"Give me that old time religion"

Please permit me a blog post of a personal nature without the need to provide advice about something or to expound on a religious topic. 

During a discussion with one of my customers and his wife, I mentioned my Blog “I Believe”.  Thinking he might stump me, he asked me to briefly state my beliefs.  I responded with the Apostles Creed which begins, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord....”. As I got into the Creed, he and his wife both joined me as we ended the Creed with, “... the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sin, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”.  The three of us laughed and parted as brothers and sisters in Christ. As they walked away, I thought, “Why had that Creed popped into my head so quickly?” As I pondered this, I began to understand the legacy of my many years in the Methodist Church (now the United Methodist). The constant and often boring repetition of certain portions of the service were silently criticized by us young folks. “I get nothing out of saying those things. I know them by heart and could say them in my sleep.”  What seemed terribly old fashioned then served the real purpose of cementing them and their message in my mind and heart.

I attend a local Baptist Church and always leave the service with a sincere feeling of having worshiped God and having been filled with the Holy Spirit through the music and the inspired message of our pastor. 

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There is a lot of talk in my neck of the woods about education. Schools are rated by how much “progress” their students have made since last year. States are ranked by their level of education. Even Countries are ranked. It’s getting so teachers are not tasked with teaching kids the basic building blocks of an education, they are teaching to take the State mandated tests. Heaven forbid, the kids actually learn anything as long as they can pass the tests and improve their school’s rank.

Boy, it felt good to get that off my chest. In this quest for a better education, we tend to lean toward the latest programs and teaching methods. There has not been a political campaign in the past 50 years, where one candidate, or both, has declared themselves to be the “education candidate”. Generally, the candidate’s promises consist of spending more money on ___, with you left to fill in the blanks. Well, in the humble opinion of this old man, more money on new programs is not necessarily the answer. Maybe we need to look back to the old days to find the methods that work best.

The old days for me mean the late 1940’s and the early 1950’s. Before the days of phonics, new math, calculators and spellcheckers, there was rote memorization. After learning to count and to add and subtract, we faced the daunting task of learning the multiplication tables. How many times did I write 2x2=4, 2x3=6, 2x4=8 and on and on? We wrote them on paper, on the blackboard and anywhere else we could find. We took the multiplication tables home and our mom or dad would sit with us and ask, “What is 2 times 2?” and we would dutifully answer ,”4”. Then go on to the next one over and over.

My dad would try to trick me by asking, while we were doing the 4’s, “What is 4 times 5”? After my answer, he would then ask, “What is 5 times 4”? It took me a while to catch what he was doing, but eventually I learned the Times Tables backward and forward. The interesting part is that I learned my multiplication tables without a calculator or without the benefits of new math that attempted to explain why 2 times 3 was equal to 6. I didn’t care why it equaled six, I just knew it did! I also knew 3 time 2 equaled six!

Spelling was another subject taught by pure mind numbing rote. We would take a list of 20 words home on