bearing blog

I've been writing about mercy recently, spurred on by the quote-meme my friend posted on FB a couple of weeks ago.  I'm at the point where I think I need a hypothetical situation to analyze, a situation where one party stresses the importance of the message "this person is very wrong and we are right," and in the process utterly–and needlessly–fails to display a loveliness that might draw anyone in.

Let's call this situation "the pregnant student at the Christian school," a situation that must happen far more often than it makes the news.  Here are the features of this hypothetical:

• A girl attending a private religious school, which may or may not have a written moral code forbidding nonmarital sex, becomes pregnant.
• When school officials learn of the young woman's pregnancy, they either expel her or punish her by removing her access to certain school functions.

Here are typical arguments put forward by defenders of such a punishment policy:

• The school has a moral code, written or unwritten, to which the family agreed explicitly or implicitly upon enrollment; the pregnant girl has clearly violated said code; the punishment is justified.
• The policy is not sex-discriminatory because the school would of course punish in the exact same way a boy who fathered a child, if the mother decided to carry to term.*
• The girl's education is not being restricted by anyone; she has lost nothing to which she has a right, only privileges.
• The school's intent is not to punish, only to prevent her from being a scandal to other students.
• The school's intent is not to punish, only to prevent her from representing the school to the community.
• The school claims to be acting in the pregnant girl's best interest.
• The school claims that they must punish her because otherwise the school would be teaching the falsehood that nonmarital sex is permissible, something they may not do even for good reasons.

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I oppose the punishing of students for pregnancy at Christian schools.

 This won't surprise you, I think, but I would like to offer some analysis that goes beyond the two obvious reasons (namely, "punishing students for being visibly pregnant encourages abortion" and "punishing students for conceiving children is de facto unfair to female students.")  These two concern justice alone, and I'd like to move beyond justice to mercy.  

But again:  don't get hung up on the specifics.  The whole reason I bring this situation up is to move back out to general principles that can guide us in other situations of messaging vs. mercy.  So let's begin.  I can think of several principles at work here, moving from the specific to the general.   All of them at least permit the school to decline to punish the pregnant student; I think they all argue against punishment, too.  See what you think.

In the following I draw on Catholic sources to back up my doctrinal arguments, but I believe them to apply broadly.

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(1) No pregnancy is a scandal.

Scandal is a technical term; it is defined (CCC 2284) as "an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil."  

There's a bit more to that:  people are guilty of scandal if they "establish laws or social structures" which degrade morals or religious practice or which make it "difficult and practically impossible" to obey the Commandments and conduct a Christian life (CCC 2286).

Pregnancy cannot in and of itself constitute a scandal for a very basic reason:   it is neither an attitude nor a behavior; it establishes nothing.  Rather, it is a biological state which naturally progresses to its end.  

Furthermore,

(2) An unmarried woman's pregnancy is not evidence that she is in violation of any life-affirming moral code.

Simply put, the pregnancy is not sufficient to "convict."  You can hem and haw all you want about likelihood and about gullibility and about these kids today, but it is true: a girl's pregnancy is not evidence that she is in violation of any life-affirming moral code.

• Sexual activity is not always freely chosen.  The fact that a pregnancy is in progress says nothing about whether the pregnant young woman exercised full freedom in the sexual act that resulted in the pregnancy.  And there are degrees of freedom, coercion, and competence
• Even if freely chosen, sexual activity that is (by Christian standards) illicit has the same character as any other sin:  its guilt can be absolved via repentance and (for a Catholic) the sacraments.  Pregnancy says nothing about whether the pregnant young woman is in a state of grace.
• It would  be a grave violation of the  student's dignity for a school official — in fact for anyone who is not her parent — to attempt to coercively extract from her a confession about the freeness of her choice, the degree to which she regrets or repents her choices, or the identity of any persons who have had sexual contact with her**.  If she freely seeks the sacrament of confession–which she cannot be made to seek — then she is protected by the seal of the confessional.

Objection:  "But the pregnancy is only part of the picture — can't there be additional evidence that proves the student is in violation of the moral code?" 

Reply:  Sure, this is a hypothetical, so we can imagine more information.   A student might brag about bad behavior (not just sex; could be drug use, shoplifting, bullying), or get caught in a banned activity, or be overheard pressuring other students to misbehave, or parents could choose to bring problems to the school's attention in an attempt to get help.   But if you've got any of that, a pregnancy doesn't add any information relevant to "Should we punish this girl?"

(3)  All Christian ministries, including schools, can distinguish between the people they serve and the people WHO serve.

What I'm getting at here is the notion that a pregnant or parenting student is disqualified from school activities because she cannot represent the school the way that the school wants to be represented.   The ministry of a Christian school is to provide a Christian education to the young people who are enrolled in the school.  The students do not bear the burden of "representing" the school.  The school is represented by its board, its officials, its employees, and its volunteers:  grownups.    

Schools sometimes tell young people that they are "representing" the school when they travel outside of it for extracurricular activities, and so they should be on good behavior.  This is faulty reasoning.  They should be on good behavior because good behavior is good.  They should practice good behavior as a student because that is how one learns to behave.  It's not for the institution's benefit that the institution teaches good behavior, but for the clients of the institution:  the people served by its mission.

The real representatives of the school are the adults who serve students through the school.  The school protects its identity in part by vetting its employees and volunteers for their commitment to the institution's mission.  

Even extracurricular activities are means by which a school serves the children it is teaching, not means by which the children are meant to serve the school.  An institution does not need to require correct moral character of the people it exists to serve; it does need to require good moral character of the people doing the serving, because that is how it ensures good service that is aligned with the mission.  Unless you want to come right out and say that your mission is only to serve people who are of good moral character; in which case, I commend you for your honesty, but not particularly for your charity.

 (An institution does, however, need to require clients to refrain from obstructing other clients' receiving service safely.  More on this below, so as not to leave a loophole.)

All this is to say:  Yes, you can expel or punish students for violating the moral code; reasons may exist why this makes sense.  However:   "because they make our school look bad" is not a Christian reason.  

If you persist in thinking that this is a reason, you might rather unjustly think that visibly pregnant students, because they make your school look bad (to people who haven't thought it through), must be expelled or punished too — even if you somehow knew the student to be repentant or not at fault!  

Now I want to address the notion that a school must punish a pregnant student in order to avoid inadvertently teaching that freely engaging in nonmarital sex is okay.  "We could give scandal if we don't respond punitively," the school might argue, and since a school (unlike one pregnant girl) is an institution that is capable of establishing social structures within itself (cf. CCC 2286 again), it's true:  a school can give scandal.  And they are supposed to try to avoid it.

This is the most difficult to answer, because it is undoubtedly within the school's mission to convey Christian doctrine regarding sexual conduct, and they are right to want to avoid scandal.  However, we can be guided here by a sound principle of moral reasoning:  the principle of double effect.  

(4)  The principle of double effect permits a Christian institution to decline to punish a student for reasons aligned with their mission, even if giving scandal and leading others into error is a foreseeable outcome.

There are many good reasons for a Christian school to accommodate a pregnant student without reservation.  It provides the girl — like any other student at the school — the education that she and her parents have chosen and that the school thinks best.   It welcomes her child into the world.  It teaches by example that unborn children are a gift and not a burden, and that supporting women in difficult pregnancies is a work of mercy.  It lets other students know that, should they become pregnant, they need not have an abortion to finish their education at the school.

Although it's obvious, it's necessary for completeness to note another condition upon the principle of double effect:   accommodation of the girl is not itself illicit:  there is nothing inherently wrong about educating pregnant girls.  The school needs to do nothing whatsoever that is inherently contrary to its mission.

It is foreseeable that some people — perhaps students, perhaps parents, perhaps members of the community — may interpret the school's declining to punish the girl as teaching that Christianity passes no judgment on nonmarital sexual activity.  But because this outcome — which would indeed be, technically, the school's giving scandal — is a foreseeable side effect of the charitable and merciful act of accommodating the pregnant student, and not an intended outcome, the accommodation is permitted under the principle of double effect.  

Not only that, but the school is in an excellent position to use its foreknowledge to mitigate the outcome of possible scandal.   It is a teaching institution, after all; it can, you know, use its words to teach Christian doctrine about both sexuality and mercy to the rest of the school and to the community even as it is using its powers of administration to try to enact Christian teaching in the lives of one of its students and her child.

If the school actually intends  to teach that nonmarital sex is not grave matter, or if they try to accommodate the student by the inherently illicit means of teaching "Nonmarital sex is not a big deal, there is no shame or guilt in it" — well, then, they would be guilty of scandal.  But concern that people might get that unintended impression is not, actually, a reason that requires school officials to punish the student.

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A possible objection:  "Technically, the principle of double effect could also work in the opposite direction.  The school intends to firmly teach a Christian moral code.  The school does not intend to encourage students who become pregnant to try to hide their pregnancies or to seek abortions, either.  Nor does the school intend to block a student from receiving an adequate education.  Nor does the school intend to teach the error that carrying a pregnancy to term is the real sin.    Therefore, the school officials, who intend to promote morality and discourage nonmarital sex, are permitted to punish students whose sexual contact is discovered because of carrying their babies to term.  That other students may, for example, conclude that abortion is the better option, or that babies are unwelcome, is a foreseeable but unintended effect of the school's visibly consistent enforcement of its moral code."

This reasoning is, as far as I can tell, correct; so it becomes a matter of deciding which of two paths are better.  

• Let us stipulate that to punish a pregnant student directly teaches that chastity is important while at the same time it risks indirectly encouraging other students to destroy the living human evidence of their sexual activity.
• Let us also stipulate that to accommodate such a student directly teaches that unborn children are welcome gifts while at the same time it risks indirectly encouraging other students to view nonmarital sexual activity as permissible in the eyes of Christian authorities.  

If we accept both stipulations, then it is impossible for the school officials to choose a path that certainly avoids all scandal, since how others receive their messages is ultimately out of their control.   

We must turn then to CCC 2287:  "Anyone who uses the power at his disposal in such a way that it leads others to do wrong becomes guilty of scandal and responsible for the evil that he has directly or indirectly encouraged."

The school must choose which evil it would rather risk being held responsible for.

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I'm going to write more about double effect and double messaging, I think.  I suspect there are more applications, anytime we feel that we are caught between showing truth and showing love.

 ADDED:  Here I write about, and link to, one Catholic diocese's life-affirming policy on student pregnancy in its high schools.

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*N. B.  Try googling to find examples in the US of such a policy being enforced against a boy.

** (If a crime is suspected, law enforcement and child protection should be involved and the student should have legal counsel; it's not a job for school officials).

Last week I tried to start writing about why it seems so hard, for so many Catholics trying to live faithfully, to “meet people where they are,” to really welcome people in. I wound up veering off course (seemingly) into a monograph about pronoun usage in the Divine Mercy Chaplet.

I mean, it is relevant, but it wasn’t quite where I intended to go, as I tackled this mass of unformed thoughts I have been having.

This is me coming back around from another direction and trying another stab at the beast.

And as you’ll see, I wind up being deflected again into a place I didn’t mean to go when I started the post.

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A friend of mine posted this quote-meme on Facebook:

My friend added,

Everything starts with actually loving people. If you don’t love the person first, for who they are right now, why the heck would they want to converse with you about deeply personal topics? I sure wouldn’t.

Love before all else. Love underlying everything. Love informing every action.

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I agree with her, and I agree with the meme, except I would tweak it in one way. I would prefer a different adverb, or no adverb at all, where the meme says “loudly.” No qualification there is needed.

Discrediting what others believe does not do any of the work in drawing people to Christ; or at least, it pulls very little of the weight, and then only if it’s done by an unusually well-spoken and sensitive person.

Now: Lots of us believe that people are intellectually convinced by good arguments. Especially, those of us who value logic and therefore believe that we ourselves were convinced mainly by good arguments, like to believe this. I believed it for a long time. Let me tell you a story:

Once when I was a teenager, mostly still being shuffled back and forth between weekends at one parent’s house and school days at the other parent’s house, I found myself away and alone and with an opportunity to go to Mass. I stayed after everyone else had finished shaking hands, had left; and approached the priest (very, very nervously) and asked if I could talk to him.

When I got him alone I spilled out my story, living at home, no car, longing for what the Church offered, having many months before I would go away to college, wondering what to do in the meantime.

He listened to me and he gave me a copy of a book that he had handy — it was a catechism for adults — it’s not important which one — but not “the Catechism,” which wouldn’t be released yet for another year or so. A thick paperback, about the size of the Catechism that would come out later, but written by some American priest. It had an IChThYS on the cover. I took it home and hid it and read the whole thing. It explained so much that I had been wondering about.

And you know, for years and years I told myself that the important thing, what pushed me to go through RCIA when I finally found myself living in a college dorm across the street from a Newman Center, was content of the book. That its clear and logical explanations, along with other ones I encountered later when I sought out more books like it, had spoken to my mind and my intellect, had convinced me.

The book was important, yes. But:

It wasn’t until relatively recently that I realized that the thing that started everything moving forward was not the book, but that the priest listened to me, and that he responded. The first thing that this first representative of the Church offered me was not, actually, the book that explained Catholic doctrine. The first thing he offered me was a chair and a box of tissues.

The thing is, even I do not know how significant the chair and tissues were, relative to the book. I am a fairly cerebral person, and a private one; it was easier for me to accept the book (free book!!) than to accept the tissues. Perhaps the main thing that drew me in for good really was the catechism, and the tissues — the “You are welcome” message of the tissues — only mattered insofar as they got the book into my hands.

Then again, maybe they were everything.

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So, that is the story that I did not plan on telling today when I started writing this post. But now that I have, I want to get back on message. Let me just throw something out there:

We, human beings, are evidently readier to listen to and understand new and different ideas when they come to us from a person with which we have a relationship based on trust.

This is inconvenient to people who like to believe that the only thing that matters, or should matter, is objective evaluation of the facts. But apparently many apparently rational decisions are really made in intuitive reaction to rapid emotional response. One of the ways we fool ourselves, apparently, is by letting our reasoning powers (Jonathan Haidt called human reason the “press secretary of the emotions” in his fantastic book The Righteous Mind) convince ourselves retroactively of the satisfying logic that supposedly led to our judgments — judgments that our emotions made in a flash, leaving our reason to catch up.

(Besides Haidt’s book, I strongly recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman for more on how intuition makes decisions that reason subsequently ratifies.)

None of this, by the way, implies that the steps of reasoning are faulty; it only means that most of the time, unless we are sitting down to do a geometry proof, we don’t begin with an intellectually reasoned step in the most logical direction. The reasoning part, especially if we are careful to remain skeptical of our own biases (as scientists are supposed to be trained to do), can be transformed from a satisfying rubber-stamp of our impulses into a check upon them. I find that writing out those steps of reasoning — or of back-justification, or of rationalization, call it what you will — does at least sometime lay them bare to where I am forced to recant my first conclusion.

Kahneman put it this way: “People can overcome some of the superficial factors that produce illusions of truth when strongly motivated to do so.” (Although they often do not.)

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If you need logical convincing of the practical importance of relationship-building in evangelization, you would do well to read those two books.

Haidt, for example offers data that demonstrates that the only thing that is reliably associated with the moral benefits of religion is how “enmeshed” people are in relationships with their co-religionists, and that our minds are designed for a sort of groupthink, based on feeling a sense of belonging with the group. This can be a feature, not a bug, if we accept that it isn’t going away, if we reach out to people with commonalities instead of right away underscoring the things that set them apart from us, send the message “You could belong — if you change — which means that you don’t belong at this time.”

Each human being is, evidently, adapted to regard with suspicion and skepticism all groups to which s/he appears not to meet the criteria of belonging.

Furthermore, information (this is Kahneman again) that comes from “a source you trust and like” carries
with it the “sense of cognitive ease” that reinforces an impression of truth; this implies the converse, that information that comes from a source you dislike or distrust carries with it a sense of cognitive stress that doesn’t dispose you to accept it.

I don’t write this in order to advise you to pretend that you are trustworthy and likable in order to get people to swallow your difficult message.

I write this in order to make plain that few interlocutors will consider your pleasant-sounding but difficult-to-believe messages, let alone your unpleasant-sounding ones, if you are not demonstrably worthy of their trust.

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Like, not putting on a trustworthy face, but actually really you are really trustworthy, and they can sense that reality.

If you can’t do that, it is not their fault if they do not listen to your truth.

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At the start of this week I drove my two eldest sons to a large public university in a neighboring state. The younger one came so that I could drop him off at a weeklong residential STEM camp the college of engineering was hosting for soon-to-be-eighth-graders. The eldest, who will be a (homeschooled) high school senior this year, came to make a college visit.

This is the second university that he and I have visited; the first was the large public university in our home city. We live in that city today because that is where I went for graduate school. Our son is price-conscious, and likes a big place and city life, so these two universities are his two likely choices. They cost about the same (thanks to tuition reciprocity), and both have about equally rated engineering colleges and business colleges. These are his two interests. When I asked him if he didn’t want to apply to a third school as a “backup,” he explained that majoring in business instead of engineering was his backup plan, because this essentially means he is applying to four colleges. This makes a great deal of sense to me.

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I have worked very hard to anticipate problems that we might run into along the way, and because I am a stickler for filling out forms correctly and fitting into the right boxes, I have documented things with near obsession. I have been thinking about applications since my first was in kindergarten, at first idly and then with more and more interest.

Still, one of the consequences of charting your own path is that unexpected bumps are to be expected. And this year I have run into the problem of official letters of recommendation. Which is something I failed to anticipate. I wound up talking to the admissions counselors, by the way, and my son and I have a plan for how to deal with it, so there is a happy ending; but let me save you some trouble if your kids aren’t in high school yet, by helping you foresee what I didn’t.

So the deal with us is this: Engineering colleges, it turns out, want academic (official) letters of recommendation from math and science teachers specifically. But in our family, Mark and I are my own children’s only math and science teachers (so far). Why would we have outsourced this? I outsourced English, physical education, and music because there are other people who can teach this far better than I. If any of my children had shown more-than-passing interest in studio art or performance art, or in a modern language, or maybe in up-to-date computer programming (I coded in Fortran 77, and Mark only writes Visual Basic), I would have sent them for outside lessons in those as well.

If there is anything that the outside observer, mildly biased against non-institutional schools, would think that I am officially qualified to teach, it is math, physics, and chemistry. I enjoy teaching those subjects, and I am confident teaching them, and therefore I do not outsource them. And if I may say so myself, I teach them well. At least, I am having fun, and the kids I have taught (mine and H’s) seem to enjoy the courses and also appear to learn the material. I make my own syllabi that are closely aligned to the AP syllabi, and I use college textbooks (which are very affordable if you go just a couple of editions out of date), and I have even found an adequate home laboratory kit for general physics and chemistry, and I insist on excellent lab notebook maintenance.

The consequence, which I failed to foresee, is that there is no math or science teacher from which I can request a letter of recommendation. H’s kids can get a letter from me, with the full alphabet soup after my name. My kids can get a letter from H, of course; she is their their English-degreed literature and composition tutor who’s worked with them since they were learning to read. But no parent can write a credible letter of recommendation for their own offspring. And I failed to foresee that a STEM college would want an institutional STEM letter.

(Cue sound of me smacking myself in the forehead.)

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Are you thinking, “But that’s crazy! Surely they have enough homeschooled students applying by now, most of whom do pretty well in college from what we hear, that they have alternate instructions on their website for applications.”

They do have some general instructions, indeed. But I think the numbers show that really, only a tiny number of their applicants find themselves in the position we are in re: STEM grades. Let’s do an engineering estimate:

• About three percent of K-12 students are being homeschooled in my state this year.
• That figure is the number over all the grades from K-12. Lots of homeschooling families only homeschool through sixth or eighth grade — more, I would wager, than the number who switch from institutional school to home school in the high school years. So I am thinking that fewer than three percent of high school students are likely to be homeschooled.
• You do have to correct for the fact that homeschooled students — likely because of the correlation with the education level of the parents — appear to be slightly more likely to attend college than the general population of students. The data on this is variable and not great, but could be as high as a doubling of the percentage who attend college. My argument is weaker the larger this number is, so I will concede it. Let’s say that maybe five to six percent of college applicants might be homeschooled. Now we have a potentially significant number, yes. (Although the few colleges I could find online that made a reference to it — mostly elite private colleges — stated that a only tiny number of their applicants were homeschooled.)
• But! Lots of homeschooling families use an umbrella school, “school-in-a-box,” or distance learning program which generates official grades and an official transcript and which may have nonparent instructors, tutors, or graders. (Certain states, though not mine, require homeschoolers to use such a service.) Even if the school or program is not accredited, universities will probably take their grades and transcripts as evidence of the student’s performance. So now we have narrowed that small percentage to even fewer students who, like mine, lack a complete institutional high school transcript.
• Finally, even those high school homeschoolers who chart their own course often use tutors, co-op classes, community colleges, and the like to teach subjects that they aren’t comfortable teaching themselves. And the STEM classes are often the ones that get outsourced. So you just don’t get many kids who have *no* institutional or nonparent STEM teachers who are nevertheless attempting to enter colleges of engineering.
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Anyway, this is just to say that if you want to reduce your bureaucracy later on, it’s probably a good idea to help your teens rack up the sorts of experiences that naturally lead to letters of recommendation.

It isn’t so much that they won’t be able to put together a good application without checking all the boxes — we really did get the impression, at least at the colleges that we visited, that they just want to be able to get a comprehensive picture of the student. It’s more that it feels better to be confident that you’re sending them something their system can deal with.

And so, I reached out to the admissions counselor, and she helped me come up with a plan that I can work with that will give them the information they need. I now feel not that there are no boxes to check, but that we have been issued an alternate set of check boxes.

I was telling Mark last night, the main benefit I got from talking to the admissions counselor and getting advice, tailored to our family’s approach, about how to set up transcripts, grades, and recommendations, was that I will spend less time wondering “We can’t just follow the directions, so…. Should we do this or should we do that?” With that advice in my pocket, my guidance counselor hat will fit a
little bit more comfortably and I will waste less time trying out different approaches.

I get the impression that even though there are plenty of experienced homeschoolers around who can tell us how they navigated this final step, it’s normal and expected to feel somewhat at sea. We provide an individualized education — that is, after all, the point. And because it is so individualized, there is a limit to how much we can follow each others’ examples. Sooner or later you just have to figure out how to fit into systems in a way that is tailored to your own family’s unique approach. Which is true for everyone, really; it’s just that for some folks the systems make that uniqueness more obvious than for others.

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Last year I wrote several posts about the fatal shooting of St. Paul Schools employee Philando Castile a few miles from my home. Castile was a concealed carry permit holder who was shot in the car, next to his girlfriend and with a four-year-old girl in the back seat, by a panicked police officer during a traffic stop.

(First post: Not so much about Mr. Castile as about bumper stickers and jumping to conclusions.)

(Second post: About Mr. Castile — appropriately — being laid to rest from the Catholic Cathedral of St. Paul at the request of his mother.)

(Third post: On the charges that were brought, in particular on the legal distinctions between manslaughter and murder.)

By now you all know — it made the national and international news, I saw it in a French news site yesterday — that the police officer who shot and killed Castile and endangered the woman and child in the car was acquitted by a jury of all charges.

The prosecutor’s burden in the manslaughter charge was to demonstrate to the jury that the police officer caused Mr. Castile’s death by “culpable negligence” whereby he created an “unreasonable risk” and “consciously” took “chances of causing great bodily harm or death”. And, since the defense claimed that the officer acted in self-defense, to overcome the finding that the shooter “reasonably believed deadly force was necessary” to prevent loss of life.

I don’t think very many people dispute that the police officer — at least momentarily — believed that he needed to defend himself. I suppose it all turns on whether the police officer’s belief was “reasonable.”

It is true that white concealed-carry permit holders have on occasion been unreasonably shot by alarmed police, but it isn’t a common occurance. Nevertheless, I believe it’s very likely that if Philando Castile had done everything the same, but had not been a black man, he’d be alive today.

I also believe it’s not reasonable for that to be the fact that made the difference.

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Civil liberties cut both ways. Mr. Castile had a legal right to be armed, and while people are disputing whether he did all the things exactly right during the traffic stop — mentioning the gun and his permit to the officer (neither were legally required of him), moving his hands after the officer requested his license — nothing he did was unusual behavior for a permit holder in Minnesota, except for being black.

It is questionable whether our Second Amendment rights are meaningful if their lawful exercise can “reasonably” frighten a police officer enough to kill someone.

And that is before you get to the Equal Protection clause and use it to test the notion that a police officer can legally be more easily frightened by people of one color than by people of another color, and that distinction called “reasonable.”

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Nevertheless, thanks to other civil liberties which are perhaps even more important, we have theoretically got “innocent until proven guilty” in this country, and the state law is written with certain words and not with others, and there is no special part of the law about manslaughter and murder and self-defense that lays out clearly what “reasonably believed deadly force was necessary” means in the context of a police officer making a traffic stop or any other circumstance where the officer has seen fit to interact with a person who has not committed any crime.

Whether Mr. Castile’s killer’s belief was “reasonable” is apparently something that is not so obvious that it was proved to those twelve jurors beyond a “reasonable” doubt. Some doubt remained. And if doubt remained, then their duty was to acquit.

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It still stinks to high heaven for Mr. Castile’s family and friends, and it stinks for all of us too — maybe not so much because a jury found room for doubt in the police officer’s reasonableness, but more because we know that juries often do not seem to find room for doubt in other people’s reasonableness, people who do not enjoy the great deference that a police uniform affords. And we know that many people in our justice system never see a jury, because of the high proportion of people who are frightened into pleading guilty to one charge in exchange for dropping a more serious charge, and whose experience has been of not getting the benefit of the doubt. And we know that Mr. Castile did not get the benefit of the doubt, and he is dead.

It is not wrong that an unsure jury acquitted. That is what unsure juries are supposed to do. They owe every defendant the benefit of the doubt.

The wrong is that Mr. Castile’s killer was allowed, by the law which does not define “reasonable,” to be very unsure himself — so very far, far from being sure — and that another human being who had not hurt anyone paid with his own life. That Mr. Castile could not have the benefit of the doubt.

And years and years and years of other people, especially but not exclusively black men, who had the same right to the benefit of the doubt, and yet could not have it. Exhaustion, dismay, and fury is justified.

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I don’t know what the answer is. I think re-examining the wording of our state law about self-defense and homicide might be a start.

Perhaps we should consider laying out more clearly what “reasonably believed” means; perhaps we should enshrine it in the law that fear of blackness itself is not reasonable (because people are definitely arguing around here that it is totally reasonable for a police officer to be more frightened of One of Those People than of your average white CCW permit holder).

Perhaps the legal definitions of manslaughter, murder, and self-defense need to be examined in the specific circumstance of police interactions with non-police citizens. Maybe we should be honest and lay out what we can agree on regarding the responsibility of police officers to make rapid judgments in quickly changing situations while protecting life and safeguarding civil liberties. It is clear that juries are willing to defer greatly to police officers’ narratives of their own judgment process. Perhaps this is what we want; perhaps not; perhaps we want it up to a point. Maybe we should write down where that point is. Maybe we should lay out clearly and specifically what it means for a police officer to be reasonable and unreasonable in the exercise of deadly force. Then we, and they, would know better what to expect from a jury. Maybe training would change to reflect the clearer rules, and maybe snap judgments would be better judgments.

This is what the rule of law means.

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I have nothing more to say. Look around and listen to what other citizens have to say who are closer to the pain and struggle and fear than I am, even in the middle of it. I’m not likely to be shot during a traffic stop, nor to have to decide whether to use deadly force on someone. I am a citizen, and that’s as far or as important as my say goes; so for now I’ll write my state legislators, and … and something, I don’t know.

I am sorry for your loss.

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My high school Latin III students have come to the end of their extremely beat-up Henle Latin grammar books, the green ones, and we aren’t sorry to see them go. There remain a few weeks in the year; and though I have focused the course on Latin-to-English translation, I wanted to spend a little bit of time doing English-to-Latin translation. I am not very practiced at this, but I thought it would be fun, and anyway, the teenaged boys I work with know very well that I am an amateur, so why not jump in together?

There are a few “continuous passages for translation” in the books as English-to-Latin exercises, accompanied by an answer key. They are certainly written at the correct level for the Latin III students to parse, steeped as theyare in an adaptation of De bello gallico, but they are not very much fun to work with. First of all, they’re about nothing but English colonialism: the Boer War and Cecil Rhodes; and the vocabulary (and the age of the book) doesn’t admit a, shall we say, nuanced treatment of this subject. Second of all, the English they’re written is ghastly boring.

So I used a couple of those passages in class only, as a teaching tool for a process of going about rendering the English into Latin. I put them up on the board and talked to them a little about the kinds of things to keep in mind and the way to go about translating, one clause at a time.

Much of this lesson I drew from my experience — I do have a little — putting English into practical, nonacademic French and Spanish, i.e., a target language of which I’m a non-native and halting speaker. I am no expert in the theory of translation, only an amateur, but I believe a lot of those skills transfer, and of those many would transfer even for non-Romance, maybe even non-Indo-European languages. I know enough to know, for example, that you don’t just get your dictionary and plod from left to right translating one word after another (a habit I had to break them of in Latin-to-English translation). You can start off that way if you want, but it isn’t always the most efficient approach.

For example, first you have to read and understand the text itself: make sure that you know the definition of every word and idiom, that you’ve identified ambiguities of meaning, that you know each word’s job in its sentence (does that “for” act as a conjunction or a preposition? and if it’s a preposition does it mean “intended to be received by” or does it mean “on behalf of”?), that you know the antecedents of all the pronouns, and so forth.

And then it’s helpful to deconstruct the sentences, to set aside all the modifiers and all the appositives and all the subordinate clauses, and write out simply the subjects-verbs-objects. It isn’t necessary to diagram the sentences, but if you enjoy that sort of thing you can do it.

And another thing you can do, especially if you have a limited vocabulary or a limited sentence structure, is to think how you might rewrite the English text in English: an English that might or might not be simpler, but that in any case is an English that you know how to say in the target language. For example, to go on a search-and-destroy mission for all idioms whose target-language equivalent you don’t possess.

For example: I have read enough French to know that if I translate an English fairy tale into French, I know to render that opening phrase “Once upon a time”, characteristic of the genre, into “Il y avait une fois…” But off the top of my head I do not know whether Italian, Spanish, Latin, Polish, Somali, Mandarin, Tagalog, or any other languages use any such catchphrase to alert the reader that they have commenced to read a fairy tale. (Let’s acknowledge that I could search for examples of fairy tales in these languages and find out how they begin — but for now set aside the wonders of Google.) I recognize “Once upon a time” as idiomatic — do we ever say we are “upon” any measure of duration? — so I know not to trust a word-for-word translation (“a single occurrence — located atop — a point in history”). I begin my translation by rewriting the idiom’s sense — an indefinite place, an indefinite time in the past, a tale which may or may not be historical — in a more straightforward English: “I have heard of a story from long ago, in a distant land….”

And finally you can recast the English into a form that, while remaining English, is more characteristic of the thought-patterns of the target language, at least in the ones you know how to use. One example of this that comes to mind from going into French is to break up all the compound nouns and reverse them: instead of going home, because it’s time for the game, to get my hockey stick and my old woolen hat and my ice skates, I go home, because the game will soon begin, to get my stick of hockey and my old hat in wool and my skates for ice. If I am about to translate into Latin, from what I can tell, this often means making explicit in my preliminary English the meanings that we often gloss over, such as purpose: I won’t go home “to get” my equipment. Instead, the game being about to start, in order that I might get my equipment, I will go home.

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So I walked the boys through a couple of paragraphs, mostly not going into Latin at all, spending most of our time rearranging the English into phrases that they knew how to render in Latin. That was just the practice. What did I give them to translate?

Well, I felt that poetry would just be mean, so it had to be prose, and it was going to be good prose. I also wanted it to have a lot of vocabulary and, shall we say, purpose overlap with the Latin they had been translating all year. This having been Caesar’s Gallic Wars, I searched for a passage that would recount something military in nature. Furthermore, because I know my own limitations, I wanted something for which a Latin version already existed, so that I might check my own efforts against something more masterly.

First I considered something from a literary translation of the Bible, a passage somewhere detailing a battle. After all, I have the Latin Vulgate to compare it to I thought perhaps to draw from 1 Maccabees, which starts out rather auspiciously for the Latin teacher used to dealing with battles and slaying and strongholds and kings:

Now it came to pass, after that Alexander the son of Philip the Macedonian, who first reigned in Greece, coming out of the land of Cethim, had overthrown Darius, king of the Persians and Medes: he fought many battles, and took the strongholds of all, and slew the kings of the earth; and he went through even to the ends of the earth: and took the spoils of many nations: and the earth was quiet before him.

et factum est postquam percussit Alexander Philippi Macedo qui primus regnavit in Graecia egressus de terra Cetthim Darium regem Persarum et Medorum: constituit proelia multa et omnium obtinuit munitiones et interfecit reges terrae et pertransiit usque ad fines terrae et accepit spolia multitudinis gentium et siluit terra in conspectu eius.

Besides the subject matter, I thought another advantage of 1 Maccabees (compared to other Bible texts I might choose) is that it was only composed (although originally in Hebrew, that version being lost and only a Greek translation surviving) about a hundred years before Caesar was writing. So it would have, I thought. a more modern and historical style to it, closer to the kind of writing Caesar was trying to produce, than a selection from more ancient texts.

The second thing I considered was an English rendering of the Latin news broadcasts Nuntii Latini put out by Finnish state radio. I would use the Latin transcript as my “an
swer key,” and I would give the boys my best English translation of the Latin (rendered in a journalistic style) to use as their source text. I would find a story about some military action somewhere, so that their battle-hardened vocabulary would be put to good use.

But in the end, knowing that a Latin version was available, I settled for this:

The Clouds Burst

So began a battle that none had expected; and it was called the Battle of Five Armies, and it was very terrible. Upon one side were the Goblins and the wild Wolves, and upon the other were Elves and Men and Dwarves. This is how it fell out…. Messengers had passed to and fro between all the Goblins’ cities, colonies, and strongholds… Tidings they had gathered in secret ways; and in all the mountains there was a forging and an arming. Then they marched and gathered by hill and valley… until…. a vast host was assembled… they hastened night after night through the mountains…

How much Gandalf knew cannot be said, but it is plain that he had not expected this sudden assault. This is the plan that he made in council with the Elven-king and with Bard; and with Dain, for the dwarf-lord now joined them: the Goblins were the foes of all, and at their coming all other quarrels were forgotten. Their only hope was to lure the goblins into the valley between the arms of the Mountain; and themselves to man the great spurs that struck south and east. Yet this would be perilous, if the goblins were in sufficient numbers to overrun the mountain itself, and so to attack them also from behind and above; but there was no time to make any other plan, or to summon help.

It’s high-interest (one of my charges let slip a “Cool!” before he recollected himself), military in scope, contains sentences that are complex yet amenable to being rearranged or recast into simpler language, and — best of all — it’s good English writing.

I do have Mark Walker’s Hobbitus Ille to refer to, but I have already tried my hand at recasting the English and setting up the Latin on my own, and I don’t intend to peek until I have made a stab at the Latin.

If you would like to try along with me, let me supply you with some of Walker’s vocabulary and proper nouns, the same that I provided for my high school juniors:

• hobbitus, -i, hobbit
• gobelinus, -i, goblin
• dryas, dryadis, elf
• nanus, -i, dwarf
• Gandalphus, -i, Gandalf
• Vates, -is, Bard
• Dainus, -i, Dain
• jugum, -i, ridge, for “spur”

Have fun! I know I will.

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My Saturday morning project, to be completed (maybe) between dropping my oldest off for the SAT and picking him up again, is to dash out a plan for his fourth year of Latin instruction. And maybe a plan for the half-credit’s worth of my little study group that will span sixth through ninth grades.

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I bring my own particular weirdness to homeschooling; I think too much, I like things to make sense and not be too messy and confusing, and — worst of all — I crave understanding things myself. Which means that before I facilitate my own kids through a subject, I need at least to tell myself a story about it that makes sense. Even if it is something I have never really studied before.

Foreign languages are a good example of that. I have a strong background in French, and used that experience to teach myself enough Latin to pass it on, by the “just stay a few steps ahead of the students” method.

I got out in front and managed to stay ahead all through middle school and until the third year of high school Latin, when my pupils (who put in more time drilling than I did) got better at, for example, rattling off the third person singular ending of perfect subjunctive active verbs in the third conjugation. I am still ahead of them in the ability to turn a translated sentence from Yoda-speak into good, sturdy English, and often in parsing a complicated sentence with many subordinate clauses and parentheticals; but I often have to point at such-and-such a verb on the whiteboard and ask them “uh, is this the subjunctive?” or bluff my way through a parsing by putting up a sentence and telling them, “Okay, kids, pick out all the participles for me.”

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I still have things to teach them about the big picture, so to speak. And as I prepare for the final year of high school language instruction — most likely the final year of instruction at all in this particular language — I’d better start by deciding what my goals are. Because there are a few different directions I can take it.

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What is the point of all this? What do we want our kids to take away from high school language learning? There are lots of potential goals, and you don’t have to shoot for all of them. Hitting a few targets well, while spending much less time aiming for others, might be a better approach.

Potential language learning goals include:

• conversational fluency while immersed in the target culture (say, in travel or business abroad)
• conversational fluency with speakers of the target language who are immersed in your own culture (say, a clinic nurse in our home city having the necessary Spanish or Somali to communicate with patients)
• to communicate more deeply with a particular person in his or her mother tongue (an adopted child, a friend, a partner)
• enough reading and writing to conduct business or friendly correspondence at the slower pace of email
• lifetime appreciation and enjoyment of literature (of any particular genre) in the target language
• lifetime appreciation and enjoyment of audiovisual media in the target language
• enhancement of the study of the sociology, politics, or history of populations who use or are immersed in the target language
• acquiring the tools of metalanguage
• an enhanced vocabulary
• a foundation for learning a different language later (for example, learning Latin now in order to learn French, Spanish, or Italian later on)
• laying a foundation for certain studies in linguistics, child development, neurology, and other fields
• better understanding of one’s own mother tongue, by contrast and comparison
• better understanding of human cognition itself, by broadening one’s sense of how language can work
• analytical skills and other forms of logic
• some or all of the technical skills of the translator, either of texts or of spoken words
• some or all of the creative skills of the translator, finding just the right turn of phrase to express the translated meaning, even doing so with meter, rhyme, alliteration, puns, and other tricks from the literary bag
• exploration of the philosophy of translation, whether “equivalent meaning” is possible, and if it is not possible, what does the translator actually seek to produce; contemplation of the whole notion of equivalence, and whether even speakers of the same language can really achieve understanding; and so forth
• the pure delight of playing with words and phrases and texts and sounds, not restricted to one’s own native tongue

I would be amiss not to mention these box-checking goals as well:

• to obtain the required credits for high school graduation and/or admission into a particular college
• to acquire enough skills in language learning that one will be able to get a decent grade in the minimum number of required college language courses

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The first thing to notice is that when time is limited, you can’t meet all these goals (except in a very broad and shallow sense). Although there is some overlap in the basic skills that are developed during both activities, every hour spent translating written text is an hour not spent developing one’s conversational fluency; every hour spent reading poetry is an hour not spent listening to the language in films or lyrical music. And languages themselves compete for your time: a future linguist might do better to acquire a basic grasp of the syntax several languages from different language families than to spend much time developing fluency in only one.

The second is that some languages are better suited for certain goals than others. Conversational spoken Latin exists these days only in highly contrived circumstances, such as classrooms, or the classical-Latin news reports broadcast by Finnish state radio, or perhaps (I like to imagine) in papal conclaves. Almost any modern language will do instead if conversation is the student’s goal — but which language to concentrate on will be guided by a prediction of the populations they’ll come in contact with. Conversely, if the main goal is enhancement of English vocabulary, Latin will be a workhorse — certainly compared with even widely populated modern languages from which English has acquired little vocabulary, like Mandarin, or with languages that have so many everyday words and word-parts in common with English — say Dutch — that there simply isn’t much bang for the buck in terms of vocabulary building.

So my goals will be guided first by the limitations and strengths of the already-selected language, which is Latin; and second by the best interest of my students; and third by my own limitations, interests, and strengths.

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Let’s start with limitations. As major goals for ordinary people, we can rule out conversation, we can rule out business and personal communication, we can rule out real-time translation into or out of spoken Latin, and we can rule out the enjoyment of films and recordings. Latin also will not help us (much) to prepare for the study of non-Indo-European languages. Since we have already spent years specializing in Latin, one more year will not broaden our understanding of human language very much, at least not as much as starting an entirely new language might, and we have probably hit a point of diminishing returns when it comes to expanding our English vocabulary with new Latin roots. Finally, these students already have the necessary three credits to get into college, possibly enough to test out of college requirements; and if they do choose to study a new modern language in college, they probably have already picked up enough study skills to succeed, especially if they pursue one of Latin’s modern descendants.

The strengths, then, remain. These are the historical culture of the Roman world and of the educated medieval wo
rld that inherited its language; a large body of literature to read and appreciate, encompassing rhetoric, philosophy, science, engineering, poetry, history, narratives, and drama; the logical, analytical, and synthetic skills that are developed more deeply by exploring ever-more-detailed intricacies of grammar and syntax; and the skilled, creative, and pondering mind of the translator of written texts.

There is a lot of overlap here. If you concentrate on translating Latin literature into English, you must read it closely, parse each sentence, and appreciate the texts’ style and content; by doing so (also, in order to do so) you must learn something of the culture that produced it. An advanced study of grammar and syntax necessarily uses authentic texts drawn from literature and history as its raw material. The history and culture are best encountered in the literature itself, the primary sources from which we know almost everything of that foreign country, the past, and here and there we are compelled to make a direct translation if we want to talk about the texts’ meaning in our own language. So by focusing on one of these strengths, we won’t fail to touch on any of the others.

The overlap implies that I could try to balance them all, have some of everything. This has been the mode of the third year, after the syllabus published by Mother of Divine Grace School: translation (mostly Caesar, a little Horace and a little Vulgate) as homework, grammar exercises in class as whiteboard work, occasionally reading passages quickly for their informational content, trying to go straight from the Latin into the brain, so to speak, without the English middleman.

That could be the best for them; certainly it covers all the bases. But what do I want for them two or three or twenty years out? I know what I still enjoy from my years of French: I can and do read it with some regularity, novels and plays and poems, news articles and now tweets and Facebook posts; I can speak it well enough to get by, and from time to time have sought out conversation; I translate for fun and the peculiar joy of geeking out with fellow amateurs; I possess boundless optimism about learning bits and pieces of other languages.

They’re not the same as me, but I can see bits of particular interest. Translating the Gallic Wars, I catch them wisecracking about learning yet another word for “slaughter” or “bloodthirsty;” I recognize it, a teenage expression of a certain pride in their own expertise, that they know enough to get the joke. This or that vocabulary word lights up recognition of even an obscure English cognate. After months of slogging through Caesar’s prose word by word, they notice things like euphemism (“Hey, when Caesar says ‘pacified’ he actually means ‘completely subjugated’!”) and misdirection (“When this battle didn’t go well, Caesar says it’s because he wasn’t particularly lucky that day.”) A brief interlude of translating a poem, and being encouraged to do so with creativity and a free hand of interpretation, was met with declarations that it was fun, challenging, interesting (although weeks later when a second poem-translation was suggested, they denied enjoying it all that much).

I am pretty set on not concentrating purely on more grammar exercises, although we will surely have to do some, if only to parse difficult sentences as we encounter them. We could do more reading and less translating, so that the homework assignments were questions about interpretation and appreciation, and learn about literary devices and such. They could read in the original Latin, or in Latin translations from Greek, texts that they have already studied in English. If we continue doing translation, we could concentrate on rhetoric (Cicero being the next logical step) or poetry (Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Catullus), or evenly divide between them. For more specialization in translation, we could spend all our time working practically on Latin texts, or we could spend some time learning about all the tools in the translator’s kit and about the different approaches one can take when translating a text in any language. No matter which approach I choose, I will have to learn more myself.

My interest right now lies in translating theory, so I often envision a course built not just on translating Latin, but in considering how different translators-into-English have solved problems peculiar to source texts in modern languages as well. I have acquired some books of essays by working translators, with sources drawn from French, German, Japanese, Italian, and Old English, and I think it would be fun to assign readings from that. I also have a textbook from a college translation course written generally so that it could be used for students of many different languages. It walks the student through concepts of equivalence at the word level, the sentence level, the paragraph; how ideas are logically linked, how transitions may be managed, ways to move back and forth in time and tense. It contains exercises at the end of each chapter, and I envision myself using them as models for constructing exercises specific to Latin-to-English translation, or more generally putting a word-for-word literal English rendering (of a text in any source language) into good English style.

Then, too, I sometimes imagine a course built more on literary appreciation. My students won’t become professional translators, and I am not sure they will ever share my passion for amateur translation, no matter how enthusiastically I gush. Perhaps I could get them started with a conviction that the enjoyment of reading Latin literature is worth the extra effort and practice, or set them up with a broad understanding of literary style and devices to support college literature learning. But for that I need to acquire some more-than-basic knowledge of the body of Latin literature, and — let’s face it — my practice of staying one step ahead of my students has not yet prepared me for it. I definitely don’t have time to read widely enough that I could on my own select the right readings. I could perhaps borrow some other teacher’s syllabus, or follow along with a sufficiently detailed literature-course spine. I’m not sure I would be able to do the subject justice. Then again, maybe I could… with a lot of work, work I would enjoy but that would take me away from other things that deserve my time.

Because in the end the teacher has to know her own strengths and limitations too. The best you can get out of me might not be exactly the thing that you want, but perhaps you would rather have my best than something you like better but that I can’t do quite as well.

I think translation of both poetry and prose excerpts, combined with some reading and discussion drawn from introductory coursebooks, and enough grammar to support it, with a little work about translation theory, is the way to go. Yes, the balanced approach: Some of what I like and am confident in, but also the bringing in the work of experts (not me) for learning together with my students something of the breadth of Latin literature. This is my first time through advanced Latin too, and I have to pick it up as I go along. The next younger students might get better content out of me, once I have incorporated it into myself. But for now, let’s not fool myself: I am no further along than my students in much of the field. What I can do well is organize information (even while I am still working to understand it) into pieces that make a coherent whole.

So I’ll do that, keeping bite-sized the chunks I have still to learn, and we will all find out together what sort of picture emerges.

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