Let’s Protect Our Protectors

I have noticed with great pride and thanksgiving many motorists moving over to put a traffic lane between our patrolmen and their vehicles, as the law now requires. Thank you!

I recall visiting the Headquarters of the Highway Patrol several years ago and I was so emotionally moved when I looked at the photographs of all the patrolmen and women who have given their lives in the service of we, the people. So very many, mostly young as I recall, who lost their lives in the line of duty. Many of these precious lives were lost on our Texas highways in traffic accidents. So many were hit by motorist while performing their duties.

What a horrendous loss. To see their faces and read the stories of their dedication and service was very moving. I thought not only of them, but of their precious families. I tried to imagine the wives and other loved ones, especially the children, left behind with no father or mother to come home to.

Having grown up alone, with no father or brothers or sisters made my visit especially meaningful. My mother was a working mom – for several years working two eight hour jobs to pay for my medical bills, in the late 40′s and early 50′s. The financial burden was just the beginning. She had to endure an uncertain future with no husband to share the responsibilities with or to lean on. And my stark childhood was truly alone and difficult.

These are thoughts that one lives with daily and forever. And these remembrances weigh heavily upon me as I think of our brothers and sisters in law enforcement and the tremendously difficult, and above all, dangerous jobs they undertake every day for you and for me.

Please take care of them. Whenever you see a patrol car beside the road – give that officer the safer margin of space he or she needs while performing the duties of their office. Remember the precious families of the patrolmen and women. Let’s move our cars over one extra lane to keep them safe. They are, after all, dedicating their lives to keep us safe so that we can return home safe to our families.

My precious wife, LeVonna, and I have created a new scholarship to honor one of our own – the Floyd and Brenda Heckman Scholarship. Floyd serves Tarrant County as a Deputy Sheriff and his daughter, Katie, has been one of our scholars at the Anderson School. We are extremely proud of Floyd and wish to honor him, his family and his service to our citizens. This scholarship provides for fifty percent of the tuition and fees to attend the school. Parents who serve in any branch of law enforcement, local, state or federal, are encouraged to contact Dr. Anderson at the school if interested in taking advantage of the Floyd and Brenda Heckman Scholarship Fund. In addition a full Heckman Scholarship is available to the children of officers who have become disabled or given their lives in the line of duty in the service of our communities, state or nation. Dr. Anderson may be contacted at 817-448-8484.

May God bless and keep all of our friends in law enforcement as they prove to be such a blessing to all of us.

In Every Child

In every life there is a Spark of the Divine. One cannot measure or even imagine the magnitude and immensity of it’s potential to change the world.

That Spark, my friend, dwells within you and the life of your child. It can never be extinguished. And it can ignite the world and be the light of salvation for a new human being, a new beginning, yes, a new tomorrow – so different and so new that our imagination may never dwell within it.

The flame of your child’s heart can fire the mind and engulf all that humanity desires. It can touch others so deeply that they will truly cherish the memory of your being beyond that you exist, even unto the distant dreams held constant in the firmament of man’s deepest desires – to live a life fulfilled, to love life beyond the self and to lift a lamp of hope and compassion so that others may see.

Take this new day, another dawn, and cherish it as God loves us. In every child is the gift of life, the essence of love.

The Poetry of You

To love someone other than yourself
Is the highest form of loving yourself,

For you come to love all humanity
And humanity becomes you.

And the greatest part of you
Becomes a part of everyone you come to love.

We are here for a purpose.
And it lies outside of ourselves
And the Noble Ideals we share.

It lives and breathes within the lives of others,
Not so fortunate as ourselves.
It lives as well as it may.

A child must possess the knowledge
That there is love,
That love exists,
And that it may be found
In you.

For a Mother and for Father
Love truly blossoms evermore
When children find:

“Tis true
There is poetry all around,
Beauty flows from everything,
But by far
The most beautiful poem
Is you.”

 - Wm. C. Anderson

The Blunt Truth About Children & Perscriptions

The acceptance by parents of chemical substances as a solution, indeed a quick fix, to the dilemmas of perceived behaviour problems places our children in peril. I say our children because every child is the son or daughter of us all.

It is an immorality beyond which we can never recover, the lost potential of our precious children – children that will never become all they could become. You, as a parent, will never realize, never know what they did not become. How could you? The chalkboard was erased before it could be read.

Let’s be blunt!

Parents, you have been deceived, lied to and mislead about drugs like Ritalin. And you have not been told the truth about your child.

Teachers and school administrators are totally unqualified by any measure of qualification in the field of medicine, without license or even one clock hour of class instruction in a school of medicine, pharmacy or even veterinary medicine or nursing. And many are effectively practising medicine without a license.

These highly unqualified educators have boldly coxed, ordered and even threatened our poor worry laden parents into accepting the very things they so opposed and feared for their children – drugs. Drugs for a simple, fast and apparently effective solution to a perceived problem: an active child mislabelled as “hyper” active. A curious and overly simplistic label that, in one felt stroke, discounts and negates the entire history of fields like psychology and in-depth studies in pharmacology.

A strange label to us because Mrs. Anderson and I never met a single “hyper” active child in over thirty years of working with children. Active children yes! Some very active, like our own son. But all normal and within easily measurable parameters of young human beings.

But teachers, medically unqualified and obviously unqualified in the fields of behaviour management, motivation and curriculum or instruction, have demanded and even brow beat our exhausted, overworked and more and more depressed parents. Parents not knowing who to turn to and eventually trusting the child’s teacher.

A truly  misplaced trust.

Guided by awesomely unknowledgeable and unqualified educators, parents literally rushed into a Doctor’s office with an agenda imposed upon their psyche by the overburdened, underfunded, ill prepared and highly trusted classroom teacher. A teacher who, typically, cannot possibly know, and who has little time to comprehend, the complexity of even a generalized cause and effect.

The cause: a normal, healthy and active child the teacher is unable or unwilling to motivate. She or he is constrained by so many elements, artificial definitions, financial limitations and bureaucratic or dogmatic burdens and barriers that the personalized needs of individual children can never be met.

The effect: a drugged up, compliant, sometimes nearly comatose child. A child forced into taking growth inhibiting, mind numbing, carcinogenic and ultimately disabling drugs which, taken long term and typically without appropriate monitoring, result in side effects that the poor parents simply had no awareness of. Unknown – unpredictable with NO longitudinal study!

“Oh My God! If I had only known!” We have heard parents exclaim. The loss of a child’s precious personality, the facial tics, the diminished curiosity and creativity, the potential of chromosomal abnormality, the loss of muscle mass, the strange developing inhibitions and many other yet unknown side effects and relational by-products resulting from effectively experimenting with our precious, and may I add, delicate children.

Do I still have your attention? Wake up!

Illegal drugs of a wide variety and easily available from a plethora of evil sources are destroying our children. And YOU, my dear parents, are a major contributor to their demise.

YOU were not armed with the knowledge or did not have the courage to stand up against even the legal and also easily available drugs of their earlier childhood. YOU communicated directly (remember taking them to the Doctor?) and effectively (remember insisting upon your child taking those pills?). YOU communicated to your trusting child that drugs are a fast and simple solution to problems. And now, in their not much later years, your children follow your example – and you are astonished.

Because of your trusting relationship, you became the most effective teacher known in history. You led your trusting child by example, and now, that child is grown and taking your example all the way to the alter and sacrificing their lives upon it, the pathway to which, was laden with chemical substances you approved of and effectively forced them to take.

The present situation has accurately been described by the media as an epidemic, even a tidal wave,  of prescription drugs. The percentages reported now approach fifteen to twenty percent of some school populations. My, what have we done?

But no more tears!

After reading this, you shall have known what we have done. Please get on the internet. Search the subject. Prepare yourself with real, significant and hard data. You shall be truly astonished at what you find. And please, trust in your own judgement!

Inform yourself and use good judgement and a heaping teaspoon of common sense (substitute this for the mindless and mind numbing drug you were going to force upon your innocent child),

If you do not do your homework, what you do will be among the most immoral acts of betrayal that can be imagined. You will have betrayed that which you held most dear in your life – your children.

Please, no more tears. This continent is awash with tears and drugs. Stop crying and turn on your computer and start reading instead. Your child can show you how to do that.

Society today doesn’t tell you how to deal with problems other than, “Taking a Pill”. And our society is very ill.

 

Freedom and its illusory opponents

There is something magical about freedom – almost indefinable. You cannot put your finger on its pulse, but you feel it. It is vibrant, alive, and deep inside you know it is the elixer, the lubricant of life. It is the answer! It solves all the problems we have, given time and dedication to its precepts and promises. But freedom has its illusory opponents.

And what have we done in this land of the free? We fell prey to the illusion that something exists more powerful, more dynamic and more liberating than individual feedom.

This illusion is control.It is egocentric and distorts everything it touches.

We find it enfolded especially within the complex layers of edicts, mandates and restrictions and strings tied to the money, our money by the way, that flows back to us through our schools.

Instead of measuring achievement and progress and giving the results to teachers and parents and kids to use as they would instinctively know, we use this valuable feedback to punish and, unbelieveably, to even abolish jobs, destroy the careers of dedicated instructors and even entire schools in an attempt to control events and people and progress. We have used it to bolster political careers and give credit where it is not understood, harmfully counter productive and not deserved.

With “No child left behind” we find drop out rates so high that, in numerous larger communities, nearly half of our children are left at the starting gate. Many are damaged beyond repair with little to no hope for a real future in this land so ripe with opportunity purchased with the blood of so many patriots. We do grave dishonor to them when we abolish freedom and hope for their children and their chidren’s children. And the instrument of their demise is the ego of control. Can we not see or do we not remember that so many Americans died for something called “Freedom”.

How can we see through this fog, this distortion of reality, this illusion? Have we really learned so little in all this time? Did we not take to heart the lessons our culture  has learned – that less is more, that free minds and open hearts and trust in the judgment of our friends we call teachers will give us the beauty we long for in the joy we seek for ourselves and our children.

There is no greater masterpiece of art on this planet than a truly happy child. And no greater artist to paint this portrait than a teacher with the freedom to create such joy!

Letter from Diane

We were happy to hear from Julie’s mom. It is always nice to hear about our former students. Thank you Diane for the update.

LETTER from Diane

Dynamics of creativity

I once read that the best thing you can do for the creative is to stay out of their way! There is more depth (and truth) to that statement than can be easily comprehended. With the assumption that creating something new is actually good for us (and there is growing doubt), let’s recognize that harvesting creativity demands an inordinate degree of freedom.

You may remember academic freedom. It was abolished in Texas around 1980 with a blunt instrument called the TABS test perpetuated to this day to maintain controlling impulses. It has been so destructive!

I have often viewed creatively precocious youth as singular works of art in themselves – to be cherished, enjoyed and, above all, protected. Children with the unique abilities to conceptualize non-linear constructs and ideas are very fragile. They are as frail as the fleeting thoughts they generate. And all are subjugated to their own self-esteem and to the thoughts they may be courageous enough to share.

Our minds are so linear in the process modality that it is almost impossible to create that which we are not predisposed to or are not familiar with. Few humans have ever had a truly original thought – a dynamic or even dangerous encounter with what is real or assumed to be known.

Our habituations evolve into our thought processes and become very real constraints to originality. And today few children are sheltered from the peer pressure and other negating factors that squelch creativity and dictate conformity. A truly creative young mind doesn’t stand a chance to blossom in an orchard that bears only one kind of fruit. I have discovered that extremely gifted children warehouse their thoughts when they fear what others may think of them, ideas that then evaporate.

Freedom from the fear to think and act on an idea is absolutely essential for society to profit from its most valuable natural resource – its gifted children. We need a non-judgmental environment coupled with an abundance of time, yes, with absolutely nothing to do. This time becomes fertile soil compelling the mind to wander and explore.

It is not enough to simply be positive. Parents and educators must understand the dynamics of creative endeavor: providing this time (totally unscheduled and unstructured), permission and encouragement to make mistakes, large doses of spontaneous humor (hey, it may not make sense but it sure is funny!), exposure to many, many other ideas, books, unusual people, places (place is truly a great teacher), even confessions Kirby and Katy are great friends
(I had the same dumb idea, twice, and I survived it both times!), stories (so what if half of them are not true – what do you think the true nature of reality is anyway? Really? Well, no one else knows for sure, so call it fiction. And throw in a good nap and a great meal with an entree no one can pronounce.

Life is a perilous, ridiculous, creative, funny, unpredictable, enjoyable and loving adventure. Or it becomes nothing at all

Alex Grubbs appointed to the United States Air Force Academy

Our congratulations to Alex Grubbs, a 2010 graduate of the Anderson Private School, upon his appointment to the United States Air Force Academy. As a freshman he is meeting with tremendous success, especially in Tennis. The following is a recent message from Linda Grubbs as she updates us on his many accompishments.

Hi, Y’all,

Alex played in his second collegiate tournament this past weekend.  He caught a cold the night before he left for Boise State and did not do great in singles, but he and his new partner, Taylor, won the doubles title!  He is a very happy camper right now (and today’s a holiday!)  You can read here:

http://www.goairforcefalcons.com/sports/m-tennis/recaps/101010aab.html

Hugs,

Linda

Freshman Alex Grubbs

Oct. 10, 2010

Two Air Force doubles teams reached the finals of their respective flight Sunday as the Falcons wrapped up action at the Boise State Fall Classic. Senior Taylor Soster and freshman Alex Grubbs rallied from a 5-0 deficit to win the Orange flight.

Kevin Grubbs attending University of Texas at Arlington

Kevin Grubbs was recently appointed to the Board of Directors of the Anderson Private School as Director of Special Programs. Kevin has served in a variety of capacities including tutoring and teaching. Dr. and Mrs. Anderson deeply appreciate his numerous contributions to the school and his devotion to our children.

 

Kevin is presently a senior at the University of Texas at Arlington and is looking forward to graduation.

As one of our precious students passed me in the hallway she whispered softly, “I miss Scarlett”.  And I shared the sentiment that I missed Scarlett too.

I remember the day Scarlett arrived so many years earlier. She was the runt of a litter of 14 puppies. There wasn’t much left that mother nature gave to the last puppy born from this large family of English Setters. She needed so much. This female puppy eventually became a member of our family and lived with us for 17 and 1/2 years and in all that time never came in heat. She was remarkable -  at the same time the most valuable and the most worthless dog I have known. And we truly loved her.

She had in her blood line five national champions. The problem was – all five names were the same. The in-breeding produced an animal that nobody wanted, but us.

When the end finally came for her I could not bear the thought of losing her so I asked my dear friend and older student, Sam Latham, to bury her. And he most graciously consented. It proved to be his last of many acts of kindness to me and this school. And now Scarlett remains buried in our hearts and vibrant in our memories, with eyes still searching ours for a big hug and a kind word of welcome.

Life provides us with a few moments, precious moments, to capture a reflection of real love. And today I share one of those with you in the photograph of Scarlett with one of her many friends. The student is Katy and she is the student that brought tears to my eyes yesterday with the softly spoken and gentle words, “I miss Scarlett”.

Well, I miss her too.

Our friends, be they large or small, children or pets, wild ducks or even a small spider hard at work spinning a intricate web, teach us so much about love and laughter and life. They teach us to greet each day with joy, to have fun and play and savor the the flavors of life. And importantly,  teach us to be kind. They are among life’s greatest teachers. And the greatest lesson they offer is to love one another unconditionally.

Scarlett, in her dying breath, as I held her in my trembling arms, taught me one last lesson – that life is brief at best. We need to open up our arms and never pass by any living creature without sharing a moment of joy, for tomorrow may never come again.

wi