While Cummings' daughter Alice was still in public school, she struggled with long division throughout the third grade. However, with a combination of help from her teacher and Cummings, she finally mastered it near the end of the year. Cummings was then flummoxed when, during the first week of fourth grade, she realized that Alice had told her teacher she couldn't do long division and – to prevent herself from having to advance to new challenges – was planning to pretend not to know how to do it the rest of the school year. "By now I had observed her zoom through a page of long division problems in under three minutes when promised a bribe-Barbie," Cummings wrote. "Quite miraculously, Alice re-conquered long division with remainders during her last week of fourth grade. She was fond of her teacher, and I suspect this was her year-end gift to him."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
