You have to wait until minute 13 of this 18 minute video to hear it, but President Barack Obama, in a Dec. 21 visit to the Washington D.C. Boys and Girls Club, does a little evangelizing about the “reason we celebrate Christmas” after reading the Polar Express to the kids and listening to a litany of multimedia acronyms on their wish lists. He does a good job, and when one child talks about giving gifts instead of just receiving them, Obama delivers a little Three Wise Men theology. Anyone who still clings to the “he’s a Muslim in hiding” conspiracy theory would do well to check it out.

I love Christmas, and it isn’t because of the presents. It’s because of the story. (GodBlogging warning: If you’re not into Christmas, are a non-believer, or just Grinch, stop reading here.) Christmas is the theology of God loving us, nothing else. We didn’t (we don’t) have to do anything except accept that love and grace and love back. It is very hard to describe. I mean, I could tell you the story, connecting the verses in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, bringing the annunciation of Gabriel and the tax-registration in the City of David and the shepherds and the wise men and Joseph’s dream and the manger birth and the Wise Men’s visit as done in popular media, but I cannot express what happens deep within me when hearing the Biblical recitation or when setting up my family’s Nativity scene.

So, I offer you this article about having a Merry Christmas and, for clergy who might be wondering how they can make their Christmas eve and Christmas day sermons great, you could do far worse that take a page from this guy’s message.

In other news, the Vatican’s official paper gave props to The Simpsons on Tuesday, (more…)

In June 2007, I wrote a column about a young Tucsonan who had come back from traveling the states to open a dance studio in Tucson’s South Park neighborhood. Joseph Rodgers had attended a Tucson Town Hall that summer where there was plenty of hand-wringing about what was wrong with Tucson but not a whole lot of people stepping up with concrete answers to the question, “What can YOU do to fix Tucson?”

Rodgers, a professional ballet dancer who had come home to Tucson to care for his elderly father, stood up, in a big way, and said he’d offer a year of free ballet lessons to any kid from the impoverished South Side. The 40-something African-American had no studio at the time and no business plan. What he had was gumption and a dream to help kids the way he had been helped by dance.

And now, receiving the Christmas letter from Dancing in the Streets Arizona, I just want to squeeze his cheeks and say, “You go!” Rodgers (who, with his wife Soleste, is still a volunteer with DISAZ) now has a dance studio, a board of directors, 141 students, and, I’m betting, lots of happiness. Next weekend, after your Christmas happenings, you can go see his troupe of youngsters perform at Pima Community College in the Nutcracker.

This is the thing that got me most in the letter: One of the current students came to DITSAZ to complete court-ordered community service. After helping last Christmas with the Nutcracker performance, he decided he wanted to dance, and began taking lessons. He follows the rules (discipline is a big part of dance, and a big part of Rodgers’ program), dances several days a week and is learning to lift weights so he can develop the strength to partner with female dancers safely (doing all those lifts and holds takes muscle). He got a job to pay for his ballet shoes and brought his grades up enough at school so he could join the band. He’s hooked on performing as a musician and a dancer – not hooked on drugs or performing as a gang member. He is succeeding, he will graduate high school, and maybe, with Rodgers’ mentorship, go to college.

All because one guy stood up and committed to making a tangible difference for a part of Tucson that normally only gets noticed for its crime rates. You go, Joey, and I hope to see the result of your love and dedication on Dec. 26!

image courtesy of Richard Whitmire

It’s Christmas, and I have a request for fathers out there: Buy your sons some boy-friendly books and then read with them. If you’re rubbing your head thinking, “What the heck’s a boy-friendly book,” chances are you’ve let Mom handle the literacy efforts in your household. Time to change, because in spite of No Child Left Behind, boys are being left behind in droves and fathers are a key part of pulling them out of the abyss.

After decades of GrlPwr, female-only science and technology camps, mentoring for the fairer sex and teacher education focused on “catching girls up,” there are some critical minds noticing that little Johnny’s failing and, oh by the way, that’s a serious issue for U.S. international competitiveness.

One of those minds is that of Richard Whitmire, author of the recently published Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System that’s Leaving Them Behind. If you’re the parent of a son, school reform advocate, elementary school teacher, or, most importantly a school administrator or member of any of the school boards in the Tucson metroplex: you need to read this book, sooner rather than later. And, Dads? You need to read with your boys more than you play World fo Warcraft with them.

“Fathers need to model literacy,” said Whitmire. “Fathers tend to throw the football with their sons and read to their daughters, and that doesn’t work anymore.”

Whitmire, a former editorial writer for USA Today and immediate past president of National Education Writer’s Association, is uniquely qualified to write about this issue, IMHO, because of his reporting 10 years ago about the AAUW study that claimed schools were discriminating against girls due to such heavy data as boys aggressively calling out answers in class (instead of raising their hands) and teachers favoring boys by encouraging them in math and science.

I wrote about the same study in my then-weekly column for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and, like Whitmire, I basically parroted what was being reported by the AAUW. There’s only one problem with that: a brief glance at the statistics of who graduates from high school, who goes to college and, most importantly, who graduates from college, shows that girls are doing just fine, thank you very much, but the boys? No so good.

Richard Whitmire

“I reported (the AAUW) uncritcally and later realized it was boys, not girls, who were struggling. I saw it personally, in the extended family and neighborhood, and also in the national data,” said Whitmire, the father of two girls. “I have 10 nephews and nieces and you can draw a line right down the middle of them and the girls were all sailing through academically and the boys were struggling – they were disinterested in school. The girls clearly wanted to do well in school and the boys’ could care less.”

But why do the boys care less? (more…)