October 16, 2008

Teaching Subversion

This morning I was over at our grade school recruiting altar servers. When I went into the 6th grade, they were studying light. So I had to ask the kids: "Spiritual light or physical light?"

"Physical light," responded their teacher. So I went on to ask them,

"Is light a wave or a particle?" A lot of umms and half-raised hands followed. So I continued,

"Maybe light is a partic-ular kind of wave. How about that?"

Then there were a lot of "whoas" and cries of "that's neat!"

But then I had to say, "Children, many times in life people will try to tell you things, and a lot of things they say will sound neat and clever. But like what I just said to you, these things often don't have any meaning. The truth is that I'm good at playing with words but I don't know the first thing about the wave-particle duality. So, be suspicious. Now, who wants to be an altar server?"
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2 comments:

  1. Michael Francis Saunders7:00 PM

    So, what kinds of responses did you get? Any takers?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Brother Charles8:25 PM

    I gave out 14 applications, and 2 permission slips have been returned...but I haven't checked our mailbox at school in a few days. Should be a good class.

    ReplyDelete

Faithful, or even just thoughtful criticisms are always welcome. Uninformed rudeness to other posters or to the Lord and His Church is not.

I also reserve the right to reject comments promoting things like private revelations and fringe points of view, if it seems to me like they are being presented in a misleading way.

If you raise a disagreement with something I say but I do not respond, please do not feel slighted or insulted, or imagine that this automatically means I disagree or agree with you. It's just that I don't find the comment box to be a constructive medium for certain forms of debate.