Mrs. Schaefer, the school's literacy specialist, found that she was required to work more with students who would be taking the CMT (Connecticut Mastery Test) standardized tests and the teachers who were instructing them and that made her lose out on time with others. "One stood up from his seat and approached her – Matthew, a tow-haired, seven-year-old she had spent considerable time with the previous year," Berler wrote of one of Schaefer's encounters with students. "Mrs. Schaefer could tell from Matthew's expression that he was both hopeful and sad. More than once he had stopped her in the hallway. 'Can I read with you?' he would ask.... Second graders did not take the CMT. Mrs. Schaefer knew there was no way she could explain this to him. 'Matthew,' she had told him, gently, 'I'd love to read with you, and when I do have a moment, I promise I will grab you.' Saying no to Matthew – turning down a child in need – cut against everything Mrs. Schaefer stood for."
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.
