Various church things

[cahn]

1. So after all the drama (mostly inside my own head, no one else cared) of last week, choir director moved back the date choir was performing at church. Without telling me! Fortunately, she mentioned it in her weekly choir email on Saturday night, which was enough time that I was able to contact the program people and have them change the program.

2. This was apparently directly related to no pianists, including me, being at choir practice last week. My in-laws were in town! No one told me there would be no pianist if I didn't come to practice! (I suspect what happened is that regular choir pianist forgot to mention he was going to be absent.)

3. For the last couple of weeks I've been substitute-teaching the 8-year-olds at church. It's... kind of fun, actually! The second week I was more confident than the first, and I think it made a huge difference both in the quality of my teaching and the way I felt about it, although I spent somewhat less time preparing the second week.

It does make me... I don't know... side-eye putting together kids of wildly unequal maturity, just because their chronological age is similar. Because although I think I did a relatively good job at engaging everyone and interesting everyone (and the thing I love about teaching that age is that I can slip in my own heretical way of looking at things -- emphasizing, for instance, that people don't have to be Mormon to listen to God, or that sometimes God can speak to us through other people, or defining the word priest, which they all knew was in the scriptural story we were discussing but not one of them actually knew what a priest was) -- I also spent a large amount of time telling people to sit down and shut up (not in those words, obviously, this is church!), and the one kid, let's call him Maxwell, that no, he could not leave and make copies of his pirate drawing, now that he had discovered the copier. No, he still could not leave and make copies. Yes, he could go to the bathroom, but he had to leave his drawings behind. (*) And so on. Clique of three girl cousins in the corner: no, you cannot play with a kindle during class. Please stop talking while Max is speaking. Hey, you might like to pay attention because I'm about to say something interesting. Let's see who's being reverent (Mormon kid code for "I'm going to bribe you with a fun activity to sit down and shut up").

Meanwhile, there's this girl, whom I'll call Caroline, whose family was visiting. She was fantastic -- very attentive, thoughtful, when I asked questions actually answered the question (instead of waving her hand around wildly because she wanted the attention, and then responding with a non sequitur, which some of the kids were doing). You could see she was really thinking about some of the points I was bringing up. (**)

I mean. I can see how a teacher who was really good could engage all those kids at the same time, especially if she had them every day instead of for four hours out of their entire lives. Occasionally even I would rise to the heights where they were all paying attention. But.. but.

(*) I should append here that Max has mild ASD; two years ago he legitimately did not understand boundaries. At this point I've seen (with other people) that he does understand, if maybe not to the extent of a typical 8-year-old, but he does do a lot of pushing to see if you'll let him have his way.

(**) This kid was sort of unbelievable, actually. She told me she liked my singing. At the end I told her that I really enjoyed teaching her. "I really enjoyed having you as my teacher!" she responded. What 8-year-old says those kinds of things?? Is it bad that I totally wondered if she was homeschooled?

4. Yesterday I was subbing in the nursery. (Ah, June, and everyone going on vacation. Someday I will be able to attend regular church, but not until July, probably.) It's the first time I've been in the nursery for months. And it turns out that the composition has totally changed since my job (calling) was there: looking after a bunch of more-or-less civilized 2.5-3.5-age girls is way, way easier than my previous task of looking after a bunch of 1.5-2.5-age savages plus two uncivilized 3.5-year-old girls and one civilized 3.5-year-old girl. (I should not say that they were uncivilized, exactly, but one was always doing things like tripping or pushing the younger toddlers and then looking all innocent, and it was really irritating. The other would just brawl with the other girl because they were both seriously high-energy, and I would spend a great deal of time trying to keep the savages' Brownian motion from taking them into the path of the brawls.) I was actually not wiped out after two hours with the kids, which is a first.

Also, they're all at the same level, except for the one 2-year-old boy who is happy as long as he's clutching his little panda bear (so cute!), so I actually found it way easier pedagogically than the 8-year-olds :) (We worked on not grabbing and asking other people nicely for things instead...)

Comments

[seekingferret]

Hmm... Actually, Judaism also has an idea that "true Priesthood" has been lost, inasmuch as the traumatic movements of the Jewish people have destroyed the genealogical records confirming the authenticity of our hereditary priesthood. We have people who have a family tradition that they are priests, and we generally respect that when it comes to the minor honors that the modern service accords to priests, but we don't have certainty that their traditions are correct. (And this is important because it's more than just being born to a priest that makes one a priest... the priest must also not have entered into a forbidden marriage, such as to a widow or divorcee.)

All the stuff about the Mormon priesthood is fascinating, and yes, kind of offensively appropriative in the way Mormon tradition usually is, but... well, my friends got into this huge and fascinating argument a few years back on a private message board about the idea of religious appropriation, and I wish I could share it with you, but basically our only reasonable conclusion was that all religions steal from other religions and it's kind of a waste of time getting worked up about it once it's syncreted to a sufficient point of distinguishment, and possibly even before that point.

I do like the idea that everyone (er.... every man. :( ) has a calling to serve others through the priesthood.

[cahn]

...Yeah, that's an awfully mature conclusion. It's a bit asymmetric, in the sense that Judaism has been around long enough that all kinds of religions have had the opportunity to steal from it, whereas Mormonism has been around for such a short period of time that we haven't really had that kind of experience. Though along those lines, have you watched/listened to The Book of Mormon (the musical, that is)?

And yeah: there is a vibrant underground Mormon feminist movement that is really annoyed about the male priesthood thing. (I am not really one of them, but I might well be if I had a Mormon husband and/or sons and got to see the inequality firsthand. And there is inequality in the way men and women are regarded -- in, as was pointed out to me the other day, the very way that the leadership (all men) take pains to point out frequently how women are just as good as men. No one ever feels the need to tell men that they're just as good as women.)

[seekingferret]

It's a bit asymmetric, in the sense that Judaism has been around long enough that all kinds of religions have had the opportunity to steal from it,

Judaism has also been around long enough that it has had opportunity to steal from all kinds of religions. A facebook friend posted an article a few weeks ago about some really bog-standard Jewish practice that apparently unquestionably originated in medieval Arabic ritual, borrowed by the medieval Cabbalists in Tzfat and then spread through the Jewish world.


(Also, ha: http://seekingferret.livejournal.com/92576.html. Not to mention, http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/80711.html?thread=221767#cmt221767 )