Put the Rock in the Jar First
My ongoing exercise journey, why emotions must be governed, and the misapplication of the word "kind" by a teacher in a Canadian school.
First of all, Matt and I are going to climb back on the podcast wagon this week, so you can expect the Usual Pod on Monday. Why the long pause, when we said we’d “try” to podcast here and there? Well, it’s our one time a year to rethink our lives from all possible logistical angles and make whatever adjustments need to be made. This time it has been an exercise (that’s a little joke) in taking all the rocks and sand out of the jar of daily life and then putting the big ones in first, instead of trying to cram them in last. Like, if you think you’re going to pray, for example, you can’t do it after you’ve done all the laundry and all the shopping. You have to figure out how to fit laundry and shopping around the prior claim of prayer. Prayer isn’t actually my problem, though. I can do that with my eyes shut. Rather, for the last 46 years, since a babe, I’ve been trying not to consider the miserable propositions of exercise and a healthy diet. In the midst of this, year six of my mid-life crisis, in a fit of differently different creativity, I’m doing it now. My goal is to be able to exercise the apportioned number of days without—and this is the kicker—making an emotionally laden decision to do it. That, I believe, or at least I’ve observed online, is the indicator of the satisfactory formation of a habit. If you can do it without having to decide to do it, you are in the habit of doing it. Or something like that. I’m well on my way there, so that’s pretty great.
Emotions are funny things, as you may have noticed. As some clever philosopher pointed out one time (or maybe they all have observed this phenomenon) how you feel at any given moment can either rule you, or you can rule over your feelings. They can either be the total sum of your personhood, or they can be mere and malleable indicators of how you’re doing as you lug yourself to church and the gym.
Which brings me to my second point, which is that the world is literally and figuratively on fire, and I feel really sad about it. Check out this Twitter, or X, or whatever thread. And the article linked. If you can stomach it, you might try to listen to a bit of the audio, but it goes on for a while and is the usual illustration of how awful things have become and why the end—not of the world, probably, but our current society—must be nigh. Here is how the article explained what happened:
An elementary school teacher in Windsor, Ontario was caught on tape berating Muslim students for skipping the school’s LGBTQ pride day, telling them their abstention was “disgusting” and “an incredible show of hatred” that made her not want to be their educator. The Northwood Public School teacher’s long tirade came amid reports of a very high absence rate at the school on its pride day. According to Life Site News, approximately 600 out of the school’s 800 students stayed home – a 75% absentee rate. True North exclusively obtained a recording of the incident, which took place in June. This is not the first instance of a teacher lashing out at Muslim students for not participating in LGBTQ pride activities. An Edmonton teacher came under fire after being recorded making similar remarks.
Six Hundred students stayed home. Wow. That’s amazing. That sure is some cultural cohesion. Can you imagine? I’m trying to imagine and I can’t really. If you go listen to the audio, you’ll hear that the teacher is veritably unglued. It hadn’t dawned on her that there might be another way of being, or thinking, or feeling. Here are some of the appalling things she says to the students:
“We as a staff here at Northwood were incredibly hurt by the statement you made yesterday,” the female teacher told her class. True North has decided not to name her in this story. “You need to understand how hurt and disappointed we are in those actions, and take that home to your parents because they are the ones that made you stay home. It was an incredible show of hatred, and it is sad. It was hatred toward a community of people, and it was incredibly disgusting to have witnessed.” “I do not want to be a part of this school, I am so disgusted by what happened yesterday.” In the recording, we hear students gasp in shock at the teacher’s remarks. Several of them also challenged the teacher’s claims. One student said, “ We weren’t trying to disrespect you.” The teacher responded, “You might believe that, but what came across was an incredible amount of disrespect, ok? That may have not been your intention, but that’s what it was.”
As you go on listening to the audio, you’ll observe that the teacher communicates, in unmistakable tones, her disgust, while in the very same breath explaining how respectful she is, how tolerant, how—and this is the word that one ends up breaking one’s teeth on—kind. What these children and their parents did was “unkind” which led to her feeling disappointed and sad and then, finally, angry.
She explains at length that when her family was “wrong” on the subject of tolerance, she confronted said family and forced them to change their views. These students must do the same thing:
She instructed the Muslim students to challenge their parents’ beliefs. “That’s when you as students, as kids, need to start teaching your parents.” The teacher also told the class her colleagues opted to plaster LGBTQ rainbows all over the school in response to significant abstentions on pride day. “All the rainbows you see around the school was because very few people came yesterday and the teachers are angry.”
It’s hard for me to even fathom how unprofessional, if not, just to give in and use the favorite word of the hour, abusive this is. Because the teachers were angry, they went and “plastered” the school with rainbows. In this world, a child or family who doesn’t affirm the feelings of the teacher deserves only shame and contempt. Kindness, we must notice, goes only in one direction.
If you listen, you’ll notice that the teacher’s voice is almost childlike. She has no intellectual capacity to answer the measured and, one might say, kindly push-back from her students. They are able to reason and she is not. They are self-controlled and she is not. They are able to understand her point of view and bring arguments from another angle and she is not able to reciprocate.
How did it come to be this way? How could it be that a place where children are educated, are taught not just to read, spell, and do sums, but to consider what kind of world they will grow to inhabit, would be catechized and formed by someone whose ideology cripples and hobbles the mind? Well, we all know that this is a feature, not a bug. The teacher has been hired for exactly those reasons. The sums, the spelling, the reading are not the point of any education. They are the means, the instruments and tools by which children, once they have grasped the essentials of who they are and what the world is like, will engage that world. And in this case, the most essential thing is the religious ideology of self-worship.
Just to return to the rocks and sand in the jar analogy, if you don’t put the rock, Jesus, in the jar first, eventually, all you will have is a thin, whispy trickle of sand pouring out and blowing away. The jar won’t have anything that sustains and guards the soul from the storms and tempests of emotions untethered from objective truth. And when you are staring at the bottom of an empty jar, what you are really looking at is naked shame, of a ruined mind and corrupted heart. And the only thing to do with that kind of shame is foist it off on someone else, even a child, even a group of people you purport to “accept” or even “tolerate.”
So, that’s another person to add to my prayer list. As usual, I’m praying that the Lord, Jesus, will have mercy on those caught by sin and the just condemnation for that sin. That he will bring along some of his own servants to tell the students about himself, and the teachers, and all the parents. That he himself will redeem the world for his own glory.
If you feel like it, have a nice day. I’m not going to bother.
My personal opinion is that if these parents keep sending their kids to this school, it will be an example of “in loco parentis” (which being translated is “the parents are crazy”).
(That’s my attempt at making a joke in a very unfunny situation.)
Unbelievable. I am without words.