Author Archives: PearlS

Starving them curious.

When one of the boys was little, I read Story of the World aloud to him one chapter a day. I was in the throes of homeschooling. My kids were ages 1, 3, 5, and 7—and he was in kindergarten. It was a recipe for anxiety. Like puppies, I’d get one kids settled in my lap and the others would immediately start out in an opposite direction, tearing up the house, wrestling, searching for food/trouble. I lived in a perpetual state of stress, worrying I wasn’t getting enough done or doing anything the right way.

Still, I was willing to give it a go, and armed with a library card and four kids to wreak chaos on shelved books, I began my noblest pursuit.

Who knew reading was fraught with so many pitfalls? Do this, don’t do that. Advice and self-help can be the worst, but I dove in again and again like it were a research project. If I just collected enough data I’d be able to assimilate the best way to do a thing.

By the time I read the Michelle Duggar parenting book, I knew I was already too late on indoctrination; I hadn’t trained any of my kids to sit on a blanket quietly for hours like I should have when they were tots.

But I pressed on, committed to the higher cause of educational excellence. Nevermind the kids couldn’t sit still.

Some sagacious homeschooling mom who had written a book on homeschool recommended reading aloud to non-readers and then having them dictate a short synopsis back to you (she also pushed the rote memorization of poems and the Declaration of Independence as well as introducing basic Latin). I was impressed. It sounded lofty. I bought into the method.
This is where I began: I’d read SoW and my little boy would listen to the chapter and then wait patiently (or very impatiently) as I wrote down his dictated book report, word for word.

Our Story of the World experiment turned into a precious notebook full of 5 and 6 year old musings. I’m not sure it set him on a path far and ahead of his peers at his tender age, but I muscled through it and bribed him along with Cheezits.

By the end of the first SoW he was reading on his own and was interested in a variety of picture books. Meanwhile, another boy had commandeered SoW and was devouring it like a novel. This to say—I didn’t follow the good mothering/homeschooling advice from the books. There was no temperance. No workbooks, no higher thinking. Books—any books became a drug to get my children to sit still for more than five minutes. And I allowed it, if for nothing more than an excuse to wash dishes in peace.

I was already falling into the dark gray perimeters of (gasp) unschooling. My children were out of bounds, untethered. They didn’t read a chapter, stop, and fill out a worksheet. They didn’t read a chapter, stop, and do a chore. They just read. And read. And read. For hours. For days.

It should have felt freeing, I guess, but it felt like failure. All those bowls of grapes, wheat thins, and hot chocolate on the couch didn’t lead to kids wanting to memorize the Declaration of Independence. No, what they were and are to this day, is incurable bookworms.

That was six years ago. We have public schooled. We have homeschooled. We have public schooled again. We are on our second set of Story of the World because the first was torn apart by years of heavy reading. Even now I find them randomly throughout the house, in a bathroom, on the table, splayed covers turned upside down to mark the spot they left off. Who doesn’t love a good Middle Ages-Charlemagne jaunt as they brush their teeth at night?

These boys are now reading Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Dumas, H.G. Wells. They know about the gae bolga and Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and Sisyphus who had to roll a big rock up a hill for all of eternity. They come home from school, consume pounds of Cheezits, and stick their noses in books. One kid has even sustained a neck injury from reading. Ha!

I’m starting to believe, thru empirical evidence, that modern methods of learning are pretty much tied to how much a parent is willing to foster curiosity. Schooling—public, private, at home—is irrelevant if there is no intrinsic hunger to know.

Benjamin Franklin was 26 years old when he began learning French. Once mastered, he turned to Italian. This he acquired by losing chess matches to a friend (the winner got to assign translation homework to the loser, which had to be completed by the next day’s chess game). After Italian, Franklin began to focus on Spanish.
He mentions in his autobiography that he attended Latin school for one year as a boy and it did him no good. But after he’d learned French, Italian, and Spanish as an adult he opened a Latin Bible and surprisingly understood it.

From these circumstances, I have thought that there is some inconsistency in our common mode of teaching languages. We are told that it is proper to begin first with the Latin, and, having acquired that, it will be more easy to attain those modern languages which are derived from it; and yet we do not begin with the Greek, in order more easily to acquire the Latin. It is true that, if you can clamber and get to the top of the staircase without using the steps, you will more easily gain them in descending; but certainly, if you begin with the lowest you will with more ease ascend to the top; and I would therefore offer it to the consideration of those who superintend the education of our youth, whether, once many of those who begin with the Latin quit the same after spending some years without having made any great proficiency, and what they have learned becomes almost useless, so that their time had been lost, it would not have been better to have begun with the French, proceeding to the Italian, etc.; for, though, after spending the same time, they should quit the study of languages and never arrive at the Latin, they would, however, have acquired another tongue or two, that being in modern use, might be serviceable to them in common life.
The Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin

His direct advice is this: compel young students to learn by means that are useful, namely a language that is not (ahem) dead (those are fightin’ words to a classical educator), but one that can be useful for, say, ordering food at the Mexican restaurant or traveling out of the States. The Latin will come, the higher thinking will come, but sometimes we waste the years of curiosity by aiming too high too early.
Rote memorization might just kill all sorts of child-focused, natural learning. Hand them a book; watch their hunger develop.

For most educators, this is out of the question. Teachers at my school throw out boxes and boxes of books and curriculum. We are forever chasing complete worksheets and high test scores, if not—and here I’m talking parents and parent educators—hoping our little Einsteins will prove they blow their peers out of the water with their intelligence. (And the sooner, the better!)
States and school districts require some accounting for a method to the madness, and hard data streamlines the process and determines how future funding is distributed.

If we could just let go a little on the methodology madness. No kid is a master at efficiency. Grownups are —and how quickly grownups get out of touch with children! But if a parent studied their child—really studied them, they could begin feeding their mind a diet that expands their academic palate. More interestingly still, one might apply boredom as a type of fasting so that hunger increases.

What Franklin doesn’t say, and I think history lives to support, is this: curious, self-motivated achievers in academics pursue excellence. Franklin was a founding father of what became the greatest nation in the world.

Look at us now—a nation of violence, greed, hyper-sexual, divisive. Look at where our kids’ eyes are fixed, look at how satisfied they are in greedily gobbling entertainment. Is there a correlation?

Will they ever be hungry to learn? What will the future hold?

Scaffolding, MLKJ, and your local drag queens.

Several years ago I remarked on the idiocy of drag queens and story hours for young children.

I didn’t say how I knew, or why I knew it was a bad mix, but isn’t it amazing how the Spidey-sense works? Even as tiny humans we have a built-in alert system that blares like a car alarm when something is awry.

This is not condemnation; we aren’t assigning permanent places in Hell over one prickly, hair-raising Spidey-sense.
No, it is purely judgment, a matter of using our senses to discriminate between what is good and bad, right and wrong. Scientists might call it a mechanism or trait acquired by evolution.
Camouflage, razor sharp teeth, poison stingers, squirting ink, the powerful spray of a skunk—it doesn’t matter to me how you think these defenses came about—the fact is, even the most basic creatures have a red flag warning system built in.

A child is naturally afraid of weird, unfamiliar things unless they have been abused or mistreated from infancy and cannot, through their broken alert system, access a proper defense.

Recently my local news reported a Martin Luther King Jr. celebration day where “queens” walked catwalk-style and performed at an “inclusive” breakfast. They were invited by the city mayor. Also invited? Local middle school students.
Nevermind what the good preacher King would say (on first thought I’d say he’d be horrified, but he was more pro-eugenics than many people would like to admit, so it’s a toss up)—what do you think parents said when their twelve year olds came home and relayed the events of the day?
Car alarms were blaring.

In education, there is a lot of talk about scaffolding.
Scaffolding is the idea that students use previous knowledge and experience as the foundation for higher thinking.

Take an example of scaffolding from one of my current classes: In kindergarten I began the year singing repeat-after-me songs with my guitar. This led to talking about and touching the guitar. We discussed instruments in the string family, and over a period of several months, the kids were exposed to other instruments in the same music family: mandolin, banjo, violin, dobro, bass, cello. We talked about how strings make vibrations that are amplified, and each instrument has its own special sound.

As the year progresses, we listen to a variety of music. Kindergarten is learning to recognize the sound of each instrument. We read stories, act out folk songs, dance to rhythms, tap out beats. We cut, glue, color. We pull out scarves and dance to classical music.

This week I made a google slides on Wolfgang Mozart, introducing the composer whose music they already recognize.
On Monday, we skimmed over pictures and shared basic facts. Born on the other side of the world (Europe), lived in a time before electricity and indoor plumbing, died at the young age of 35.

“What instrument is this?” I asked, pointing to an old portrait of Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang’s dad.
“A violin!” They yelled.

Tuesday we listened to the first piece Mozart composed (as a five year old—“hey, I’m five, too!”) discussed the word prodigy and went over the pictures again.

On day three I pulled up the third slide of the Mozart presentation.
“And what instrument is this?” I ask, pointing to the picture of 5 year old Mozart perched next to an intricate keyboard.
“A clavier!” A little girl shouts out.
I beam.

Since then we’ve discussed how Mozart was contemporaries with George Washington. We’ve talked about wigs and leeches and hygiene and Ben Franklin and his glass harmonica. We’ve watched the Papageno clip from The Magic Flute. Next week we’ll break out boomwhackers and coloring sheets and play Rondo Alla Turca. During my lunch duty as I squirt ketchup onto pink trays and poke straws into juice bags the kids beg to talk more about Mozart next class.


This is scaffolding. This is a method for acquiring knowledge.
This is how lifelong learners are born. One must build knowledge block by block.

Now I will repeat what made my local news: the city mayor invited a group of drag queens to parade their scant bodies and garish makeup in front of eleven and twelve year olds—all in the name of inclusion.

Doesn’t it land a bit odd with you? Say what you will about inclusion, but every child deserves some basic scaffolding.

This is what makes inclusion a rotten apple—it places children in the center of confusion and offers no explanation other than to accept it, no questions asked.
At the heart of inclusion is bitterness that refuses the idea of higher thinking.

You might think that, by exposing your young child, you will lay a stable, inclusive bedrock for her future encounters with diverse people in the world. But the truth is you are refusing to give her the scaffolding she needs to reason her way through life. You might even be ruining her natural alert system to where she cannot access a proper defense should the need arise.

In my classroom, the children have lots of questions. They want the knowledge that sparks their curiosity. They are looking with hungry eyes, devouring the answers I give them. I am, after all, their construction supervisor, erecting scaffolding and watching as they add another tier, one story at a time.

Have you done this favor for the children in your life?

Scaffolding is training up a child, little by little; small bites. They don’t need to know the ins and outs of sexuality. They don’t need to see or comprehend behavior that toys with perversion or slinks about in the margins of society. Plenty of lessons are adult-themed, properly handled with decades of scaffolding and without sacrificing the tiny voice inside that says “I’m too scared to learn about this right now.”

It’s worth thinking about.

Bread bakers, world makers.

I’m not forty yet but I have been coming up with more stories to tell my kids which makes me think I’m edging in on old. I could’ve sworn I couldn’t remember that much from childhood. 

When we walked in the school building this morning, it smelled like warm, delicious hot rolls. We enter through the cafeteria side. I mused aloud that a sweet woman named Carmen used to make all the hot rolls, cinnamon rolls, breadsticks at our school. 

I can still remember the taste, even down to the tray, the crusty bits of flaking cinnamon and icing, the buttery garlic of the massive soft breadsticks that were nothing more than elongated hot rolls. How lucky I was to eat in her cafeteria for thirteen years of my childhood! No roll, cinnamon or otherwise, fit squarely in any of the small side dish compartments. The breadsticks—only breadsticks in name—are still a revelation in my mind; fluffy, mouthwatering and golden on top. They always came in pairs, stuck together, as only a pizza wheel had separated the dough prior to rising. Picture two full-size hotdog buns without rounded edges—this breadstick masterpiece was easily the size of the art boxes we kept in our desk. I think I survived on Carmen’s dependable bread through elementary, middle, and high school—and especially on those meager lunch days that boasted Salisbury steak or other vague meat choices.
Opaa!, our out-sourced lunch plan du jour, even with its spunky exclamation point cannot hold a candle next to the meals I grew up on (nixing the beanie weenies, of course). 

What’s even more shocking is that Carmen taught me her magic for three years straight. I wasn’t paying full attention—it was 4-H Yeast Breads I, II, and III and I killed my fair share of yeast with hot water out of Carmen’s microwave. I was far more concerned with the weight of disappointing a grown up than watching a master at work.

My mom would pack yeast and a five pound sack of flour in a paper bag for me to store in my locker during the school day. In the afternoon, Carmen would take us to her house to pull out stained recipe books and try our hand at the trade. I remember the heavy responsibly of not killing yeast so as not to disappoint Carmen nor my mom who had paid for it. Carmen would cluck and tsk and try to help fix our (usually un- fixable) mistakes.

(Why didn’t we ask for Carmen’s trustiest recipe? Why did we, week after week, flip through the same recipe book in search of something lighter, fluffier, tastier—when Carmen herself had all the secrets?)

We—my oldest brother and me—would inevitably bring home rock-like lumps of “cranberry wreaths” and “peanut butter bears”—only the fanciest, most complicated delicacies—for our mom to pretend to fawn over and declare, mouth full, “delicious”. Our Parker House/butter fan/knots/pretzels/Sally Lunn—they were all dense and nearly burned on the bottom. No fear, in a couple weeks we would repeat our attempts!

This is what floors me, if I am being honest, about school, and about communities. Good ones persistently seek small victories in small spaces, never looking up to see who is watching.

Carmen, the idol of my youth, was a lunch lady. I looked up to several grownups in my life and none of them probably ever made much more than minimum wage. Yet I used my yeast bread knowledge to secure my first real adult job at the age of twenty, walking into a commercial kitchen and offering to make pizza dough, from scratch, for lunch. Within a year I was managing the place.

Another grownup I loved was a teacher who sang as we marched through the elementary hallways. She smiled constantly, beamed really, at her students, like we had made the sun rise that morning. No lesson was too small. We studied ugly little pollywogs, stanky, murky water in a dirty aquarium. We touched milkweed and watched butterflies be born.
I remember the centers in her classroom. Centers! How in the world did she make first grade interesting enough to be remembered, down to the 4 major food groups (we spread peanut butter on bread cut out into teddy bear shapes)? I love her to this day for loving me.
And now I spend my evenings brainstorming up fun little ways to make my classroom engaging and memorable—digging out an old pair of tap shoes to show the students tomorrow along with a clip of Gene Kelly and Singin’ in the Rain.

The things that seem undoable to the general crowd, like changing the world or molding the future: I learned it from sweet ladies who were genuinely just trying to make the next day’s batch of food or lesson plan for hungry kids who didn’t appreciate what they had until they’d left the nest.

That’s really how simple it is—a willingness to get messy coupled with some deeper satisfaction that doesn’t come from recognition, but a determination to live nobly.

Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde: implications of a pharmakeia life.

Would you believe I’d never read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde until this, my thirty-ninth year of life?
In the name of Halloween and literacy (and in-class read-aloud-ability, although I quickly determined this not to pass muster) and my kids who willingly swap around books with their mother, I picked up an abridged version of Stevenson’s classic.

It went the way I expected, with Dr. Jekyll drinking green bubbly formulas to turn him into the coarse, reproachful other self of Mr. Hyde and then vice-versa. I guess I didn’t know that the Jekyll part of him was his original identity and that he began transitioning to Hyde as a way to live out his lustful, sinful nature as a separate self so it “might not harm anyone”.

The surprise isn’t that he killed himself in the end as Mr. Hyde, his self-medicating ways no longer effective (do spoiler alerts count 140 years after a book was written?), but that my kids who read the book asked, quite innocently, if something like that could happen in this day.
Could a person really take drugs to make themself turn into a different person?

How fascinating, I point out to them, that Stevenson probably knew little of medicine but could conjure up a story where it was possible to live two contradicting lives thanks to pharmaceuticals. The old live-by-the -Spirit-and-you-won’t-gratify-the-sins-of-the-flesh loophole. He was a man ahead of his time.
Yes, I tell my kids. Yes—a person can and does take drugs today to become a different person.

What is the moral implication? Where does willful behavior turn into shame, fear, or guilt that turns into mental illness that changes the brain’s chemistry and is, eventually, medicated? Why do we toe the line of instability?
We Christ-followers recognize this truth:

…each person is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.

James 1:14,15

So what about adding medication to the mix makes it seem so next-level? As someone who formerly took pills for anxiety as a young person (and thankfully got off them*), I think it boils down to drug dependence. Jekyll relied on drugs to turn him into Hyde, but he relied more on the drugs that turned him back into the respectable version of himself. Sin, he admitted, was present in both versions of himself, but he felt it manageable and worth the expense—not fully considering that death was part of the equation. When they no longer worked, he was more helpless and hopeless than he’d started out. It was no longer a physical death he faced, but a slow, agonizing spiritual death of hiding his true self.

In the book, The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation, Jim Wilder and Michel Hendricks write about the benefits of metabolizing shame. We are in a culture today that cringes at the mention of shame, but shame has a very specific, healthy, wonderful purpose. Shame** serves as a signal to the brain that behavior needs to be corrected, not to be ignored or defended.

This is something we need to think about when we start looking at medication for relief in mental health situations. Should excessive worrying, anxiety, fear be part of a believer’s life, one who trusts that “God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power, and love and discipline” (2 Tim.1:7)?
Even more compelling is the prophetic words of John in Revelation where he describes “the rest of mankind” in the end of the age who “did not repent of their murders nor of their sorceries nor of their immorality nor of their thefts” (Rev.9:20-21)—sorceries translated from the Greek word, pharmakeia—in other words, medicine, or drugs.
When I think of our culture of abortionists, sexual deviants and scammers—repenting of pharmaceuticals—drugs, even—this is certainly something to consider, familiar as it is. They did not repent of their…pharmakeia… Why should they repent of it unless it were something shameful? Something character-altering, replacing, as it were, the Spirit inside us?

In 1906 Dr. J.A. Seiss wrote,
“We have only to think of the use of alcohol stimulants, of opium, of tobacco, of the range of cosmetics and medicaments to increase love attractions, of resorts to the pharmacopoeia in connection with sensuality—of the magical agents and treatments alleged to come from the spirit-world for the benefit of people in this—of the thousand impositions in the way of medicines and remedial agents, encouraging mankind to reckless transgression with the hope of easily repairing the damages of nature’s penalties—of the growing prevalence of crime induced by these things, setting loose and stimulating to activity the vilest passions, which are eating out the moral sense of society…”

Has your shame caused you to repent? Does your sin, hidden or drugged, harm other people? Jekyll thought it could be managed, and he, though fiction, ended his life as a miserable shell of a man. It affected everyone around him and they ended up having to clean up the mess he’d made.
Our sin has long term consequences—death, to be frank. It reeks and lingers long after we’re gone.

…do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead expose them; for it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret.
But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light.

Ephesians 5:11-13

*I am not anti-medicine by any means. But clinical anxiety and other such issues are much better dealt with through long-term healthy relationships instead of chemicals.

**Wilder and Michel explain the difference between toxic shame (condemnation) and corrective shame—the former should be rejected, the latter is formative.
The friend that kindly gave me this book was helping me understand some mutual past relationships with a narcissist.
The book says, “Narcissists use condemnation skillfully as a strategy for success. If your community has a narcissist in a position of influence, you must train yourself to reject his or her toxic shame. Condemnation should roll off of you like water off a duck’s back. A firm rejection of condemnation also is a way of loving a narcissist. You are giving them a window into a life free of toxic shame. Who knows, maybe God will use you. Your refusal to accept condemnation may be their first step toward healing.” (Pg.137, The Other Half of Church, Wilder and Hendricks. Moody Publishers, 2020.)

The lower room: non-experts in basement education.

Public school is a great teacher. I think grownups forget just how microcosmic it is: a tiny, identical reproduction of real life.

The quote I admire so much from Francis Shaffer about how “Christians should always actively seek the lower room”—I am quite literally in the basement of our school, boarded in by windowless walls. I couldn’t get any lower. I’ve gone and done it, made a fool of myself—making a fool of myself every single day. Like every job I’ve ever had before, I’m making it up as I go.

What does it take to become an expert on something, anyway? More schooling? Life? I’ve always wondered, never quite reaching the expert level at anything.
I have a parks and rec degree—this is the truth. It’s what I told the visiting cooperative learning coach when he popped in my room earlier in the week.
“I didn’t know you could play guitar,” he commended me warmly.
I don’t, not really, I’d thought. I know five or six chords. I just happen to be in the basement with children who also don’t know any better.

I don’t know how to explain music theory, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The last teacher made the rookie mistake of asking the kids what they liked and didn’t like about the previous music teacher. It rapidly turned into a free-for-all, as things do when you let the kids boss you instead of the other way around. So I’m working my way out of a situation where kids have not had to sing or even study music theory for the past couple years.
I’m more of a music room archeologist, digging through decades of leftover materials and broken instruments to scrape up something useful. There are millions of worksheets and outdated transparencies and vinyl records.
My best resource is YouTube, where creative music teachers with boundless energy have posted ideas and original songs with which I can teach.

I use a Sharpie to write up an original worksheet and copy them to pass out to students. The quarter note is a pear, the half note is apple, watermelon for the four-count whole note, and cherry for a pair of eighth notes. I draw pictures of smiling cartoon fruit on the whiteboard for the kids to copy onto their paper.
My own children have benefited not from fancy worksheets but from intentional, experiential learning. This means we read a lot and do millions of projects. It’s messy and loud-ish and caters to a smaller class size. So how do I translate real learning into real life public school?


Fortunately I discovered a stash of 20 ukuleles in the cabinets.
I listened to a podcast, a conversation between two music teachers who marveled at how engaging kids actually called for less passive screen-staring activities. They settled on ukuleles as the perfect non-Orff instrument for engaging screen-weary kids.
But making music—which should never be less than joyous—is the least of my worries. I’ve got students who handle an instrument with the same care they handle a Snickers bar.
We spend the first ten minutes of class talking about showing respect, having a good attitude, following directions. By the time we finished tuning and got to fretting chords, most were already checked out.

I’ve worked on building blocks of learning—stamina, for one: learning how to sit still and listen. My kindergarten students can now listen to (almost) a whole book without interrupting me (once or twice). I’ve got them to where they’ll sing a call-and-response song—my crowning achievement so far.
There are so, SO many behavior situations that ruin every third direction I give. The fatigue that comes with classroom management and handling whiners, gripers, meanies, and needies of every shape and size—it really is a wonder we cannot send these kids home to stop ruining the learning atmosphere. Positive reinforcement on the whole doesn’t do a lick of good unless the child is already behaving. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s an inch at a time and I might be one of the only responsible adults in their life.
If no one reads to them at home, if no one sings with them at home—why should they think it a natural thing when I do it in front of their eyes at school?

Basically I have no idea how this is going to fare long-term, but I never promised a long-term solution. All I knew is the situation could be better and it looked like if anyone cared at all, it must be me. The old camping motto, “pack in, pack out” and the general attitude from my mom, “leave things better than when you arrived” have both been fairly applicable, if not downright inspirational.

So this is the lower room. I actively sought it, I suppose. At thirty-eight years old, I haven’t even built up two days of sick leave in my short career. An expert would’ve stuck it out in this field for longer than me, would’ve racked up 17 years in this business by the time they got to my age. Maybe they would’ve earned their masters and be one of the school administrators by now.
There are no answers to the standard, pervasive issues, only the pledge to have a good attitude and take it day by day. It helps when I remember that they are all just kids. Kids who need directions, need someone to encourage them, need someone to give them hope.

And as Gretty reminds me, “you can always write a book about it someday.”

Turn on the Light: smuggling Jesus into the public school.

There are times I think I’d like to have a snarky Twitter account so I could spit out pithy one-liners. I resist this urge because one, social media has never done me any favors, and two, the anger of man does not bring about the righteousness of God (i.e. the pithiness of Pearl does not make for justice in the world). Rather, it makes for a slow-to-listen, quick-to-speak, know-it-all smart aleck.

The blog forces me to think it out, spell it out, work it out. But I have had some 140 (and 280, thanks Twitter for upping the limit) character-limit thoughts that have been boiled down over the first month of school with hours of car-ride time to junior high basketball games.
Like, interesting how church people get excited about stories of smuggling Bibles into forbidden countries but won’t set foot in a public school.

It’s too pithy, I know, but it must be admitted: it’s easier to stand in a booth at the fall festival handing out free water bottles, or volunteer to bring snacks to VBS and hoping that’s as far as Jesus expects me to “let my light shine before men”.

I recently sent a thank you note to a local church for providing lunch to the district during one of our professional development days. I asked them to also pray the Lord would call more folks of character (Christians, I meant real Christians) to the public school missionary field…not because children need to be better institutionalized but because people are bumping around in the dark just waiting for someone to turn on a flashlight.

Just ask the kid who doesn’t own a pair of matching shoes, the one who accidentally squirts ketchup right onto his cigarette-burned shirt but doesn’t even stop to wipe it off because he’s always dirty anyway. Ask the single parent who doesn’t know why her middle-schooler is suicidal even though she spends every off hour scrolling Tik Tok and comparing herself to other girls.
Ask the teachers who are overwhelmed with IEPs, behavior issues, state standards, curriculum, make-up work, parent concerns and complaints and the constant emails asking them to add more to their plate.
The problems are already too big to be solved, but it’s not too late for the Jesus-following crowd to let their light shine.


I myself never wanted to be a school teacher. It was familiarity with the public school scene and out of a sense of duty I felt compelled to become one. But I can tell you with confidence that whatever short-term “missionary” role I play (as it seems awfully doubtful I can sustain it full-time and long-term)—it has been far and above effective in amplifying this little light of mine.
The love of learning—curiosity—is a substantial component of Christian faith—seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened! Is it too big a stretch to reimagine Christian adults setting healthy examples and boundaries for children and other grownups? Teaching them how to be curious? How to succeed, how to fail, how to treat one another?
If one wanted to initiate change, wouldn’t it benefit them to begin building rapport amongst a circle of educators and pupils? To challenge one another to excellence in academics and civil duty? To engage with some of the 49.9 million public school attending youth in America who make up the next generation?

Here’s another limited-character thought:
What if all middle-age Americans (post-children) or young adults (pre-children) were drafted into a mandatory teaching service for two years? Would it promote a sense of duty? Would it make public education patriotic?

If big government wanted to solve this problem, I believe they’d be on it. But they have never really cared about children, only power. This is why sweeping changes to education these days are agenda-driven, not child-focused. If flaws are revealed in education (and there are many), voters would bail.
Truth is, you wouldn’t be so worried about the “indoctrination” of your kids if you saw the bigger picture—that as a parent, you have the biggest influence. Your kids are actually looking at you to learn how to listen, how to react, how to live.
They are waiting on you to lead them, to teach them.

What if parents who say they truly care showed up as classrooms reinforcement? What if dads came on campus to make sure no one was smoking pot in the bathroom or messing around on lunch break? What if you took a day off every month to volunteer? What if you taught for a year? It’s happening to me, and I’m not sorry about it.

I want to think Christians could see and seize this opportunity to show up in our American schools as light-bearers—taking turns to lessen the burden. But I get the feeling it costs far less to pass out water bottles and listen to the heroic tales of Bible-smugglers.