Measuring The Unmeasurable

I’m a tidy-minded sort of person. I like to see things sorted. Measured. I don’t like vagueness and loose ends.

So I welcome one of the major changes to affect schools and schoolteachers in recent times: the renewed emphasis on the measuring and tracking of pupils’ progress. Not that this approach ends with the pupils: teachers, too, must be ‘performance managed’. And then, from time to time, the whole school gets assessed and categorised according to its results. The inspectors come in, scrutinise everything and everybody, and give you the equivalent of a mark out of ten.

Having been in contact with schools for most of my life—first as a pupil, then as a teacher and most recently as a school governor—I’m happy to see this insistence on standards. It’s a welcome development from the days when too many teachers breezed through each day with barely a hint of planned lessons, and where the mark they gave a pupil at the end of the year wasn’t far from ‘think of a number’.

But there is a danger in the new passion for standards and record-keeping. It is to do with the fact that some things are more measurable than others. Give little Fiona a reading test on a set text. Count the number of mistakes she makes and deduct that from twenty, or whatever, and you have a meaningful mark. You can say with certainty whether she did better than Richard or Shania. But other areas can’t be so neatly assessed.

Richard, for instance, has a younger brother smitten with leukaemia. The whole family has been disrupted for well over a year by the upset: one parent or the other spending nights at the hospital with the sick child; the worry about whether he will come through and live to see another Christmas; related financial issues; and the focus on the sick child that inevitably sometimes robs Richard of attention.

Everyone agrees that Richard’s progress in school has been adversely affected by all this. But how do you take that into account when it comes to school tests and record-keeping? Yes, Richard would have done better with his maths and reading if he hadn’t had to cope with the trouble at home. So do you add a few percent to his actual score to take account of that? If so, how many percent? Probably you shouldn’t, say the purists; you must record only measurable achievement.

So what about the child whose parents are going through a protracted and acrimonious divorce? Home tensions are high. Nerves are jangling. What allowances, if any, do you make for that child when doing the measuring? And what about the boy whose dad, in his forties, collapsed and died of a stroke at work last month, causing the poor lad’s concentration-levels to plummet? How do you fit him into the measuring system?

Teachers, too, have their ups and downs, and there’s no less of a problem in knowing how to take account of hard-to-measure factors in assessing their progress. This year the Head of Geography is happy because she has seen 78% of pupils manage a Grade A, B or C. But after the summer break the pressure is on for her to raise the percentage next year. Indeed, her incremental pay rise may depend on it.

If the new intake proves to be a ‘good cohort’, that is, one with a high average IQ and mostly from stable homes, she can expect to improve on last year’s figures. But what if it’s a ‘bad cohort’? What if there is a high percentage of not-too-bright pupils, many of whom would never make a Grade A, B or C if they stayed in school till they were twenty? And what if, for some reason, a majority of them happen to come this year from dysfunctional families, with attendant emotional and learning difficulties?

The Head of Geography does her very best. She puts extra hours in. She maybe gives after-school tuition to the most needy students. She motivates her departmental staff as best she can. Everybody works their socks off all year but, in the end, the pass-rate at A, B or C turns out at only 61%.

The members of the Performance Management team frown at the figures before them as the Head of Geography enters the room for her annual assessment. ‘What went wrong?’ they ask. ‘This drop in standards can’t be allowed to pass without censure.’

What is the poor staff member to say? Should she tell it like it is? ‘Well, I’m afraid they were a pretty dim bunch this year—the dimmest for years, in fact. And more than half of them are from seriously screwed-up home situations. All of us in the department have worked our very hardest with them, but you can’t expect us to make a work of art out of duff materials.’

Personally, I like that. It’s honest, and it’s probably a fair assessment. Of course, the teacher would use less bald vocabulary and wrap it all up in bland education-speak. But whether you call a spade a spade or an agricultural implement doesn’t alter the basic situation. And if I were on the committee I’d be voting for the Head of Geography to be granted her incremental rise, even though the measurable results fell short of the goals set for the year. After all, this year she and her staff probably worked harder than ever precisely because of the tough materials they had to work with.

The moral of this tale, I suppose, is that while we do well to measure the measurable, common-sense dictates, at the same time, that some key factors in the educational process cannot be measured with precision. And it’s here that a little human warmth and understanding needs injecting into school stats and performance management meetings to oil the cogs in the school machine.

Without it, the system’s in for a seizure.

Slutwalks

A Toronto policeman started it all. In a health and safety talk to students he touched on the issue of sexual attacks on women and dared to say, ‘Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.’

Now, groups of women are marching across major cities in Canada and the USA to champion their right to dress how they want—provocatively or otherwise. They call the events ‘slutwalks’. The topic has crossed the Pond to British TV. One guest on the news this morning took the marchers’ side: ‘The only issue is that rape is wrong,’ she declared. ‘No-one has the right to tell women how they should dress!’

I nearly choked on my muesli, because in my view the Toronto cop deserves a medal for his insight, his reality and his disdain for political correctness.

Yes, rape is wrong. Always has been; always will be. It can never be justified. But once we move beyond that black-and-white tenet we enter a world of grey. A lot of the grey surrounds how sexual desire is triggered, which is different in men and women. I’m making some generalisations here, but women respond largely to who is making the sexual advances, to the atmospherics, to ‘romance factors’. Men, by contrast, are switched on by visual stimuli—and that’s about it.

It’s no good holding forth about how we think things should be in this respect. We need to come down to earth and face realities: this is the way things are. This is how men and women are wired, and nothing is ever going to change it.

So if a girl dresses provocatively—and I don’t need to spell out what that means—any normal guy who sees her is ‘turned on’. Whether she intends to create that effect or not is neither here nor there. It just happens. As far as the guy is concerned, her sexually provocative appearance yells, ‘Come and get me!’

Many men, of course, take control of their impulses. And so they should. But not all men do. Some will react at the most basic level and yield to them. These are the ones who will jump a girl tottering (due to high heels and too many vodkas) down the street at 3am after a clubbing session, drag her into some bushes and give her what they believe she is asking for.

Then there is an outcry. And rightly so, since rape is wrong; full stop. But some of the outcry is unjustified. It comes from indignant women who rave that they want to be treated with more respect and not just as sex objects. Fair enough. Women are more than sex objects and deserve to be treated with respect. But respect has to be earned. And there’s where our friendly Toronto cop chipped in with his advice. Ninety-nine percent of men would, if they were honest, agree with him.

Provocative dress is fine in the marital bedroom, but it doesn’t belong on the streets, or anywhere in public. To drive through any city centre late at night is to drive through a meat market, with acres of naked female flesh on display sending out just one signal to all the males in the vicinity. And women who don’t realise what that signal is—as interpreted by any typical man—need to wise up quickly.

I gather the poor policeman has been forced to apologise for his remarks. No doubt he was thinking of his job and his pension, both of which would likely have been on the line had he refused. But he really had nothing to apologise for. He was wise, he was practical. He was right.

Water on the altar

I’ve never liked hype, especially in Christian things.

‘Do I hear an Amen to that?’ yells the preacher when he’s said something he thinks deserves one.

‘Amen!’ the congregation dutifully responds. But not me. Yes, I do interject the odd ‘Amen’ from time to time, but only when I feel a strong urge to do so, and so far that has never coincided with a preacher’s prompt.

In fact, any attempt to manipulate a congregation’s emotions turns me right off. A preacher may, for instance,  inject into his voice a pseudo-emotional tremble when he comes to a key sentence, especially if he’s arrived at the compulsory (for some) end-of-meeting appeal. People around me gasp and go all ‘spiritual’, but I feel like groaning, and sometimes I actually do. Or the worship-leader insists that we sing that song again for the twentieth time, but this time on our knees. We all know that endless repetition can numb the mind and produce an altered state of consciousness. It’s hype.

For me, that sort of thing tells me it’s time to exit and visit the toilet. ‘Stop messing with people!’ I want to shout. ‘If God wants to do something exceptional here he’s big enough to do it by himself. He doesn’t need your pathetic help!’ I don’t say it out loud, of course, but I’ve been sorely tempted.

I’ve come to see that the supernatural is, for the most part, delightfully ‘natural’. It happens in the midst of the normal and the routine, when no-one is hyped up or glassy-eyed. Some have even entertained angels without realising it.

So when, at the end of a meeting, I sense a reluctance in most people to rise from their seats and join the coffee-queue, I feel a strong urge to be the first to rise, wander casually to the back of the room and say, ‘All right, Fred?’ to Fred. Later, I hear people say things like, ‘What an unusual sense of God’s presence there was at the end of the meeting, wasn’t there? Nobody wanted to leave their seats.’

Nobody, it seems, except me. Because I don’t think it was really anything to do with a ‘sense of God’s presence’ at all. Maybe some were chewing over what had been preached, which is good. But it was, I think, more a social and psychological phenomenon of some kind than the Holy Spirit at work in any special way—and it could have been triggered by the pseudo-tremble in the preacher’s last sentence or two.

In the light of the above confession I was happy to find, in reading 1 Kings 18, that the great prophet Elijah had his feet firmly on the ground when it came to things supernatural. He didn’t like hype any more than I do. That chapter, of course, describes his great confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. It was a contest: whoever’s god brought down fire to consume the sacrifice on the altar would be seen to be the true god.

The prophets of Baal went first. And, boy, were they into hype! They danced themselves into a semi-trance, cavorting round the altar. They cut themselves till they bled and indulged in lots of ‘frantic prophesying’. They no doubt felt ‘the presence of Baal’ in a big way. But unfortunately the fire didn’t fall; the real supernatural didn’t show up.

Then it was Elijah’s turn. You could understand it if he had tried to help God along a bit, taking a few steps to ensure a good fire. He could have chosen only the driest of wood. He could have hidden a few firelighters in among it. He could have secreted a box of matches up his sleeve. He could have stationed one of his supporters nearby with a lens to focus the sun’s rays on the tinder that he had tucked in among the sticks.

But no, he wasn’t having any such nonsense. More than that, in fact, he did everything possible to kill any hype and ensure that God would be seen to send the fire himself: he had twelve ‘large jars’ of water emptied over the sacrifice and the wood!

Water on the altar—I love that! In fact, had I been there to see it I’d probably have shouted an unsolicited ‘Amen!’

Nice U-Turn

Our current coalition government, I feel, is more of a good thing than a bad one. The Tories and the Lib Dems stand at opposite ends of the political spectrum, so neither party can do all it wants, which means we get steady, middle-of-the-road legislation rather than the more extreme variety we’d get if either party had things all its own way.

Unfortunately that doesn’t stop the Labour Party, now in opposition, from trying to trash everything the coalition does. I’ve always disliked the adversarial nature of our government system, where the party in opposition feels duty bound to scorn every decision made by the party in power. Even when a decision is clearly in the nation’s general interest the opposition will find some way of making it look foolish. I’m not touting here for any party in particular; it was just the same when Labour were in power.

The proposed sale of vast tracts of publicly-owned forest is a recent case in point. It was clearly a money-making idea at a time when the government was trying to get the nation out of debt. But the universal outcry from the public showed them how deeply unpopular this proposal was, and now they assure us that the idea has been scrapped. Good.

And what was the opposition’s line in all this? When the sale proposal was first made they cried ‘Shame!’ and accused the government of sacrificing public amenities on the altar of financial gain. Fair enough. So you’d think they would have been the first to cry ‘Well done!’ when the proposal was dropped. Instead, they pointed the finger of scorn while chanting ‘Weak government’, ‘Climb-down’ and ‘U-turn’.

That’s not good enough, in my view. It tells us that the opposition’s main focus is not upholding what’s best for the nation but making the government look daft. That’s a self-serving and childish attitude, the kind of thing one expects to see in a school playground but not in the halls of Westminster.

Yes, maybe the government should have done a bit more research into public opinion before coming out with the forest-sale proposal. And yes, if a government reverses its policy too often it is going to lose the nation’s confidence and so be legitimately branded weak. But personally I’m delighted that the government had the guts to scrap this particular policy and, even better, to stand up in the House of Commons and bluntly admit, ‘We got it wrong’.

‘Well done!’ say I. When your car’s about to smash into a road-block a U-turn may be a frustrating necessity but it’s also the right and sensible thing to do. That’s what happened here and applause, not scorn, is in order.

A bit of negative confession is a good thing

I just heard that a young businessman—a distant acquaintance of mine—has gone bankrupt. It has caused immense pain to him, his immediate family, and to the kind folk who, too late in the process, parted with money to help him try and avoid bankruptcy.

One telling feature of the story is that the business had been in financial problems for a very long time before he told anyone about it. Why, I ask myself, didn’t he open up at an earlier stage, in which case the worst might well have been avoided?

Part of the explanation, I’m sure, lies in the fact that he is a committed Christian.

At the start, of course, this was a huge ‘plus factor’ in the situation. His Christian standards ensured that he conducted his business with integrity. Also, it meant that divine help was available, and I don’t doubt that he called on the Lord many a time when things began going wrong.

But being a Christian also brought, I suspect, a ‘minus factor’ to the situation. In certain types of church culture there is strong pressure to be victorious, to be on top of things, to be seen to be the head and not the tail, to win success that will show the world how it’s done, to be people of faith, and generally to be up-beat about everything. And that, alas, makes many a believer reluctant to admit falling short of the ideal. When everybody else is apparently living in victory it’s doubly hard to admit defeat.

Most non-Christians in this young man’s position would probably have been a lot quicker to make the problems known and to seek advice and help early on. Unlike Christians they have no ‘faith culture’ to pressure them, no ‘I’m a winner’ reputation to maintain before their peers.

That’s why I’m all for a modified ‘victory’ culture that leaves room for vulnerability and the admission of failure. Leaders are especially responsible here. If they keep pumping out faith and victory all the time they will actually produce failures more serious than might otherwise have been the case.

Let church leaders, therefore, be judiciously frank about their own weaknesses and difficulties from time to time. A bit of negative confession can do a powerful lot of good.

Yom yom

No, not ‘Yum yum’. I’m not talking food here; I’m talking God’s word to me about money.

Let me explain. Yom is the Hebrew word for ‘day’, as in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Doubling it up to yom yom gives a phrase meaning ‘day by day’ or ‘daily’. It occurs in Psalm 68:19 – ‘Praise be to the Lord, to God our Saviour, who daily bears our burdens.’ And that is a verse especially meaningful to me.

Years ago I was thinking how nice it would be to get a huge financial windfall. I imagined a lawyer calling me to say that my Great-uncle Eustace—who I’d never known existed—had died, that he had been rich, that I was his sole heir and that a couple of million pounds was about to be deposited in my account. Brill! I’d be set up for the rest of my days.

It never happened, of course. Instead I felt the Lord saying to me, ‘Don’t expect anything like that, son. I have different plans for your financial welfare. I’ll take care of you just one day at a time—I will ‘daily bear your burdens’—so you’ll have to trust me one day at a time. Can you manage that?’

I thought I probably could. Yes, I would continue to keep a budget and manage my accounts sensibly, and I would be grateful for any occasional extras that might come my way over and above my regular income—currently my smallish pension. But that said, daily reliance on the Lord would be my bottom line.

This has been my approach to financial security ever since, and the Lord has been true to his word. He puts unexpected extras my way now and again, and I remain solvent and well provided for. Praise him!

Joyless religion

‘Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!’ (Phil 4:4).

That’s an easy command for true Christians to obey. In fact it’s impossible not to rejoice when the Holy Spirit lives within convincing us of the reality of God’s love for us, our relationship with him, the forgiveness of our sins and the assurance of coming glory.

I don’t mean the pseudo-joy of a fixed cheesy grin and a ‘hallelujah’ in every sentence. I mean the deep-seated, unshakable joy that comes from knowing all is well at the level that matters. This is the joy that, when Christians meet together, spills over in heartfelt, exuberant songs of praise to our God.

No other religion knows this. There’s no joy on the faces of ayatollahs. Buddhist monks may claim some inner peace, but their religion produces few smiles. Sikhs and Hindus know how to party, but joy is nowhere to be seen in their temple rituals.

Joy is a Christian hallmark. Let it show!

‘No room in the what?’

‘In the inn’, of course.

This is the Christmas story we all know and love. Joseph, with Mary at the point of giving birth, arrived in Bethlehem and ended up in a stable because the inn was full. Read it in Luke chapter 2.

The truth is in fact a little different. Biblical scholars have known this for a long time, but traditional versions of the Christmas story die hard and, next December, nativity plays all over the world will stick to the usual line. If you’re more interested in facts than sentiment, read on; otherwise, stop now.

Regarding Joseph and Mary’s accommodation in Bethlehem, consider these items for starters:

• Joseph would have been welcome anywhere in Bethlehem, the town of his ancestors, simply because of his pedigree, especially as he was a direct descendant of King David.
• A woman about to give birth draws sympathy and help from any group of people. The citizens of Bethlehem were no exception; no-one would have closed the door on her.
• Even if accommodation in the town had been a problem, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth lived in a nearby village and they could have fixed to stay there with her and her husband.
• But they didn’t, because Joseph had had plenty of time to fix accommodation. Contrary to the usual line, he and Mary had been in Bethlehem several days before she gave birth (Luke 2:6) and they were staying in the home of some friends there when her moment came.

They were not in an ‘inn’ at all in the sense of a place offering rooms for paying guests—Greek pandocheion. They were with some friends, in their house.

A typical Middle Eastern house had one main room where the family lived and slept, plus a smaller room exclusively for guests, called in Greek the katalyma. This is where Mary and Joseph would normally have been put up but, with all the people in Bethlehem for the census, someone else was occupying it. So the family had graciously invited Mary and Joseph to share their own accommodation—the main family room.

Typically, at one end of this room was a lower-level area where the family’s cow, donkey and few sheep would be sheltered overnight. The animals could eat, if hungry, food placed in small depressions in the floor called mangers. These were at the higher level, just next to the drop to the lower level half a metre below. Sometimes they were made of wood, in which case they could be moved. It was in one of these that Mary placed the infant Jesus.

The reason Mary gave birth to Jesus in their hosts’ family room and laid him in one of the typical mangers there is because ‘there was no room in the katalyma’—the house’s guest room. That room was occupied by other guests.

So we need to revamp our understanding of the nativity account. There was no innkeeper, because this wasn’t an inn. And the birth was where the manger was: in a warm and friendly family home, not in a cold and draughty stable.

It was, however, a typical poor person’s house. The rich had separate accommodation for their animals. Jesus was born, not in a luxury villa but in the peasant-home of some commoners. And that was why, when the angel told the shepherds that they would find the infant Messiah lying in a manger, it was such good news to them. The Christ was in a peasant-home just like their own!

I don’t suppose the nativity plays will ever be re-written; tradition dies hard. But in my view the realities of the nativity just described serve to enrich the story, not to rob it of its power.

[To learn more, see Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, SPCK, 2008, p25ff—reviewed here]

Good old NHS

For overseas readers, the NHS is the British National Health Service. It guarantees free health-care to all British citizens. And it’s marvellous!

True, some have to pay a token amount towards their medication, but the elderly, the needy and other vulnerable groups pay nothing. If you need an operation, it’s free. Consultations with top-notch medical specialists cost you not a penny.

I’ve travelled in many parts of the world where medical care is simply unavailable, or of desperately poor quality, or comes at such a high price that only the richest can afford it. Compared with all these options the NHS is an unmitigated blessing.

Over a decade ago I developed an irregular heartbeat. ‘An electrical glitch,’ the cardiac specialist concluded after I’d undergone various tests at the local NHS hospital. They put me on medication to control it, and I’ll be on it for the rest of my life. So every three months I pick up a prescription from my doctor’s surgery, take it to the local pharmacy and pick up my pills. And because I’m over 60, it’s all for free.

More recently I realised my hearing was deteriorating and needed to do something about it. Within weeks I had a consultation with an expert audiologist and two weeks later became the wearer of a high-quality digital hearing aid behind each ear. These cost me nothing and they have made the world of difference. When I’m running out of batteries I drop in with my record-book at the local audiology centre and pick up a new supply, all for free.

So I often exclaim, ‘Thank you, Lord, for the NHS!’ Can you blame me?

I’m immensely grateful that I don’t live in one of the world’s poorer countries where such service would be unimaginable. Some years ago, in Zambia, I overheard a British visitor talking to a Zambian national about hospitals. ‘I can’t stand hospital food!’ she complained. To which the Zambian replied, ‘You mean they feed you in hospital in your country?’ Yes, if you find yourself in the local hospital in her town in Zambia your relatives have to come in with food for you, otherwise you get nothing.

But it’s the Americans who puzzle me the most. President Obama has been working hard to push through a programme of medical care that would guarantee provision to the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Good for him, I say! Yet strident voices condemn him outright for it. Most puzzling of all, so-called Christian voices denounce him as an instrument of Satan, or as the Antichrist himself, for even daring to think up such an idea! Surely to make provision for the needy is Christian in every sense? I just don’t get it.

Maybe someday I’ll grasp what the Evangelical Right in the US is all about. In the meantime I’ll continue to be grateful that I don’t live there and to draw upon the good old NHS—and thank God for it.

Good old NIV

With good reason the New International Version has become one of the most popular Bible versions ever: over 400 million copies in print. The NT arrived in 1973 and the OT five years later. I’ve used it ever since.

It has undergone some revisions, the most recent being in 1984. Also, Hodder & Stoughton produced an Anglicised edition for British folk who didn’t much care for the original American spellings and occasional odd (to us Brits) vocabulary. Then, starting in 2002 (with the OT in 2006), came the TNIV – Today’s NIV – which moved solidly towards gender-inclusive language wherever appropriate; so Paul addresses his letters to ‘brothers and sisters’, not just to ‘brothers’, because that’s what the Greek adelphoi actually infers. Not everybody liked that, but I thought it was brill and moved over to the TNIV as my ‘regular’ Bible a few years ago.

Now further change is upon us. The NIV translation and revision committee have finalised the text of the 2011 edition. Printed copies should start rolling off the press by March 2011. You don’t have to wait till then, however, to check it out; the full text is already available to read at the official website: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201&version=NIV

The committee have combined the best of the TNIV and the 1984 NIV into the new version, and both the others will cease to be published as from now. From what I’ve seen, the new version is looking good, and I’m all set to move over to it as soon as I can. The word on the block is that H&S will in due course be doing an Anglicised edition, too.

If you’re interested in seeing how the committee have approached the gender-inclusiveness issue – and also viewing their general guidelines, with some concrete examples – take a look at this article: http://www.biblegateway.com/niv/Translators-Notes.pdf

The new version will continue to be called simply the NIV. I think it will do well.