Friday Fragments

Hosted by Mrs4444.

Time for the end of week mental declutter that is Friday Fragments. Let's see what's floating about in here shall we?

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I did my 6th Kiva loan this week, which apparently makes me an average Kiva lender. Must do better. I'm going to stop buying Macca's coffee on work mornings and instead do a Kiva loan each month. There's a perfectly good coffee machine at work anyway.

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The church notice board that I was venting about on Thursday last week has gone from offensive to merely bemusing. It now reads "Without God the world is like a door off its hinges." I invite speculation as to meaning in the comments, my first thought was "can now be used as an improvised table-top?"

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There's a new Terry Pratchett book on the way, I've pre-ordered my copy of I Shall Wear Midnight and can't wait for more of Tiffany and the Nac Mac Feegle.

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This week there have been only two days on which I posted Creating order from chaos pics. What a slacker! Here are today's feeble efforts.

The notice board, which wasn't really that bad (oh yes, it's been worse in the past) but things kept falling off it because there were too many sheets of paper stuck on with the one pin.

Before and After

The cupboard behind the notice board. I do not like the way the shelves in this cupboard sag. It's freaky. I keep having visions of one of the shelves giving way and all the glassware and stoneware coming crashing down through the floor into the stairwell below. Probably on top of my head.

Too many breakable things piled on top of other breakable things.

I worked my way up from the bottom shelf to the top. When I got to the top shelf I looked at it, pulled out one bag of stuff, stood there holding it for a while. Then put it back and left it for another day.

Looking much less precarious.

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My Dad

Dad took me out to lunch today. We went to a Japanese restaurant at Hornsby called Kibou which I had heard good things about and which Dad has been to often enough that he didn't have to specify which beer he wanted. It was goooooood. I'm a terrible food blogger though, I kept starting to eat before taking a photo!

Seaweed salad

Gyoza

Teriyaki chicken with salad, rice and miso

Sashimi

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I arrived home just as the kids were coming in from the bus stop and was greeted with much laughter and by this sight.

Guess we'll be needing new track pants then.

It seems they got a little over-stressed during sport. I'm so glad they have fully lined track pants and that he was able to find this highly amusing instead of totally traumatising!

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That's it from me today, I'm off to post a package containing Vegemite and Tim Tams to an unsuspecting blogger somewhere (hint, it's our lovely Friday Fragments host). Well, she knows the package is coming, but Vegemite is guaranteed to be surprising, forewarned or not! Don't forget to go visit other Fragmented Folks, head on over to Half-Past Kissin' Time to see what everyone's been up to this week.

Quick hit: Church billboards make me sad.

I drove Caitlin to her ballet class this afternoon, on the way we pass one of the local churches and, as I find myself involuntarily doing every time, I read its notice board. Now, the things written on this notice board are often inane and sometimes illogical* but this one strikes me as being actually offensive.

"God allows what he hates to achieve what he loves."

I beg your pardon? The end justifies the means? All the suffering and hatred and evil and misery in our world is justified by the supposed fact that some people will believe in and worship God? I don't think so.

*There's a church in Hornsby for which I would add occasionally funny/clever, but this church's notice board has never made me so much as smile.

Linkfest No. 17

Stuff I thought was worth sharing...

Karen Healey, at Attention Rebellious Jezebels, reviews books "in dialogue style in a spoilerific manner that often renders in-depth, wonderful works nonsensical" and is also highly amusing.

Charlotte of Charlotte's Library asks Where are the Good Mothers in Middle Grade Science Fiction and Fantasy?

Ladysquires at Shitty First Drafts explains Why I'm Not Proud of You for Correcting Other People's Grammar.

On the subject of the Ethics Classes trial:

• Teaching Ethics as an option to non-scripture at Motherhugger.
• Practical things you can do to help - a post in the discussions section of the St James Ethics Centre Facebook page Towards an Ethics-based Complement to Scripture in NSW Primary Schools
• Deborah at In a Strange Land is tempted to say, "Diddums"

A few words from an Ethics trial class student

My niece attends one of the schools involved in the Ethics classes trial. Yesterday her mum posted a photo on Facebook of an article appearing in their local Village Voice newspaper in which Annika is quoted on the subject of the ethics classes.

Click to embiggen

"I think the ethics classes are really fun," Leichhardt Year 5 student Annika Rees said. "The teacher gives us situations like whether we think something is fair or not, and then we discuss the topic and give our own opinions. It's important because it gives us an opportunity to see other people's point of view and perspectives on things without anyone being right or wrong. That means we feel like we won't be judged on our answers and gives us a chance to justify what our perspectives are."

So there you go, a small glimpse of the view from inside the Ethics classes trial :-)

(Also, way to go Annika!)

Thursday is Scripture day at school

This afternoon Tom came home with a 1964 pre-metric Australian penny that he'd been given by his Scripture teacher for remembering the weekly Bible verse. I asked what the verse was and he quoted - Peter said "You are the messiah, son of the living God." I asked if he thought that what the Bible claimed Peter had said was true and he looked at me like I was silly and said "No" with an undercurrent of "Duh!" So then I asked if he'd told his Scripture teacher that he didn't believe it, and he answered "HELL NO!" Which struck me as rather amusing. It also made me go and print out Penny Sharpe's petition in support of the St James Ethics Centre school ethics classes trial.

The provision by law of a period of time each week for Special Religious Education, taught by volunteer "scripture teachers" recruited by the churches, in NSW schools is a legacy of a deal made between the government and the churches back when public education was just being established. The Education Department ruling that students who opt out of SRE may not be given any useful instruction during that period is not codified in law, is unjust, and must be challenged.

My kids go to Scripture because they'd rather stay in their classrooms with their friends than go to the library and twiddle their thumbs. Approximately once a month I remind them that they have the option of not going, if the alternative was something other than thumb twiddling I'd haul them out of SRE so fast you wouldn't see them for dust. I feel a vague guilt that I'm not making a point by having them opt out, but it doesn't feel right to use my kids as pawns in a political or ideological exercise so I let the decision rest with them. No doubt if we lived in an area with a higher proportion of non-religious types there'd be a critical mass of kids opting out and my lot would be in the library watching dvds and colouring in along with half the school.

The St James Ethics Centre has developed a course designed to provide "an ethics-based complement to SRE" and which can be offered as a "meaningful secular alternative during the allocated time for SRE." This ethics course is currently being trialled in 10 Primary Schools in NSW despite frantic efforts to stop the trial, in particular by the Anglican and Catholic churches. There is also an ongoing campaign being waged against the possibility of the Ethics course being favourably reviewed at the end of the trial and subsequently being rolled out to all schools.

I really, really hope that the trial is a huge success and that the decision makers in the Education Dept and in the NSW parliament do not allow themselves to be swayed by the loud voices of a well organised religious lobby and I'm not going to simply hold my breath and hope over this, I'm going to do what I can to make my voice heard and let the government know that there are many, many voters who disagree vehemently with the things being said by people like Peter Jensen. I'll be writing emails and voting in polls and talking to people in my community and I think I'll print out a few more copies of that petition and get to collecting signatures, if you live in NSW you might consider doing the same.

I'm really rather fond of this time of year

Here we are at the beginning of December, my house is strewn with Christmas decorations, the kids have decorated the tree, we have strings of lights ready to festoon the garden, I have all my special Christmas candles out, the Advent calendar is hanging by the dining table, there's Christmas music loaded up on the iPod and I've started my annual re-read of Connie Willis' Miracle and Other Christmas Stories. Yes, I'm an atheist celebrating a pagan mid-winter festival co-opted by the Christian church to commemorate the birth of a man who was was almost certainly not born on the 25th of December and I'm doing so in the middle of summer.

Of course I'm also rather stressed by all the STUFF that has to be done in the next few weeks and when people ask me how I am I tend to reply "A little weary..." and I whinge about being asked to do extra things like make 40-odd jelly cups and cook brownies for a year 6 mufti day on the same night as I'm hosting a P&C executive meeting at my place and having my mother-in-law over for dinner. But I do it any way. Because it matters to the kids. But I made Adam cook the brownies. (That was last night by the way.)

Is there a point to all of this? Well may you ask...there did seem to be one when I started....
(It would help if I wasn't half-way through my second glass of Stanton and Killeen muscat.)

Oh, I know! Christmas, it makes me happy, for lots of reasons that are to do with family and friends and celebrating life and sharing and thinking of others and reconnecting with people we don't see often and good food and drink and silly traditions and memories and endings and beginnings. So what I thought I might try and do through December is write a little about some of those things and try to explain why I, I really like Christmas.

Meanwhile, I'm going to finish this glass of wine and eat another chocolate elf.

Bye, bye November

It's been fun, I've written 12 times as many posts as I did last month making it through my third NaBloPoMo with relative ease and, I think, only minor irritation to my family.

We have 2 and a half weeks of school left for the kids, that's only 12 days of primary school to go for David. I got his high school orientation info pack today, so many pieces of paper, so many forms to fill in, fees to pay (I'm interested to see that these include a voluntary $100 per student donation to the P&C - wonder how many people pay that?), new systems to learn, it's all a bit overwhelming.

There's a nice vague handout about the Religious Education program at the school with references to "inter-denominational" "non-threatening" and "significance of religion" which as far as I can see equates religion with Christianity and completely disappears any other faith, or lack thereof. I'll be interested to see an outline of the lesson program (the handout offers one on request). It's a program that was introduced when I was at the school, I remember it as being monumentally tedious, and that was when I was heavily involved with one of the churches that developed and still financially supports the program. There's a notable lack of references to the optional nature of Special Religious Education and no indication of what kids who opt out would be doing during that time - I'm not surprised by this and I don't believe there are any regulations that require that information to be offered, but it's interesting.

I'm tired. My head is full of little, and not so little, things I have to do, or remember, or talk to people about, or go to, or shop for. I have speeches and reports to write for the P&C. Work is relatively busy. November was a fairly hectic month for us and I really just want to stop for a while, but December promises to be just as full-on. I'm so looking forward to the holidays, I plan on sleeping and reading and playing games and not being in a hurry to do anything.

More thoughts on Scripture in schools

I started to respond to comments on my previous post on the subject but it was getting kind of epic, so I thought I'd better chuck it all in a post of its own. This may be a little disjointed! (BTW, Scripture = Special Religious Education, or SRE, but no-one calls it that.)

A couple of people made reference to the thumb-twiddling in the library being not such a bad thing, I must admit I very nearly included a disclaimer in the original post to the effect that I was quite sure the kids were perfectly happy with the thumb-twiddling :-) Actually I believe my kids' school encourages reading which is something I'd have been very keen on as a kid had I been at all aware that Scripture class was optional.

My memories of Scripture are of some poor sodding volunteer coming into a classroom full of kids who saw the lesson as something they were not required to take seriously, like being a substitute teacher, only worse because you have no hope of convincing the kids that anyone cares if they don't do the work. As for the subject matter, it was pretty much exactly the same as we were getting at church in Sunday School, very much of the indoctrination of impressionable minds variety.

From what I see of the stuff my kids do in Scripture now it's also very definitely of the teaching dogma variety and not at all of the comparative religious studies style, and really why would it be anything else? These classes are largely being taught by volunteers who are doing it because they believe it's important to bring the kids into the fold not because they want to equip them to understand the various world religions. When your kindergartner comes home on a Thursday afternoon and tells you very seriously that all the houses in your street were made by God, or that Adam and Eve were the first people, or that the whole world was flooded and wasn't it a good thing that Noah was around it becomes very clear that myth is being taught as fact and that I have a problem with.

It's quite true, as Toni mentioned, that some schools positively encourage kids to visit all the different Scripture classes, my nieces have done a bit of swapping around between Protestant, Catholic and Buddhist classes at their school. Perhaps the nature of the classes is different in other schools, perhaps there are whole cohorts of enlightened Scripture teachers out there delivering lessons that invite a critical analysis of the subject matter, which incidentally is perfectly possible even with 5 year olds. Hey, my Mum has done a bit of Scripture teaching in the past, but the last time she did so (filling in for a friend) she was so disgusted with the curriculum materials and the lesson plans that she was expected to follow that she swore never to do it again.

From St James Ethics Centre on Facebook:

Those schools that have completed an expression of interest in being a pilot school are confirmed as participants in the pilot. They are Darlinghurst, Crown Street, Ferncourt, Rozelle, Hurstville, Bungendore, Neutral Bay and Baulkham Hills North Public Schools. Another school is 80% through the process. There is room for just one more.

Don't suppose there's much hope of grabbing the last spot for our school.

Ariane mentioned one of my big doubts about this whole exercise - where are the volunteers to teach ethics classes going to come from? I know the churches often have a fair bit of trouble filling the volunteer roles to teach scripture and they have a presumably highly motivated pool of people to draw on. I, of course, find myself answering the question in my own head with "perhaps I should..." at which point the other half of me jumps up with a cartoon sledgehammer yelling "don't you DARE think about volunteering for anything else" and squishes the idea flat. It's all very well saying "What a wonderful idea, we should definitely have ethics classes offered in all schools" but that's not going to be much use if there's no-one to teach them.

Mind you, even if there aren't enough teachers to go around, there'll be some no small victory in breaking the anachronistic hold of the churches on that half hour of SRE a week should the trial be deemed successful and the NSW Dept of Education and Training' policy on the matter changed to allow the classes to be offered across the board.

Ethics classes to be trialed as an alternative to "Scripture"

This is fantastic news. It's about time there was something better for the non-scripture kids to do than go to the library and twiddle their thumbs.

When my oldest first started school I hadn't quite given up on the church, I'd long since moved away from any belief in god but I still saw value in the ethical teaching and the community that a church fosters. So off he went to Scripture classes, as did most of his classmates. It wasn't long before I was rather regretting that decision as I found myself dealing with the some of the less-nuanced ideas that came home from the classes. I console myself with the thought that at least he'll be well equipped to understand any biblical allusions if he ever ends up reading various classic novels and poetry. My other 2 have also gone to Scripture classes and I freely admit it's because it was easier to go with the flow and let them be with their friends. Especially as the alternative was so unsatisfactory.

Every so often I offer my kids the option of not going to Scripture class, none of them have taken me up on it, they'd rather stay with their friends and sit through lessons about things they do not believe than be bored. If something like these proposed ethics classes were available at all schools, not only would I jump at it now, I'd have been thrilled to enroll the kids in them way back in Kindergarten.

From the SMH:

ETHICS classes will be introduced in NSW schools, offering an alternative to religious studies for the first time in 100 years, the Premier, Nathan Rees, will announce today.

The St James Ethics Centre has been working very hard for some time to get this project up and running. "Towards an ethics-based complement to scripture in NSW primary schools" gives an overview of the issues involved and of the proposals being considered.

I am so very pleased to see this trial getting the go-ahead and I will be presenting information about it to our next P&C meeting at school. I only wish there were to be more than 10 schools involved in the trial. Ah well, teaspoons. Hopefully it will be a huge success and we'll see further progress in the near future.

Wielding her teaspoon*

Caitlin's class has recently re-arranged their seating and each table group gave themselves a name. Caitlin is sitting with the "Gaybo" group. I asked what the hell that was supposed to mean. Apparently, according to the kid who suggest the name, it means "we're not gay."

*sigh*

I was glad to hear Caitlin had no part in choosing the name. David tells me that "gaybo" is used as an insult by kids at the school, so how it also means "not gay" isn't quite clear to me, but either way it's problematic.

Thing is, if my "that's dodgy" radar went off, why didn't the teacher's?

When I pointed out the problem with the name, Caitlin instantly said she should go to her teacher and tell her "that it's homophobic". It's pretty cool that she wants to do that but I can't help but feel apprehensive about the possible fall-out for her. Guess that's what letting your kids grow up is about, at some point you have to step back and let them take risks and I do think it's better coming from her than from me.

This'll follow on nicely from the class discussion that was had last week when the scripture teacher was away. They all took turns talking about their beliefs about religion so Caitlin found herself proclaiming her atheism to the whole class (I think there were a couple of others who also said they didn't believe in god, so about 10% of the class, which I found interesting).

*the teaspoon reference comes from here.

More on the Hillsong thing

Further info on the Hillsong run "personal development course" - another article in the SMH, Hillsong accused of closet zealotry.

What on earth possessed anyone to think that letting a religious group run a class for the kids who have explicitly opted out of any religious studies was a good idea?

"The teacher's federation representative for Cheltenham Girls High, Doug Williamson, said non-scripture students at the school were being invited to join the Shine program, where they were exposed to religious content."

At least in that case the parents were apparently informed that Hillsong was running the course and had to sign permission slips for their kids to attend (not that that makes it ok). It would seem that's not always the case.

"A parent from another Sydney school said students at her child's school were automatically enrolled in the Shine program if they chose not to attend scripture."

This, however, makes me proud both to be a Greens voter and a P&C member (I'm the P&C president at my kids' school).

"The NSW Greens yesterday called for Shine to be suspended while allegations that it put an unhealthy and inappropriate emphasis on physical appearance were investigated. It joined the NSW Federation of Parents and Citizens in expressing concern that the program could damage the self-esteem of the at-risk girls it purported to help."

I do hope they'll be addressing the issue of the inappropriate religious connections as well as the physical appearance stuff.

Hillsong helping girls "discover their value and created uniqueness"

This makes me feel physically ill:

From the SMH - Hillsong hits schools with beauty gospel

You know what? Even if you take away any religious connotations the mere fact that there is a course being taught IN SCHOOLS, purportedly to boost teenagers' self-esteem, which includes teaching

"a range of skills including how to put on make-up, do their hair and nails, and walk with books balanced on their heads"

makes me furiously angry.

Tom on theology

"Mum, all parents believe that God is a myth."

"Really? What makes you say that?"

"You think it's a myth."

"Well, yes, I do. Just like the Greek and Roman gods were myths."

"But not the Egyptian gods, they were real."

Aaaaaargh!

Today I am wearing my "You Are Here" tshirt from thinkgeek. Caitlin's friend asked me if it was the milky way. Yes, and that's where the Earth is I say pointing to the spot indicated on the shirt. Then she asked me if I knew what was in the middle, so I said yes I did, did she know? And she told me, in all sincerity, that in the middle of the milky way there is a big special cross. Um, no, there's a big black hole says I. And in the middle of that there's a cross says she. She's seen a "documentary" says her mum. No that's not documentary, that's fantasy says I before my politeness circuit can kick in.

I am seized with an urge to offer to teach cosmology for kids to their class.

*cries*

Link-fest No.1

Not sure how often I'll post one of these, probably whenever I've collected a decent number of links and before they get too out of date.

On Alas! A blog Myca links to a series of essays titled "Christians in the Hand of an Angry God" posted by bradhicks on his LJ. (The LJ posts are 3 years old but still well worth a read.)

blue milk is asking "What does a feminist mother look like?", subsequent posts on her blog have some of the answers she's received. I may get around to posting my own response eventually.

Kate Harding has a post on Shapely Prose titled "Reality vs. relativism" about dieting and weight loss surgery.

Some of my friends had a great time at the Hub convention on the weekend, Leish has a recount on her LJ: Muhneys and Mcnabs and kangaroos, oh my!