Volume > Issue > Letter to the Editor: June 1989

June 1989

Lasch

Christopher Lasch’s “The Obsolescence of Left & Right” (Apribpis one of the most stimu­lating things I’ve read in years.

Bernard Ramm

Irvine, California

Coles

This letter concerns Robert Coles’s April column on “Teach­ing Fourth Grade,” in which he said, “not only does it help me understand how children think…. but…their words and reac­tions give me a much needed boost sometimes….”

Our Lord must have had His reasons when He counseled, “Unless you become like children….”

As a parent and former art teacher, I too have had kid-in­sight boosts such as Coles’s. I was visiting with the fifth-grade teacher whose class was waiting for my art lesson, when a boy came up to her desk and presented her with a clumsy little Popsicle-stick sculpture. He said, “I made it at home for you.” A classmate standing nearby point­ed to it and sneered, “What’s that?” The boy answered, “It isn’t what it is that matters; it’s that it is!”

I was introducing a third-grade class to my “inside-out” method of drawing animal shapes. The first step is for the children to imagine the main shape of an animal as I call out its name. I purposely alternate animals whose shapes are most different from one another. I had shouted, “Think giraffe!” I followed im­mediately with the command, “Alligator!” A little fellow at the back of the room let out a yell as he pushed an upraised hand down on top of his head and then flung both hands out beyond his ears to help his brain make the sud­den transformation.

One evening I was lying in bed beside my three-year-old niece Susan, waiting for her to get sleepy. We had been talking about guardian angels. She came up with this observation: “Some­times I know my angel is so big her wings cover the whole house; other times she is so small I can hold her in the palm of my hand.”

I subscribe to the NOR as a kind of bridge between the world of the mind and the more child­like world of faith. I was delight­ed to find a fellow traveler — Robert Coles — crossing over with me.

Catherine M. LeGault

Central Point, Oregon

You May Also Enjoy

New Oxford Notes: January-February 2011

The Extraordinary Ordinariate... Words of Wisdom from the Walrus... Condom-mania, the Rerun... Soldiers for the Battle...

Moving Beyond Nuclear Pro-Choice

The fact that some arguments against strategic nuclear deterrence are faulty does not permit the conclusion that there are no compelling moral arguments against it.

The Folly of Trying to Outdo Wagner

Review of All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics