July 28

July 28, 2013

Dear Pat,

I had a nice morning at church. You know that they say that when churches are meeting it’s the most segregated hour in our country. Well, it’s not like that at my church. We’re a small congregation, and predominately made up of African Americans, but more White people like me are finding a welcome community there. I wanted to tell you, though, about a couple of things that we talked about this morning. I don’t know if you attend church anywhere or not, or even if you believe in God. Really, that is not any of my business in terms of how well you do your job.

This morning our pastor talked about the Lord’s Prayer. You might or might not be familiar with it, but in any case, he pointed out something that I think can be useful to all of us no matter our belief. He noticed that the prayer uses the pronouns “we” and “us” a whole lot. That makes the prayer really a prayer that everyone gets what they need – daily bread, forgiveness, and so on. That’s really why I’m not one of those people that want to see bad things happen to you, but I am willing to share things I notice and things that I know to try to help you out in your job.

I know you have had the opportunity to meet a couple of people from my church already when they were arrested, but they didn’t see you. One was my pastor, and one was a friend of mine who sings in the choir with me. I know that they would join me in my invitation to you to visit my church some Sunday as well. We are very friendly people, and I know most would be interested in talking to you. I hope you take me up on this or speaking to my classes since you didn’t make my family reunion. Maybe next year when you’re not so busy.

As I’ve mentioned before, I teach future teachers. It is an awesome job and a great responsibility that I’m not giving up no matter how difficult you make it for me. I’ve noticed a couple of bills you have signed or are fixing to sign that you may want to take a second look at. First, what is the purpose of requiring that cursive writing be taught in the schools? It isn’t tested, and while it might be nice to learn, I have found that if you don’t have a test for something then it doesn’t really get a lot of attention from teachers. Will a test be developed? I really hope not since it’s not really a skill that people need when they get out of school. They need to sign their name, but that doesn’t even have to be cursive. I know that you understand the importance of computer use since you are requiring schools to do away with all print textbooks in the next few years, so I’m having trouble understanding the need for cursive even more. Please help me with that!

I was concerned that you are going to sign into law, if you haven’t already, a bill that will require seventh grade teachers to lie to their students! I don’t know if you know many seventh graders, but I have to say that this is ingenious on your part! I teach a class called “teaching adolescents” where we talk about adolescent development and seventh graders are just at that age where they don’t believe hardly anything an adult tells them! That’s what makes teaching teenagers so tricky. But if we tell them a lie – like that abortions cause miscarriage – then they for sure will not believe that! Great idea!

Finally, I don’t know if you read your local newspaper, but I do. The News and Observer is saying a lot of things about you these days, so I hope you take a look! They have a lot of facts on their side, so I hope you pay attention. One thing they said was that you haven’t read the entire voter ID bill, but that you are still going to sign it. Would you like me to come read it to you? I can definitely do that, and then we can set up tutoring sessions so that I can help you be able to read things on your own in the future. As I said the other day, it’s really not a good idea to sign things without reading them! You can get into trouble in the future when you do things like that!

Well, I need to leave soon for my second job. I play music in a bar on Sunday afternoons. I don’t make much money, but every little bit helps!

Take care,

Nancy

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