Commonplaces--June 2022

“Noah was so shut into the ark that no evil could reach him. Floods did but lift him heavenward, and winds did but waft him on his way. Outside the ark all was ruin, but inside all was rest and peace. Without Christ we perish, but in Christ Jesus there is perfect safety.”—C.H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening M. June 5

“Almost all error is, really, Truth perverted, Truth wrongly divided, Truth disproportionately held and taught…Here is where so many have failed in the past. A single phrase of God’s Truth has so impressed this man or that, that he has concentrated his attention upon it almost to the exclusion of everything else.”—A.W. Pink, The Sovereignty of God 

“Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age. The learned life then is, for some, a duty.”—C.S. Lewis, “Learning in War-time”

“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.”—Lewis, Ibid.

“If men’s judgements were right, custom would have always been derived from good men. But it often happens far otherwise: what is seen being done by the many soon obtains the force of custom; while the affairs of men have scarcely ever been so well regulated that the better things pleased the majority.”—John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, “Address to King Francis” 

“There is nothing less in accord with God’s nature than for him to cast off the government of the universe and abandon it to fortune, and to be blind to the wicked deeds of men, so that they may lust unpunished. Accordingly, whoever heedlessly indulges himself, his fear of heavenly judgement extinguished, denies that there is a God.”—Ibid., I.iv.2 

“Indeed, men who have either quaffed or even tasted the liberal arts penetrate with their aid far more deeply into the secrets of divine wisdom.”—Ibid., I.v.2 

“Manifold indeed is the nimbleness of soul with which it surveys heaven and earth, joins past to future, retains in memory something heard long before, nay, pictures to itself whatever it pleases. Manifold also is the skill with which it devises things incredible, and which is the mother of so many marvelous devices. These are unfailing signs of divinity in man.”—Ibid., I.v.5

“By His Word, God rendered faith unambiguous forever, a faith that should be superior to all opinion.”—Ibid., I.vi.2

“What is the beginning of true doctrine but a prompt eagerness to listen to God’s voice?”—Ibid., I.viii.5 

“Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”—Ibid., I.xi.8 

“Faith ought not to gaze hither and thither, nor to discourse of various matters, but to look upon the one God, to unite with him, to cleave to him.”—Ibid., I.xiii.16

“It is ill-advised to pit God’s might against his truth.”—John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.VII.5

 

Material Cause

I can only imagine how lonely it is being a materialist.

There is no plan to the universe. There is no god above you, only sky. There is no one who really knows you, all the way down. There is just you. Every day this “you” goes out into a world where most things are trying to hurt, exploit, and manipulate all the other things; worse, they’re supposed to be that way, as Darwin so helpfully informed us. And if you want to make any progress through this war zone toward your goals, no one is really going to help get you there—except, again, you.

The resulting pressure of being a consciously self-conscious materialist must be unbearable. How can someone as limited as the “you” knows itself to be deal with an infinite number of outcomes and an infinite number of possible obstacles (most of them the people closest to you)? No wonder Nietzsche went insane. But there are workarounds. That pressure can be dulled by routines; smothered by the anodyne embrace of sex, drugs, and alcohol; ignored by the mass of flesh-colored emoticons that pass for people in our logic-free society. But I believe most often it is channeled into the Cause.

The Cause can be anything. Better schools for the kids. A new car. The top of the career ladder. Conservative politics. Progressive politics. A famous Instagram account. Freedom. Safety. A Hollywood career. Global warming. The perfect body. One more dollar. One more cat.

All that really matters in the long run is that the Cause inevitably becomes part of the Self. It has to, really—the Self is the only cause-er we know from the inside out, and therefore the only force in the world that is personal. Nobody knows what is really making that other Joe do anything, the same way nobody knows what makes gravity do anything. Some folks with funny Greek names (psychiatrists and physicists, respectively) have pretty good guesses, but they still don’t know. All they know is what the stuff is made of and some of what it’s doing. But we know the Cause—no matter who you are, for you it is the obvious, normal thing to do. Often it is also the thing most noticeable about you, betrayed by social media posts, bumper stickers, clothing, attitude. You give it life, and in return it becomes part of what you are. How many people have you met that one of the first things they uttered was “I am (whatever Cause they are currently chasing)”? The Cause, no matter how trivial, becomes part and parcel of the person. When it succeeds, they do, and when it doesn’t…

Well, that is not to be contemplated, for no man ever hated his own Cause. It must be the fault of all those other Causes out there, competing for the same limited resources, time, applause, and support. In this world there are only those who support the Cause, and those who hinder it. And since the Cause is part of the Self, there are only those who help you, and those who hurt. Failure is personal: it is other people. And the vast majority of them are out to get you.

Materialism wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Instead of turning the universe against you, it was supposed to bring freedom from the Great Enslaver, Religion. After all, hadn’t it given us the Industrial Revolution? Was not Utopia in sight at the turn of the last century? Finally, we could feed and clothe the world, travel around it at lightning speeds, and explain virtually every natural phenomenon (not to mention the supernatural) we saw along the way. Man’s labor could accomplish anything. We bored through mountains, bridged oceans, harnessed the lightning bolt, caught and rode the very winds. There was a price, of course—work became mostly boring, stifling, repetitive, and soul-killing. But we didn’t believe in souls anymore, and until we figured out how to fix that (and of course we would) there were escape hatches. Sex has always been a popular choice, but now there was “reaching the top of the ladder” and “vacation” and “recreation” and most importantly “progress” to help it out. Every machine needs a little oiling now and then, and materialism’s two major oils were sex and science. Each could save you from the perils of the other—sex made the Self feel real in a sterile scientific world, and science made the ugly biproducts of a sexual liberty less and less of a problem.

Enter Roe v. Wade.

Now Roe v. Wade is dead, and the response is showing just how much of a Cause it is for so many people out there. When those judges struck it down, they struck down all those Selves, too. No wonder the Christians are being exhorted to “be sensitive” or “watch our tones”—they are strolling through the middle of a mass grave, and a cheery whistle just seems like the final unwitting insult to the Apocalypse. “Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, hosts of selves, heaps of Causes, dead bodies without end—they stumble over the bodies!”

Long ago, a reluctant African academic also lived through an Apocalypse. He was exhorted to be sensitive, to watch his tone, to cautiously mourn with those who mourn, to love these Selves as they loved themSelves and their own threatened bodies. Instead he glanced at the shattered Cause around him, and he gave the following exhortation to those around him:

“There is no need to be instructed to love oneself and one’s body; we always love what we are and what is inferior to us but belongs to us, according to an immovable unvarying natural law, one which was also made for animals, because even animals love themselves and their bodies. It therefore remains for us to receive instruction about what is above us, and what is close to us. Scripture says, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. The aim of the commandment is love, a twofold love of God and of one’s neighbor. No class of things to be loved is missing from these two commandments…The person who lives a just and holy life is one who is a sound judge of these things. He is also a person who has ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more), or love two things equally if one of them should be loved either less or more than the other, or love things either more or less if they should be loved equally. No sinner, qua sinner, should be loved; every human self, qua human self, should be loved on God’s account; but God should be loved for Himself.”—Augustine of Hippo, De Doctrina Christina Bk. I

Love God, love His Cause, and love all those selves out there like they were your Self, in that order. That includes the million-plus helpless kids who now have a better chance to see the light of day. 

Be thankful, and rejoice, for Material and Cause is not all there is. We know it, because Roe is dead, and the fight is just starting.

Book of the Month May 2022: Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory

 So it turns out that John Quincy Adams (tenth president of the United States, and son of the second) was appointed a professor of Harvard University. The things you learn.

He was named as the inaugural Boylston professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in 1805, when the United States were not yet thirty years old. As one of America's best-educated and foremost public men, he was greatly in demand and could not afford to devote all his time to the school. But when he could get away from his post as Massachusetts's United States Senator, he would journey to Harvard and deliver a lecture or two to the students.

The result was the thirty-six Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory. Adams could not finish his intent for the series because he was named Ambassador to Russia and resigned his professorship to travel to the Baltic. However, the lectures he did give are a lucid and succinct summary of rhetorical practice and theory during the days of the Founding Fathers. If writing and speaking well are skills you want in your toolbox, this is a good summary read.

The most fascinating part of this book was when Adams showed the limitations of the English language when it comes to emphasis. Many languages (including the classical Greek and Latin) can show emphasis by the location of the word in the sentence--particularly by placing it at the beginning or end. English, however, because of its strict requirement of subject-verb-object and massive use of articles (a/an/the) is usually forced to begin a sentence with an insignificant word. That is a limitation that I had never considered, and one that as a speaker and writer, I can now keep in mind. Words are powerful weapons, in storage in the mind. Knowing how to use them is what arms them.

Commonplaces--May 2022

“Not one of the public speakers in repute had any extent of attainment in literature, the inexhaustible fountain of eloquence; nor in philosophy, the parent of moral refinement; nor in the laws municipal or national, so indispensable to all solid eloquence at the bar; nor in history, which makes all the experience of ancient days tributary to the wisdom of our own. They had neither the strength of logic, that key-stone to the arch of persuasion; nor its subtlety to perplex, and disconcert an opponent. They knew neither how to enliven a discussion by strokes of wit and humor, nor how to interweave the merits of the question with the facts of the cause; nor how to relieve tediousness by a seasonable and pertinent digression; nor finally to enlist the passions and feelings of their auditors on their side.”—John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Lecture V

“With more confidence than safety, they have relied on the fertility 

of their own genius.”

"But praise is only the illuminated hemisphere of demonstrative eloquence. Her orb on the other side is darkened with invective and reproach.”

“General encomium is the praise of fools.”—Adams, Lecture X

“Learning in a head of indolence is like the sword of a hero in the hand of a coward . The credit and the usefulness of a merchant depends at least as much upon the employment, as upon the extent of his capital. The reputation of learning is no better, than that of a pedantic trifler, unless accompanied with the talent of making that learning useful to its possessor and to mankind.”—Adams, Lecture XV

“There can be no possible advantage in supposing our antagonist a fool. The most probable effect of such an imagination is to prove ourselves so.”—Adams, Lecture XXII

“A speaker may be unintelligible either for want of distinct ideas, or of proper expressions. No man can give what he has not.”—Adams, Lectures, XXVI

“Let your metaphors be not too thickly crowded...The poet may soar beyond the flaming bounds of space and time; but the orator must remember, that an audience is not so readily excursive, and is always under the power of gravitation.”—Adams, Lecture XXXIII

“The mastery of our own passions can perhaps be only accomplished by religion; but, in acquiring it, her most effectual, as well as her most elegant instruments, are letters and learning. At no hour of your life will the love of letters ever oppress you as a burden, or fail you as a resource.”—Adams, Lecture XXXVI

“There are three chief things concerning which men in general greatly err: misery and happiness, folly and wisdom, bondage and liberty. The world counts none miserable but the afflicted, and none happy but the prosperous, because they judge by the present ease of the flesh. Again; the world is pleased with a false show of wisdom (which is foolishness with God), neglecting that which makes wise unto salvation. As to liberty, men would be at their own disposal, and live as they please. The suppose the only true liberty is to be at the command and under the control of none above themselves, and live according to their heart’s desire. But this is a thralldom and bondage of the worst kind. True liberty is not the power to live as we please, but to live as we ought!”—A.W. Pink, The Sovereignty of God

“An attitude of fatalistic inertia, because I know that God has irrevocably decreed whatsoever comes to pass, is to make a sinful and hurtful use of what God has revealed for the comfort of my heart.”—Ibid.

Favorite Student Bloopers of 2021-2022

 It's that time again--time to revel in the hasty misspelling, the overlooked word, or the unconscious alteration. Not to mention a few good old fashioned instances of ignorance...

“In my opinion the writer obviously tried to make the point of Roland being a brave worrier with strength and might.”

“Solomon was led astray by his desire to worship idles.”

“She has climbed great and risky hills and braved some deranged and treacherous rivers.”

“The Apocrypha was written in Greek because the land it was written in was concurred by Alexander."

“Shakespeare wrote in iambic pintometer.”

“Promises to futile lords were what the entire economy was built on.”

“In the Medical Catholic Church, the Bible was kept in Latin.”

“Fabian Tactics are a form of Gorilla Warfare where instead of attacking your enemy head on, you wear them down.”

“The Jewish Temple furnishings were carved into the Archer Titus.”

(Or, alternatively) “The Temple furnishings can still be seen on the italics.”

“The Pax Romana was a piece of Rome."

And my personal favorite from last year, as an honorable mention:

In answer to the question, “What was the name of the famous speech Cicero delivered against Mark Antony?” a Canadian student answered, “The 2nd Amendment.”

Book of the Month--April 2022: The Name of the Rose

 

The fit is upon me to start another series. Like most of my blog series, it will probably be short-lived, unnoticed, and rather undeveloped. (But, then again, so are most human beings. Perhaps that is just how life is supposed to be this side of glory.)

That series is the “Book of the Month” feature, highlighting my favorite work from the preceding month with a short synopsis, review, and impression. The inaugural subject of this series is The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980), translated by one William Weaver.

This novel is rather like what would happen if the Middle Ages bumped into Sherlock Holmes and they both had a conversation about semiotics. That’s the study of signs and symbols and how we human beings know what they mean, for you normal folk. A young German monk (our narrator) winds up accompanying a British monk (William of Baskerville, in a deliberate nod to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles) on a diplomatic mission in northern Italy in 1328.

It is a tense, fractured period. The Pope has abandoned Rome in what will become known to historians as the “Babylonian Captivity of the Church.” A significant portion of the Franciscan order is resisting the current (very rich, very corrupt) Pope John XXII over the issue of whether poverty is a mandatory virtue of the Church or not, and the Holy Roman Emperor has gotten involved in the politics of it all. Various popular heresies have ripped through the church. It is, for fans of medieval political writing, the time of Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham. In the midst of all this drama (which intersects the story in various ways), William and his pupil Adso spend a week at a fabulously old, wealthy monastery—and are asked to solve a mysterious death. In doing so, they discover many secrets about the monastery and its inhabitants, including its wondrous (and forbidden) library.

The amount of research and thought that went into this novel was little short of astounding. I am not an expert on fourteenth-century history and writing—far from it—but everything I did know about the period and the books described dovetailed neatly. Eco even manages to copy the style of much medieval writing, full of allegory and description. While some places might have benefitted from an editor’s trimming (particularly late in the novel when momentum has been building) the effect is still one of stepping into a different time and place. With a few brief exceptions, this is not a modern story in historical trappings; it is instead a thoroughly medieval work with a few modern touches (or slips). The days and hours themselves are noted by the prayers of the monks, and the introduction gives a fictional textual history that seems quite plausible. To the casual reader, this is boring overkill; to someone like me who knows style and time, it is positively pleasurable.

While a couple (brief) atmosphere slip-ups keep this novel from cracking my top five list, it is definitely in the top twenty-five, and is slated for a leisurely reread. If you’re a fan of the Middle Ages, high-school-aged or more, a devourer of mystery novels, or a student of semiotics (or somehow all of the above) find it and enjoy it.

Commonplaces--April 2022

“Duties and studies and exertions are painful; for these too are necessarily compulsions unless they become habitual, then habit makes them pleasurable.”—Aristotle, Rhetoric I.11 (1370a)

“A man may wrong his enemies, because that is pleasant; he may equally wrong his friends, because that is easy.”—Aristotle, Rhetoric I.12

“How can I express in word the depravity of the human heart? For it is inevitable that the creature which the love of God has not permeated should love itself the most.”—Philip Melanchthon, Loci Communes

“Justice—n. A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes, and personal service.”—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

“Incompatibility—n. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.”—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

“No wretched drunkard reeling along the road is a more pitiable or disgusting sight than the man who is intoxicated into idiocy with the alcohol of his own accursed pride.”—Archibald G. Brown, Sermons Preached at Stepney Green Tabernacle, quoted in Mark Jones Knowing Sin

“The goodness of God makes the devil a polisher, while he intends to be a destroyer.”—Stephen Charnock, in Mark Jones, Knowing Sin

“[The young] think leanness means health and weakness good judgement, and while they think it is enough to be without fault, they fall into the fault of being without virtues.”—Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria II.4

“In any conflict, the better resourced (even if he is the victim) is thought to be the aggressor, because of his greater power.”—Quintilian, VIII.5

“Eloquence is really nothing else than the power of giving a distinctive look to all, or at any rate most, of our thoughts.—Quintilian, IX.1

“Such composing lacks clarity because of the verbiage, for when a speaker throws more words at someone who already understands, he destroys the clarity by the darkness.”—Aristotle, Rhetoric III.3

“The worst thing about ignorance is that it believes every advisor has a true answer.”—Quintilian, XII.3

“They took their seats for a time in the philosophers’ lecture halls, so that later on, dour in public and dissolute at home, they could claim authority by despising everybody else. Philosophy can be counterfeited, eloquence cannot.”—Quintilian, XII.3

“Even shyness—a vice, but an amiable one, and one that can easily produce virtues—is sometimes damaging, and has in many cases caused gifts of talent and learning never to come to light, but to moulder away in secret.”—Quintilian, XII.5

“People who cannot be led into better ways by reason can only be restrained by fear.”—Quintilian, XII.7

“Excellence is always something that had not been there before.”—Quintilian, XII.11 

“Something that comes close to the truth is not yet completely identical with the truth itself. The Muslim stands much closer to the truth than the servant of Baal or Molech, and yet Muhammad stood infinitely far from the truth.”—Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace Vol. I

A Crumb of Chreia

[A chreia is an ancient Greek rhetorical exercise, in which a student was required to expand on a well-known saying or action of a famous person by using certain methods or "headings." This one was composed for a rhetoric course final.]

Quintilian wrote that “Everybody prefers to have learned rather then to learn!” (Institutio Oratoria III.1)
This is a trustworthy saying, for Quintilian was not only a practitioner of rhetoric, but one of its great teachers; his entire work is dedicated to nothing else than the instruction and formation of a perfect orator. That is too immense a topic to praise here, but surely we can honor him for this bare bit of insight, spilled out(almost carelessly) from the great storehouse of his wisdom.
For he is saying that what students have already mastered is very hard to replace with later instruction, even if what they have learned originally is faulty or incomplete. The cause of this is not difficult to determine, since it lives in every man’s experience.
Who does not remember agonizing over some approaching final exam in his school days, knowing that mountains of effort and rivers of sweat had been used up in trying to anchor the needed facts in the memory? Every student knows that learning is tough, and often tedious. The raw clay of the mind is being pressed into a different mold; when it finally emerges bright, shining, and ready to be displayed to others, there is a genuine pride in the achievement.
But then another rushes up, secure in his own superior learning, and attacks the hard-won treasure with words of scorn! “They were poorly instructed, they were wrongly taught, they should instead listen to a newcomer and begin again.” Even if the newcomer is right and everything he says is as true as the face of God, the one being instructed instantly revolts. Admitting this new point means that all previous effort has been vain. Not only this, but it means he must own up to being wrong—worse, being a deceived fool in the presence of someone who knew even more about a subject. Pride, embarrassment, and anger combine to stifle the humility of confessing error.
On the contrary, a man who can be convinced of his own faults is rare—he has disciplined his wayward emotions and is prepared to do whatever needs to be done to arrive, not at mere knowledge, but at truth. What teacher would not travel many miles to find such a student? The very rarity of those who prefer to learn contributes to their worth, compared to those who prefer to have learned.
This saying proves that labor is hard and men are proud, and that once they have mined a bit of knowledge for themselves they are reluctant to throw it away, even if it is proved that what they clutch is nothing more than fool’s gold.
Consider with what reluctance Quintilian admits in a few places that he had changed some positions on pedagogy since his younger days! Here the one doing the correcting is not even another, but his own older, wiser self—the one person every human being on the earth will proclaim incontestably superior to who he used to be. And yet he is reluctant to admit even an improvement in his system before the sharp eyes of others, and defends his change of course with many reasons and proofs; afraid of appearing weak and inconstant as the wind.
Therefore, as Solomon has written, Wisdom calls to her children: “Hear instruction, and be wise, and refuse it not.” He joins his testimony to the orator’s: refusal to learn is not the path of the wise few. It is instead the path of the mulish multitude—but the pride of the foolish blinds them to which road they are traveling, leaving them in the dark even while they claim sight.
With all this in mind, it is quite clear that Quintilian has given us a great and memorable saying of education. May we always keep it as something we are learning rather than have learned.

Our House of Defense

Ps 31:1-3-- To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David. In thee, O LORD, do I put my trust; let me never be ashamed: deliver me in thy righteousness. Bow down thine ear to me; deliver me speedily: be thou my strong rock, for an house of defense to save me.

Lord, as we bring our petitions before you, help us to remember that you are our Rock, our House of Defense, our King. We are a brash and egalitarian people, and we often forget that a king must grant only the petitions of his people that truly benefit his whole kingdom, and not merely the pleas of favorites. And your kingdom stretches over all earth and time in many hidden ways. So our first request is that we not be arrogant and presumptuous in our requests.

Next we pray for wisdom for those who govern under you: for Jared Longshore as he undergoes ordination exams, for our presbytery as they consider launching King’s Cross, for honest men of God to step forward into eldership, for the Greyfriars students in their studies. Nor do we leave out the civil realm, for it is also under your hand: we request justice in the Wilson court case, in Dobbs vs Jackson, and in the office of President Biden and those around him. You have promised to deliver us from our enemies. Bow down your ear and hear.

You have considered our trouble and known our souls in adversity, so we request comfort, aid, and healing to our many sick and wounded. The curse consumes us all in time, and this is a terrible evil, but some feel its jaws swiftly and keenly. We ask you especially for those whose suffering is long, or without hope, for our bodies are weak and tempt us to doubt your goodness. Guard them and grant them healing and peace.

Your goodness is great and laid up for those that fear. Therefore we request peace for the God-fearers in difficult circumstances: our brothers in Eastern Europe, the singles and widows of our congregation, and all those you are testing. We ask that you grant them good courage and strength of heart. Show us your marvelous kindness, for we  hope in the Lord, our covenant head, our king, and our Deliverer. 

Amen.

 (Delivered at CCD 03/27/22)

On Distracted Students

Note: While the personages mentioned in this are fictional composites, the situation is, sadly, one I face often in online schooling.

Dear Mr. S—,

Thanks for reaching out. Far too many parents never even notice that their child is having trouble in my class until it is far too late to do something—I’m delighted to find that you are staying so involved.

You said in your email that John is having trouble staying focused, you’re not quite sure how to help with that, and you’d like any advice I can give. You’ve caught him multiple times during class with several windows open on the computer, chatting with friends, listening to music, or doing anything besides solely paying attention to me and his other teachers. You know this is occurring on a regular basis, but don’t want him to always do school directly under his parents’ eye, since “that would defeat the reason we put him in an online class in the first place.” You're considering switching to a more traditional schooling format to solve the problem. Does that seem an accurate summary?

I have noticed two major categories of student who struggle with staying focused in online classrooms; each tending to arise from opposite ends of the aptitude spectrum. The first is the student who is bored stiff—he thinks he knows everything (or at least quite enough to pass the quiz) and quite often he does. The slow plodding required for the slower students in the class causes him to disengage and seek more diverting material. If asked a direct question, it only takes a few seconds’ work to figure out the context and come up with a reasonably correct answer—easily covered by the excuse of “tech trouble.” He’s not being challenged, and no amount of lecturing from Mom and Dad will change that. After all, he will think, he’s making good grades—isn’t that the point of school?

The second student, instead of being bored, is overwhelmed--no matter what he does, he can't understand ninety percent of what the teacher is saying. He’s reading massive textbooks that don’t seem to make sense either, but all the other kids in class appear to somehow be getting this, particularly the four or five who always come up with those questions the teacher likes so much. Since no one likes to appear dumb (particularly in front of a bunch of cute girls) admitting he’s lost and asking for help is out of the question. So, he might as well do something fun—and comprehensible— instead of sit there and feel stupid. If the teacher asks him a point-blank question, he also can easily pretend tech trouble, and quickly slip back to his game. If lectured, he can semi-honestly assert he’s doing the best he can, but school’s “not really his thing.”

As a quasi-third option, there is also the student who has simply developed a systemic lack of discipline (which shows up most pointedly when surrounded by bright, shiny objects like screens). He wants to pay attention, and sometimes can when the topic is interesting enough, but his default state is to chase the latest impulse. With so many pleasurable options a click away, that impulse is easy to gratify. This type feeds into our first two options quite regularly: the brilliant student can indulge his curiosity, the slow one his apathy.

You will be better able than I to judge where John falls. A few questions for a week straight at the dinner table about “what he learned that day” should provide a pretty easy diagnostic tool. As far as solutions go, I haven't been a parent myself yet, but here are a few educated guesses:

If you think John’s the smart-and-bored type, then I suggest you tie something he actually does value—time with friends, reading, sports, whatever—back to his grades. If he doesn't meet a certain grade in the class at any given time, he doesn't get that privilege that week and must spend it on school instead. Don't be afraid to set the bar high! Since this type of student is motivated more by laziness, if you can make him sufficiently uncomfortable, he will move. And if he's making straight A's and still goofing off half of class, then he just needs more responsibilities (because he can obviously still handle it). Make him go get a job, join a club, start learning a trade, play a sport. When the grades finally start to drop, ease off about an hour’s worth of tasks a a week, and watch him go.

If you think John’s the overwhelmed type, you might require him to attempt asking or answering at least one question in class every day—and then check up on him. If he does that I will hear from him often, and he will usually be wrong, since he doesn’t know what is going on anyway. That will be both humbling and discouraging at first, but it will have the long-term affect of both forcing him to pay strict attention and to recognize exactly what he doesn't know. Since he’ll be getting daily personal explanations of his mistakes from me, it should also boost his understanding. Eventually, that should build into a fair amount of confidence--thus solving the problem. It's also helpful if you can ask this sort of student to synopsize what he learned that day at the dinner table. Roll out a whiteboard or something and ask for a 5-minute demonstration and summary. If he can't do it, then you know some extra study time is in order and he should, too. (Actually, this exercise is one of the most valuable things a parent can do for any type of student, period.)

If you suspect it is merely lack of discipline, the counterintuitive solution here is to pursue that discipline outside of class time rather than inside it. Does your son always make his bed? Write legibly even on homework no one will ever see? Complete chores on time and well? A kid who regularly does all that and more probably won't give you much trouble in class itself. This is arguably the hardest problem of the three to fix, because it requires both a lot of attention and a whole new set of habits, but it has the biggest payoff, as well. Your son is always going to be living in a digital world, and the sooner he masters it, the less it will rule over him. One of the drawbacks of online schooling compared to traditional homeschooling is that kids often spend a significant portion of the day away from their parent’s direct oversight. As you note, that’s a feature, but often it becomes a bug: the student develops some bad habits before parents can even notice. If that's where John is, then all you can do is thank God you noticed now, do some heavy-duty praying, and try to do some retraining. It will be unpleasant for both of you, but the harvest will be joyful.

If you truly think the only way to solve this is pulling him from school, I understand. Some kids just can't handle the manifold temptations and distractions that come with distance learning. I would far rather John learn self-discipline in another school than merely stick with me. But since you’re here now, I hope the above advice is useful.

May God grant you wisdom.