Fifth-graders were required to learn about the Constitution, and Morey decided to have his class act out how a law would be passed. Students were asked to submit five bills they thought the class should adopt and he then chose the best two. One suggested that the class have "professional Fridays," where students would dress as if they were going to a workplace, and the other required healthy snacks as a way to combat the nation's obesity problem. "The students' enthusiasm surprised him," Berler wrote. 'I thought they would pass one [Professional Fridays] and veto the other, never bringing it to a vote, and we'd move on to the next lesson,' he said. Instead, the students took their legislative duties seriously. After some debate, both bills passed out of committee, then passed out of the full House and Senate, only to have the Senate committee reject the House's Healthy Snack Bill and the House committee do the same with the Senate's Professional Fridays bill. Mr. Morey watched with amazement as Marbella, the self-appointed head of the House committee, suddenly took charge. Applying her persuasive skills as adeptly as President Lyndon Johnson might have, cajoling this committee member, arm-twisting that one, she muscled a rewritten Professional Fridays bill first through the committee and then the full House.... The Healthy snack bill eventually passed, too, with amendments of its own."
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.
