Posts from the ‘Thoughts’ Category

Those Days When You Feel Like The Little Mermaid

I love our language teacher. I love how she teaches, what she teaches, and I feel like our time together is worth it. Lately she’s even been helping my language abilities by engaging me in philosophical and controversial conversations. We’ve gone over the war in Iraq, abortion, same-sex marriages, and other hot topics.

Today she brought up how she doesn’t think it’s right for parents to prohibit bad behavior for fear that it will put the idea in their children’s minds to do it. She said one of her friends worked in a private Christian school and shared with her that the kids who attended that school were worse than those in regular schools. She said kids there did things they shouldn’t because they were told they couldn’t. On the other hand, kids who were never told not to do something, didn’t. She asked if my mom ever told me I wasn’t allowed to kill others. When I answered in the affirmative she asked, “Why? Did your mom think you were going to kill people if she didn’t tell you that? And if you would have killed people, would that have stopped you?”

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Language Acquisition: Sprinkling or Immersion?

They say the best way to learn a language is through immersion training. That is, go and live among the people who speak the language you want to learn and you will pick it up faster than you ever could in the classroom. The idea is when you are surrounded by a foreign language, you are forced to learn it to survive. I don’t disagree. But I have to tell you, I’m having a hard time getting fully immersed.

I’ve been a little discouraged with the progression of my Russian skills. I’ve done a lot of thinking as to why that is because it seems, at first glance, we’re doing all we can. Katie and I are very satisfied with our Russian teacher, and I feel like I’m learning a lot from our time together. Our Russian lessons are an hour long, four days a week. On the days we’re not in class, we spend two or three hours doing homework and studying on our own. Add to that the different group events we attend each week and it feels like we’re spending a lot of time studying the language. When I really think about it, though, if we’re talking about immersion training, we’re not even getting our hair wet.

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Stuff I’m Learning: Ministers and Social Security

I have been absolutely amazed at all there is to learn about ministers, missionaries, and taxes. I feel like every day I learn (or re-learn) something new. It is amazing how hard it can be to do this work with integrity, as so much of this stuff is just begging to be swept under the rug and labeled “Not So Important.”

One such matter that has really surprised me is the subject of ministers opting out of Social Security. Ministers are one of a very select few who can easily say they don’t want to participate in Social Security. The simple reasoning behind it is that if you feel like being a part of Social Security goes against what you believe, and you work as a minister (a job entirely based on your faith), you may opt-out.

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We Won’t Be Seeing “Dinner For Schmucks” Either

I am just getting so tired of it, you know? From the very first trailer we saw for it months ago, Steve Carell’s new comedy Dinner For Schmucks looked absolutely hilarious. It truly looked like a genuine comedy, funny because it’s funny and not funny because it’s full of shocking, revolting sexual humor. And because nothing in the trailers seemed to indicate it being filthy (as they typically do), Katie and I had been making plans to go see the movie on opening day.

However, as we do for all our movies now, we checked Plugged In Online (read more about the site here) before we headed off. Turns out, it is just like almost every other comedy coming out today: full of sexual vulgarity. No I don’t mean a few innuendos, I mean saturated with exaggerated sexual humor designed to make you laugh because of how uncomfortable you are, simultaneously introducing images and situations to your mind that you never would have had up there otherwise.

So as for me and my house, we will not allow ourselves to put this movie into our minds, a place where dialogue, images and situations can be recorded for a lifetime.

Check out the Plugged In review for the movie here.

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