Morey saw that two students in his class, Chandler and Carlos, were popular and that the other children would often follow their example. The teacher asked Chandler to set a good example but wasn't sure if his message had gotten through. One afternoon, however, the class arrived back from lunch before Morey did. The students knew they were supposed to read silently to themselves, but no one did. "Chandler, who sat near the door, heard Mr. Morey coming down the hall," Berler wrote. "'Let's get out our nonfiction books,' he called to the class. The children faced Chandler. They saw he was serious. Immediately, everyone – even Carlos – settled down. By the time Mr. Morey entered the room, all the students were reading. Chandler couldn't believe it – the whole class had listened... Before the week was out, Carlos spoke to him privately about changing, too. Chandler was certain that he'd turned a corner.... Then a few days later, briefly, he lost it again. This time, without being asked, he apologized to Mr. Morey. 'I guess I'm going to have to keep working on controlling myself, because people say in middle school the teacher's not going to deal with that. I hope by the end of the year I'll be a new person,' Chandler said."
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.
