June 1989

Lasch

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

Bernard Ramm

Irvine, California

Coles

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catherine M. LeGault

Central Point, Oregon