Certain moments occur in every parent’s life that we vow that we will remember: the way she sounded when she said "mama", the way he looks when he sleeps, or the way she skips around the house. Yet too often our memories betray us, and years later we can't conjure up those images or those voices, no matter how hard we try.
Today we have tons of aids to remember our kids’ triumphs and foibles, but we don’t always have the time to use them. Many of my friends are into scrapbooking, and I’m always amazed at the wonderful collages they can make of something as simple as photos of kids playing in the leaves or going to the beach. But all that work is way too much pressure for me. My best friend started scrapbooking six months ago, and she already feels as if she’s five years behind! Yet nevertheless, when I see her creations, I feel like a horrible parent for not wanting to join the fun, but I don’t want to start a hobby that will just induce guilt.
So what can we do to stop that memory sieve? After all, one day I’m going to want all those memories to embarrass my children with. I’m already planning the video montage and slide show at my kids’ eventual weddings. My own mother started the tradition. At a speech on my big day, she read aloud the little booklet from my grade one composition class: “I live with my Mommy. Her name is Beth. She sleeps a lot. A real lot.” I used to wake up at 6, and having to wait until 7 to go into her bedroom just about killed me. It defined our relationship at the time.
When my girls were younger, I kept a notebook by my bed where I could write down anything particularly funny my own girls say. One of my entries from ten years ago was when Katie asked, “Mommy, if God has the whole world in His hands, does that mean Australia is getting squished?” I don’t want to forget that. And I won’t even go into what she said when I told her about the birds and the bees. I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise if any of you are ever invited to her wedding.
But that embarrassing slide show won’t be complete without pictures and videos. Too often, though, we only get the camera out for special occasions. I’m trying to start taking pictures of everyday things, like how they look curled up in bed reading, or playing the piano, or practising the guitar, or even blow drying their hair.
I always managed to remember to take photos when the kids were little of my oldest child. My younger one, though, was more like an afterthought. When Katie was five I realized I had no pictures of her that did not also include her older sister. My uncle, who grew up in a huge Irish family, once said that if the third child has more than 10 photos taken of him or her by the time he or she is 16, half of them are on file at the police station.
There are so many pictures I wish I had taken with they were younger, but it’s too late to get those years back. But I can still find plenty of embarrassing ones if I start snapping, even today. So this summer I’m being camera happy. And now that my kids are teens, and are well-acquainted with technology, I’m getting them to organize all the photos and videos so that I can find them if I ever need them. I may even let the girls prepare each others’ eventual embarrassing slide shows. But I’m still not taking up scrapbooking.
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Last week I took four teenagers (two were my own) down to New York for a Bible quizzing tournament. That means twelve hours, in total, in a car with these girls over the course of the weekend. And we got into some really interesting conversations.
One of the girls is a senior in high school who is very bright and very motivated. She finds it really difficult to process the fact that so many of her fellow students just can't write. She reads their papers, and thinks, "But you've been speaking English your entire life. You can speak a sentence. Why can't you write one?" She once got into a conversation with her English teacher about this, and her teacher said that there is a school of thought that in 100 years, tenses will disappear from our language. We're getting so lazy in the way we talk and write that difficult grammatical usages will slowly disappear.
We have more technology than ever, but people don't seem to know as much.
Around the same time as this conversation, I received an email from a university friend with a link to a Grade 8 final exam from 1931. It's got Geography, Civics, History, Literature, even Penmanship. Check it out. It's HARD! Way harder than we teach kids today.
I often get rather depressed at the lack of education kids get nowadays. I know that makes me sound like a fuddy duddy, but I think, with all of the problems we have to solve in the world, how can we do it when people can't handle more than a soundbite? When they don't know history to put things in perspective (ie. they don't know that Jerusalem actually has always had Jews living in it, for instance, and was the capital of the Jewish homeland basically forever). Or how can we attempt to even think about how to handle dictators today when most people do not know about Chamberlain's "peace in our time" speech?
But it's easy to attack the school system. My bigger issue, though, is that the church is doing very little to combat this. You would think that church would be a place which would emphasize learning; traditionally we have. Indeed, many denominations were born to be more "intellectual" compared with the "common people". Higher learning was originally all theology; everything flowed from that. It was assumed that to be a Christian meant that you were slightly more educated because you read the Bible and thought about it. And since Christianity encompassed all that you could know about God's creation, then higher learning all flowed from that theology.
But today in church we don't really require thought. We focus more on emotion. I find it difficult as a speaker to get past this; I do a much better job at weekend retreats when I can get more in depth into a subject than I do at the one-time events. But it is a challenge because people don't always WANT to think. And yet at the same time, our generation thinks that we are smarter than previous generations (despite that Grade 8 Geography Test).
One of my daughters' main complaints about Christian education, whether it be at church or at camp or at retreats, is that it always focuses on the same stories: David & Goliath, Noah's ark, Joshua, Joseph, Jonah. Rarely do you require kids to actually think. And the Bible stories are NEVER put in context. I read a study done recently of the incoming class at Moody Theological Seminary, I believe it was, and less than half could put these four events in chronological order: Moses, the exile of Judah, David, John the Baptist.
People just don't know the basics--even people who have been Christians their whole life.
And if we don't teach context, whether it be with the Bible or with history, then we aren't raising children to be really educated or to really be able to think. You'd think the church would be spearheading this, focusing on Bible memory and real Bible understanding, but instead we focus, too, on shallow things and entertainment. And then we wonder why twenty-somethings lose their faith.
I wish I knew the solution, but I don't. I think we were far smarter before there was TV and when families read together at night.
My only solution is for my own family: we don't have a TV, we homeschool, and we make our kids memorize. But that won't help the society at large. So what do we do? I really don't know. I'm at a loss. Anyone have any ideas?
Have you broken any of your New Year's Resolution lists yet? I've done a great job with the exercising one! Breaking it, that is.
But here's another resolution I hope we'll all try to keep: memorizing Bible verses. I find that memorizing Scripture myself, and memorizing it as a family, really helps one's spiritual life. There's something special about knowing where a verse can be found, or being able to say it to yourself when you're feeling down.
The problem with memorizing is that if you're not consistent, you don't remember it. Or you may work on a verse hard for a week, but it doesn't stick.
I've recently worked on a new memory system that has worked so well for us. We use it in our homeschooling with Latin vocabulary words, but it can work for memorizing anything, including Bible verses.
Here's what you do. Take some cue cards and write on each one what you're trying to memorize--such as the Bible verse for the day/week. The week you're learning the verse, you go over it everyday. The next week, you're done with it and you're onto another verse. But how can you be sure that you remember last week's verse?
This is where the method comes in. Write last week's verse on a cue card, and put in a pile with an elastic on it with the number "1" on it. This is the pile you'll work through everyday.
Then you review the verses in pile 1. Any verses you get right move to pile 2.
Tomorrow you do both piles 1 & pile 2. Any verses that are correct get moved up a pile, so that you now should have pile 1, pile 2, and pile 3.
Everyday you do piles 1 & 2. Pile 3 you do every Friday. Pile 4 you do once a month. And Pile 5 you do every other month. So if you're memorizing one verse a week, for instance, you'll likely review it everyday for a while, then every week, and then next month, and then it will be gone.
It works well because you can add verses to pile 1 at any time. So if the verse from last week is still moving through piles 1-3, that's okay because you can just add more verses to pile 1 and it doesn't really matter. You can have as many there as you need to.
The main thing is that you review each verse at least five times before you get rid of it.
Here, then, is what a sample schedule would look like:
Everyday: Go over new verse AND Everyday: Review verses from piles 1 & 2. Remember if you get a verse correct, move it up a pile! AND Every Friday: Review pile 3. AND Second Wednesday of the month: Review pile 4. AND Every 31st of a month: Review pile 5. (Why the 31st? It's easy to remember, and it means you'll hit pile 5 about every other month. You'll hit it twice in a row July-August and December-January, but you probably need the practice anyway :) ).
If you ever get a verse wrong, it goes back to pile 1!
This way you're sure that once you're rid of it, you really know it.
If you want to memorize verses as a family, the best time is right after dinner. Even if you can't do it every night, try for as many nights as possible. And if you use this method, you can be sure that you won't forget any! You'll go through each verse at least 5 times, and you'll space it out!
I hope that helps you get your spiritual life off to a great start this year!
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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