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 It
begins innocently enough, while checking homework of a VERY BRIGHT
grandchild (here, see his picture!) you notice instructions:
Describe in your own words ‘lower latitudes’ .“ To this he has
written, “Low ground between two hills.”
Tactfully
you suggest this answer needs revision, and he wants to know what is
wrong with it. You explain that latitudes are imaginary lines,
circling the earth, marking degrees of distance north and south from
the equator. “Lower latitudes” would be those lines, or the area
they define, closest to the equator.
With
equal tact he praises you for knowing what the book said (he
emphasizes deliberately), but the teacher said, “Answer in your
own words.”
Good
joke! You laugh, tousle his head, and marvel at that sharp Turner
wit. (We’ll give his dad credit some other time.) “Well, boy,
you just put down there, ‘land close to equator’.”
He
is very patient with you, since you don’t understand these
matters, so he says simply, “Grandpa, those are your words,
but the teacher wants me to put this in my words.”
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Hmmm,
Yes! Have an apple son, and I’ll figure this out. Now the boy is
brilliant, so— of course— only nine years old and already he has
grasped the very essence of today’s philosophy. All truth is
relative and subject to each individual’s interpretation. I read
the book with my background, he reads it with his. What is truth
to me may not be truth to him. After all, the teacher said
“In your own words.” Only a Grandpa who does not understand this
generation would make a fuss over that.
His
mother notices the silence and wants to know what’s holding up the
homework. Well, you can explain. If the teacher is sufficiently
filled with love she will accept this answer as “genuine
self-expression.” We must be careful about adverse criticisms—
starting negative vibrations, and all that stuff. Besides, you do
not know all there is to know about latitudes, or latitudinarians.
Here is opportunity to practice unity in diversity.
Then
mother comes in swinging a globe like a female Atlas. That smart
grandson hurries to his room to correct his homework; Grandpa
returns to his paper, and mother to her ironing. Mothers are like
that, yeah they are!
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