Cummings said she was happy with some aspects of Alice's progress a couple of months into the start of homeschooling and less than pleased with others. "On the plus side, our house was less stressful," she wrote. "If for no other reason than the elimination of the daily 'GET IN THE CAR RIGHT NOW YOU'RE GOING TO BE LATE FOR SCHOOL HERE TAKE THIS WASHCLOTH AND WASH YOUR FACE IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR AT STOPLIGHTS!' ceremony. Just as I'd intended, my daughter was getting the opportunity to explore interests for as long as she saw fit." But then one day, Alice came up to her with a "mistake" in a book. "'It says the country of Portugal! They think Portugal is a country!' she added, and cackled in delight. I asked carefully, 'When, in fact, it's a....?' 'State in Italy!' she hooted." Cummings says she was struck with anxiety, writing, "Was her future being compromised by a parent/teacher who wasn't completely certain what Italy had in place of states?"
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
