We Are Children of God

What does this mean? Here are some ideas:

The all-consuming fire of God's love

There is simply no end to it. I don't claim to understand it because my imagination of love is generally limited by the degree to which I am able to love. But I can believe in the unendingness of his concern and his care.

Confidence in self and faith in the future

Father in Heaven plans and works continually for our good. It's difficult to fathom because we often assume he is subject to the same limitations that we are, but he comprehends in exquisite detail the consequences of the happenings in our lives. He knows what he wants us to be. Don't you suppose that each day angels are dispatched to set in motion the chains of events that ultimately bring great blessings into our lives?

You are never alone
Angels and the Holy Ghost are also sent to comfort us, to guide other people to help us, to helps us to live lives more fully and happily than we would on our own. Do you ever get the feeling that left up to your own devices things wouldn't be going so well? Well, that's because they wouldn't be, and you aren't left to your own devices!

No farewells
We will see our friends and family again when united before God's throne. Of course we will say 'goodbye' to people, and we will miss those who step from mortality to immortality before we do. But there will be reunion! The tears we shed upon parting in this life will be dried in the next as we renew the sweetest associations we enjoy here.

Life without an ending
We will, in our happiest state or better, exist continually from now onward into eternity; death need not destroy our relationships, our personality, our hopes, our selves; we ought to treat each other well, because we could influence the quality of other people's eternal existence by what we do and say; for those whose existence here makes them wish there was an end, there will come and end to their suffering.

We can be so much more
Let us lift our heads up to see a brighter vision, a nobler view of ourselves. In spite of our failings and deficiencies, in spite of the weaknesses that to us are blatant and inexcusable, because we are children of God we can be – we are – good. We can be kind, we can discover truth and fight to defend it, we can love fervently and endure hardship for the good of those we care for. [In Old English, God literally means good, after all. Children of good! How could we become something that our parent is not?]

We can choose to follow him
Because he is worthy of our trust and of being followed and emulated. Because there is no better companion for traveling the roads of our lives.

I Disapprove: English Immersion as Foolishness and Arrogance

See this link about English immersion education programs. English immersion sounds like something that foreigners do when they want to learn English fast. That's something such a system is good for. However, at least in California, English immersion is in essence a rejection of bilingual education. Now, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe California's bilingual education programs were sufficiently flawed as to be worse than English-only. But English immersion to me represents foolishness combined with arrogance.

Foolishness
A better system in many regards is two-way or bilingual immersion. In such a program, children from their youngest years are taught in both the dominant language (English) and a minority language (usually Spanish, though French, German, and Japanese are seen). They receive language instruction -- in other words, grammar, composition, literature, speaking and presentation skills -- in both languages. As the theory goes, this produces students competent in both languages.

English immersion, as I understand it, is essentially two-way immersion chopped in half, yielding -- okay, do the math -- one-way immersion! So it means "English only." The article I linked to above claims that this results in improved English proficiency (likely true) while usually still maintaining the minority language at home. This last point is the tricky one. Yes, many students will continue to communicate with their families in the minority language. But no, this is not equivalent to receiving an education in/on that language. As far as being useful in the workforce, it will suffice for blue collar jobs and nothing more. Do latino immigrants not deserve a chance at reaching higher than that? English immersion sacrifices rather than develops the native language of immigrant students. While English is arguably the most important language to have mastery over in this country, it is foolishness to cast aside easily-developed native-language resources. In refusing to educate elementary-age students in Spanish, we increase the amount of work required later on: ten years down the road they will have to learn a "foreign" language in high school and, instead of learning a third language, they will most likely spend time solidifying their command of their native language (easy A's). We could have taken care of that in elementary school!

Arrogance
There are many children who continue to be able to communicate at a rudimentary level in Spanish while primarily developing English skills. However, unless they begin learning English at a very young age it will never be like a native language to them. And so they have a complete, native mastery of no languages at all. How demeaning! Most native English speakers in the United States would never bother to imagine what it's like to primarily speak a marginalized tongue. Some students develop a sort of lingua-cultural self-loathing because they see that their language and culture are regarded as inferior. Now, maybe I'm leaning a little too much towards the fluffy "let's celebrate all cultures, flower power" philosophy... but, well, maybe a little of that would be appropriate. The greater crime is to raise generation after generation of immigrants with a notion that they must assimilate completely and pretend that their native culture doesn't exist. If that idea had prevailed during previous waves of immigration we might have lost such cultural gems as bagels, pizza, and polka ;-) And do we think that American culture is so all-encompassingly awesome that we have nothing to learn from those who come to our country? What if from the latinos we learned something about strength of family? What if from the asians something about hard work in school? Or from the polynesians how to relax a bit and roast pigs underground? Along with that, there are surely many things that immigrants can learn from our culture, and there are economic benefits not only for them but for their families back in Latin America, to whom they send substantial support money (aka remittances).

The end. Fin. Конец. Terminus.