt upon the observation of David,” Spurgeon says with reference to this verse. “Never are the righteous forsaken,” he writes; “that is a rule without exception.”

David isn’t so much stretching the truth as he is pounding it home. What’s behind his almost unbelievable claims is the central truth of God’s love to those who love him: “Be not afraid.”

Here and everywhere in scripture, that’s the bottom line. Sometimes, in scripture as in life, you’ve got to get behind the words to find the truth.

Geometry assignment; Feb. 7

We took the last of our perfect squares quizzes today.  I'll average the top two scores when I put them in the gradebook.  We also took a short quiz on working with radical expressions.

Assignment:  section 8-1;  page 288-289;  #27-32

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Remembering Frederick Manfred--1912-1994 (ix)

To my mind, Frederick Manfred was deeply influenced by modernism, the prevalent intellectual worldview of his time and the cultural and intellectual milieu of, at least, the American Depression. After leaving college he traveled to the East coast, where the rough shod farm kid with the Calvinist pedigree walked in on the substantial political questions of the day, questions which were, during those years, sometimes answered better by socialism and communism than capitalism.

In New Jersey and later in Minnesota, he met what his own people would have called “leftists.” They were bright and they were influential and they were many. His many years of cloistered Christian and Reformed education did not stand up well against the prevailing modernist views of faith and spirituality—that Christianity was little more than a remnant primitive mysticism that would, soon enough, disappear among the masses, just as it had already disappeared among the enlightened. That never happened, and Fred died before the advent of our post-modern milieu, when spirituality, in all its manifestations, is flowering, sometimes madly.

His father, Frank Feikema, may well have prompted the most beautiful writing Fred Manfred ever did, a loving elegiac biography in Prime Fathers.

But what remained in him of the faith in which he grew was the beloved, yet searing memory of his deeply religious mother, whom he idolized, a woman named Alice Van Engen. His mother’s vibrant and gracious spirituality must have glowed like a dawn, if you listen to him. She is in his novels. Her death ends Green Earth, and offers his readers—and his people—an explanation of how he considered himself liberated from the cultural and spiritual strictures of his tribe, a tribe he never really stopped loving, strangely enough—and respecting.

In his daughter’s memoir, Frederick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers, Freya Manfred remembers the way her father always extolled his mother’s beauty and grace. But she also remembers her father—and quotes him—admitting that his mother’s early death (he was 17 when she died) was something of a blessing: “’. . .I’d have had an awful time explaining my vision to her or going up against her,’ he said, ‘because she never yelled at me. If I did something wrong, or she thought I hadn’t been entirely honest, she’d just look at me sadly and I’d feel terrible, deep in my guts.’”

The caricature of stern Dutch Calvinism would have no currency if it weren’t, in part, true. Fred Manfred remembered and undoubtedly experienced dour religiosity, preening self-righteousness, and outright hypocricy amid the Siouxland Dutch, and Fries, from which he’d come. But it wasn’t sharp tongues that kept him wondering about God, even arguing, I believe; what never left him was, instead, the loving embrace of his Godly mother, what she was and what she represented.

His liberation comes in the final powerful pages of Green Earth, when, on her death bed, Ada (his mother) tells Free (read Feike) that she wants him to be a writer even if she’ll never see him in heaven someday. She wants him to be true to what he is.

But to know that he himself felt, in a certain way, blessed by her early death, for the reasons he gives, can’t help but make us question whether the liberation he celebrates in Green Earth is purely fiction and not memoir at all. No one will ever know. Only two characters are privy to that death bed scene—Free and Ada, son and mother.

Most critics of the work of Peter De Vries maintain that even though you could take the boy out of his boyhood Calvinism, the ambience of that world—its powerful religiosity—never really left him. The same can be said for Frederick Manfred.

Elsewhere in her memoir, Freya Manfred remembers how, close to his death, her father once asked her a question she thought strange: “What do you suppose God will have me do when he gets me into the other place?”

To which his daughter replies: “I didn’t know you thought there was another place.”

It seems, he did.
________________

Tomorrow:  A hospital memory

Red Rock Miracles

Henry Whipple was one of the first students. Don't be fooled--not the Henry Whipple, the famous Minnesota missionary who, in 1862, pleaded with President Lincoln for the lives of hundreds of Dakota braves and won.

This Henry Whipple was a cute little Navajo six-year-old, who no one on earth had called "Henry Whipple" until he came to the new school at the mission, Rehoboth Mission. In 1903, that Henry Whipple was one of Rehoboth's very first students. He's the little guy down on the left.

First crack out of the box, his teachers named him Henry Whipple because the Henry Whipple was a missionary hero.

But there was another reason too, that one not so noble. Those very first teachers, all of whom spoke with thick Dutch brogues, didn't stand a chance of pronouncing Henry Whipple's Navajo name--whatever it was--so they simply dropped it and gave him a name rich with honor and a whole lot easier to pronounce.

They likely didn't ask him. After all, changing the boy's name didn't matter because they were there in New Mexico on a mission to teach the Navajo the gospel of Jesus Christ; and they were sure--just as all Anglos were back then, even those with thick Dutch brogues--that accomplishing that mission meant stripping a six-year-old Navajo kid of just about everything he'd ever known: cut his hair, dress him in white man's clothes, teach him the Bible, the English language, and Heidelburg Catechism. That's how Indian education was done, after all, in this country.

The truth is, there was a school at Rehoboth mission only because the mission wasn't on the Navajo Reservation. It wasn't placed where there was already an Indian school, where the government gave missionaries lots of good time with kids anyway because the government believed that bringing Native people Christianity was a super good way to make them forget they were Indians and make them real Americans.

It's no wonder that many Native people across the continent, even today, think of Christianity as the white man's religion. Even the government thought so: teach 'em to look decent, to speak English, drive a tractor, build a shed, and go to church. You know, get with the program: be an American like everyone else.

Today, no one knows what happened to Henry Whipple, the cute little boy you see on that first Rehoboth school picture because no one really knows his name. On that picture, he's just Henry Whipple, not the missionary Henry Whipple.

Not long ago, Rehoboth Christian High School was named one of the premiere 50 Christian high schools in the nation. It's a great honor really, even though no educator fully understands how someone decides who's number 27 and who is 127. Rating institutions must be something of a crap shoot.

That being said, I'm sure Rehoboth Christian High is greatly thankful they are among the chosen, the elite, recognized to be what they are, one of the finest Christian high schools across the length and breadth of this country. Being one of the fifty best, no matter what kind of wizardry got them there, is far better than not showing up on the list.

That they are there is not a miracle. A school that began as a mission enterprise in the racist footsteps of every other educational institution on American reservations, has slowly and stubbornly become something compellingly unique, a reservation school that not only works but excels, and one that does it all in the name of the Lord. There are teachers and administrators at Rehoboth--and I am blessed to know some of them--who work their hearts out to create a school dedicated to the glory of the risen Christ.

Hard work, dedication and endless prayer have played significant roles in creating an institution that's become nearly as stunning as a sunset on the red rocks in the school's front yard. There are many to thank, including some of the earliest folks, who recruited Navajo and Zuni kids the hard way, by building friendships, one family at a time, through long hours sitting in front a fire on the dirt floor of a hogan.

An old Rehoboth grad, someone whose kids and grandkids have all attended Rehoboth, told me his father claimed that the only reason he sent his boy down the road to the mission school was because that missionary, that Rev. Van--when that white man talked about living a good life he was really talking about what his father called "the beauty way." 

His father wasn't a Christian, but his father sent his little boy to school at Rehoboth because he'd learned to trust the man who said the boy should be there.

There are other schools with Dutch Calvinist roots among the fifty best Christian high schools in the nation--Eastern, in New Jersey, Pella, in Iowa, Lynden, in Washington, Sioux Falls, in South Dakota, and Holland, in Michigan. Each of them has ties to each other and to Rehoboth, schools where the mission is teaching kids something akin to what one might find in John Calvin:  "There is not one blade of grass, no color in the world, that is not intended to make us rejoice." All of life belongs to Him.

But only one of those elite Christian high schools was not built for Dutch Calvinist kids. Only one was built for others, and only one was built for this country's first nation people. That one is Rehoboth. We did a lot of it wrong through the years, but God almighty quite regularly weaves gorgeous blankets out of our filthy rags. 

Really, Rehoboth Christian School is a miracle.  Soli deo gloria.

Sunday Morning Meds--Noonday Sun

. . .the justice of your cause like the noonday sun. . .”

Not an appropriate metaphor—not right now anyway.  It’s too blame hot.

Two days ago I decided to take a quick trip out west before school starts and I’m pitched back into the classroom.  Just two and a half hours west, the Missouri River, which has been turned into a series of reservoirs by the Corps of Engineers, winds its way north, cutting right through South and North Dakota, before moving west once again.

 

The Missouri Valley, gorgeous and humbling, is huge, broad, wide, and, frequently treeless.  Standing alone out there, you somehow get to know your place in time and life.  I wanted to get out to some out-of-the-way spot along the river and stand on a bluff at dawn, camera in hand.  I did.  But that has nothing to do with this line from Psalm 37.

I’m getting older—trust me, that I know—as is our car.  We’ve got a sun roof, right?—and the car is white.  I’m thinking I can save the old beast some wear-and-tear if, for two and a half hours, I deign the air-conditioning.  Besides, all around me are myriad overweight and balding Harley lovers on their way to Sturgis for the annual million motorcycle march.  What kind of man am I if I sit like a sissy in air-conditioned comfort?  It’s a guy thing.

So I turned the air-conditioner off.  I did. 

And I almost died. 

Just a few weeks ago on the plains of South Dakota, the temperature reached 115.  It wasn’t that hot while I was there, but 105 is hardly mellow.  The whole world looked bleached and starved.  There will be no corn crop this year out there, but that’s not terribly all that unusual in central South Dakota. Fields are yellowed prematurely and sickly thin because weeks and weeks of heat often rode the back of a raspish south wind that will wither almost any living thing.

I had visions of taking photographs, but during the middle of the day it takes a pretty heavy polarizing filter to get anything but endless tawny-ness on the Plains.  Out there, earth and sky meet, really—the world seems a dusty tarn in flat-out unremitting heat.  On the Great Plains, there ain’t no trees, and thus no place to hide.

Heat wears you out.  All along the way, my windows open, I marveled that road construction people could actually stand in that heat during the day—worse, work in it, pouring blacktop, of all things. 

But I know what David means, even if, this morning, in the cool of my basement, I’m thankful to be out of the noonday sun he seems to admire. 

The shoulders of the Missouri River are huge and husky, just a few rippling savannahs running memorably up their ample sides.  When the noonday sun shines openly down upon its waters and those gargantuan bluffs, there are few dark corners and almost no hiding from that ball of fire.

King David’s take on that phenomenon is joy, however, because in bright sun there are no secrets and no prejudices.  Righteousness shines, bare nakedly, in the wash of noonday.  Everybody sees what they haven’t.  They’ll all know because there it is. 

There are times in everyone’s life when it’s a great thing to be out of the shadows, to be baldly open for all the world to see.  That’s the promise, startling as it seems.  No more repression, no more fear, no more enforced silence.  God’s love creates for all of our humanness one grand out-of-the-closet noonday sun. 

_____________________ 

For the record: It wasn't 105 degrees two days ago, I'm no longer teaching, and that wonderful white Aurora became part of the pages of history long ago.  In case you're wondering, Sunday Morning Meds are a series I wrote some time ago, over several years. After the world's longest winter, I think I'd love 105.  Once.