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A multi-age, whole-family science curriculum.

This week I wasn't able to get together with Hannah for co-schooling, so I gave the kids Tuesday and Thursday off and dedicated a day and a half for school planning:  mainly, to throw together a week-by-week curriculum for next year's science.

This coming year I want to try out something new:   teaching the same subject to my three school-age children as a group.  I figured we'll read some picture books and have some discussions and activities together, and then my sixth-grader can be sent off for some extra independent work.  I thought I'd try it with the subject block we call "science."  I typically hate -hate-hate prepackaged elementary school science programs anyway, so as long as I'm going to be winging it I might as well save time and teach the same subject to all three kids.

(Why do I hate prepackaged science curricula?  Let's be blunt:  I have had enough training in physical science that I tend to get morally outraged by all holes, errors, oversimplifications, and gaps.  This causes me intense irritation that I don't experience when trying to teach other subjects, such as art appreciation or history.   I recognize that every curriculum contains holes, errors, oversimplifications, and gaps, but even when they are obvious to me, they don't bother me as much as they do in science curricula.  I would be interested to find out if other homeschooling parents get exceptionally irritated  about the shortcomings in curricula covered by their particular fields of expertise).

Since it's the first time I'll have tried teaching science to three levels at once, I want to pick a topic that would be easily accessible to all of them.  That is, I want to choose a field with the potential for hands-on demonstrations and experiences that can involve the kindergartener and second-grader; at the same time, I want the sixth-grader to keep a laboratory notebook,  make precise measurements, run calculations, and self-evaluate.  

I briefly considered botany, but decided to save it for another year on the grounds that I would have to do a lot of preparatory review myself (I've only had one year of high school biology, from a ridiculously incompetent teacher).  Earth science would be good, except my sixth-grader already had that as a second-grader; I'll repeat that curriculum (which I designed, natch) for the younger kids some year when he's doing something else.   The sixth-grader has also already done electric circuits, anatomy, and a chemistry-in-your-kitchen sequence.  Hannah has been teaching ornithology to the younger kids for months now; come to think of it, she has done such a great job at it that I ought to ask her to write a guest post about it!

In the end I settled on human nutrition:

• There are a seemingly endless supply of relevant picture books in the library system.
• The subject is obviously and practically related to daily life, which fits my philosophy for primary-grade nature study.
• The "labs" are mostly cooking, but the sixth-grader will be able to find some test-tube-and-beaker work.
• I can use the subject to teach some useful practical-life skills, like snack-making and food budgeting.
• The topic is interdisciplinary in an interesting way.  By that I mean I can use some good children's literature about food (food preservation unit study = Blueberries for Sal!) and I can let it creep into social studies at the edges (what children around the world eat for breakfast; economics) as well as getting into several different branches of science and technology (chemistry, anatomy, ecology, agriculture) and, as a bonus, some rhetoric (why do we have a "food pyramid" and not some other shape?).

Once I got that figured out, I picked a sixth-grade nutrition textbook with decent scope and some ideas for experiments -- yes, it's full of holes, errors, oversimplifications, and gaps -- and used that as a sort of skeleton to hang my own ideas on.   

Just when I had made up my mind to teach human nutrition, along came Jamie's suggestion via email that I should review Ellyn Satter's Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family (I'm giving it a mixed review:  I criticize some aspects here and here, and I begin to point out some good stuff here).  One of the appendices is entitled "Nutrition Education in the Schools," and it gave me some good ideas for organizing my approach toward the differently-aged children.  Because of its influence, I think I will save all the "nutrient" discussions for the sixth-grader, and spend my time with the younger children exploring the world of human food: classifying, growing, harvesting, buying, cooking, preserving, displaying, tasting, and digesting.  

 So far I've assigned a topic to each of the thirty-six weeks of the school year, based on the kind of work I think my sixth-grader ought to be doing.  Now I'm going down through the topics and searching through the library catalog for good picture books that match up with each topic.  (I am doing subject searches like:  "Vegetables -- Juvenile fiction" and "Refrigeration and refrigeration machinery -- Juvenile literature.")  This is the fun part.   It'll give me an excuse to check out a whole lot of kids' cookbooks, if nothing else.  

Once I get all the topics in order with a list of good picture books appended to each one, it'll just be a matter of requesting  the books a week or two in advance so I can plan some activities.  I'm pretty used to doing this by now with history, so I have a lot of confidence that I can "wing it" on a week-to-week basis as long as I have a topic plan in place.  If I have time before the year starts, though, I can plan more details in advance and so cut down on the winging it.

Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family review part 3: Some good stuff.

In the last two posts (#1 and #2) about Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family by Ellyn Satter, I pointed out problems and inconsistencies I perceived in the book.  Now I want to write more about things I found helpful or that I  particularly liked.

The book has an odd structure.   From the title, you might guess that it's mainly about how to feed children.  But that's only what the middle section of the book is about.  The subtitle is a little more descriptive:  How to Eat, How to Raise Good Eaters, How to Cook.   

I suspect with this title, the book is trying to set a trap.  Parents will pick the book up hoping that it will help them get their picky eaters to eat, or maybe hoping that they can curtail a junk-food habit.  And then, perhaps, they will discover that part of the problem is that they (the grownups) have unresolved food issues -- maybe even eating disorders -- themselves, and that before they can teach good food-acceptance and food-choosing skills to their children, they will have to work on their own issues.

 + + +

That first part -- "How to Eat" -- is aimed at people who really don't know how to feed themselves, or who have such awful emotional issues around eating that they do not possess the skills to eat normally, or who suffer from eating disorders.   It's not a comprehensively long section, but I think it contains some good stuff. 

As I wrote before, Satter comes from the "accept your body at the weight it is" school of weight-writers, and one of her chapter titles is "Eat as much as you want."    I do not share the fatalistic "you can't lose weight and you shouldn't try" attitude, and I think "Eat as much as you want" is correct only as long as your "want" is in conformity with the requirements of your body, duties, and state in life.  But we have to have our priorities right, and changing one thing at a time is often best; and if you lack the most basic skills of feeding yourself, or suffer from a clinical eating disorder, or experience terrible emotional reactions to food and eating -- as, apparently, do many of the people that Satter works with -- then probably you need to put healing first, and shelve concerns about weight or even the advanced topic of gluttony until you've mastered simply feeding yourself.  

Indeed, I suspect that Satter's focus comes from being used to working with people whose weight problem is not their biggest problem, and for whom over- or under-eating is a symptom of an underlying disorder.    Just to give you some perspective:   Her anecdotes include

• a woman who required weeks of therapy to muster the courage to taste a strawberry
• a man who felt guilty about consuming a single bite of anything that wasn't bland,  
• and a woman who thought it was obscene that her seven-month-old liked eating.    

For these folks, worrying about weight or gluttony would be counterproductive.

Still, for those of us who aren't quite so far gone, and who understand that "acknowledging a moral fault" isn't the same thing as "descending into a spiral of negative emotions and self-hatred," speaking of "gluttony" can be helpful.   In myself I found that gluttony, as a moral fault, was inextricably bound up with physical and psychological problems.  Physically, I had to reconnect with my sensations of hunger and satiety, as Satter recommends; once I'd done so I was less enslaved by gluttony, but even to take that first step required resisting gluttonous impulses -- that first step, in other words, was a moral victory.    And preceding that was a desire to be freed from the impulse-pleasure cycle, a desire that can only have been put in my heart by God.   Psychologically, I continue to struggle with the impulses of bulimia; I have the most success when I acknowledge a spiritual and moral component to that struggle.  We should never be surprised that the mind, the body, and the will are entangled, and that all three need to be taken together as a united whole.

To that end, Satter's book contains tools and ideas that can help someone who's trying to release herself from the hold of gluttony.  Here are some that I find especially powerful:

•  The idea that "eating competence" can be broken down into a set of discrete skills which can be individually learned.
• The idea that food needs fall into a hierarchy, and that more-fundamental needs should take priority over less-fundamental ones.  
•  A good description of "normal eating."
• Tips for being satisfied at meals.
•  The idea that "food acceptance" (the opposite of pickiness) can be broken down into a set of discrete skills which can be individually learned.
• A technique for learning to recognize the signals of hunger and satiety.
• Tips for learning to eat at meals (instead of grazing) and for organizing successful family meals.
• A philosophy for dividing responsibility for children's nutrition between the parent and the child at various ages. 

All of these are good, and I'll write more about them in subsequent posts.

 

Review part 2 of Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family: Virtue and restraint.

(Part 1 here)

So there's a couple of turns of phrase in Ellyn Satter's Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family that sets off red lights and sirens for the likes of me.

The first one is "Shun Virtue."  Yes, you heard that right:  shun virtue.  It even appears in the index:  "Virtue, shunning, 20."

The second one is "Restraint is profoundly unrealistic."  "The research is clear that restrained eating profoundly disrupts eating attitudes and behaviors" (okay, that's circular) "as well as destabilizes body weight."

Let me first give you an idea of the grain of salt you need to tuck into your cheek here.  Note that she does not say that the research is clear that restrained eating causes, or even is associated with bad outcomes -- only that it's associated with weight instability, which in turn is associated with bad outcomes.  And although the heading "Restrained Eating" in the appendix (pp. 240-241) is followed by a column and a half of text with citations, only a couple of these are actually about so-called "restrained eaters."  Just one of those looks well-supported to me, and I'll write more about that one further down.

But more to the point, how can we take anyone seriously who says "shun virtue" and "restraint is unrealistic?"  I'm automatically suspicious of the "restraint is unrealistic" line, because in my experience it's often the backbone of an entire philosophy of existence, life, and education -- a philosophy which I utterly reject.   It comes too often with advice to "do what feels good", justified by the assertion that self-control is inherently damaging, and that our pent-up frustration will find an outlet in psychological problems or some kind of binge.  We Catholics are certainly familiar with analogous philosophies in sexual matters, no?
 
I'm not saying that Satter espouses a "do what feels good" philosophy, or even that she's incorrect in suggesting that "restrained eaters" really do tend to binge as a reaction to their restraint (more on that later -- I think the evidence is that some of them do).  I'm just saying that the twin phrases "shun virtue" and "restraint is unrealistic" make me instantly skeptical.

But maybe the problem is one of defining one's terms.  Obviously Satter's not setting out to write a book about virtue and vice.  She's not, then, using the term "virtue" and "restraint" in the same way that we are -- they aren't theological jargon, but some jargon of her own.  So what does she mean?

A quote:

When I helped Wesley learn to feed himself in a more positive and nurturing way, I encouraged him to have regular meals.  This brought us right up against his well-developed pattern of freaking himself out with the food rules, and together we apprehended him again and again when he went chasing off after the food rules and neglected to provide himself with foods he enjoyed.  When his eating became chaotic, we traced it to his out-of-control virtue.  You understand the dilemma of the overdeveloped conscience if you order broiled fish when you really want it fried, and then give in to cheesecake when the dessert tray comes around.  If you truly enjoy broiled fish, you will have to come up with some other example of out-of-control virtue, but the point stands:  If you can't give yourself permission to eat the foods you enjoy, you will have to rely on impulse to get them.

She's using the word "virtue" to mean something it never means in ordinary usage:  something bad.  Can real virtue get "out of control" and become bad?  I think not, although we can misunderstand what behaviors are required for the practice of virtue (and become prudish when we intended to be modest, for example).  So -- this is an error on her part, and it sounds to me like she's unfamiliar with the language of virtue -- or else she would choose a different word.   (Note too the reference to an "overdeveloped conscience."  No such thing.  You can have a perverted conscience, though, which is what she really means:  a conscience that tells you good things are bad.)

What Satter means for the reader to shun is food scrupulosity:  excessive rule-following coupled to self-judging with respect to the rules.  She calls this "virtue." I hope it does not reflect upon her opinions about people who really do try to be virtuous in the correct sense!

That takes care of "virtue."  Now, how about "restraint?"  What does she mean by a "restrained eater" or an "unrestrained eater?"

Helpfully, she includes a side box with a definition of "restrained eating."

As originally defined, restrained eating is trying to get yourself to eat less food or less-desirable food than you really want in pursuit of thinness [or health]."

• Imposing absolute limits:  so many calories, so many helpings.  Going by portion sizes or a food pattern. 
• Making yourself hurdle:  "I have to eat this before I can eat that."
• Avoiding certain foods...
• Limiting your menus to drab, uninspiring foods
• Trying to fill up on low-fat, low-calorie, "healthy" food
• Trying to eat only low-carb...
• Substituting low-calorie butter, margarine, or salad dressing for the real thing in order to save calories.
• Asking yourself "Do I really need that?"

This is what she means whenever she talks about "restraint."  She clearly doesn't mean all kinds of self-control, because (while she recommends "self-trusting" eating) she does make recommendations that require self-control or self-discipline, and even an imposed outside structure.  For example:

•  She advocates eating as part of regular meals and snacks -- not grazing.
• She offers techniques for learning to like new foods through controlled exposure.  (Some of us find it hard to believe you might need self-discipline to get yourself to eat more of something, but indeed you do.)
• She advocates "tuning in" and "staying in touch with your feelings of hunger and eagerness to eat" while eating -- mindful eating.  She even advises, "That takes effort."  In other words, she advocates slowing down and paying attention.  
• She even gives an excruciatingly detailed technique for learning to notice hunger and satiety signals, right down to how long to chew a mouthful of food.  If that isn't controlled, I don't know what is!

 
It's pretty clear that she thinks *her* messages are all about trust and not control or restraint, but I'm not buying that the distinction is all that clear.  (Similarly, she writes lots of stuff about how children need to be free to take as much or as little of a food as they want -- but when you get right down to it, even she says that children should only be given one helping of bread lest they fill up on it!  And she even advocates making "rules" -- her word, not mine -- about Halloween candy.  Gasp!  Rules!)

So.  What does her "unrestrained eating" have to do with gluttony?  When she says "get rid of restraint," is she inviting us to be gluttons?

What's usually cited as Aquinas's "definition" of gluttony is really more of a classification of gluttonies (too much, too soon, too eagerly, too pickily, too expensively).  I made a stab at defining gluttony here:  gluttony abhors the restraints on food that are necessary according to our state in life.  Restraints are placed on us by a number of different requirements:  charity, obedience, resources, physical health, religious or ethical duties, and manners, among other things.  If you can't stand to make your food intake conform to these requirements, you might be a glutton.

It's really clear from reading Satter that with her term "restrained eating" she doesn't mean to condemn any of the restraints I mention above -- except those we perceive we need for physical health and especially thinness.  For example, she strongly emphasizes table manners, and demonstrates sensitivity to food budgets or cultural differences in food traditions.  

As far as I can tell, though, she completely ignores a distinction between our real physical constraints and our perceived ones, and condemns as dangerous "restrained eating" any self-control in pursuit of help.  

Can she really mean this?  I assume, for instance, that she wouldn't advocate ignoring the restraints placed upon people by allergies, autoimmune diseases, or endocrine diseases like diabetes -- even though these involve eating "less" or "less-desirable" food "than you really want" in the pursuit of "health."   A diabetic simply cannot eat as much as he or she wants of whatever he or she wants.  And conditions like diabetes really do exist on a spectrum from healthy to pre-metabolic syndrome to metabolic syndrome to pre-diabetes to full-blown diabetes, itself on a continuum of severity.  So somewhere along the line, a person has to be aware that food choices affect health, and a little bit of "restraint" won't kill you.  But by ignoring the constraints placed on people by real physical disorders, she loses the opportunity to clarify when restraint is appropriate.

So I mentioned above that there was one thing about the dangers of restraint that made sense to me.  Here's the one thing she writes that looks plausible to me based on the citations, and that I'm willing to believe on her authority, given that she works with people who suffer from eating disorders:

Rather than overeating per se in response to stressors, restrained eaters suspend restraint:  They stop undereating.  Then, because restraint has been violated, rather than simply eating enough to satisfy hunger, they go on to overeat.

That sounds really familiar.  The term she uses for this pattern is "restraint and disinhibition."  And I think what it comes down to is this:  Following rules won't cure gluttony all by itself.  The tendency is still there.

And she may be right about this.  On the other hand, the problem may also be that the rules are poorly designed.  I tend to think that she doesn't really think all rules are bad; she just won't call the good rules "rules."  More on this another time.

This.

xkcd this morning.

I think it explains why I love my husband.  

Not that he reminds me of a slime mold or anything.

Ramen hacks.

If your kids like plain ramen, and you don't, maybe you could use these ramen hacks to jazz up your portion and avoid making two lunches.

I think I might try one of these next time I am serving lunch to 11 kids and three moms.  For the moms.

Who doesn't like noodles with some greens, poached egg, and sriracha sauce?  But hey, that's so traditional it's almost boring.  On the other hand -- Doesn't the ramen-topped shepherd's pie (near the bottom) look twelve kinds of awesome?  Come on.  Admit it.  

Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family" review part 1: What I learned from reading the appendices first.

So I finally gave up on reading Ellyn Satter's Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family forwards, and started reading it backwards instead, starting with the appendix.  I'm not sure why, but I found that easier -- maybe I just wanted the details first.  Also, I was kind of curious what kind of publications the author cited.  

It seems that many of her publications appear in The Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, which is not a periodical I am familiar with.  This is the journal of the Society for Nutrition Education, an educational and advocacy organization.  So, more of an education journal than a nutrition-science journal.   Skimming through the abstracts, I see a lot of papers that are trying to answer the questions:  How do the messages that people hear influence the food choices they make?   How do people learn about nutrition?  What really helps people make positive changes?

All these are good questions to ask, especially if you are a parent, an educator, or a blogger who likes to write motivational posts about healthy, temperate eating.  It's worth noting that this is not the same question as "what food choices should I make to be physically healthier" or "how do I lose weight."

 I get the impression that Satter's area of expertise is in "how to teach children to eat well," "how to understand eating," "how to make positive choices," "how to navigate the confusing mix of food messages that we're all immersed in"  or "how to correct certain eating disorders."  Her focus isn't in biochemistry or in nutrition science:  "what kind of fat is best for you" or "how many calories should a person eat." 

But you wind up with a little bit of overlap, because Satter does have definite ideas about what kinds of positive change are most important, and that winds up getting presented as "make this kind of change first, save that other kind of change for later."  Which sounds a little bit like "this is what you should eat."  But it's not, actually, that kind of advice.  

So I guess I learned something useful from starting with the appendices after all.  This book is, among other things, about setting priorities for change to more positive eating.   And when it comes to priorities, Satter places nutritional content of the food considerably lower than the emotional context of the food.   So, for example, it's much more important to her that families eat regular meals together than, say, what those meals are made of.

+ +  +

Mark has a fair amount of exposure to food, nutrition, and food-marketing research, and is skeptical about sweeping claims drawn from studies that demonstrate correlation but not causation.  So, for example, take Appendix B, "What the Research Says about Meals."  Satter presents a whole string of data, citing twenty different sources, that shows strong associations between regular family meals and good outcomes in children and adolescents.  And then she concludes the appendix with this:  

The evidence is compelling... the day-to-day routine of structured, sit-down family meals and snacks reassures children that they are loved and that they will be provided for -- nutritionally and in all other ways.

Well, no.  The evidence actually is that children who have regular family meals tend to be healthier and do better and school and things than children who don't -- possibly because regular family meals are a marker for success, not a cause of it.  "When you start advising people to make a change, you'd better be sure that it's causation and not just correlation," warns Mark.  Now, I tend to think about many interventions-correlated-with-good-stuff, "Why not try it and see if it works?" but then, I'm biased towards thinking that something like family meals are a good end in themselves.  

Mark has a point:  If you start telling people that they should eat regular family meals together, you're telling a big chunk of the population, "You don't parent your children right... the way you do it is wrong... you might be to blame if your children have problems later."  These messages aren't without consequence, especially for the people who don't go on to make the recommended changes because of hardship or conflicting desires or whatever.  And if in fact family meals don't cause good outcomes, well, then your advice didn't actually help anyone.

So, there's a bit of a grain of salt to take the advice with:  correlation, not necessarily causation.  On the other hand, many of Satter's readers may desire things like regular family meals for their own sake, whether or not it makes the children better-behaved, smarter, or fitter.  And there's some advice in here about how to do it, even if you don't know how.  Believing that making some of these changes might help your family's physical and emotional health could provide some useful motivation.   

Another sweeping statement shows up in Appendix D, "BMI Mortality, Morbidity, and Health:  Resolving the Weight Dilemma."  After presenting some data that demonstrates what we already know (it's hard to lose weight) and what many people don't know (overweight isn't as strongly associated with bad health as a lot of people think it is), she goes on to advise:

[Weight loss] can't be achieved anyway... instead of trying for weight loss, focus on improving your health behaviors.  Establish goals that can be achieved:  

• Develop and maintain eating competence.
• Develop sustainable patterns of activity.
• Learn to feel good about yourself, just as you are.

She clearly believes that weight loss can't be achieved.  I'm all for developing eating competence, for learning to fit exercise into your life, and for getting rid of unhelpful negative thought patterns, but I don't like the "it's hopeless" attitude toward permanent weight loss.    

But in one sense she's correct that weight loss can't be achieved directly.   A weight loss "goal" isn't a real "goal" because it's not something you can decide to reach.  You can't exactly choose to lose weight.  What you can choose to do is change your behavior, and that might help with the weight loss you hope for, or it might not.  Desiring behavior change for its own sake is something I've written a lot about.   A behavior goal -- unlike a weight-loss goal -- is something that can be achieved merely by choice.  And such behavior goals include eating well and getting exercise.

("Learn to feel good about yourself just as you are," though... I'm having trouble finding any evidence that this is associated with better outcomes.  This sounds like touchy-feelyism to me.  And why should I work hard to develop eating competence or sustainable activity -- why should I try to improve anything at all about myself -- if I "feel good about myself just as I am?"  No, better to remain always aware of our shortcomings and always ready to work on them.  But this is obviously a philosophical difference, not a difference in expertise, between her and me.  I think it's an error to claim that science supports this kind of "should" philosophy -- either hers or mine.)

Because it's late, I'm going to stop here, even though there's more to be said about the appendices.  I'm particularly interested in what she has to say about "restrained eating," something she says is associated with bad outcomes.  A fair question:  Is "restrained eating" as Satter defines it the same as eating temperately?  Is "unrestrained eating" as Satter defines it the same as eating gluttonously?  Or is the unrestrained-restrained axis orthogonal to the temperance-gluttony axis?  Tune in later and I'll think out loud some more.

Ah, Lent. And upcoming thoughts.

All my blog readers disappear, and so do I, a little bit.

No, I didn't give up blogging for Lent, though I did prune back my RSS reader quite a bit.  I do have a few things percolating around that I'll be writing about soon.

For instance, some weeks ago commenter and blogger Jamie asked me if I wouldn't pretty please read a particular book by Ellyn Satter, Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family, and then offer my opinion.  I am here to report that it is a very interesting book, that I am not done with it yet, that I struggled with it for a few days before finally settling on reading it backwards (starting with the appendices), and that so far I have several opinions.  

One:  it's not a very easy book to digest, something about the density of informati0n, but I will do my best to distill it for you when I write my real review (or, more likely, reviews, since the book's three parts could have been three separate books, but aren't -- for one very good reason).

The three parts, by the way, break down like this:  (1) how to feed yourself, (2) how to feed children ("get children to eat"), and (3) how to cook.

Two:  there are some extremely useful organizational principles -- I mean mentally organizational principles, not ways to make things easy to find in your freezer.  Good ways to think about, for instance, how to rank the competing values that are often in play when we decide what to eat, or exactly what it is we're teaching children when we set out to feed them.

Three:  I am not really the intended audience for two-thirds of this book, but some of the extremely useful organizational principles are found in the parts of the book that I would think I wouldn't need to read.   What I'm getting at:   The "how to eat" and "how to cook" parts are very, very, very basic.   But it's in there that some of the useful principles are to be found.

Four:   I think this is one of those books that has a gem or two for everybody, and should probably become the How To Feed Yourself bible for a small subset of the population.  There are also a lot of recommendations that make the most sense for people who have a certain set of food-related skills and/or issues, but would not really be relevant to people who possess a different  set of food-related skills and/or issues.

Five:  The author definitely comes from the "you can't lose weight by dieting, so you might as well try to be healthy at your size" school of food writing.  My readers know I don't agree with this sentiment as a one-size-fits-all, permanent assertion, but considering her audience and the purpose of her book, I think she is not off base in making this recommendation.   

Is that cryptic enough for you?  I will write more later.  For now, consider that your appetizer.

Lent, Monday one.

Last Friday, the kids and I met Mark at church for the fish fry dinner, then he took the three younger ones off to run errands while the 10-y-o and I stuck around to attend Stations of the Cross followed by Eucharistic Benediction.  I pointed out that the booklet (it's the Liguori stations) contained the Stabat Mater in Latin as well as in parallel English translation, and out of the corner of my eye watched him happily flipping back and forth trying to make out the Latin as best he could.  It's exactly the sort of thing I would have been doing as a ten-year-old, and I had  to hide my smile.

My mind wanders terribly during these things, but a phrase from one of the Stations jumped out at me -- so to speak -- and I decided right there to take it as my Lenten theme.  It's the ninth Station, "Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem:"

"...do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children."

I'm not sure exactly where that will take me, yet, but I think it will take me far in forty days.

* * *

My plans are modest.  I'm hoping to make it to an hour of adoration twice a week during Lent -- just me -- using about two-thirds of what's usually my school-planning time.  And I set some limits for myself on the computer, eliminating some of the extra time and also taking some of the stuff I usually read out of my RSS reader, with an eye towards serenity.  Above that, I'm going to try tentatively giving up some items of food, but on a day-by-day basis.   I swore off giving up food-type things for Lent a couple of years ago, because I felt it exacerbated my eating disorders, but I'm feeling stronger about those now and so I think I'm ready to give it a try again, but carefully.  I also have some spiritual reading lined up.

So, not one big thing-to-do-every-day, but several small things that hopefully will add up to doing something every day.

Questions.

In response to a reader question, agnostic sci-fi writer John Scalzi explains why he encourages his daughter to take an interest in faiths and in Christian faiths in particular.

Worth reading, and I think many of his points apply to people who practice a faith and who naturally want their children educated deeply in it.  We shouldn't be afraid to encourage them to learn about other faiths, presented as fairly as possible (which doesn't mean, "their faith is as correct in its teachings as our faith;" but which does mean "here is what they believe, set out in the same kind of language they would use.")   Where other faiths raise questions about our own, after all, is an excellent place to offer some answers. 

Sins magnified.

One of my Lenten disciplines is going to be to avoid political outrage on the Internet.  I think I've found a helpful mantra this morning, ironically, in a political-economic blog.

From Megan McArdle:  A useful insight about the office of the President, one that extends to politics and politicians in general, and applies to both Dems and Repubs:

To me, a better explanation [for the Obama administration's treatment of accused leaker Bradly Manning, which some argue constitutes torture] --one that explains the fact that there's not that much daylight between Bush and Obama on these issues--is that being president makes you want to do these things.  The president has access to more information than the rest of us...

Not only does the president hear about threats we don't, but he's the guy who gets in trouble if any of these threats come off. The combination of heightened threat-alertness, and personal risk aversion, makes him willing to do bad things to avert the potential threat. And since the president knows that he's a good person, and the people around him are basically good people, he's willing to trust them with power that no institution should have.

...I mean, I used to think that Janet Reno was evil--SWAT teams and tanks in child custody disputes? Really? Then we had a succession of new Attorneys General who all seemed to err on the side of megalomaniacal overreach. At which point I decided that it probably wasn't the person; it was the office. When you're sitting up there in that lofty perch, hearing about all the bad things that are happening in the country, and you know that you could do a lot more to fight them if you just had a little bit more power--well, sure, maybe it's not a good idea in abstract, but you're not going to abuse it, you're just trying to solve problems. Et voila, Waco.

So too, I suspect, with tormenting prisoners, and civil liberties. Maybe if Mark and I were president, we'd support this stuff too. Which is not, by the way, an argument for doing it. It's an argument that we need to serve as a check on the president. Because we're not going to fix it by just electing a better person to be president. Whoever we elect will still be president, with all that implies.

I think this is a good insight because it can help us avoid the temptation to assume bad faith, stupidity, or consciously evil motives -- personal evil -- in the officeholders we disagree with. 

I think if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we all tend to give the guys "on our side" the benefit of the doubt while assailing the integrity of the guys on "the other side."  It's subtly dangerous to our own spirits to divide the political-social world up into good guys and bad guys. 

Good ideas and bad ideas, or good actions and bad actions -- sure!  

Good people and evil people... stupid people and intelligent people... noble people and base people... not so much. 

(And watch out for the temptation to insist, "I'm not saying he's an evil person, I'm saying he has evil motives!"  Since you can't actually observe motives the way you can observe actions and statements, and can only guess at them, to declare someone's motives bad is really just a circular way of declaring him a bad person:  you believe the motives to be bad because you believe him to be bad and therefore incapable of having good motives.  Fess up.)

I get really tired of the "Obama is evil" movement, and am equally tired of the "Bush is evil" movement.  Similarly tired of the smaller "He or she is evil" movements that play out in smaller theaters, like the one going on now in the Wisconsin State Capitol building. 

McArdle suggests that maybe it's just being President that tempts human beings to do apparently bad stuff.  Gee, I can't imagine that -- holding one of the most powerful offices in the world, a severe temptation to evil acts and omissions?!?  Sarcasm aside, it also seems pretty obvious to me that men with different leanings would be tempted to a slightly different variety of evils, but also that universal desires -- say, to increase one's own personal power, or to be thought well of by others, might lead to startlingly similar behaviors even by men of quite different political beliefs.  Hence McArdle's suggestion that this theory explains why President GW Bush's reviled policies towards certain prisoners appear to have been continued rather than reversed under President Obama.

I think we would do well to reserve our indignation towards the personalities of our political opponents, even in the most upsetting of policy debates, even the ones that seem to us the starkest battlegrounds between good and evil.   Better, I think, to recognize that high offices themselves constitute high opportunities to commit dreadful sins and injustices.   Yes, they also present opportunities to do great good... which means nothing more than opportunities to commit terrible sins of omission.  

And it's really just our preference for some sins over others that leads us to condemn some sinners over others, I think.  They're all freaking sinners, as are we.

During this Lent, one way I'm going to temper my political outrage is by avoiding the blogs and websites that tend to exacerbate feelings of irritation.  (That's not all political blogs and websites, incidentally -- some of them generally inform and entertain me without making me angry, at least if I don't go on to read the comments.)    But since it's impossible to avoid political information and opinion entirely, I think it will also help to have in my pocket the little mantra:  "It's not the person, it's the office."   Because without the publicity and power the office has granted, the officeholder's flaws would never, ever have become so magnified as to attract and hold my attention and my judgment, through my own distorted lens.