From Word To Word

People always want to begin with writing, but good writing is an ending before it is a beginning, a culmination before it is an inauguration.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, good writing is preceded by slow and careful reading, by thoughtful and patient reflection, and by learned and leisurely conversation.  Writing that does not proceed from these things is deficient.

Slow and Careful Reading – It is better to read one book very well than to read many poorly.  Being well-read should never be confused with being much-read.  Many people read much without ever reading at all.  There are fewer people who truly read well.  Though they may perhaps read less, they are the readers who gain from their practice.

Good reading approaches the text slowly, attentively, with an openness to what might be thought through it, with an openness to being interrupted by reflection and by conversation.  There is no substitute for this time and for this attention.  It permits what is not us, what is other than us, to approach us through the text.  The text is not itself of the greatest importance.  It is the site through which we are encountered by what is of the greatest importance, and its value is in how well it provokes us to be so encountered.

Good reading leaves its mark on the text.  It writes in the margins, and it turns the corners of pages, and it notes its favourite passages with bookmarks, even if it does these things only figuratively.  A book that is well read is stained with fingerprints and coffee stains, even if only in metaphor.  It is well used.  It is a tool that has become worn to fit the mind that is reading it.

Thoughtful and Patient Reflection – It is necessary to reflect on reading whenever something calls through the text, whenever the text provokes, but also regularly, as a discipline.  To reflect is to engage in the exercise of thinking as if it were a religious act, as if it was the rule of a monastic order, in order that it might sometimes become a spiritual act, beyond the rule of any order.  It is to order one’s mind so that it might be prepared more fully for what will come to disorder it entirely.

Reflection is always accompanied by a writing that is not a writing, a secret and secretive writing, notes and jottings, incoherences and incomprehensibles, a writing that will never appear as a writing to be read, a writing that remains hidden and unread.  It is a writing that is also a rereading,  a returning to the places in the text that need mastication, rumination, regurgitation.  This writing chews the text like a cow chews its cud, again and again.  It digests the text, gains sustenance from the text, takes the text into itself, makes the text a part of itself.

Reflection is a wondering and a wandering.  It follows the text to other texts and returns them to where they began. It takes its time as it wanders.  It does not run or even walk.  It strolls.  It ambles.  It perambulates.  It wallows in its journey through the text, follows it wherever it leads.  It is not concerned with a destination, at least not now, not yet.  It leaves destinations to the future and reserves for the present a certain forgetfulness of what the future might demand.   Its purpose is to see what might be encountered now on its path through the text, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, not to create a coherent text of its own.

This activity, this reflection, this meditation, is essential.   It must not be hurried.  It is not brainstorming or some other such technique.  It is an openness to the text, a willingness to give the text time and space, a discipline of doing the text justice.

Learned and Leisurely Conversation – Conversation is not mere group discussion.  It is not mere argument.  It is not mere chatter.  It is a coming together through the text, where the text becomes a site where we catch sight of one another.  There are always too few of these opportunities to converse, always.  They must be treasured when they arise, guarded jealously, so that they are not overwhelmed by the many things that are less important but more pressing.

Conversation involves a careful listening of one another.  It considers what the other has to say.  It considers what it will reply before it replies.  It takes its time, so it is not afraid to pause.  It is willing to say less and have it be meaningful than to say much and to have it be mere chatter. It knows that it is better to give things their proper time.

Conversation is being on the way together, is helping one another along the way.  It turns us in the same direction, puts us shoulder to shoulder.  Though we may turn our eyes to one another, our feet are always on the path together, following the same path together, so that we might draw nearer to what it is we are seeking.  Whatever disagreements we may have between us, conversation always agrees, before all else, to walk the path together.

Conversation is also sitting at the table together, breaking bread together, recognizing what is other to us through the breaking of bread.  It is the invitation to the table and the acceptance of the table.  It is sitting face to face.  It is having more between us than words.  It is also having between us a giving, and a hospitality, and an invitation, and an acceptance.  It allows us to digest each other’s words like bread and wine, to make each other’s words a part of us.

Conversation never ends.  It is always being suspended for a time, but it is never ended, except by death.

Writing -  Only in the context of these disciplines of reading and reflection and conversation, only in the context of these practices, that writing can begin.  Indeed, these disciplines will produce writing, inevitably.  Though this writing may take many forms, it will become a necessity in the one who reads and reflects and converses.  It will become, not a task to be undertaken, not an ideal to be fulfilled, but a hunger to be satisfied, a thirst to be quenched, a lust to be satiated.

This is what there is to be learned.  This is the learning that teaching must let be.  This is the learning that teaching must let be learned.

As a parent who is trying to support his children’s learning, I am always looking for places where they can see their interests in action and actively participate in them.  Why stop at reading about beetles in books when you can catch your own beetles and see them for yourselves? Why be satisfied with watching an internet clip about bats when you can make a bat house and attract them to your own house?  This kind of learning, learning that engages people with their world in active and tactile ways, is essential to everyone, in my opinion, but it is especially important for young children.  In fact, the difficulties involved in incorporating this kind of learning into the classroom is one of the major reasons why I am avoiding the traditional school system altogether.

Unfortunately, it is not always easy to get access to the places we would like to see.  While there have been some people, like Piccioni Brothers Mushroom Farm, who have been very cooperative, most places are closed to the idea of having anyone, especially small children, come and see what they do, and even if they are willing to have us through, like Speed River Bicycle, insurance restrictions and labour laws often prevent them.  The clear message is that having learners in the workplace is a hindrance, a distraction, an annoyance, and a legal liability.  It would be easier for everyone concerned if they would just go back to their classrooms and leave well enough alone.  The shops are closed.

Now, I do actually agree with this assessment.  Having learners, especially young learners, under your feet while you are trying to accomplish something  is very certainly a hindrance and a distraction and an annoyance and a legal liability.  I  agree that it would be easier, far easier, to send learners back to a classroom and let them learn what they can from their teachers.  I even agree that there is almost nothing to be gained and very much to be lost by most workplaces in letting learners through their shops.  I understand all this.

Even so, it always disappoints me when yet another workplace or university department or public works or volunteer organization tells me that its shop is closed to visitors in general and to children in particular.  The benefits of an open shop seem to me so obvious, to the children certainly, but also to our society more broadly, that I can hardly believe one more person is giving up the opportunity to share a passion, a craft, a skill, or a knowledge with a young learner.  It saddens me that we are a society more interested in efficiency and liability than in conviviality, that we are unable to recognize what we are modeling to our children when we shut them away in schools and daycares and after school programs and deny them access to the things going on in their world, that we fail to see how this only produces adults who are still children, unable to think and act for themselves, unable to do anything but follow their bosses and their politicians and their advertisers blindly.

I understand.  It is much easier to keep a closed shop.   But it comes at a cost.

As I return once more to Martin Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking?, I am stepping away from the thread of his argument for a moment to take up some comments that he makes on the the nature of teaching.  “Teaching is more difficult than learning,” he says, “because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn.  The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than – learning.  His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by ‘learning’ we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.  The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they – he has to learn to let them learn.  The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices.”  Then, a few pages further on, he returns to the subject, saying, “Learning, then, cannot be brought about by scolding.  Even so, a man who teaches must at times grow noisy.  In fact, he may have to scream and scream, although the aim is to make his students learn so quiet a thing as thinking.”

The question of teaching and learning is one that continually preoccupies me, as my longtime readers will know, and I am particularly concerned with how to teach, not literature as such, but learning through literature.  I am interested, to use Heidegger’s language, in how to teach students to learn, in how to provoke them to learning, in how to draw them into learning.  The difficulty is that I must accomplish this within the constraints of institutional education, according to the demands of grades and credits and degrees, demands which remain operative on students generally even if they are alleviated, at least to some extent, in my own class?

In response to these questions, I am toying with several ideas for my fall class, and I am interested in Heidegger’s claim that to teach is to let learn, but that this letting learn is not necessarily a quiet or a passive thing, that it sometimes involve a good deal of noise, a good deal of screaming.  In other words, if Heidegger is interested in what provokes us to thinking, I wonder whether we might take another form of this word and suggest that he is interested also, at least to some degree, in the provocative, insofar as it relates to thinking, and the question for my own teaching becomes about how to provoke learning, how to provoke reading, how to provoke reflection, how to provoke conversation, how to provoke writing, and to do so entirely apart from the entirely artificial and deformative stimuli of grades and credits.  How would a teacher be provocative in this way?  Would it require a certain noisiness at times, as Heidegger suggests?  What would be required for a teacher to provoke in our school stoday?

Dave Humphrey recently sent me a link to a lecture by Astra Taylor called On the Unschooled Life.  Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, a philosopher, and an unschooled child who has directed two films, Zizek and The Examined Life, both of which I enjoyed very much.  Her lecture is a passionate and articulate defense of unschooling that is nevertheless aware of the social questions that this mode of learning raises.  It is well worth watching.

One of the questions that it raised for me, not for the first time, was about how the principles of unschooling, with which I largely agree, confront the necessity of obtaining accreditation in order to enter certain occupations.  It was this concern that eventually caused Taylor to choose public highschool over unschooling in her teens, and it is this question that faces many homeschooled and unschooled learners at some point.  In order to pursue a certain vocation or occupation, they find themselves forced to achieve some form of accreditation through the kinds of institutions that they have spent most of their lives avoiding.

There are also those situations where parents, whatever their ideals, are simply unable to unschool or homeschool their children.  Single parents, for example, are not likely to be able to stay home with their children, and even two-parent families often feel that they need two incomes to survive, though this is untrue in more cases than people think.  There are also those families in which parents are unable to provide good learning environments at home, whether due to psychological, or emotional, or physical difficulties, or due to a lack of access to learning resources, or due to unsafe communities.

Whatever the reasons, there are many cases where children are placed in formal educational institutions even when they or their parents would prefer them to be learning more naturally and organically in their homes and in their communities, and the question becomes, at least for me, how might we enable these children to make the best of necessity and find room for learning in the gaps of institutionalized education.  Rather than unschooling or homeschooling, how can we help children to practice what we might call counter-schooling?

I do not have a definitive set of answers to this question, and I would welcome the ideas and experiences of others on the subject, but here are a few preliminary principles that I think should characterize this kind of counter-schooling:

1) Most obviously, parents need to model self-directed learning in the home, pursuing their own learning interests, making use of community resources like libraries and friends, keeping learning materials like books and films and whatever else in the home.  Both of my children have black hardbound notebooks for their drawing and writing, not because I told them that they needed to do this, but because they saw me writing my own notes in these kinds of books and because children model themselves after their parents.  I merely had to model this way of learning myself and give them the books when they asked.  They did the rest.

2) Parents need to support the learning interests of their children by connecting them to the full resources of their communities, from peers who have similar interests, to other adults with the knowledge to offer help and apprenticeship, to libraries and books and computers, to trips and excursions, and to whatever else.  This is not a matter of scheduling children with activities that are supposed to be good for them.  Nor is it a matter of granting them whatever whim they happen to have at the moment.  It is a matter of providing them with the resources that they need in order to follow the learning that really interests them.  My eldest son, for example, is intrigued by photography, so we have a camera that he can use, and a place where he can upload them to show his friends.  My youngest, on the other hand, spends hours drumming on things and plunking on the piano, so we have a musician friend come over once a week and play musical games with him.  In neither case have we started them on some sort of program that would confine their desire to learn and to do things within the constraints of classes and grades and levels.  Instead, we try to offer them informal and inexpensive  opportunities to follow their interests.

3) Parents need to help their children counter the demands of school by modifying assignments, reducing homework, and pulling their children out of school whenever possible.  If children are going to be in school, they will need their parents to advocate on their behalf in order to mitigate the influence of the institutional environment.  Children need space and time to discover and pursue the learning that interests them, and they will not have space and time if they are always doing homework and always stuck in a classroom.  Children cannot be failed in Ontario for not doing their homework, so parents can help their children to modify some assignments in alignment with their interests and to discard others entirely.  Ontario also allows for children to attend school part time, at least in theory, and we know several families who take advantage of this provision either by having their kids attend on the half days when a parent is working, or by pulling their kids out of school around a shiftwork schedule.

4) Members of the community need to take their roles as learning models seriously, acting as mentors, allowing children to apprentice with them, and including children in their own learning whenever possible.  I have creative writing sessions at my house, for example, for both homeschooled kids and for kids whose parents take them out of school for the afternoon.  These kids are working on a collection of their short stores that they will publish through on online self-publishing site.  They decided on this project themselves, and they spend their time at my place reading their stories to one another and helping each other improve them.

These are some of the ways that I think we might encourage children to learn counter to the institutions that they are sometimes forced to occupy, but I would be interested in any further suggestions that others might have.

Though I am a proponent of home schooling in many of its guises, I am actually a little wary of the term.  Its connotations are too much about schooling and too little about learning for me to be completely comfortable with it, and it seems to imply that either children are educated at school or they are educated at home, where the fact is that all children, wherever they are more formally educated, need to be learning in the home, because there is much that formal education does not and can not teach us.

So, though my kids are not yet old enough that I am forced to put them in formal education of some sort, and though my wife and I have not yet decided whether we will actually home school our kids when they come to that age, we are already learning at home, not necessarily in very formalized ways, but intentionally and constantly.

As part of this process, I was looking for a way that my kids could express what they are learning in ways that are not just assignments, in ways that are relevant to them, and so I have decided to make a blog that I am calling Ethan and Marlon’s Field Journal.  Though I am doing most of the typing, my kids are directing all of the content.  It is a place where they can tell their stories, show their pictures, and link to the things that interest them in what we are learning. They are very excited about the idea, and I am just as excited to see them learning at home.

As you will probably have gathered on your own by now, very few of my interests lie in the realms of science or mathematics, but this was not always the case.

I was very interested in botany and entomology in my early teens.  During the summers that I spent with my father and brothers at the hunting camp on Manitoulin Island, I used to go for long walks, taking specimens of anything that seemed interesting.  I would dissect, pin, arrange, bottle, and collect things.  I would grind them and make infusions out of them and even paint with them as  pigments.  It was amateur science mixed with some strange instinct to herbalism and alchemy, all born out of months spent in the midst of nature without much else by way of distraction.

I was also fascinated by some of the more or less philosophical questions that mathematics raises.  I can remember pondering for hours about what zero was, for example.  If it was not a number, then I wanted to know what it was precisely, and this was my first flirtation with the idea that nothingness is actually necessary to thingness, not just as a placeholder, but in essence.

Unfortunately, as I have recounted to many people over the years, these kinds of interests were soundly beaten out of me by the very people who were supposed to be teaching me about them.  One mathematics teacher, for example, came by my desk one day to ask what exactly I was doing.  I showed her my notebook and explained that I was trying to work out the nature of zero.  She told me to stop fooling around and start doing my homework.  I never did any kind of mathematics again except under compulsion, and I dropped the subject entirely as soon as I was able.

A whole semester of memorizing the parts of a cell, for reasons that were never explained to me in any way, had a similar effect on my interest in biology, and my chemistry teacher the following semester actually told me, only two weeks into the course, that I should drop it because I was most likely to fail it anyway.  I ended up taking Science in Society instead, where we baked bread and wrote poems about scientific principles and mostly did very little of anything.

Since that time, however, I have found any number of books that have appealed to the initial interest that I had in science and mathematics, as rudimentary and uninformed as that interest was.  Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings was the first such book I can remember.  Its story engaged me so thoroughly that it inspired me to read further about dopamine and to learn more about chemistry than I ever did in any class. Its attraction for me was that it situates a particular scientific problem in its narrative context.  The reader is invited to identify with the scientist and with the patients and with the story.  The science becomes meaningful because it is a part of a story, and it was this story and that caused me to go beyond Sack’s book to some of the more technical details of his work.

This is one of the reasons why I encourage my students to read Robert Adams’ The Land and Literature of England if they are interested in the history of English literature.  As opposed to most history textbooks, it employs an interested narrative rather than trying to achieve some kind of disinterested objectivity.  It revels in the anecdotal and the tangential, even when it admits that some of these things are a little suspect historically.  It makes the historical study of literature into a series of tales that could be shared over a few pints, assuming that you are the sort of person who would share literary stories of any kind over a few pints, which I must assuredly am.  I find, invariably, that this narrative of English literature not only entertains and informs the students who bother to read it, but that it also encourages them to go to the historical documents themselves.  The story not only helps them to learn the basics.  It also creates the desire to learn more deeply.

I am writing about all this now because I have just finished another of these books:  Colin Tudge’s The Secret of Trees.  The front cover of my edition proclaims that it is “a love-letter to trees,” but it is more accurately a love story about trees, a story that goes back millions of years and is by no means finished yet.  Tudge does not at all shy away from the technical details of his subject, giving introductions to plant biology, natural history, and botanical classification, among other things, but neither does he dwell on them.  They are simply included as elements of his larger narrative, and this narrative, written as only a lover can write, inspires its readers to love trees too.  More than that, it gave meaning and interest to some of the mere facts of biology that were inflicted on me in highschool.

If some teacher, any teacher, had thought to tell me the story of how mitochondria, and other organelles as well, probably originated as independent simple cells and then invaded other single cells in order to form complex cells, this would have lent a whole lot more meaning to the apparently random shapes that I was labeling in my notes.  If anybody had taken the time to explain how plants use hormones to respond to their environment, I would have had a meaningful point of entry into chemistry.  Yet everyone was so busy trying to transmit information that they failed to make the information meaningful.  Everyone was too busy, too scientific, too objective, and too educated to tell a story.

Yet stories are how we learn, certainly as children, and also, if we are willing to admit it, as adults.  I understand that scientific papers and mathematical proofs serve their purpose, and I am not suggesting that we do without them.  I am only arguing that these things remain mostly meaningless without the context of their stories, and I am also perhaps suggesting that the increasing irrelevance of academia for many people has to do with its inability to remember and recount the stories that give its work meaning. It is these stories that inspire people to learn more, inspire them to love what they learn, and so these stories need to be shared more often.

As a teacher, I do not prepare a lesson.  I prepare only myself.  I prepare myself to teach, to model, and even, perhaps especially, to fail.  I do not offer my knowledge.  I only offer myself, with my knowledge certainly, and with my experience, but also with my failures and inadequacies.  No amount of lesson preparation can covera  poverty of self-preparation, and this self-preparation is not a matter of a few hours the night before class.  It is a matter of a life lived.  I prepare myself to teach with every moment that I live, for good or for ill.  I am always preparing to teach, and I can only hope that I am preparing well.

I was reflecting on this past semester and regretting that I was unable to host the class at my house for a party afterward, when I began to recall the occasions when I was myself  invited as  a student into the homes of my teachers and professors.   In university, I can remember attending  a few post-course parties at the home of Daniel Fischlin and Martha Nandorfy.  I have also had coffee at the home of several of my professors, including Kenneth Graham and Michael Keefer and others whose names now escape me.  I even had one professor, one of those names that I cannot now remember, who conducted one of her classes in her home.  There were many other occasions when I met with my professors socially in more or less public venues, of course, but there were only these very few when I was invited to meet with them in their homes, and these few remain significant to me even today.

As I was thinking about these things, I remembered suddenly an earlier time, almost certainly the first such time, when my highschool Latin class was invited to a Saturnalia party at the home of our teacher, Magistra Bell.   I had taken her class almost by mistake, mostly because it was not French, which still seems like very good reasoning to me these many years later.  I soon discovered that I quite enjoyed Latin, however, not the subject per se, though it was far better than French, but the class itself, the way it was taught, the way that I found myself learning in it. At the time, I would have identified this enjoyment as a product of Magistra Bell’s academic accomplishments.  She had her doctorate, which was not very common among my highschool teachers, and she had published several books in her subject area, including the second unit of our curriculum, the Cambridge Latin Course, and two collections of Latin literature, Amor et Amicitia and Imperium et Civitas.  I have since had the misfortune, however, of encountering many people who, despite any number of degrees and publications, are completely inept as teachers, and I would say now that Magistra Bell’s success as a teacher came from something else entirely, from the same attitude towards her students that motivated her to invite them into her home when no other teachers would.

It was not that there was anything magical about this invitation, of course.  Merely inviting students to your home will not make you a good teacher, and not all good teachers are able to invite their students into their home in this way.  Rather, it is the attitude that this kind of invitation reveals that is significant, an attitude that respects students, as Magistra Bell did, not as peers in knowledge, which could only be a false and unproductive respect, but as peers in learning, as fellow learners who were beginning on the same journey that she was still following, even if she had progressed much further along it.  This kind of respect does not minimize the greater knowledge and experience that the teacher brings to the process of learning, but neither does it assume that this knowledge and experience makes the teacher essentially different from the learner.  Rather, it understands both teacher and learner to be performing the same function, though at different stages and in different ways.

The result of this respect, of this understanding, is that the distinction between teacher and student is no longer of the kind that should prevent them from interacting with each other in ways that go beyond a formal and hierarchical relationship.  While there is a level of respect that will always remain, the relationship between teacher and student becomes of a kind that is open to a certain intimacy and informality, becomes of a kind that is able to offer and receive an invitation, even an invitation to the home.

This way of relating to students is not without risk, certainly, but it is a risk justified by tremendous value.  I recall vividly walking into Magistra Bell’s house, and I recollect, perhaps falsely now, that there were bookshelves that she had built and window coverings that she had woven and pottery that she had thrown, and I remember the books, the many books, and all of this produced in me an impression of someone who was learning and growing and doing things herself, quite apart from the role in which I saw her every day.  Her invitation to me, to come to know her beyond the classroom, even in such a small way, was a real gift, a gift of a sort that had never been offered to me before and has very seldom been offered since.

All of which is to say that I owe Magistra Bell a considerable debt, and that I have now recalled it, and that I hope in the future to repay it by offering the same gift to my own students in turn.

Learning requires failure.

In order to learn, it is necessary that we come to a place where we fail, where are be confronted by our failure, so that we will be forced to learn, before anything else, how to learn, because it is precisely when we fail that we are forced to go beyond ourselves to our teachers and our mentors and our peers and our resources and our technologies, and it is then that we can begin to learn.  If we are never allowed to fail, we will never learn how to learn.  Failure drives learning.  Learning requires failure.

Let me give you an example.  Something like twelve years ago, I decided that I wanted to learn how to make pie pastry.  I had tried to make it more than once, and I had observed my mother making it any number of times, but none of my attempts had been terribly successful, and I wanted to learn to do it properly.  I found several recipes.  I compared them.  I tried them.  In every case, there was something not working quite right.  The results were edible, but the dough was never very workable.  The process was frustrating.  The product was unattractive.  I was failing.

So I decided to go to a master: my paternal grandmother, who made two pies every weekday for many years of her life.  She lives on Manitoulin Island, and the next time I was there I had her lead me through her process.  I did exactly what she did, side by side, every step of the way, and somehow hers worked and mine still failed.  The consistency of her dough was perfect.  She could flip it over, fold it into sixes, and cut designs in it, then unfold it onto the pie like a work of art.  The consistency of my dough was at first too dry and then, after a little water was added, too moist.  I could get it into the pans, and it tasted fine, but it was certainly nothing to take to the county fair.

I despaired, but I persisted, and I experimented with every recipe I could find: with shortening or with lard, with egg or without, a dash of vinegar or not, less water or more, one temperature or another.  I failed and I succeeded, to one degree or another, time after time, and I began to find something that worked for me, though it is not something that will likely work for you.  There was no single secret.  There was only trying one thing or another, watching one person or another, and practicing, much practicing, so that I can now fold my dough into sixes and cut designs in it, though I rarely bother.

This is not the end of things, however, because learning by failing never really ends.  The other day I saw a cherry pie with the thickest, most unbelievable double-crust, so I talked to the woman who had made it.  She explained how she cuts the top crust about an inch too wide, so that there is a healthy bit overhanging the whole of the pie.  Then she tucks the overhanging pastry under the edge of the bottom crust, so that the edge is now three layers thick, and she squeezes these layers together to form her crust.

Of course, I should hardly have to say by now that I needed to try this technique for myself.  I should also hardly have to say that I failed.  Tucking the top pastry under the bottom was a little more delicate than I thought, and my first attempt could only have been called, even with all possible sensitivity, misshapen.  The second was much better, and future attempts should only improve as I get practice.

This is how learning works.  It works through failure.

I had the opportunity to appear on CFRU’s Family Matters show this morning, talking about fathers who stay at home and who homeschool their children.  Though both of my kids are preschoolers, which probably disqualifies me as a homeschooler in a technical sense, there are few enough homeschooling fathers that just my interest in the idea qualified me to appear on the show.  I am rarely as satisfied with what I say as I am with what I write, and this was the case again this morning, but it was an interesting experience for me, and I do not think that my comments misrepresent me.

Those who are interested in hearing the audio can find it in CFRU’s  Program Archive, but the site does not provide links to individual programs, so you will need to select “Sunday: 2009-11-21″ from the initial list and then “8:00:00 – Family Matters” on the list of the day’s programs.