Monthly Archives: October 2016

The (Rudderless) Boat

Posted on October 25, 2016 by Pieter Stok

A friend recently sent me a song that he had written about education – partly his own education 50 odd years ago but more pointedly also about education today. The reality is that today education is even more perilous because it has moved into a post-modern era where the present social views are determined by numbers and political correctness rather than an objective norm e.g. a Judaeo Christian ethic. The song refers to this as a “rudderless boat”.

mousehole

Mousehole Cornwall UK

Currently in our state this has come to a head under the guise of “Safe Schools”. On the surface this is a noble idea. Our children need to be safe from predators and bullying – every one of them. Yet within the program there is also (not too subtle) social engineering about sexuality – an engineering that is shaped by the latest (most vocal) views.

Another phrase in the song that struck me was, “the system can’t tell me what all this is for.” The implication is that so many ideas have been compressed into what has become an overcrowded education/curriculum which, I believe, is striving to compensate for a chaotic social fabric. The result is that we have lost sight of, or have become unsure of, the purposes of education because there are just so many competing ideas in this can of worms.

The school in which I teach states in its Vision Statement “[Our] College strives to be a vibrant Christ-Centred community where parents and teachers serve in partnership to nurture in each child a passion for learning and an uncompromising desire to live according to God’s word.”

Three things stand out in contrast to much of our current education in this statement. One, education is the equipping of a child to love God and their neighbour, two, this is on a foundation not created by our own whims but one that is distilled from the Word of God and three, this is surrounded by a community shaped by a common ethos.

My friend’s song also asks, where will the current societal trends in education lead us? It is a question that disturbs me too and for which the only answer I have is, more chaos.

 

 

Categories: christian education, Education, Uncategorized | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Life in the City

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Pieter Stok

A quirky and wonderful post from my wife – who loves cities:

Sometimes I think I appreciate cities as other people appreciate nature. I’ve walked along Bourke Street in Melbourne for the past few hours. Dawdling, really. Stopping at a cafe overlooking the street, sitting on a bench in the mall.

The street is amazing. It’s so full of bitumen, concrete, trees with their bright green spring-ness fluttering in the breeze, big imposing buildings with little ones squished inbetween. There are interesting things to see in the shop windows. Stuff you’d never wear in a fit, stuff the likes of you’ve never seen before. My mind goes in all directions: imagining what people would have thought seeing a television or a vacuum cleaner in a shop window for the first time. Or wondering at the street sign that says ‘formerly Synagogue Lane’.

There are people everywhere. Busy, playful, bored, hassled, waiting. It seems every nation on earth is represented on the pavement and in the vehicles. I catch a sigh here and a laugh there. People talking to each other animatedly. Some looking lost and many who definitely know the mission they’re on. I wonder where all these people will be at the end of the day. Do they have loved ones to come home to? Will they feel they’ve achieved something today?

It’s fun to concentrate on the tiny details of the city. The way the bricks of an old building have been laid, or the little bows on the heels of the lady standing in front of you at the pedestrian crossing.

And then to switch your attention to the vastness of the streetscape. The sudden whoosh of wind hurtling along the canyon between the buildings. Or the volume of humanity moving about. Or the blue sky above me with wisps of clouds appearing and disappearing from view as they duck behind the skyscrapers.

Eventually, it’s time to leave this wonderful built environment. I feel the same as others might after a day in the bush. Refreshed.

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The Power of Literature

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Pieter Stok

“What fictional book has challenged your thinking and touched your life in some way?” That was one of the questions we explored recently in a Literature class. Other questions included, “What character in literature do you identify with and why?”

Literature or story and the characters and ideas that it portrays is very powerful.  Powerful literature works its way into our hearts and minds. Characters and situations become so real to us that it is hard to put the book down because we still want to be involved in this person’s life. Sometimes the novel ends so abruptly that we are confronted with a sense of loss. I am still waiting in frustration for Jasper Fforde’s  second book in his series “Shades of Grey” (No! Not 50 shades!). Eddie Russet has been left in limbo for many years.

Scout in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” has forever made me more alert to the ways in which young people perceive the world. One student commented that Holden Caulfield’s struggle to accept adulthood is one with which he identifies. Steinbeck was a master at portraying the outcast and misfit. Once introduced to Lennie and George in “Of Mice and Men” we can never look at the people on the fringes of our society the same way again. Good literature confronts us and makes us sit up. We may agree or disagree with the author but at least he or she has made us take notice.

Arthur Miller’s exploration of the ‘American dream’ in his play “Death of a Salesman” discomforts us all as we reconsider our hopes, ambitions, failures and successes, and causes us to reflect on the stories we tell ourselves to justify our existence and legacy. Franz Kafka’s stories written nearly 100 years ago are an ominous omen of the confusion and lack of focus and direction our societies find themselves in today.  I certainly feel like a confused “K” at times as I try to understand the world around me.

Is there a work of literature that will forever be with you? It may be one that you return to time and again. I’d love to hear about it.

Categories: literature, Reflections, Uncategorized | Tags: , | 6 Comments

As Time Goes By

Posted on October 17, 2016 by Pieter Stok

A few weeks ago while teaching a year 10 class it suddenly hit me that it was exactly 50 years earlier that I had been in Year 10. I expressed this to the students and they responded by saying that it was amazing that someone could be so old and still talk and stand at the same time.

We discussed the changes that occurred over this period. Then the unemployment rate was well under 2%. A student could leave in year 11 and do a two year primary teaching certificate and be back in the classroom before turning 20. Lots of students left by year 9 and 10 and went straight into jobs and apprenticeships. At Queenscliff High all my fellow students would remember Robbo who was the first to escape and became a postman. Even in the early 1970s I could still walk into the Ford factory and find myself on the afternoon shift the next day earning some money so I could afford to get married the following year.

At my school girls still did the “girls’ subjects (Home Economics, Commerce and Shorthand and Typing) and boys did the “boys’” subjects (Mechanical Drawing, Woodwork and the sciences).  Some schools were beginning to experiment by allowing a more democratic choice of subjects.

There was the cold war, nuclear fears and the growing rumbles of the Vietnam war. Colonialism was coming to an end and we had just introduced decimal currency.

The divorce rate was still low and de facto relationships hardly heard of.  Although later I found out that many of these families suffered at the hands abusive husbands and fathers.

Technology has of course been the one of the most massive changes. In 1966 the teacher would hand out sheets which had been duplicated on a spirit duplicator. Every student would sniff their sheet of paper for its faint smell of the spirit/alcohol.

For those of you who are a certain age, what changes have you noticed?

Categories: Education, History, Uncategorized | Tags: , | 4 Comments

The Practice Exam

Posted on October 11, 2016 by Pieter Stok

 

The room is nervously quiet.

A heater gently hums.img_1053

There is the rustling of twitching pages.

Then the reading time finishes

and the starting gun booms  in explosive silence.

The click and scratch of pens flinch in earnest.

Unseen but real

nervous energy tensions the air.

Minds ponder,

details are rummaged for in far recesses

while palms sweat.

 

Only to know that this is “practice”

and it needs to be done all over again.

Categories: Education, Poem, poetry, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

My Turn

Posted on October 11, 2016 by Pieter Stok

I have been watching the American election process with a fascinated horror. It is like observing a slow motion train wreck and being helpless to do anything about it. For me, it is scary to think that the “winner” will wield amazing power within and outside the US.

Yet the most appalling part of this debacle is watching the behaviour of many of my brothers and sisters in Christ. Their writhing and slithering around the candidates with obfuscation and weasel words is sickening to witness.

Let’s get a  few things straight. Every political candidate is going to be flawed. We won’t get the perfect candidate until we are in heaven – and then we won’t need them anyway. Less flippantly however, it is the hope that fellow Christians put into the political process, as though this process is going to be a means of “salvation”, which is alarming.

Christ was neither for the Jewish leaders nor the Romans. His allegiance was to the Father. I think we can learn a lot from that. Our allegiance should not be primarily for one party or the other but to the Father and His purposes. Our task is to put forward an image of an entirely different Kingdom – not a kingdom where we need to create a hierarchy of crucial issues and  choose abortion over gun control, or tax over social justice as issues, but rather where we give the world in which we live a picture of what life can be like under King Jesus. We can begin by showing that in our families, in the way we treat the weak and the vulnerable … and the list is endless. The problem has been that we have seduced by our culture. That seduction is in large part the the reason why there is teeth gnashing amongst many Christians today.  We have come to realise, rather late, how far the temptation has led us astray

For too long we have made the mistake of  assuming that democracy is somehow “Christian”. Like Churchill I believe it is the worst of all forms of government  except for all the rest. Now that Western societies have largely foregone their Christian values of the past (which, by the way, enabled democracy to work) we can no longer assume that the majority will get things right. For Christians there is a growing clash of values. We need to rethink our place and purpose in modern post-Christian democracies. I am not saying, don’t be involved – we need to be. But it isn’t the source of our hope.

I believe we are seeing the discomfort and angst of that transition in the current US election. But that uncomfortableness is true for any political arena in Western democracies today. In the US today that change is so glaringly in the spotlight.

Our task is to think about what allegiance to the Father means and how we can be counter cultural in a genuine way in this changing world.

Categories: Christianity, Church, Politics, Uncategorized | Tags: , , | 7 Comments

The Footprints We Leave

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Pieter Stok

We left footprints in the sand.

Mine large,

His small.

His dancing with excitement

In circles and jumps.

Mine in a straight line, alert

cautious.

 

A sand castle here,

A shell there.

Seaweed, seagullsimg_1046 and sticks.

Exciting materials,

to explore and investigate.

 

His steps will become larger.

Mine will fade.

But there was a time

when we walked on the beach

together.

Categories: Family, Poem, poetry, Uncategorized | Tags: , | 2 Comments

The Paperboy

Posted on October 2, 2016 by Pieter Stok
Writing about my beach cleaning days encouraged me to cast my mind back even further to my first paid job. When I was in Grade 5 a notice appeared in the window of “Skinners” the corner store in our town asking for a “paperboy”. The weekly wage was 15 shillings – $1.50 in decimal currency. 
At the time this seemed like a huge amount of money for a 10 year old but looking back it hardly kept my bike going. Yet every morning I got up at 5.45 am went to the store to sort out the papers for the different clients and then cycled (and pushed my bike) around the hilly part of town, which was my allocated patch, delivering newspapers – The Sun, The Geelong Advertiser, The Age (which was an horrendous monster on Wednesdays and Saturdays), The Sporting Globe and for the racier clients, The Truth (a misnomer), which was an education in itself for a young paperboy!
I wasn’t given a list but had to remember all the addresses and which paper was wanted when and where. I made a few mistakes in the first week or so which irritated both shop keeper and reader. In the end I got the hang of it.
Then I encountered the seasons! Most of the year was OK but winter was dark and cold. Fingers froze on the frosty mornings but gloves made it difficult to handle the newspapers. So my dad taught me a trick he had used in Holland. He showed me how to make cones made out of newspaper and place them over the handles on the handlebar so I could slide my hands in while cycling.  Even my dad, who wasn’t tolerant of “softies”, made an exception on a few really bad cold wet mornings and actually drove me around to deliver the papers.
This time was also an education in names and how to pronounce them. When “Marny” wanted an extra paper how was I to know it was written “Mahoney”. And then there were the migrants from all over Europe whose names were not just unpronounceable but also unspellable. How do the Poles get away with putting so many consonants in a row without losing their false teeth?
The worst thing about being a paperboy was that I wanted to read everything. The papers

marilyn

Not The Sun, but a headline I remember.

were a constant temptation to stop and read. However the ire of the customers and consequent lateness at school cured me any dalliance. However I clearly remember some of the headlines that occurred on my beat as a paperboy: the Berlin Wall, Cuba, space flights, civil wars in Africa and Marilyn Monroe’s death are still etched in my memory.

I delivered papers for a few years but then two other jobs came up: working on a farm and in a bakery. But they are tales for another day.
Categories: Family, Uncategorized | Tags: , | 3 Comments

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