Friday Retroflective: I love summer.

Thoughts and Images

I love summer.

At the end of each school year, my youngest son is an uncooperative ball of nerves, fidgeting and flailing, a vacant, tired look in his eyes. Reports come back that he has done nothing of his school work and he arrives home at turns distant or grumpy. Then school lets out. We get one long weekend in. I introduce the notion of doing "some homeschooling" over the summer and he reacts as if I have suggested we visit the zoo. So far, we have done a research project on the habits of stink bugs and reinforced adding with dice and Unifix cubes, as well as fractions with orange wedges. He happily subtracts into the negative range with glee (his idea.) We play Mad Libs and do word games, answer the questions on Junior Trivial Pursuit. My mother is working up a Social Studies curriculum on the Revolutionary War. It is such a pleasure to sit with him for this hour a day. He tires easily of one subject, but, given the luxury of working with just one student, I can switch to another or change course. Then, when we are finished, he spends hours building Legos from little schematics, totally at peace with the world. Suddenly, he is compliant, happy, enthusiastic. Again, I say: I love summer.

Posts
I don't feel like shoving all my links down your throat for this weeks's Friday Retroflective. Did I write anything worth reading? If you haven't read the Team Ambiguity post on that Loyola study associating organic food with selfish behavior, you probably should. There's more to that than I believe we even scraped the surface on, although the discussion was quite rich. Comments are not closed. Ever.

Finds
This week, Glennon Melton of Momastery wrote a post that I want to stand on the rooftops and trumpet, positing that Jesus, who appeared once before in a pre-resurrection world as a sinner who was breaking the word of God for love, would today appear to us as a poor, black, gay teenage girl. The reaction to this statement has, of course, included hate mail, massive "unfollows" and disapproval. It is worth reading Glennon's own reasoning for why she did it. I hope that, whether or not you agree with Glennon, you, like me, admire her courage. She has a giant blog following, a book deal (and publishers were in a bidding war to get her to sign.) Hers is not in any way a political blog. She had nothing to gain from this, and everything to lose. Why she did it? She's that kind of writer and person.

My friend Jessica Banks has written a very thoughtful piece on race and racism and why it is so hard to get our hands on.

My friend Tangled Lou has written a piece on lone wolves, shooters and the lesson we keep failing to learn about caring for the ill before they harm others.

My husband posted the text to the best sermon I've ever seen him deliver on how we attribute motives to one another and how this shapes the discourse we can't really have with those with whom we don't agree.

All of these articles are written with intelligence, depth and compassion. What more could you want? I could sit around reading things like that all day because they make me a better person. Thanks to all of the writers who do it.

And I think that's enough heavy reading for your summer homeschooling curriculum, don't you? Have a great weekend!