For Wilshire Baptist Church
While taking a long walk Sunday afternoon on one of Garland’s trails, we heard the familiar cry of a red-tailed hawk and stopped to look up. There it was, soaring with its brown and white striated wings stretched out and silhouetted against the puffy white and gray clouds. We watched and listened and wondered what it was doing and why it kept crying out.
We resumed walking and soon we heard the crying again, but this time we heard more voices. We looked up to see that the hawk had been joined by another, smaller hawk, and before long there were three more. Then we knew what we were seeing: it was time for flying lessons.
There’s a science to the development of school curriculum that has been perfected over the decades. I’m not an educator, but as I understand, the developing brain is ready to receive, comprehend and learn certain things at certain ages. An interruption of that timeline — especially a long one — can lead to “learning loss,” where children forget some of what they have learned.
Learning loss is usually associated with long summer vacations; some studies indicate students can lose up to a month of what they learned in the previous year. Thus, the importance of summer reading programs and the like. But there’s been talk among educators throughout the COVID-19 pandemic about a deeper, more serious learning loss as children have been isolated from their teachers, their lessons and each other.
I’ve heard talk of this in some church circles as well. We Baptists have led the modern church in the idea of graded “Sunday School” curriculums that roll out Bible stories and concepts about faith and spiritual matters at ages where they can be comprehended and assimilated with a child’s life experiences and perspective. There is a fear among some that this past year of pausing that process may lead to a sort of “spiritual learning loss” that may be difficult to fix.
Sunday after our walk, we got out our garden trowels and planted flats of flowers that we bought from a Wilshire friend’s Scout troop. As we worked, a couple walked by and stopped a moment to compliment us on our yard. They said their boys were at the church just a block away and they were walking through the neighborhood until time to pick them up again. Thinking about that later, I realized their boys were engaged in some kind of Sunday evening children’s program that was no doubt helping to keep them on track in their spiritual growth. Like the young hawks we saw earlier in the day, they were at “flying school,” learning how to soar and glide on the winds of life, as it were.
As we watched the hawks earlier in the day, I began reciting a few lines from John Denver’s “Eagle and the Hawk.” My memory was a little fuzzy, so I looked it up and we listened to it as we drove home. These words stand out:
Come dance with the west wind and touch on the mountain tops,
Sail over the canyons and up to the stars.
And reach for the heavens and hope for the future,
And all that we can be and not what we are.
“Reach for the heavens” and “all that we can be and not what we are” — that’s the heart of what education is about, whether the lessons are in reading, writing and arithmetic at school, or in faith, hope and love at church.
We probably won’t know for a while what the damage has been from the pandemic in terms of learning loss and getting children ready for the future. I suspect we’ll find out soon enough. Meanwhile, a friend moaned recently about the taxes she has to pay for public education. She doesn’t have children and she doesn’t think she should have to pay so much.
I don’t have children either, but I’m glad to pay whatever is needed to make sure future generations are prepared for life — theirs and mine too. Someday they’ll be the ones making the big decisions that impact us all. I want to know they’ve been well trained in how to soar and thrive no matter which way the winds are blowing.