All Shall Be Well

The Three Desires of Julian of Norwich

Sometimes I do a bit a research just for the fun of it. This morning, a tweet from Liz Burns sent me on my merry way:

I discovered that this quote is attributed to Julian of Norwich, a 14th-15th century Christian mystic. Her visions while seriously ill led her to write Revelations of Divine Love (ca. 1393), purportedly the first book composed in the English language by a woman. Despite living in a time of turmoil, punctuated by peasant revolts and outbreaks of the Black Death, Julian believed in a merciful and loving deity. She claimed that her famous "All will be well..." was spoken directly to her by God.


The lines were incorporated into T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding (1941-42):

"Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching."

In more recent times, Julian's words appear in an amazing variety of song lyrics:

Pete Townshend (from The Iron Man: The Musical, 1989)


Anderson Peterson (from The Far Country, 2005)


A more traditional rendition by OHRWURM Folk Orchestra (c. 2012)


And for Easter, from the Oremus Hymnal (1984)
All shall be well! Lift every voice on high;"Death has no more dominion but shall die."

Poetry, song lyrics, even the title of a murder mystery...Julian of Norwich's words live on. Tracking down the source of this quote, and its modern manifestations, was a lovely little task for a Monday morning.

Thanks for the inspiration, Liz!

"ALL SHALL BE WELL" By Leo Reynolds

Cougars

When my husband began researching cougars for an art project, he went directly to Google. He expected to find this:


Maybe a few of these:


And perhaps some:


What he didn't expect to see was:


Evidently "cougar" can also be defined as "a woman 40 years of age or older who exclusively pursues very young men." To commemorate Barbie's landmark birthday this year, a video entitled "Barbie at 50: Cougar Barbie" popped up on YouTube showing the birthday girl partying with men young enough to be her sons. (The link is below - may be considered offensive by some, so use discretion when viewing.)

While my husband and I laughed at the fruits of his research, this experience did reinforce some key concepts relevant to student internet use:

• seemingly innocent search terms can lead to unanticipated results
  
• not all search engines are created equal
• for younger students, pre-selected websites may be the best choice
• adult supervision and monitoring is key
  

In our district, elementary classes are told not to use Google. Instead, the district website has links to Clusty and Ask which both cluster results. In this case, a student searching for information on cougar, the animal, could quickly identify appropriate pages. Additional, less desirable results might appear, but they would be grouped under a different category.

Another approach is to cooperatively plan research units with the school's library media specialist, who can help teachers locate websites and databases appropriate for their grade level. All sites should be tested prior to student use, just to be sure that there are no unwelcome surprises.

Even on the "safest" sites, inappropriate content may appear. This doesn't mean that children should be barred from the riches of the Internet. It just reminds us that students need to learn how to safely navigate in cyberspace, and we need to be there to guide them.






"Cougar" by dracobotanicus
"1970 Mercury Cougar" by dave_7
"Prince George Cougars" by iwona_kellie
"Barbie at 50: Cougar Barbie" on YouTube
"Cougar Niece" by Mo ToMo