Pastor Osteen just confirmed to Oprah Winfrey that he believes that “homosexuality is shown as a sin in the Scripture,” noting that he encourages people to be “willing to change and grow.”

On the other hand, when Piers Morgan asked him in October whether he supports the Biblical position of a life for a life, Pastor Osteen admitted (in this video): “I don’t know,” because the death penalty is a “complicated issue.”

In other words, Pastor Osteen doesn’t feel compelled to support everything in Scripture. He openly ignores Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, and Dueteronomy 19:21. He reserves the right — as we all do — to pick and choose.

This is why I don’t think there’s any merit or integrity to his argument that he is forced to condemn homosexuality because Scripture calls it a sin.

As it happens, I don’t believe that Scripture says that, but I do support Pastor Osteen’s right to interpret Scripture as he chooses.

What I don’t support is the way he presents his opinions as unbiased fact.

As far as I’m concerned, until Pastor Osteen takes responsibility for his own words, he’s no better than any other coward who hides from the people he attacks.

Yes, she was awarded a prize for simply being quiet, the bar in her school sadly having been set so low that by doing nothing she was already outperforming her peers. (Rabbi Larry Milder expresses a similar sentiment in his song about his experience teaching Religious School: There’s a Riot Going On in Classroom Number Nine.) Equally unfortunately, most of the audience at the award ceremony chuckled in solidarity, probably remembering their own not-so-different experiences in Religious School. Some of them may even have thought, “so you’re the goodie-goodie who got us all in trouble when we were pasting our yarmulkes to the wall.”

How did this happen, and what can we do about it?

Many Religious Schools seem like case studies in institutional bipolar disorder: children must attend but nothing should be required of them; or everything should be required of them and there should be no consequences for not fulfilling the requirements; or the consequences should be so severe that everyone hates being there; or loving Religious School is so important that the school is turned into a playground where nothing is taught; and so forth.

Hidden in this list of institutionality-disorder symptoms are three of the elements that I believe are crucial to a productive Religious School: content, connection, and compassion.

I think we have an absolute obligation not to waste the time of the students who show up to Religious School. After all, they aren’t allowed to leave. If I go to a lecture and I’m bored, I can walk out. But we don’t give children at Religious School (or public school, for that matter) this prerogative, so I think we have to make sure that their time in class is well spent by giving them challenging and engaging content.

Having fun also seems like a good idea. And some people believe that the best way to have fun is to turn learning time into game time. But I disagree, because, fortunately, children naturally love learning. So I think that by providing a stimulating environment we will also create a place where children enjoy themselves. Schools that dumb down their curriculum to make the place more enticing have it backwards.

Having fun also contributes to my second element of Religious School: connection. If the only point of the school were to convey information, we could distribute textbooks, offer a yearly exam, and do away with the weekly gatherings. But Judaism is not merely a collection of facts to be learned. It is also a sense of connection — to our history, to each other, to the Jewish people, to Israel, and to the synagogue.

Thirdly, I think our school has to offer compassion to people — children and parents — whose lives are increasingly lacking that vital component. Too many parts of our lives are uncompromising and rigid, forcing us to adapt to them rather than letting us be ourselves. Our school can offer an island of relief against this troubling trend.

Taken in isolation, any of these three aspects — content, connection, and compassion — can lead us astray. If we focus only on content, our Religious School will lose its soul. Connection by itself won’t work, because we have to offer something to be connected to. And compassion alone threatens to make the school irrelevant to people who are already thriving.

But in combination, I think these three goals can help provide the foundation of a school worthy of the collective energy we all invest in it.

[Reposted from the Vassar Temple Blog, in turn reprinted from my article in the Vassar Temple January, 2012 bulletin.]

And I think this is what we see with President Obama’s plan to help home owners refinance at a lower interest rate.

At first glance, it seems like a good idea, because home owners will save money thanks to lower mortgage payments. But that’s only half the story.

The other half is that people who have invested in real estate will earn less.

For example, on each $100,000 of mortgage loans, an interest-rate drop from 6% to 4% saves a home owner almost $1,500 per year. If, let’s say, one million people shave two percentage points off an average of $250,000 in mortgages, then one million people will save on average upwards of $36,000 each over the next ten years.

But by exactly the same token, investors in real estate — banks, but also pension funds and the like — will collectively lose more than $36 billion over the text ten years.

Just by way of example, one adverse reaction will be to the New York State Teachers’ Retirement System, which has some $1.34 billion invested in real estate. If the return on that $1.34 billion drops from from 6% to 4%, the fund will earn $27 million a year less, for a total loss of $270 million over ten years.

In short, there’s no free lunch here. When some people save money, other people earn less from their investments.

Like a ship taking on water, America is sinking from debt. And like two groups of sailors — each trying to save half the boat by shifting the water to the other side — our leaders seem focused on solving half the problem even if they make the other half worse.

In the past I have chastised religious leaders and other prominent people for not speaking out against terrorism committed by their alleged coreligionists. So I want to be clear that I do not support what these Jews (if they are Jews) in Israel are doing. I’d like to think that no one could even make such a mistake as mixing up my respect and tolerance with their hatred and bigotry, but I know that as tensions rise, so does mistrust. That’s why I’m publicly denouncing these acts as clearly as possible.

Equally, I hope I’ll set a model for others to speak out, even when they might not think it’s necessary. The next time we read of religious violence or intolerance, I hope we’ll also read of masses of religious leaders speaking out against it.

For many people, that question — part of the haunting Unetaneh Tokef prayer — is reason enough to boycott the Days of Awe. After all, the text of that famous medieval poem offers a simple, clear answer to why people suffer: it’s their own fault. They were given a perfectly fair trial (conveniently featuring God as prosecutor, defense attorney, witness, and judge), and every last chance to return to the right path, but they stubbornly refused God’s lifeline. So they died.

But the subtext of Unetaneh Tokef tells a different story, referencing the Book of Job more than any other. For example, the “still small voice” of the Unetaneh Tokef text mirrors Job 4:16. The text of the next line of Unetaneh Tokef deals with angels, as does Job 4:18. Literally reading between the lines, we find Job 4:17: “Can humans be acquitted by God?”

The text and subtext vehemently disagree, so what looks like an answer — people die because God makes them — is really a question: What’s going on here?

The High Holidays in general are like that, and so too are our lives. We have a text. But we need the subtext to understand it. And the simple, clear answers are usually wrong.

Here are two examples.

Toner Cartridges

Last October, apparently, a terrorist group experimented with shipping explosives in toner-cartridge packages as a way of bringing down cargo aircraft. In response, the US government, through the TSA, “restricted the transport of printer and toner cartridges.”

To me, this kind of response is like seeing someone drive up to a government building with explosives in his Chevy and reacting by making it illegal to approach government buildings in a Chevy. It misses the broader point.

Even though the toner cartridges offered certain benefits, they were not central to the malicious plan. Yet four months of government work produced an inane, short-sighted response that focused on printer and toner cartridges, rather than on the real issues.

Nuclear Power Plants

In March, an earthquake-induced tsunami damaged the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan along with many of the auxiliary systems that were supposed to mitigate the impact from any potential damage. The result was partial reactor meltdowns, thousands of square miles of contaminated land, billions of dollars in damage, and as-yet unknown health consequences.

In response, officials here in the US looked at the degree to which nuclear reactors can withstand earthquakes and tsunamis, variously noting that those two events are unlikely in the areas where certain reactors are built, and that other reactors can withstand any likely earthquake.

But, again, the problem isn’t earthquakes or tsunamis per se. The problem is unexpected conditions. And it only took until last month for new unexpected conditions to surface. A fire broke out in Arizona that threatened the nuclear facility in Los Alimos. And floods forced the shutdown of two other nuclear power plants across the nation. Just last week, reports were published about jellyfish blocking the intake valves of cooling systems at some nuclear power plants.

Shortsightedness

It seems to me that what these decisions — and many more like them — have in common is shortsightedness. They are instances of reacting to a specific example of a broader problem by focusing on the example instead of the problem.

By and large, high-ranking policy advisers and nuclear engineers are not stupid. Surely they can see the folly of these decisions.

So I’m left wondering. What is it about our political and social systems that, apparently, makes it so difficult to react rationally?

Here’s why. (You may also want to start with a summary.)

Setting the Stage

It seems to me that the three questions to ask regarding any policy are:

1. What are the benefits?

2. What are the drawbacks?

3. Is the trade-off worth it?

Just to be clear, what I let my students do is use their phones for anything except actually talking: text messaging, Facebook, Internet, etc. are all allowed, because these activities, unlike talking, do not interfere with other students. And the phones have to be set to “silent.” (“Vibrate” doesn’t quite do it. On a metal desk, a vibrating phone can practically be heard throughout the building.)

Having discussed this issue with dozens of school principals and other educators, I know people have strong gut reactions to cell-phone use, and they often have misleading intuitions. So in addition to my own experiences, I’m including an extensive list of research-based resources that provide insight into the benefits and drawbacks of cell phones, and, more generally, technology and multitasking.

Misunderstandings

Many of the perceived drawbacks of cell phone use come from misunderstandings, so I think it makes sense to start there.

Distractions and Multitasking

Many people intuitively think that students who text during class — or who otherwise multitask — must be learning less of what they are being taught. But the evidence is both complicated and mixed.

Just for example, Wierda et al. (2010) describe a well-known case of how adding a second task to a first can make it easier for people to do the first one well. Their particular task (also described in Arend et al. [2006] and elsewhere) is fairly well known. It involves watching a stream of digits and letters on a computer screen. The task is to identify the few letters among the many digits. People do a better job if they are also watching a moving gray dot, trying to notice when it turns red.

Certainly this doesn’t mean that doing two things at once is always beneficial. (For example, Strayer et al. [2011] show that talking on the phone while driving makes it harder for 97% of the population to avoid a collision in stop and go traffic.) But it also means that doing two things at once is not always detrimental.

Similarly, passive distraction — extra stimuli that people have to ignore — can make a task easier (as Friedrich et al. [2011] show directly).

Also, research suggests that multitasking difficulty increases with age (Clapp et al. 2011). So it’s hard for older adults to appreciate when younger students can multitask successfully.

And for that matter, there’s reason to think that children who grow up multitasking also develop brains that are better suited to it. In this video interview, Dr. Jay Giedd (Chief of the Unit on Brain Imaging in the Child Psychiatry Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health) notes that, “It’s sobering to realize most humans that have lived and died have never read.” His point is that multitasking is not necessarily more unnatural, or more difficult, than reading — at least for people who grow up with it.

And it seems that people who practice multitasking get better at it (Dux et al. 2009).

Bowman et al. (2010) have found that students who text-message while reading retain as much information as students who do not.

I think that these studies — and many more like them — demonstrate that our intuition can lead us astray when it comes to whether texting is distracting for students.

I’ve noticed similarly surprising results in my own classes. My classes for 11 year olds don’t normally consist of lectures, but every so often I have to explain something to the entire class. Sometimes when I’m doing that I’ll see a student texting. From time to time I’ll stop suddenly and single out the child by name, asking, “what did I just say?” Almost without exception the student knows the answer.

Finally, as I describe below, I think that turning a cell phone off can be more distracting than keeping it on.

Common Courtesy

One complaint I frequently hear is that texting during class — or otherwise using a cell phone, or, really, any electronic device — is just plain rude. When someone’s talking to you, you’re supposed to listen, not do other things.

I think this is both right and wrong. Unlike the question of how distracting it is to text when someone’s talking to you, the issue of manners is relative.

My upbringing has generally taught me to agree that undivided attention is a sign of respect. Anything less is rude.

But I also know people for whom a hand-written note is the only respectful way to communicate personally. A typed letter, for them, is a sign of a cold, pure-business approach. So is e-mail (to say nothing of texting). They may be right (in their communities), but they are also wrong (in mine). For that matter, I imagine folks a generation before them chastising the youth of the day for using slovenly ballpoint pens instead of a proper quill.

Similarly, my grandfather’s upbringing taught him that wearing anything less than a jacket and tie is disrespectful. He would quite literally be ashamed if he knew that I taught wearing neither a jacket nor a necktie. And while he would be right (for him, at least), he would also be wrong.

I think that cell-phone use is similar. It is not inherently rude. It’s only as rude as people think it is. And here we seem to have some combination of a generation gap and a culture clash.

I would hate for people to judge me as rude based on my e-mail or attire, just as I try not to judge them.

As I point out below, I think we owe the same respect to the next generation. Anything less is dismissive.

With all of this this in mind, we can turn to the benefits and drawbacks of cell phones in the classroom, starting with the benefits.

The Benefits

The most obvious benefit of letting children use their cell phones is that they really want to. We know this from the efforts the students go through to keep them, and, often, to use them surreptitiously. (In typical 11-year-old behavior, students I’ve observed in other classrooms can been seen staring down at their hands, which are buried in their laps. When their teachers tell them to stop texting, the response is, “how did you know??”) Other things being equal, I think letting children do what they like is better than not letting them do what they like.

A second benefit comes from the social aspect of texting. One of the reasons we have organized classes — as opposed to one-on-one tutoring in person or over the internet — is so the children can share an experience and otherwise interact with each other. And one of the ways children now do exactly that is by texting. I see texting as similar to whispering to the person next to you, with the added benefit that most children know how to text quietly, while their whispers are usually louder than they think.

A third benefit really belongs in a different category: The students can use their phones for classwork. Some people think this is a drawback, because for them looking something up on-line is cheating. But using a calculator in place of a slide-rule was once considered cheating, too. I think that there might be times when taking a cell phone away for a test is a good idea (just like children still learn to add and subtract), but in general giving children access to knowledge at school seems like a good idea to me.

Many more benefits of having cell phones in the classroom come from avoiding the negative impact of taking them away. Two that come to mind are these:

The children often think that their messages are important. When we take away their phones, or when we tell them they can’t use their phones, they are often left wondering what important message they are missing. I remember an 11-year-old waiting for a text from someone she described as her ex-boyfriend. Just because I don’t think that the message was important doesn’t mean that her whole life at the moment wasn’t focused on whether he would write her, and, if he did, what he would say.

By comparison, if a loved one of mine were in the hospital undergoing dangerous surgery, I would keep my phone on even if I were lecturing. If the phone rang, I would take the call during my own lecture. And I’m sure everyone would understand.

I don’t see it as my place to tell students what to feel passionately about.

Letting this student keep her phone on, in this case, let her relax because she didn’t have to wonder whether she was missing an important message, a message that might even demand an immediate reply. And I showed her that I respected her feelings.

More generally, letting students keep their phones on to get messages that are important to them helps them focus on class and creates a welcoming environment.

The same reasoning applies even for more mundane messages, I think.

I can imagine someone coming into my class and placing an envelope in front of me, face down, so I don’t know who it’s from. “This just came in the mail for you,” I’m told. The envelope would be distracting. Who’s it from? What does it say? Is it good news? Etc.

A cell phone that’s turned off is like a closed envelope. You know you have a message, but you don’t know what it is.

Finally, taking cell phones away from students creates (unnecessarily, in my opinion) an antagonistic relationship between the teacher and the students.

So, as I see it, a policy of allowing cell phones in the classroom:

1. is fun.
   
2. creates an environment that’s appropriate for the students’ natural way of being in the world.
   
3. makes the classroom experience more social.
   
4. gives students access to knowledge.
   
5. validates who the students are.
   
6. can help students focus on the class.
   
7. improves the relationship between student and teacher.
   

All of these seem like good things to me.

The Drawbacks

So what are the drawbacks?

In my experience, most of the perceived drawbacks — as I described above — are not as bad as they seem. But even so, I see a price to be paid for allowing cell phones in the classroom.

For one thing, the teacher may not like it. Just as we don’t want to tell children they are wrong to think that texting during a conversation is polite, we don’t want to tell teachers (or even other students) that they are wrong to think that it’s impolite. The teacher is allowed to feel uncomfortable when students text during a class. And it’s harder for teachers to do a good job when they’re uncomfortable.

Another potential pitfall — and I’ve experienced this — is that the phones can get out of hand. One way this happens is when children forget to silence them, so I have buzzing and ringing during class. I would probably have some of this anyway — anyone who’s been to a concert knows that it’s nearly impossible to get everyone to turn off their phones — but certainly I have more of it because I let the students keep their phones on.

A third drawback is more subtle. To the extent that most classes don’t allow cell phones, allowing a cell phone in one may send the subtle message that the class isn’t as serious as the ones that prohibit cell-phone use. (This particularly vexing objection is part of a larger pattern that may make teachers imitate widespread but bad practices in order to appear legitimate.)

Finally, even though it seems that texting is less of a barrier to focusing on the class than it appears, that doesn’t mean that using a cell phone doesn’t still distract the students, at least a little. Foerde et al. (2006) report that even when students seem not to suffer any learning deficit from multitasking, they may be less able to apply their knowledge to new situations, for instance.

So the drawbacks to cell phones in classrooms that I see are that they may:

1. make the teacher uncomfortable.
   
2. create noise.
   
3. make the class seem less serious.
   
4. hinder learning in ways that aren’t yet clear.
   

The Trade-off

It seems to me that all of the potential drawbacks of having cell-phones in classrooms can be overcome, while the same is not true for what we lose by denying children access to their cell phones.

Most teachers can learn to accommodate children’s behavior once they understand it better. Children can be reminded to silence their phones. Other cues can help the students take class seriously. And material can be reinforced to overcome any barriers presented by the cell phones.

By contrast, it’s much more difficult to compensate for the ways in which children feel cut off without their phones, for the anxiety they feel when they wonder but don’t know what awaits them, and for the lack of validation of who they are and what they feel.

Finally, when we prohibit cell phones, we run the risk of becoming like the old fogies who banned ballpoint pens and calculators.

So I allow cell phones in my classrooms, and my experience has been that the classes are much better for it.

What do you think?

References

Arend, I.; Johnston, S.; and Shapiro, K. (2006). Task-irrelevant visual motion and flicker attenuate the attentional blink. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 13(4): 600–607.

Bowman, L.L.; Levine, L.E.; Waite, B.M.; and Gendron, M. (2010). Can students really multitask? An experimental study of instant messaging while reading. Computers and Education, 54 (4), pp. 927-931.

Clapp, W.C.; Rubens, M.T.; Sabarwal, J.; and Gazzaley, A. (2011). Deficit in switching between functional brain networks underlies the impact of multitasking on working memory in older adults. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 108, No. 17.

Dux, Paul E.; Tombu, Michael N.; Harrison, Stephenie; Rogers, Baxter P.; Tong, Frank; and Marois, Rene. (2009). Training Improves Multitasking Performance by Increasing the Speed of Information Processing in Human Prefrontal Cortex. Neuron doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2009.06.005 (Vol. 63, Issue 1 pp.127 – 138)

Foerde, K.; Knowlton, B.J.; and Poldrack, R.A. (2006). Modulation of competing memory systems by distraction. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 103, No. 31.

Friedrich, E.V.; Scherer, R.; Sonnleitner, K.; and Neuper, C. (2011). Impact of auditory distraction on user performance in a brain-computer interface driven by different mental tasks. Clinical Neurophysiology 2011 (in press).

Strayer, David L.; Watson, Jason M.; and Drews, Frank A. (2011). Cognitive Distraction While Multitasking in the Automobile, in The Psychology of Learning and Motiviation, Vol. 54, ed. Brian Ross.

Wierda, S.M.; van Rijn, H.; Taatgen, N.A.; and Martens, S. (2010). Distracting the Mind Improves Performance: An ERP Study. PLoS ONE 5(11): e15024. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015024

My basic point is fourfold:

Most of the perceived drawbacks of cell phones are based on misunderstandings or partial understandings. Cell phones are not generally distracting for the children who use them — certainly adults tend to be more distracted by multitasking than children — and the phones may even make it easier for children to concentrate on class.

Second, letting children use their cell phones in class demonstrates an appreciation of who they are. They feel validated. They feel accepted. And this creates a better learning environment.

Third, cell phones augment the social experience of being in class. We don’t usually isolate children on purpose, but keeping them away from their phones is a kind of isolation.

Finally, cell phones are fun. Why wouldn’t we welcome this sort of enjoyment in class?

At any rate, I have more in the complete post, and I’d love feedback.

I posted fairly frequent updates on the official And God Said blog, and I won’t repost them all here.

Some of my favorite posts include:

• The Eurostar Biathlon, about how I just barely managed not to miss my train;
  
• Reflections on London;
  
• London, which includes photos of Hampton Court Palace and more; and
  
• Coming Home to JFK, which isn’t really a favorite, but I hope maybe someone will take notice and start to fix the airport, which — at the risk of offending the Third World — I call “an island of the Third World right here in the middle of the First.”
  

Enjoy.