News and Prayers

Britain has raised its security level to critical.
The latest in a trilogy of obviously related attacks was at the Blackpool airport in Glasgow. Yesterday school got out in Glasgow and many children adn their families were at the Blackpool airport when a potentially horrific terrorist attack was foiled- the intended explosions and consequent destruction murder and mayhem are too horrible to contemplate.

Details at LGF, which is updating regularly

Ace (mind the language, younger readers) has a cogent post about the idiocy of dismissive attitudes toward these murderous attempts.

Cadillac Tight does, too.

Larry Johnson has a history of being dismissive about terrorist activities and sneering over averted catastrophes. Good thing Britain has some security officers who take this thing more seriously.

More here.

Grilled Hawaiian Burgers

Combine the juice from one can of pineapple rings with equal amounts of teriyaki sauce and marinate hamburger patties in this for just an hour or so.

Grill your burgers as usual- but also grill the pineapple slices.

Have the burgers and pineapples together on a toasted bun with a slice of swiss cheese, lettuce, and red onion.

The first time we had this we thought it sounded disgusting, but our friend encouraged us to at least try it- and it was pretty delicious!

Books and Resources on the 20th Century

This is by NO MEANS intended to be the final word on the 20th century. I just pulled together my notes from about five years ago when I was working on pulling together some history texts on the 20th century for high school. I probably don't even have all my notes together in one place. It's just a starting place. But it's a pretty huge starting place. (Updated to add that I'm putting in bold those books we use).

I culled my library shelves and made heavy use of interlibrary loan. I went to a large curriculum fair in Seattle Washington. I went to _every single booth_ that carried anything history related, and I asked what they had for 20th century history. The only two possibilities I found were a textbook book and some study guides from another publisher (more about this below).

One thing to consider is that very few of the books were written before 9-11, and that this alters the terrain of the book, so to speak. This is something like sitting down in 1950 to read a book published in 1936 and written about 1900 to 1935- there are events that will be seen with better clarity post WW2 than Pre WW2, and there are events that don't even get put in the pre 9-11 books that we now realize were very important.


I read through these three books on the 20 century, side
by side, looking for a 'spine,' or primary text:

Paul Johnson's, Modern Times- which I expected to be my favorite choice for 20th century history for my high school students.


Martin Gilbert's concise volume of the history of the 20th century


A Short History of Western Civilization. by John B. & Sullivan, Richard E. Harrison recommended in the very excellent Norms and Nobility- comprehensive, but definitely a textbook (i.e. dry).

I was dismayed as I read Johnson's Modern Times, because it was the the one I thought I'd assumed (for ages) that I'd be using and I had to revise my ideas about that. He is very, very strong an analysis, but he is assuming his readers come to the book with a hefty amount of background knowledge. For just one example among many, he briefly talks about how Dali, Surrealism, DaDaism and some other art form I forget, all reflect the age, and reflect the same sort of attitudes that Freud popularized without actually consulting Freud- but this is the very first time he's ever mentioned Dali, surrealism or Dada, and I've now read several pages past this point and he never does explain who they are or what they did.

It's like he is saying something like, oh, "Greckot's famous art
work popularized the views of Freud, although Greckot, Mothle, and
Schmeer all approached their work independently."

This communicates nothing to the reader who does not know much about
Greckot, Mothle and Schmeer. (dont' rush for your history references. I made those up). Neither, I think, will Johnson's work
communicate much to the student who hasn't already studied the 20th
century. I think this book wasn't written to the student, but for the adult who lived through at least part of the 20th century and already has at least a passing acquaintance with the major players and themes.

I asked my older two girls to pick a chapter, read it and review and they both said pretty much the same thing- they loved his writing, but thought maybe they should try a different chapter because the chapter they read wasn't one they knew much about or understood the background very well. A case could be made that they maybe *should* know the background material better, but the fact is they didn't, and if you don't either, Johnson won't help enlighten you about the facts.
Very little backstory given, except in a few key places,
and lots of analysis of said backstory. Somebody who could offer more of the backstory could use this in their homeschool. I needed something else.


The Gilbert book is great- but too concise- too much compressed into
too little space. I'd love to look at his larger three volume set
(900 pages each) but it appears to be OOP. This is, however, the one we'll be using, with some supplementary books on specific decades. It is a good book, engaging, and it's amazing that he can keep the interest going with his relentless emphasis on who did what to whom on what date- but it's still not exactly what I want. I wonder about his longer version, but it's three volumes long!

Johnson's has all that great detailed analysis that Gilbert misses,
the personalities and juicy stuff and almost connecting the dots-
except he doesn't tell you much about the dots. A book that offered something like a combination of Gilbert and Johnson would be ideal. If Johnson would just tell a little more of the background- even if he just had a brief, almost encyclopedic entry at each chapter telling what this is all about, it would be perfect.

Then I read a few other books about the 20th century:

Great Lives, World Government by William Jay Jacobs- thumbs firmly
down, vomiting, gagging and hurling the book against the wall. Mao
Tse-tung is a hero, the Red Guards only overly enthusiastic people
who did more than 'laugh at their teachers' and occasionally
embarrass them in front of large crowds.

The Triumph of Liberty, by Jim Powell- I thought this might work well as a book from which I selected excerpts. I think not, mainly because the lay-out is a little too complicated to do that with ease. However- this is one some parents want to consider for our teens. It has definite potential for older children. Link is to audible version, and I really don't see how they managed that.


The 365 Most Important Events of the Twentieth Century: Paul Baldwin- naw. More of a reference, encyclopedia type entries

Ghosts of the Twentieth Century- In spite of the title, this one
looked really neat from the write-up in the library catalog. Supreme
disappointment. It's a comic book in hardcover. Perhaps suitable for second graders. I have a bone to pick with those who write the book descriptions for our library's catalog.

The United States in the 20th century-David Rubel- this is in
timeline format with lots of text. Some people might like it, but it wasn't for my family. I couldn't look at it deeply because it's in a format reminiscent of Usborne- lots of pictures, arranged in jumpy patterns (more text than pics, though), and gives me a head-ache.

Growing UP in the People's Century- Children's eyewitness accounts of the 20th century, by John D. Clare. Possible supplementary text
It is not America-centric (since it's published by the BBC); Mao is not a hero; not too gross(a couple things were hard to stomach, but it wasn't too bad), no dead people pictured. The naked Viet Namese girl whose clothes were napalmed off of her, seen fleeing her village with others is here- but over all not too much my sensitive plant could not handle.
I wasn't excited about the handling of the Women's Right Movement- but I don't expect to find a mainstream book reflecting my ambivalence here, and there isn't any propaganda about abortion rights. 141 pages, picture heavy, some bias, esp at the end-'will we stop pollution, solve population problems, Will the UN gain in influence (UN= always good guys)?' Here is some more in depth information about it:
Here is a description and text transcript of two pages of the BBC,
John Clare _Growing UP in the People's Century_ book. Further 20th
century texts comments in my next post:
Growing Up in the People's Century, by John Clare

Page 22- The Great War
On 28, June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of
Austria-Hungary, was shot and killed in Sarajevo. It was the event
that sparked off the First World War.

In the years leading up to 1914, many people had begun to feel that
war was inevitable. Most people were nationalists. Nationalists
believed in national pride, power, and empire. They thought that
other nations were their enemies.

All over Europe, arms factories turned out weapons. In France,
Bleriot's factory made aeroplanes for the military. Twenty-five
million soldiers were trained and kept 'in reserve', in case of war.

To try to prevent a war, governments made treaties of alliance with
other states. But in 1914, these alliances dragged them into war.

Austro-Hungarian politicians blamed the small country of Serbia for
Franz Ferdinand's death. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
Russia came to Serbia's help. Germany entered the war to help
Austria-Hungar, and attacked Russia's ally, France. When the German
armies went through Belgium, Britain declared war on Germany.

Everyone was excited. They thought that the war would be glorious,
and that it would be over by Christmas. They were terribly wrong.

The Great War became the first world war. Fighting took place all
over the world. The war involved 70 million men from 20 countries.
Troops from Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand and America came to
Europe to fight- and die- in a conflict they knew hardly anything
about.
------------------
The above text is on the top half of the page. The bottom half is a
color coded map of Europe, with a smaller inset of a world map, to
give context. The map shows Allied Countries at the start of war,
Countries joining the Allies, Central powers at outbreak of war,
Countries joining Central Powers, with lines showing the Western
Front, the Furthest Russian Advance, and the Cease fire line.

Facing this page is a full page spread with two pictures and two
columns containing quotes from people who were children in WWI.
There is a large picture at the bottom of the page, black and white,
German women waving goodby to their menfolk at a train station in
1914. Everybody is cheerful, waving, wide smiles.
There is a smaller inset of a colored Australian recruiting poster
saying "Australia has promised Britain 50,000 more men, will YOU help
us keep that Promise."

The format for the quotes is typical for the book- gives the person's name, country of origin, year, a short description, and the quote.
These two are:

TEd Smout
Australia, 1914
Ted Smout was 17 years old and still in school when war was declared
in 1914. He joined the army for a variety of reasons. (White
feathers were the mark of a coward.)

"In Australia at that time we were part of the British Empire and
were very loyal to Britain, and we felt it was our war... Apart from
which, if you stayed a year or two longer, you'd have got a white
feather from the girls!
"No, it was the thing to do."

Karl von Clemm
Germany, 1914
Karl von Clemm lists some of the confused reasons which led a young
man to go to war:

"All over the world there are young fellows who say: 'The war's just
an adventure, and it's our country'- and it's patriotism, and partly
to get medals- it's a mix.
"And it's wonderful because you get away from family and all of a
sudden you're on your own at 18 or 19 or 20, which is great."

Some pages have more text, some much less. There are many pictures
on every page, including posters, post cards, magazine covers, etc.
of the time.

BJU has a textbook on the 20th century and I did look at this- it's useful as a reference book, but it's dry, choppy, and typically textbookish (also it was written for fifth graders.)

A Basic History of the United States, by Clarence B.
Carson. Writes from a classically liberal, which is to say conservative, constitutional, and slightly libertarian point of view- somewhat dry, and obviously, this is only suitable if all you are interested in is American history. The 20th century is covered in part of volume 4 and volumes 5 and 6.

Only Yesterday, by Frederick Allen- interesting, seemed somewhat trivial and occasionally prurient- but these are quibbles against the value in getting a sense and genuine flavor of the times.

For older students and Moms interested in the middle East today: What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern
Response by Bernard Lewis. The HG checked it out from the library, and I snatched it. Terrific.

Also Randy Alcorn's Safely Home, a book about the church in China,
fiction, but informative and helpful where based on real events in China and within the underground churches in China (odd theology of Heaven, in my opinion, but this mainly shows up at the end). Sad, but happy in the way Lewis' Last Battle is happy, if you know what I mean. I sobbed through the last four chapters or so. I know this book didn't appeal to everybody- but the key, I think, is not to read it as theology or history but as an account of underground churches in China.

And, if you want more on WWI, for a mature, sensible, well grounded
student who can stand a lot of grief and if you do not object to reading about the pacifist line of thinking that not unnaturally sprung up in response to the horribly senseless loss of life in WWI, the HG suggests Testament of Youth- which none of us will read with her. There is also a video series based on this book- which none of us will watch with her.

"The Century that Was : Reflections on the last one hundred years",
edited with an introduction by James Cross Giblin- I only glanced at this, but it appears to be commentary more than history, so I didn't glance further.

The Hakim books (History of US)- I don't like these. And certainly not for high school.

I went to that homeschooling bookfair mentioned above where I looked at and discarded two programs (sorry, I think I remember which two, but since this was five years ago I can no longer remember with certainty which two so it would not be right for me to say).
I bought some study guides by James P. STobaugh, D. Min, For Such a Time As This Ministries.
There are things I like about this as a resource, but it's not
intended to stand on its own, and I think it requires more direct teaching involvement than I was looking for.
In many ways, I think this may be similar to Michelle Miller's
approach, except he doesn't recommend many specific books. He gives
an overview, a timeline, some short biographical articles, and some
great questions to ask as you study the period or cultural event. The way he separated the topics up means this would be a pricey (and confusing) program to use to cover all of the 20th century, but you could pick one of the guides to study one aspect of the 20th century in greater depth. He has a separate guide on the Civil Rights movement, one on the Roaring TWenties, one on the Black experience from post civil war to the 20's, then the 20's to now (three of his children are black)
Questions he suggests the student ask about historical figures- Do
these historical figures use the Bible as the primary
objective guiding force of their lives? Is there any absolute
force/truth that guides their actions? Do they act as if there are
eternal consequences for their actions? Do they seek to please a
higher power or their own desires? and so on.

His study guides (at the time) were only 10.00 each, or you bought five and got one free. That's what I did. I believe they have been revised since I looked at them and would definitely be worth investigating again. The website has sample pages, and I highly recommend checking them out.
--------------

I would have liked something that included the fact that Walter Cronkite stood up in front of the television cameras and flatly lied about the Tet Offensive. I can find six hundred
page books at Amazon about that, but I wanted something more succinct.
I'd would have liked something about Walter Duranty, who received the Pulitzer Prize in the 1930s for standing up and telling lies about Stalin's policies, for saying that everything was fine, while millions were dying of starvation as a direct result of Stalin's policies and he knew it perfectly well.
I'd like something about the reprehensible history of Planned
Parenthood in this last century. George Grant's Grand Illusions is
online, I think, and it's a good, readable book, very passionate,
very well documented. But I wasn't sure I could squeeze in one more nonfiction book in our 20th century year.

I also liked these as supplemental reading:

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's journals: Bring Me a Unicorn by Anne Morrow
Lindbergh; collection of her letters and diary entries from about
1928 to 1938 or so - lovely, lovely, lovely. Well written,
interesting glimpse into the Lindbergh furor and how exciting the
thought of flight was to a demoralized generation)- all of her journals. Mothers who read at least will be moved by them.


The Men Behind Hitler: A German Warning to the World, by Bernhard
Schreiber : A history of
eugenics, looks very readable, very good, very chilling, connects
planned parenthood to the eugenics movement today- and yes, we do still have such a movement.

Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng (China's cultural
revolution, 1966-1976); definite keeper. Wonderful, wonderful book.

Red China Blues

Witness

The Diary of Anne Frank

The HIding Place

Some of Us Survived- a book about the Armenian genocide in WWI

The Endless Steppe- a book set in WWII, about the removal of a Polish (I think) Jewish family to Siberia

Somerset Maugham: I looked for one of his novels to use, but didn't like The Razor's Edge, Ashenden was interesting, perhaps a little lightweight, Of Human Bondage was too big, The Moon and Sixpence had moral problems. I did like his Writer's Notebook, though.

Lightweight but fun reading with insights into the times: Helen MacInnes's classic 1950 espionage book Neither Five nor Three; While Still WE Live- a story of the Nazi invasion of Poland, and the work of the POlish underground (She lived in Poland for a time and her husband was a British Diplomat. One of her books was so accurate in regard to practices of the POlish underground that there was an investigation into leaks- but I can't remember which title that is) and Rest and Be Thankful are some of my favorites (I've blogged about these before here and here).

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, which is still the best chronicle of the horror of Nazi Germany and has never gone out of print to my knowledge- and is very long.

For post 9-11 reading, Between War and Peace : Lessons from Afghanistan to Iraq, which looks interesting, and even better- 34 of the 39 essays are actually online, free, at National Review.


I spent a lot of time looking for literature for the 20th century and found the pursuit generally unrewarding. I really struggled with the 20th century literature. I found the history depressing, discouraging reading, as was much of the fiction written in the period as well. Then I remembered that somewhere I read an analogy that for centuries Christians have basically stood with one foot in a boat (the world) and one foot on the beach (Christianity), and this was comfortable, and not really even much of a problem because the world of Western Civilization was so closely moored to Christian values that it didn't really make a big
difference, at least externally.

But in the 20th century, the boat was unmoored, shifting away,
and people standing with one foot in each are going to be doing the
splits. When that boat started shifting, Christianity was largely
unprepared, I think, and so there is a dearth of literature for this
time period that meets my goals of literary style, character
development, virtue, and worthy reading.

The next problem is that girl, boy thing- not romance, but the shift in thinking about gender about books.
This is the century when we decided that men and boys really don't
read unless there's swearing, naked bosums, and a bottle of booze in
the drawer. Plentiful explosions and dismembered body parts may
substitute for any of the above. I really think the best literature of the 20th century was mostly written in the first thirty years of it (with a few notable exceptions).

I had difficulty with finding well written material that doesn't shock my socks off or bathe me in vile and vulgar crudity. The last hundred years have seen a decline in the field of literature like no other century as far as I can tell. The notable exceptions? We'd already read most of them.

World Magazine offered a list (compiled by readers) on their blog a while back- it might be a helpful place ot search.

Again- this is not intended to be comprehensive, the final word, or even a significant authority in your life. These are some of the books I read and considered and wrote notes about in, approximately, 2002. Others may have been published since then or maybe I missed some you'd love or turned my thumbs up at some you'd hate. It's just a start.

Updated: Sherry mentioned three books she was thinking about using, but hadn't seen. I had seen (and rejected) two of them, and that discussion reminded me of two more I did like and use. Here's a summary of the stuff in the comments:

Our Century In Pictures by Peter Jennings- biased, shallow, also American rather than world history. The conclusion of New York reviewer Gary Wills was, " We are probably being unfair if we judge this as a book. It is a TV show that has wandered off the screen where it belonged.

The following excerpts were taken from this site:

...don't mistake the length for depth. The chapter "New Morning: 1981-1989" recycles many of the old shibboleths often heard from the media about the "decade of greed," degrading the Reagan years as a time of naivete, instead of recognizing the true pride and patriotism with which many remember it.

Cynicism rains on the parade of Reagan's "Morning in America" as the
authors proclaim: "In fact, it would be hard to imagine a time more
devoted to historical revisionism than this decade...in America, in
particular, feelings of nostalgia for less complicated times ran so
high it felt occasionally as if the society had been transplanted to
the grounds of an elaborate theme park where a tidied-up, even
cinematic, version of the past could be lived out in comfort."

To make their point, the authors crib some of the worst diatribes
from 1980s newscasts and cast them as history. "Finally, with the
deepening of the chasm separating America's rich and poor, the
arrival of AIDS and a drug epidemic in the inner cities, the soaring
deficits encouraged by Ronald Reagan's ambitious defense spending,
and the insider trading scandals that brought down two of Wall
Street's most outrageous billionaires, it was hard not to feel that
the nation was just pretending to be in better times, distracted by
the fizz and bubble of its new wealth, tolerating the worst kinds of
ethical and moral abuse, pushing aside bad news or, worse, delaying
its full impact for future generations."

Whew. That mouthful makes you yearn for the Depression by comparison.

Of course, when the authors come to the Clinton years, they found
economic optimists were no longer living in Disneyland: "By the late
nineties the nation seemed to have arrived at an economic Eden."

Here's another:

The reader should perhaps bring to these books a certain wariness toward permitting celebrity TV anchors to organize our history for us. Making connections among the welter of images they televise for us nightly isn't exactly their strong suit.

What Everyone Should Know about the Twentieth Century by Axelrod and Phillips- if this is back in print, I am glad. It wasn't available for a while. That said- it's good enough, but not terrific.
You still have to ignore his bias (see his take on the Oklahoma bombings for an example) or point it out.

Susan Wise Bauer's 20th century history book, The Modern Age-, while for younger readers than I was looking for, is really well done. I like it the best of her history books.

Ah- here's the one with newspaper stuff that I liked: The 20th Century Day By Day: 100 Years of News-" This was published by DK- a dear friend picked mine up for me at a Sams' club for 15.00 (Dear Friend, did I ever pay you back???????)- but I think it's oop again. However, you can get what looks like a software version. Not nearly so nice as curling up on the couch together and looking through the century's headlines, IMO.

But, again- these are just the titles I read- and not even a comprehensive list of those (my notes are scattered). Also, some titles are not in bold that I really want to use but just haven't yet (the one on eugenics, for instance).

The Play Area

We don't exactly have a 'play room.' We blocked off a corner of the Common Room (Using bookcases, natch) for a play area. For the most part the youngest two and their friends use it as a storage area and do most of their playing out in the main floor space.
Tonight I cleaned up that storage space, and this is probably the cleanest it will ever be until they've completely outgrown these toys:

That dollhouse is probably the best money I ever spent on a toy. It is popular with every child who comes. The blue crate is full of more dollhouse accessories. Beneath the dollhouse 'table' (formerly a bench at the dining room table) we have the dollhouse garage, made by the FYB (it's lasted over a year), and a plastic tote of Tinkertoys.

In front of that is a small, red, wooden, toy refrigerator and a shopping basket of food stuff. The Ice-cream chair isn't a permanent member of the play room- it's just there for me to sit on while sorting toys and in this picture it's keeping the basket of cool wooden toys off the floor so we could sweep it. These toys are awesome- wooden blocks that fit together like Legos, castle blocks, wooden animals and people and trees and farm stuff, all kinds of goodies, and all of it picked up at thrift shops. That basket has kept many little boys (only one of them mine, sniff, sniff) entertained for hours. I love that kind of stuff so I kept on buying it when I found something at a thrift shop, but only one of my children has really been into blocks and accessories.

The door you see in the shot is the FYG's, and that bookcase in the front where you just catch a corner shot- that is my collection of nursery rhyme books. Hanging on the FYG's door we have a canvas bag full of too many paper dolls, but I had trouble being ruthless there, too. The paperdoll bag has an overpopulation problem.

The above picture is taken from the vantage point you see in this next picture:

As you can see, Jenny is still making progress on the couch recovering project. That's my uncle's rocking horse on the top of the cabinet. Inside the cabinet we have one shelf of books (easy reader types that I will probably get rid of when the Boy finishes them), a shelf of puzzles (tangrams, parquetry blocks, that sort of thing), and a shelf with baskets of things like cars, balls, and a few small stuffed animals. I should have opened the doors because it looks GREAT, and it isn't actually that full.

To the left you see our stack of bean bags and a pile of the stuff I got rid of. It wasn't supposed to be in the picture, but I wasn't paying enough attention. That round gray thing is an old cheese barrel or something. I use it for an end table. OH, and a few books behind the couch.=) These would be poetry, fairy tales, and some school reading for the youngest two. To the right (at the end of the couch) we have foreign language and art books (the art spills over into another shelf elsewhere). You can't see it, but on the other side of the cabinet I have a bookcase full of field guides and nature study books, and then we have the french doors out to the deck (where my moss rose is thriving).

What you can see is an old screen belonging to my great grandmother. I do not know what used to be on it. Now it's just cardboard. We use it to block the worst of the sun from coming through the deck doors and heating up the room. One of these days I'm going to cover it with pretty fabric. What? No, really. I am. In my heart.

When I turn around and stand with my back up against the cabinet above, you see this:

These are picture books and dress up clothes. They are on a set of library shelves the HM picked up for a song at a library sale a couple years ago. See where the dress up clothes are hanging so nice and neat? Until a couple days ago, that space was also filled with library shelves and picture books. The dress up clothes supposedly lived in a laundry basket on the floor and hung from hooks over the FYG's door. Mostly they ended up piled up everywhere except where they did belong. I hope this will make it easier to solve that problem.

I went through the picture books and got rid of a couple shelves worth- this is what's left. Isn't that ridiculous? I really did try to be ruthless. I guess I'm not very good at it. That harsh mocking sound you hear would be my husband. Even though he's sound asleep he just knows I just said something ridiculous. But I don't know why you're laughing when you're trying to read all the titles on the spines (and you know you are). I never do remember to turn the flash on, so my pictures are kind of blurry. Sorry about that. I know how frustrating that can be. Believe me.

But I did get rid of a couple hundred books- if by getting rid of them we mean "took them off the shelf and stacked them up on a table elsewhere for an indefinite period of time until I can bear to actually get rid, rid of them. and that is what I mean. So once I cleared all that space, for fear I might put the books back and because I asked him nicely, the HM took an old wooden rod, cut it down to size and screwed it into the library bookshelf bracket so the kids could hand the dress up clothes on it. I love it. The shoes and hats are in boxes beneath the clothes (which are, some of them, pooling on the floor because they are so long).

Tomorrow I'll be tackling the space behind the closed door, the FYG's bedroom. It's pretty grim back there. So if I haven't posted in 24 hours, contact my family and tell them where to look for me.

She won't mention names, here. But that was HILARIOUS.

The Common Room family, as you know, is enough fun on their own, with nine of them there's never a dull moment

But with the advent of some good friends moving in while they build their house, they've grown from nine to fourteen, (the numbers including a 7 year old, 8 year old, 9 year old, 10 year old and 11 year old from both of the families together), and life at the house, if not a box of chocolates in and of itself, is full of delicious nibbles of the stuff if you'll only take the time to look.

Okay, sometimes, you don't even have to think to look. You are made to look.

Take this evening, for instance.

There The Equuschick was in the kitchen, doing dishes nonchalantly, when out of the corner of her eye she saw a young boy, the ten year old, heading briskly and unconcernedly in her direction from his bedroom.

He was wearing his underwear on his head. He had the unmistakable air of a ten year old who had forgotten that he was wearing a pair of underwear on his head.

But when he saw The Equuschick, he gave a horrified gasp and turned on his heels, tearing at his, er, headwear, as he ran back to his bedroom.

But The Equuschick is afraid it was too late, she was doubled over. She couldn't help it.

(She has seen boys with underwear on their head before, you know. She has a brother.)

The poor kid returned to the kitchen minutes later, with an uncovered head and a perfectly innocent expression.

It seems, his mother says, that he was on his way to get ready for bed, carrying his socks and toothbrush and such to the bathroom, and carried his underwear there, on his head, for inexplicable reasons. Then he remembered he wanted a drink, and forgot to remove them.

Poor boy.

The Equuschick's sides hurt.

Whales

I'm reading Moby Dick right now, and though I'm not liking it much, the bits about the actual whaling are interesting. So, I was rathah interested when Equuschick told me a few days ago about the whale they found with a fragment of a 130 year old weapon.
Really fascinating stuff, that. I had no idea that whales could live for that long, or that you could judge their age from the amino acids in their eye lenses.

And I Can't Get My Laundry Folded Because of My Reading Addiction

Says the HG.
And what about Chocolate, Caffeine, Celtic Music, and blogging addictions? Can I get disability payments for those?

If I move to Sweden, maybe:

A Swedish heavy metal fan has had his musical preferences officially classified as a disability. The results of a psychological analysis enable the metal lover to supplement his income with state benefits.

Roger Tullgren, 42, from Hässleholm in southern Sweden has just started working part time as a dishwasher at a local restaurant.

Because heavy metal dominates so many aspects of his life, the Employment Service has agreed to pay part of Tullgren's salary. His new boss meanwhile has given him a special dispensation to play loud music at work.

Thanks to David, who left the link in the comments here.

Say Howdy For Us?

I picked this up at Connie's blog- isn't it swell, folks? What fun. Wanta play? Pleeeeeeeze?

HInt- click on 'sign this guestbook...'
G'wan, give it a shot.=)

The Training Ground of Family Life

I have come to see motherhood as part of my spiritual formation. I have needed to learn to find the 'grace of the moment,' each moment, and I have learned and relearned this many times each year of my 24 years of mother.

Parenting is not a single experience. It's transformational, and it's a continuing process over the course of a lifetime. Different stages call for different parenting, different approaches, different actions.

To be in a family is to wrestle with the putting off and putting on virtues (Ephesians 4:22-27) daily in a real rather than merely theological way.

- Seasons of a Family's Life by Wendy M. Wright

Unfortunately, I scribbled this down on a scrap of paper I was using for a bookmark, and I don't know how much is a direct quote, how much is paraphrase, and how much is my thoughts in response to something Wendy Wright said. I do know that while I do not share Wright's theology or ecumenicalism (she is a CAtholic who visits a Budhist monastary for spiritual retreat), I am finding much in this book that resonates with me. I've shared some of that in these two previous posts.

Guess What These Words Have In Common?

And can you use them in a paragraph?

room, common, recipe, christmas, with, how, poems, what, homemade

time, salad, poem, people

recipes, soup, stitch, dressing, nine

springtime, saves, everywhere, can, know, you

easy, frugal, about, beef, little, from, tin

make, homeschool, kittens, children, tea, roast, water

homeschooling, book, origami, mason

family, blog, come, binker, Charlotte, baby, house, leaves

Paisley and Pinks

These are the flowers Jenny made for the hat I'll be wearing with this dress.
She made them using the tutorial I mentioned here (whhoops, no, she didn't. She used the pattern from this one)

The thing about the band is that, besides the colors just making me happy, it's removable, so I can wear with my floppy straw hat in the summer and I can wear it with my black velvet hat in the fall, and if I wanted to, I could probably figure out a way to wear it as a headband.

You'll notice that Jenny blogs the least of any of us, unless that's maybe the HM. Writing just isn't her thing. But sewing clearly is, and since none of the rest of us can sew, we really appreciate her talents in that direction. In fact, when I showed her the flower tutorials and the fun stuff at this website she sighed with deep and earnest yearning and said, "I can't wait to be done with school. I'm just going to sew and sew all day long."

I'm going to look over her schedule and revise it somewhat to give her more time to sew.

The Equuschick is Afraid This Is Probably Accurate

Mocha Frappuccino

Hyper and driven, you'll take your caffeine any way you can get it. Frappuccinos are good, but you'd probably chew coffee beans in a crunch!

What Flavor Frappuccino Are You?

Another bedroom photo.

This is how my desk looked the day I finished cleaning the room. It is not how it looks now... there are books stacked around all the edges, and pocket change, and notebooks, and other Useful Oddities that always manage to find their way onto blank surfaces.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned clutter, the desk is still a perfect place to do my Bible study, my book reading, my Spanish (I'm trying to keep up with it over the summer). Rearranging the books and notebooks that grace its surface is easy enough, and then I can sit and admire all my magazine clippings, art posters, and post cards. :)

Eye-Poppers

Let's not talk politics anymore. Let's look at this stuff from The Rattery- all of it, Gentle Readers, in very close proximity at The Rattery:

I pulled these out from a batch of other like things we brought home recently. I picked these merely because they seemed to have similar colors. Somewhere.

We have wrapping paper from the seventies (early seventies), embroidered lady's hankie (I think hand done by a relative), a piece of china (we have other pieces from the same set. The platters are sort of elongated eight sided affairs), and in the background a hand crocheted pot holder of uncertain parentage.

Not pictured, yet taken from the same general corner of the bedroom we were cleaning, imagine several other pieces of china of other vintages, patterns, and in varying condition, and other hankies in other colors as well as representing several decades, a black vintage purse (fifties?), hot pads, a plane black document frame (probably fifties), some handmade carriers for covered dish events probably purchased at a bazaar in the 80s, a badly tarnished and very miscellaneous handful of silver utensils, the stemless bowls of two clay pipes, a lovely green glass bud vase from Portugal, a dozen never used washcloths from a white sale in the 60s, and a St. Christopher's medal probably several decades old. Oh, and a couple local newspapers from the fifties. Plus, of course, the ubiquitous nail clippers.

So far as I know, none of us were ever Catholic.

We must have done a lot of nail clipping, my family.

And One More Thing

You may remember crying Senator Voinovich, who cried in frustration and grief (or political stuntery or frustration at not getting his own way, depending on your perspective) when John Bolton was appointed as UN Ambassador.

He disgraced himself even further recently in a phone interview with Sean Hannity. You probably already know that, but since I only listen to talk radio once in a very blue moon, I didn't (I have to be in a moving vehicle with nothing else to listen to, and these two conditions just aren't a big part of my life right now). But it's pretty funny stuff.

Until you remember that this is one of our country's leaders, that he makes policy for you and me, and that he's pretty much a clueless idgit with utter and total disdain for the peons who elected him.

Liveblogged here.
Sample of the quality of Voinovich's attitude:

"If you count the number of minutes you've had, you got to talk more than I did."

Plus, he doesn't know how much it will cost, and his constituents should stop bothering him.

I agree. They should never bother with him again. Starting now, and continuing through the next election.

Unbelievable

Jesse Jackson Jr. wants to spend our money on an invisible airport.

Keep up with this unkosher garbage at the porkbusters page.

A quote.

But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care very much about Nature because they did not describe it much. They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but they sat on the great hills to write about it. They gave out much less about Nature, but they drank it in, perhaps, much more.

G. K. Chesterton, A Piece of Chalk

Update on the Immigration Bill

Here's my earlier post. Here's a source for the results. The nays had it by 14 votes.

Items of particular interest to me:

The opponents were allocated 10 total minutes to make their case. Harry Reid has exceeded the rest of the hour they said they would take.

Not ten minutes each. Ten minutes.
As DeMint put it:

“This immigration bill has become a war between the American people and their government. It’s a crisis of confidence…This vote today is really not about immigration. It’s about whether we are going to listen to the American people…the allocation of time as we approach this vote is very symbolic. the supporters of this bill out of an hour’s time have allocated 10 minutes to the views of the American people.”

And this from Captain Ed's live blogging of the 'debate' (what kind of debate gives one side ten minutes and the other side a constantly expanding 'hour?':
9:41 - Arlen Specter believes that people who call and e-mail Senators do not represent America. Not coincidentally, only 14% of American people think Congress represents America.

9:44 - "We have a foolproof method of determining whether an employee is illegal." We do? When did that arrive, and why hasn't it been implemented yet?

I also appreciate Captain Ed's recap:

The bill came to the Senate originally through a self-appointed committee of Senators, bypassing the normal committee process where Senators can debate and amend proposals in a sane and rational manner. The "Masters of the Universe" wanted only four days of debate, but under pressure, Reid gave it eight -- but refused to allow more than a handful of amendments. The bill lost on cloture by 15 votes, a clear rejection of the arrogance of Reid's process.

So what did he do this time? He decided on an even more arrogant process, demanding that the Senate vote on a bill that had not even been provided to them. Reid used an unprecedented procedure, the "clay pigeon", and then set up the rules so that no one could offer any further amendments. He turned the world's greatest deliberative body into the In-N-Out Debate Society, a railroad job so complete that the only rational option to punish him for it is to shoot down cloture and embarass him publicly for it.

Keep in mind that our legislators who are in charge of 'representing us' and were expected to vote on this bill did not even SEE it until yesterday (June 27, 2007) afteroon. John Cornyn was on the floor complaining about this fact when he got his copy handed to him for the first time. 400 page bill, less than 24 hours, and no debate. The ONLY intelligent vote under such conditions is no, but how often do you suppose it happens? This bill is so hotly opposed that we're getting lots of inside details, but do you really think that they always read those bills before they vote on them?
P.G. Wodehouse doesn't get any more farcical than this:

...after a rushed reading by Senate staffers found a plethora of mistakes and at least one serious omission. That leaves the Senate debating a bill that no one has read, and that no one has put in its final form, which means that everyone on the floor has blathered about nothing at all. It's almost as ironic as Seinfeld -- and we're paying for it.

Or, as Ace put it (minors should check with parents before heading over there, and MY minors' parents say no):

...honestly, even if it were the case that this bill were marginally better than the status quo (which is all its proponents are able to straight-facedly claim it is, after all), it doesn't matter -- because we have made our opinions known and we are being utterly ignored. Whether a bill is marginally better than the status quor or not, if 70% of the public tells you they do not want the bill you do not attempt to ram it down their throats with no scrutiny on a rushed schedule that doesn't even permit Senators to read the bill's provision.

You slow down. You either improve it or sufficiently make the case to the public that the bill is in their interests. You do not repeatedly attempt to sneak the bill past the public before they can hear what's in it. (And then complain about the only broadcast media that actually did so!)

Watch closely what follows, because the losers are trying to turn this into an indictment of talk radio, and they will be increasing attempts to control those airwaves. Senator Sessions noted that talk radio folks actually knew more about the bill than the Senators who were voting on that, so naturally, the only solution to that is to shut those upstarts up.

Fickle Fashion

A very long while back I wrote something or other about not worrying about what others think about how we look. A friend told me that she'd been struggling with that, very specifically in regard to one particular item of clothing. It was old, her grandmother (I think) had either owned it or given it to her. But it was a warm outer garment and it was cold outside. So she decided just to humble herself and suck it up and wear that thing out in public.

It was a very stylish pancho. We get a lot of clothing catalogs here in this house full of girls and I'd been noticing that they were coming back in style. They were, in fact, trendy, cutting edge. Look them up at Nordstrom's right now and you can find some for upwards of a thousand dollars. No kidding. My friend doesn't have teen/college age girls. She doesn't get those magazines. She thought they were twenty or more years out of date, and actually she was on the cutting edge of a new trend.

It's such a shifting standard, fashion is. Why let it tyrannize you?


This post wasn't written by Pipsqueak.

Are You Crazy?

"In Medical Nemesis (1976) Ivan Illich argues that the medical industry creates a market (and, thus, a means of profit) for itself by transforming life events into medical problems."( cited here)

Which could explain why 1/4 of us are mentally ill. Remember this
article?

One-quarter of all Americans met the criteria for having a mental illness within the past year, and fully a quarter of those had a "serious" disorder that significantly disrupted their ability to function day to day....

Although parallel studies in 27 other countries are not yet complete, the new numbers suggest that the United States is poised to rank No. 1 globally for mental illness, researchers said.

Put that tidbit together with this description of a 'new' mental illness from the late 1990s:

"...a working mother who is competent and controlled at her job but explodes at home when small things go wrong or a computer programmer who is the ultimate loner, sitting hunched over his terminal night and day.

One woman could never see long projects through to their end. Instead of setting reasonable goals and meeting them, she would jump into a project with both feet only to find her initial energy and enthusiasm fading before she completed it when a new project captured her attention..."

If this describes you, you may have 'shadow syndrome,' a mild form of a more severe mental disorder. People who start projects but do not finish them, people who keep their desks messy and have trouble finding things sometimes, people who dive into projects but seldom complete them probably are mentally ill. I was so relieved to hear that it wasn't really my fault. Around that time period I also read that shyness was a disorder, and I decided that the the goal was to eventually have every personality type branded with some sort of dysfunctional disorder so that we could excuse our character flaws by calling them illness.

Oddly, the researchers mentioned in this article caution against using your religious community and leadership to help you overcome your anxieties and concerns, but the end of the article says,

"It is not clear why Americans have such high rates of mental illness, but cultural factors clearly play a role. Immigrants quickly increase their risk of mental health problems, especially if they do not live in native ethnic communities. Minorities also tend to have lower levels of mental health problems despite lower economic status, suggesting that the social support they provide each other is protective."

The social support they provide each other is often based on their shared religious values and community. The social support I get from my church is also protective.

In the early 1900s John Dewey opined that independence could be a form of insanity, and that the purpose of school was to socialize children into dependence. (Democracy and Education, chapter four)

IN 1973 a psychiatrist publicly admitted that he believed:

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future."

(Harvard psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, speaking as an expert in public education at the 1973 International Education Seminar)

In the '90s I read some material from the Parents As Teachers program in Missouri (PAT is in other states, too, although sometimes under a different name). Although called 'parents as teachers' it is really another program whereby the local government gently interferes with the parent child relationship. The people who are to work with the parents are called 'parent facilitators.' At the time I saw the materials for the program, Parent Facilitators were given a form with a list of criteria which the Facilitator was supposed to check off indicating any areas where the child might need state assisted services. There was no option for 'normal.' The final checklist item was 'other,' which my source told me was referred to in private meetings as "that wonderful catch-all."

By February of 2000, according to a study published in JAMA, "as many as 1.5 per cent of children 2 to 4 years old were receiving stimulants, antidepressants or antipsychotic drugs - a group that includes "major tranquillizers" such as thorazine" (stimulants include drugs like Ritalin, tranquillisers include drugs like Prozac).

And a couple years ago I read these two articles:
Mental Illness is the new Normal

According to a new government-sponsored survey, most Americans qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis at some point in their lives. ....

Some of us are old enough to remember when political dissidents were diagnosed as 'mentally ill' and imprisoned in mental institutions in the old USSR.

For somebody who really doesn't believe in conspiracy theories, I seem to be hinting at them quite often. But it doesn't have to be a 'conspiracy' held by cigar smokers skulking in back rooms behind locked doors. An interest in personal gain and basic human selfishness don't require a conspiracy- these are traits most of us share without any conspirational efforts at all- which brings us to my most recently discovered statistic:

As states begin to require that drug companies disclose their payments to doctors for lectures and other services, a pattern has emerged: psychiatrists earn more money from drug makers than doctors in any other specialty.

How this money may be influencing psychiatrists and other doctors has become one of the most contentious issues in health care. For instance, the more psychiatrists have earned from drug makers, the more they have prescribed a new class of powerful medicines known as atypical antipsychotics to children, for whom the drugs are especially risky and mostly unapproved.

Drug companies spend twice as much marketing those drugs as they do researching them. This hits close to home for us because the HM fully expected to leave recruiting for the military to go into sales for one of those drug companies. Most of the other recruiters he knew did this after they left the military. It's incredibly lucrative, and he had some good contacts in the field. But after looking into what was involved, he just couldn't ethically or morally participate. This latest information may be 'recent' but it isn't really all that new.

In 2001 Nation of Victims reviewed Tana Dineen's book Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People

Somehow, it is now the norm that after every school shooting, car crash or airline disaster, psychologists are brought in who, Moses-like, are expected to lead survivors of tragedy, or even tragedy's witnesses, back to the promised land of "wellness." Somehow western man has come to believe that a stranger with a few initials behind his or her name is a necessary aide if a witness to either violence or death is ever to be healed.

There's a simple explanation for why mental illness in this society is supposedly on the increase. It need not be deliberate, but it is due to a natural tendency to do what benefits us most without even consciously making that choice. It is the same explanation for why Teacher's Unions (though not so much teachers) are agitating for schools which offer cradle to graduation care. It is why social workers have tended to keep kids in foster care longer than they need to be there (and sometimes when they have never needed to be there at all). It's about job creation.

"Indeed, the diagnoses and prescriptions offered by psychologists largely amount to little more that job creation, she argues. Therapists need patients, so they create disorders with which to label prospective customers. Eventually, everybody can be described as abnormal and in need of treatment."

Psychotherapy has political consequences. Individuals freed from moral responsibility are no longer citizens, but patients or victims who need someone else to manage their lives. As Ms. Dineen writes: "The psychology industry considers and treats people as children who, regardless of age, experience or status, must be protected, guided, sheltered and disciplined." But by smothering individual responsibility for the sake of self-esteem, psychotherapy creates a depoliticized society of contented creatures who need only to be organized and pacified.

And that is a form of tyranny. It may produce a lifestyle that looks and feels nicer than life under the governments of North Korea or mainland China. But it is no less tyrannical. Ms. Dineen's book exposes the threat to freedom posed by all those trauma counsellors rushing to rescue modern man's poor, shivering psyche.

If you haven't read Brave New World yet, you really should. As Miss Mason noted about fiction reading, well written fiction reveals essential truths about life:

It shows how, what seems a little venial fault is often followed by dreadful consequences, and our eyes are opened to see that it is not little or venial, but is a deep-seated fault of character; some selfishness, shallowness, or deceitfulness upon which a man or woman makes shipwreck. We cannot learn these things except through what is called fiction, or from the bitter experience of life, from the penalties of which our writers of fiction do their best to spare us.

We're medicalizing life. All of us need help from time to time, suffer intolerable burdens, are crushed by events in life outside our control, and crippled by pain from those circumstances. If we had more community, more 'bearing one another's burdens,' maybe we'd need less of whatever the latest version of Soma might be.
-----------------------------------------------

(The JAMA report is here, authorization required.

I blogged about this briefly here)
And They Call It Help: The Psychiatric Policing of America's Children
by Louise Armstrong

Another Breastfeeding Post that Isn't Actually About Breastfeeding

That study about the reading gap between the poor and the middle class reminds me of other studies I've seen. I remember seeing other studies 'proving' that it is the college educated, higher income women who choose breast-feeding (the not even always unspoken implication being, 'choose a bottle and it's likely you're uneducated, poor, and dumb'). Now I am totally in favor of breastfeeding. Anything else is a distant second best. However, studies showing that college educated women are more likely to choose breastfeeding do not prove a single thing about the merits of breastfeeding. They only prove that breastfeeding is (or at least was at the time of the study) a trend embraced by the upper middle class. And, for good or ill, women who have been to college tend to follow the trends of the upper middle classes. Sometimes those trends are good (ergo, breast is best). Sometimes not. It's largely a happy accident when it is a good trend and an unhappy accident when it isn't.

You see, when formula was first marketed, it was in an era with these values and traits:

*The tendency to hand over responsibility for personal health to the medical profession,
* an increasingly more patronizing attitude toward patients by the medical professions,
*a greater reliance on institutions, along with their structured environments, and
* premature application of poorly conceived and poorly tested medical theory.

That information comes from "The Legacy of Scientific Motherhood," a paper by RN Marie Davis, who cites Edward Newton's forward in Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives as her source. She also notes:

Formula was calculated to the last calorie, was measurable and was very much a scientific process. Breastfeeding was not viewed as sterile nor was it the least bit scientific. It was not seen as measurable.
Now that formula was considered "safe," nursing was banned as unhealthy and the push was on for "better" babies through
"superior" infant formulas.
By the sixties, the Space Age was on. Artificial baby milk was proclaimed the "modern way" to feed a baby.

Naturally in such a cultural climate, it was the college educated, upper class women who tended to choose formula feeding. They had such a high regard for science that they believed whatever science could create would be an improvement over nature. A friend tells me she still has some material from a formula company in the fifties which plainly states, "Formula is better than breastmilk for your child."

Like the Language Wars we've been blogging about, there was no little amount of self-interest behind the promotion of formula feeding as 'scientific.' According to Ted Greiner (citing Wickes IG. A history of infant feeding. Part IV: Nineteenth century continued. Archives of Disease in Childhood 1953;28:416-422):

Pediatricians from the very beginning became commercially involved in artificial feeding, as obstetricians pointed out at the first international congress on Gouttes de Lait in Paris in 1903.

Learning that those with higher education do X does not prove a thing (good or bad) about either the merits of X or the merits of a college education. It only proves that X is the popular thing in and among the college educated. Tomorrow, it may be something totally different. The 'back to the land movement' and return to breastfeeding started, after all, among those same college educated, upper middle class young people who had been formula fed by their college educated, upper middle class mothers.

Any study telling us that people with a college education are more likely to.... only tells us what the zeitgeist is, no more, no less.

The Smiling Bird

Some of you have probably already seen this, but the Equuschick hasn't and I know she'll enjoy it.
The bird is cute- the smile is dolphinesque. It was thought to be extinct and has been rediscovered in a forest sanctuary protected by the Catholic church.

Paisley

I had to laugh when reading this blog post at Posie Gets Cosie:

"Like paisley. Paisley?!?! I don't like paisley. I don't even like paisley. I am a rose-and-polka-dot person, not an exoticant. I like strawberry-ice-cream pinks, fluffy peonies, and gingham..... Where did I get all this passion-flowered Provençalia?"

Well she got hers at the Pottery Barn. I got mine from the yard sale where bolts, yes bolts, of old fabric were two dollars a bolt. So this was something like 15 yards of fabric for 2.00. Plus the pink stuff.
Mine? What I am I talking about?

This:

This would be the fabric Jenny just used to make my new Edwardian walking dress.


And this would be the pattern.

We bought it several years ago when we lived sort of near a fabric store that carried Folkwear and retro fabrics. This would be the picture on the cover of the pattern:



And this would be the dress, strategically pinned back in the middle and flared out at the bottom so as to make it look like its owner has a waist instead of a perfectly round apple dumpling shape.



We're going to make some floppy fabric flowers out of the same material and attach them to one of my floppy straw hats (Have I mentioned here that I love hats?) and I'm going to wear it out in public. Probably with pink shoes. And will I be stylish? No, I will not. Will I 'fit in?' Goodness, I hope not. Will I have fun? Yes, I will.

The dress is hanging on my closet door. That bulletin board is a ribbon bulletin board I put together using materials purchased from a thrift store. Click on the picture to enlarge it and see what else is there. It's a little out of focus- I apologize for that.

I glued some vintage buttons where the ribbons intersect. There's a picture of my grandmother when she was in college and a picture of the Rattery when it was my great-grandmother's house.

And, of course, that pink and paisley dress.=)

The Reading Gap

We all know that the poor and underprivileged just don't read to their children, right? At least not as much or as often as the middle class. Right? Everybody knows that. There've been studies and everything.

Like this one:

Children from low-income households average just 25 hours of shared reading time with their parents before starting school, compared with 1,000 to 1,700 hours for their counterparts from middle-income homes.

These oft-repeated numbers originate in a 1990 book by Marilyn Jager Adams titled, "Beginning to Read: Thinking And Learning About Print." Ms. Adams got the 25-hours estimate from a study of 24 children in 22 low-income families. For the middle-income figures, she extrapolated from the experience of a single child: her then-4-year-old son, John.

How did that one study have so much influence in common knowledge, seeping down into something we all just know? Advocacy groups picked it up, worked it down to a soundbyte or two, and began trading the same piece of information back and forth with each other through the media. Carl Bialik, The Numbers Guy, explains:

As is typical for such numbers, the child-reading stats have taken on a life of their own through a game of media telephone, with news articles usually attributing the numbers to one of these advocacy groups or to various researchers or foundations that themselves got the numbers from the Adams book.

"Do bear in mind that perhaps the most frequent source for 'public' infobytes is other 'public' infobytes," says Ms. Adams, a cognitive psychologist and chief scientist for Soliloquy Learning, a Waltham, Mass., company that creates software to help children learn to read.

Reminds me of the ridiculous report that wife beatings go up 40 percent on Super Bowl Sunday (which report has been soundly trounced, debunked, and disproven, but it is a lie that will not die).

Carl followed up his initial column on the problems with the reading gap study here, and he asked his readers to share their thoughts on this question:

When advocates marshal numbers such as this one to aid their cause, it raises certain questions: How effective are numbers at rallying support? Is it OK to use suspect numbers, if the greater cause is good? What responsibility do advocates have to the truth, or is their sole responsibility to further their cause? I’d like to hear what you think in the comments.

The comments are very interesting. You can read them by clicking on the link above. Carl followed this up with one more column where he summarized what he'd learned from his readers.
Turns out that there really may not be such a huge gap in reading. There is a gap, but it's not the books:

Child-development researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley estimated, in a 2003 paper in American Educator, a 30 million word gap by age 3, by which they meant that in families on welfare, children had heard 30 million fewer words by age 3 than had children in professional families. The findings are troubling, though as the blog Language Log pointed out, the Hart-Risley study was based on observations of just 13 children in professional homes and six in welfare homes.

I don't know what the quality of the reading would be like in each group, either, and it seems to me that would make a difference, a monstrous huge one. After all, if one population reads Sesame Street books for fifteen minutes a day to their little ones, and another population spends that fifteen minutes reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to their little people of the same age, two very different things are being measured and compared as though they are the same.

I am reminded of some of the studies showing that children in large families are less intelligent than children from smaller families. This changes when you separate out the reasons people have larger and smaller families. Those who have large families deliberately, as a living out of their theology and and philosophy of life parent very differently from those who have large families because they can't remember to take their birth control pills. Those are both generalizations, of course, and there will always be individual exceptions, don't get huffy.

Take a look at those articles again and think about how you can apply this information to real life, to reaching out to those in need. Reading programs are all well and good, but most of the reading programs I know of are filled by kids like mine who would already be reading all the books they can get their hands on. But how you do you start a 'conversation program?'

You don't. But you could start a conversation. Start with your neighbor, with somebody at the grocery store, with young person at church or in line with his parents at the bank. Pick a word, an interesting word, a large word, and use it. Look at these kids and speak to them. Listen when they speak to you.

The New Normal

Some sixteen years ago or so we had a new baby. She was really the easiest, gentlest, happiest baby we've ever had, but still, I remember a time when several minor crises and interruptions came up throughout the week, and I kept thinking to myself, "Well, these things will work out when we get back to normal."

About the hundredth time I said the 'someday things will get back to normal' mantra, I suddenly realized that there was no such thing as normal for us. We had a baby. She would be a toddler, a preschooler, a little girl learning her alphabet, and then there would be other new things for her to learn, and meanwhile, we'd move (being a military family at the time), and we'd have other new children, and we'd finish one topic and it would be time to learn a new one, and the rest of our lives we could be on the bleeding edge of learning something new, in life, in school, in our personal growth.

Normal, says Patsy Clairmont, is the setting on your drier. It's not my life. It probably isn't yours.

So I really appreciate this quote a very precious friend once emailed me:

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time.”

—The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (20 December 1943), para. 5, p. 499; quoted in The Quotable Lewis, (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, 1989), 335

Adapted from this previous post where my commenters chimed in with their own memories and experiences. When Donna-Jean became a mother she realized children don't come with datebooks, and anyway, often what looks like a detour is part of the divine plan. Sprittibee reminded us that life is what happens while you're making other plans, and many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the LORD's purpose that prevails. And Firefly encouraged us to appreciate the moments, interruptions at all, because after all, in this life, "God only expects us to do what we are able. The things beyond our control we must turn over to him. Nothing is normal in this world we live in presently. If we set ourselves to what is directly in front of us, we can often see the beauty God has set right before our eyes."

Embrace the interruptions, the moments, the unplanned experiences. After all, they're going to happen anyway. The difference between a good and bad day isn't usually the interruptions- it's the quality of my responses.

And More Language Wars

Are we done beating this dead horse yet? No, we are not. Obviously. For one thing, we're having fun. For another, it's not dead and it's not a horse. I am not sure what it is, but it might be a rattlesnake. A rattlesnake that would swallow whole our children's ability to grow up immersed in rich language, steeped in living books, and nourished by the stories of generations of people who lived in the days when people read and spoke as a matter of course and Shakespeare was performed for the masses.

And so, as my part in kicking this vicious snake one more time, I have revisited the article in question and extracted the remainder of the comments I thought particularly worth reading:

N. Whiten (I really like this person):

"Large" words exist because they embrace the entire meaning of what a collection of smaller words mean while adding shades of meaning to the statement you are making. Thus, large words also have their utility. I could rewrite my comment using "smaller" words and it would serve its purpose of "communicating" the basic meaning but the more subtle meanings would be lost. ...as a native English speaker, it behooves me to actually know my language. Language is the fundamental if not the only way of communication and if you refuse to use "large" words because of their supposed lack of utility you lose part of the language.

Long ago and far away in grade school when we had to write papers with a minimum word count, I began by trying to flummox my teachers with large and fancy words. And that is when I learned the truth that a single large word 'embraces a collection of smaller words.' Using fancy large words meant I had to use more of them to reach the 200 word minimum. If I eschewed the jaw-breaking, multi-syllabic words and stuck to the short words of only a single syllable or two, then I could reach that 200 word minimum in record time. I hadn't said anything worth saying, necessarily, and my sentences were choppy and uninteresting, but I'd done the minimum least amount required asked of me.

M.S. from Toronto demonstrates the level of communication to which we can all aspire if we eliminate all those elitist words:

Me like article. Article good.

(DHM from her computer chair: snort.)

Keith in Ottawa not only makes a pertinent literary allusion, but uses a mental image that just perfectly diagnoses the problem:

... our language is being stripped of meaning and dumbed down. I think this is having a profound effect on society and culture. ...Something needs to be done about the mental constipation that seems to be afflicting so many people. Everyone should read George Orwell's 1984.... Orwell's thoughts on language apply more today than ever.

Maybe this dismissive attitude towards the language and our ability to use it well is not a mere snake, but a fanged creature of another kind, a bloodsucking creature of the undead that will leave its victims staggering around in the dark, infected with the poison. If so, Jim Cohoon from Chiliwack really pounds a stake into the heart of the blood sucking idea that we should reduce our vocabularies (emphasis added):

... a sophisticated language generates sophisticated minds. As Michael Polanyi put it: "Pre-verbal knowledge appears as a small lighted area surrounded by immense darkness... Even adults show no distinctly greater intelligence than animals so long as their minds work unaided by language". In a narcissistic culture, the prevailing social forces tend to lead in the direction of 'dumbing-down', which leads to questions about the underlying forces driving cultural narcissism. As an example, Orwell wrote in 1984: "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?" Or Allen Ginsberg: "Whoever controls the language controls the race." Ultimately, the best defence against various forms of thought-control totalitarianism (whether induced through the stick or the carrot) may be, not a well-armed citizenry, but a citizenry with a large vocabulary.

Yes!! This is more exciting than a football game (yes, I'm a geek). We've often said here that the more you know, the more you can know. The converse is obviously that the less you know, the less you can know. And while I still do not really buy the whole conspiracy theory programme, I do think some garden variety self-interest is involved here. In the country of the blind, not only is the one-eyed man king, but he goes around poking out the perfectly good eyes of any new babies, because they threaten his power.

Here's where it all began. Mama Squirrel followed up here. And I responded here. And then I was so interested I went and read all sixty some odd comments and copied the best ones. Then I noticed on particular thread that was especially amusing so I extracted that out and posted about it here. And then I shared a little personal story about how and why I had learned how destructive it can be to play the soft bigotry of low expectations game.
Others weighed in with their thoughts. And then I posted this, and so Mama Squirrel continued with this.

That Immigration Bill

For some time now I have had the attention span of a lobotomized gnat for this kind of thing, so I doubt I'll update on it like I should. That said, here are some things informed citizens should know:

What is the story behind the story?

No sooner had the bill been tabled after two lopsided votes against cloture than it sat up and began clambering off the table for yet another run at passage, as Malkin is reporting in gruesome detail today. So when exactly are her "Kill the Bill" efforts going to include investigation of what forces behind the scenes are really driving this insanity? FACT: There's very little popular support for this bill, as
Rasmussen has shown:
"Just 20% of American voters want Congress to try and
pass the immigration reform bill that failed in the Senate last week. . . .
Sixty-nine percent (69%) of voters would favor an approach that focuses
'exclusively on securing the border and reducing illegal immigration.'"

We're talking about a "373-page “Clay Pigeon” amendment" that was dropped on Congress on a Tuesday evening with every expectation that 48 hours later- on Thursday or Friday- it will be passed "with severely limited debate again." Forget about whether you are in favor of amnesty, opposed, or you just plain do not care. Do you really think these people are reading that 373 page document before Thursday? I don't. I am really tired of 'representatives' voting on bills they don't have the time to read.

Above quotes from Malkin's page, where I found a pointer to this as well. You'll really want to take your blood pressure medication and read this slowly:

Senator Reid has been trying to portray this immigration nightmare as solely the responsibility of President Bush, but today we saw just how bad Reid wants it. He used his power as Majority Leader to manipulate and abuse the rules of the Senate to ram this bill down our throats. He has set up a process that guarantees votes on a few amendments while blocking all others. This has never been done before, and it’s the most heavy-handed and rigged thing I have ever seen. This bill may have Ted Kennedy’s name on it but it belongs to Harry Reid now.”

You can read it yourself by clicking on the link to Malkin's page- there's a PDF file there. Or you can read the plain text version here (it's a free hosting site, so heavily filled with ads. Just scroll down).

Apparently everybody's linking to this piece by Stanley Kurtz at the Corner. Well, yeah:

The bill is wildly unpopular, yet it’s close to passing. The contrast with the high-school textbook version of democracy is not only glaring and maddening, it’s downright embarrassing. Usually, even when we’re at each others’ throats, there’s still an underlying pride in the democratic process. This immigration battle strips us of even that pride.

I’m still stuck on the way this bill was going to be pushed through without a public airing of crucial provisions, in the two or three days before Memorial Day recess. But I should be stuck even further back–on the way this bill was cooked up in a backroom deal that bypassed the ordinary process of public hearings. We take them for granted, but those civics textbook fundamentals are there for a reason. We’re going to pay a steep price for setting the fundamentals aside.

Senators who believe that by passing this bill they will at least be getting a divisive issue out of the way are making a serious mistake. This is not 1986. The immigration issue is far more prominent now, and it will only grow in importance. Demographics, and the problems of assimilation in a globalized world of satellite dishes and easy travel will see to that. Look at how votes on the war have come back to haunt Democratic politicians. Votes by legislators of both parties on this bill will be haunting them–and all of us–for years to come.

Supporters of this bill sell it as a compromise that will heal America’s divisions. I fear it’s quite the reverse. This bill is infuriating the public and undermining faith in government itself.

Captain Ed is reading it (can we elect him?):

POINT 1: Page 21, lines 12-16, apparently reinstated the 24-hour limit on probationary background checks. Remember when they promised to fix that so that no one would get a probationary card without passing the full background check? I guess they broke that promise.

Some looney in some internet forum I used to read would earnestly ask people complaining about the government, "Do you feel divorced from the political process? But why? This government is your government..." I think it's pretty clear that this is not the case.

Updated to add:
Here's where to find out who and how to contact. Assuming you want to contact somebody in D.C. and you think it will matter.

More on the Language Wars

Yes, I'm still going on about the college professor who thinks we should stop using big words because we're too dumb to know what they mean (I share the links at the bottom of the page for those who need reminding). And if he has his way, it will become a self-fulfilling prophesy.



From that online article I've been excerpting several of the best comments and reposting them.



Barbara J. Stewart from Vancouver, Canada writes melodically, then brings it up with a cannon burst of perfect imagery and points out yet one more problem that comes from not being proficient in ones own language:

I find joy in the richness of language. The correct word - the very precise word - has a resonance, like hearing the right note in a piece of music. It isn't totally utilitarian. Our appreciation for art, for example, deepens as our visual vocabulary expands (at least until it jumps the shark into the Lord Blackian territory of curatorial gallery-speak). The complexity IS the enjoyment. Otherwise, we'd be left with nothing but advertising logos, big-eyed children and dogs playing poker.
Polysyllabic words aren't the only issue. I watched the US political debate spin around someone's (correct) use of the word "niggardly". And it's hard to soar as a culture on the endless repetition - verb, noun, adjective, conjunction and gerund - of the "f word".

Too right. And if you want to think more about beauty versus efficiency or utilitarianism vs poetry, you might like to read Happy Catholic's post on new Mass translations. Whether you're Catholic or not (I'm not), I think you'll like what you read there- especially toward the bottom of the post under the heading 'efficiency.' Good points!

I think it's time to bring in the conspiracy theories, and so does Sean Arthur from Peterborough, who writes:

Almost everyone is missing the point.

People in power want a complacent, predictable populace. Public school educators don't want trained, clear thinking and inventive minds (otherwise that is how they would be teaching); Business wants a uniform, unquestioning populace that works as many hours for as little compensation as possible who will spend every penny earned without thinking; and likewise Government at all levels, politicians and bureaucrats, hate change and want complacent, easily manipulated taxpayers.

Learning a language well builds intelligence and mental discipline, and disciplined intelligence is the foundation of creativity and invention and independence of thought. And creative, inventive and self-disciplined people are more challenging to educate and difficult to manage, less homogeneous as consumers and more difficult to persuade politically.

The principle that trained and disciplined minds results in more creative and independent persons applies to all the other disciplines as well, of course: visual, performance, martial and even spiritual arts, like Yoga and meditation. But language has universal application, so its import looms larger.

Mastering language builds intelligence. Simply learning a new vocabulary is not the same.

Is there really a conspiracy? I don't know. Sounds sort of far-fetched to me. However, I do know that I am shamefully reminded of when I was a young and stupid mother I sometimes tried to convince my younger and much brighter child that the reason I wasn't sharing my Coke was because it was 'yucky,' and she wouldn't like it anyway. I do wonder why it is that these college educated, literate folks who work in fields requiring a proficient use of language are so sure the rest of us don't need it. See again the Happy Catholic's article where she points out that a Bishop decrying the use of "born ineffably of the inviolate Virgin” as incomprehensible to the rest of us uses words like, well, comprehensible, as well as inaccessible, catechize, convey, intelligibility, proclaimability, lex orandi, lex credendi, and compromised. Why is he allowed words the rest of us aren't? Is it because they taste yucky, so we won't like them anyway?



Maybe it's like most licensing boards, which actually exist to protect the jobs of those who set the regulations and control the licensing process, but they like to couch their protectionism in terms of altruism.




Here's where it all began. Mama Squirrel followed up here. And I responded here. And then I was so interested I went and read all sixty some odd comments and copied the best ones. Then I noticed on particular thread that was especially amusing so I extracted that out and posted about it here. And then I shared a little personal story about how and why I had learned how destructive it can be to play the soft bigotry of low expectations game.
Others weighed in with their thoughts.


Updated to WHOOT! Mama Squirrel responds (we are on a roll, we are) with a fantastically apt book tie-in. Why, oh, why, didn't I think of that book? It's perfect.

Homage to Bulletin Boards

This is one of the additions made to my room after my recent cleaning and rearranging attack. This shelf (which is really a hutch, which is why it is missing one of its "sides") stands between mine & Pip's closets. The shelves above hold a tea cup belonging to my great-grandmother (right), a tea pot I couldn't resist at a dollar store, and (on the left) a tea cup from a dear friend .

The bulletin board functions as a unboxed-jewelry-box, holding my jewelry with thumbtacks. I put up a few favorite odds and ends as background decorations: a piece of vintage sheet music with a pretty cover, a card Jenny made for me, a Bible verse the Girl copied for me, a post card sent to my great-grandmother by her mother when she (my g-grandmother) was in college. Little things that aren't really so little after all, but remind me of special people.

The bottom shelf holds more of the same... except for the cubby on the far left, which holds my curtains, until such a time when I have both the inclination and the supplies available to hang them at the same time. Ho-hum.

Homeschooling Carnival

Plenty to read and think about here.

This reading list organized by state looks fun.

Mama Squirrel's post about the anti-word thugs is worth reading and rereading. Bending the Twigs weighs in on the same topic, and I'll have more on it (yes, again) later.

I'm always interested in hearing about others who homeschool children with special needs, and I wish more people without special needs kids would read posts like this one, too.

Living

In How To Live On 24 Hours a Day, Arnold Bennett recommends that his readers pick a field of study and pursue it in a regular course of study, applying their minds to this exercise in auto-didactism. He suggests different fields of study and how one might approach them. He mentions music particularly because at the time he published, the Promendade Concerts held every summer in London were extremely well attended (the history of this program is quite fascinating, started in 1895, the design of those who planned them was to encourage the common man who did not normally think himself interested in classical music to attend the concerts and learn more). He acknowledges that many people will object by saying, "But I know nothing about music," which, after all, is sort of the point, and he points out why not knowing much about something is hardly a good reason not to learn more:

Now surely your inability to perform "The Maiden's Prayer" on a piano need not prevent you from making yourself familiar with the construction of the orchestra to which you listen a couple of nights a week during a couple of months! As things are, you probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments producing a confused agreeable mass of sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.

Now, if you have read, say, Mr. Krehbiel's "How to Listen to Music"
(which can be got at any bookseller's for less than the price of a stall at the Alhambra, and which contains photographs of all the orchestral instruments and plans of the arrangement of orchestras) you would next go to a promenade concert with an astonishing intensification of interest in it. Instead of a confused mass, the orchestra would appear to you as what it is--a marvellously balanced organism whose various groups of members each have a different and an indispensable function. You would spy out the instruments, and listen for their respective sounds. You would know the gulf that separates a French horn from an English horn, and you would perceive why a player of the hautboy gets higher wages than a fiddler, though the fiddle is the more difficult instrument.

You would *live* at a promenade concert, whereas previously you had
merely existed there in a state of beatific coma, like a baby gazing at a bright object.

Of course, in our day the orchestra is even more accessible than it was in his. We need not wait for summer concerts. We can bring them into our living room via television, DVDs, CDs, and iPods. Mr. Krehbiel's book can be read online, free, at Gutenburg, and you can google for pictures of all the instruments.

We have more besides. When the older Progeny were the youngest and only Progeny we liked to listen to Peter Ustinov's The Orchestra (we still do, but I have just learned that this is sadly out of print), and Aristoplay's Music Maestro- which, I think, is also out of print. There are probably other books, tapes, and games just as nice. I bought those nonconsumable programs some 18 years ago because we hoped to have a large family and we wanted things we could reuse.

And for all our new technology and music available at the flick of a switch or the push of a button- are we wiser, are our lives richer, are we really living? We can be, but are we? For some of us the answer will undoubtedly be a resounding yes. For others, not so much. But if we aren't, what what are we waiting for?

I'm No Mandarin, But Do Plead Guilty To Impudent

It is not a crime not to love literature. It is not a sign of imbecility. The mandarins of literature will order out to instant execution the unfortunate individual who does not comprehend, say, the influence of Wordsworth on Tennyson. But that is only their impudence.

Arnold Bennett, How To Live on 24 Hours...

CM, Short Lessons, and Math

How short are Miss Mason's short lessons?

It's my opinion that when Charlotte Mason talks of short lessons in
volume one, she means to apply them to the ages of children volume
one addresses- birth to nine or so. I think the lessons get longer
as the children get older. I also think when she speaks
of 'lessons' she is talking about lessons during school hours, and
assumes that the children will be using math outside of school- not
homework, but in doing real life stuff (building and sewing both
require measuring and sometimes multiplying, working with area and
perimeters, and so forth. Other work we know the children did that
requires some practical math would include cookery, budgeting their
pocket money, reading books that have math ideas in them, and so
forth). I also suspect that the doing of pages of math problems would not really be the lesson- the actual teaching of the math concepts is the lesson, along with working them out together on the board or with manipulatives.

I do agree that probably Miss Mason did not have her students doing
as much written math work as we do, and I'm not sure that we're
wrong to do a little more. But I am sure that we don't need to feel
guilty for doing math for more than ten minutes here because 'it
isn't CM.' CM didn't even do it that way.;-)

If you look at this page there is an actual lesson schedule for the PUO schools in 1908. Probably in other years the plan looked different, since Miss Mason adjusted her schedule every year, but this is one tool we can use to find out what she did (at least one term in 1908).

Now when I look at it and compare the different years, here's what I
see:

Form I:
"Number" six times, 20 minutes each session- (keep in mind that
they had school on Saturdays).

Form II:
Had a *thirty* minute class in arithmetic, five times each week.

Form III gets really complicated:
Three thirty minute periods of arithmetic
One thirty minute period for geometry (Euclid, and I am reasonably
sure that they actually _read_ Euclid's book)
Two Ten minute sessions on Euclid (my guess, and it's only a guess,
is that these were for hands on work with shapes, forms, and
theorems)
Three ten minute sessions of what is called "Arithmetic (mental)"

A couple of those ten minute sessions of mental math come on the
same day (just an hour or so later) as an arithmetic lesson. That
makes me think that maybe they had the math lesson first- talking
about the math concepts, working through them together on the board
or with manipulatives, or on slates or in exercise books with the teacher's oversight.
Then they went ont to things like exercises, singing, poetry-
clearing the brain of cobwebs. Then they came back and did mental
arithmetic for ten minutes to practice what they learned earlier.
That's my current guess, anyway.

Anyway, form four:
Arithmetic- 2 thirty minute sessions
Euclid, or geometry- 2 thirty minute sessions
Algebra- 2 thirty minute sessions

This form is also doing astronomy (45 minute class), geography,
geology (45 minutes), and botany, and they are going to need to use
some math to do very much in most of these topics.

There is no schedule for forms V and VI here, and I'm not sure why.
I do suspect that it would have only increased, as every year
increases incrementally.

To further flesh this out, we can go over to a later year. We have
a copy of her 1921 schedule, which doesn't give times, but does give
booklists.


This would be more useful if I had a copy of the books she
mentions. I do have several other school mathbooks from the same time period, and they all have this one thing in common- ten pages in any one of them actually covers a vast amount of material. A thin little math book would typically cover two or three years of material. There were far few practice pages and more straight instruction. So if you're simply looking at the number of pages she covers, that can be deceptive. Twelve pages in a book from 1921 might be the equivalent of forty or more pages of Saxon math or Bob Jones since these books had very few practice problems (and smaller print).

In the copying of the information below, I have deleted some
distracting stuff like the prices of the books at the time, or the
direction to see the P.N.E.U. office

In a single term form one covered:
Sums.
Teachers should use The Teaching of Mathematics to Young Children,
by I. Stephens...

Form IA - Pendlebury's New Concrete Arithmetic, Year II. Term I.,
or,
IA- Junior Arithmetic, by Bompas Smith,pp. 24, 25, 34-38, 60-66.
Tables up to twelve time twelve (five minutes' exercise in every
lesson).
Tables to be worked out in money thus:
9 X 7 = 63.
63 pence = 5s. 3d.

IIB Pendlebury, Year 1.,* Term III., to be worked with dominoes,
beans, etc. Rapid mental work.

So in one term, they were to work through several pages of their
math textbook, plus learn the timetables up to twelve, plus apply
their multiplication to money and learn the conversion of the
equivalent of our quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.

Further studies in arithmetic were afforded by geography in this term (Pace and make plans of your schoolroom, the distance to front gate and 10 yards on each of 4 roads. Suitable tests under Scouting) as well as under nature study (we place calendars, seasons, and time under math- but I believe seasons and calendars were a nature study topic); as well as paper folding and paper modeling.

Form II:
Arithmetic
Teacher should use The Teaching of Mathematics by I. Stephens
A
A New Junior Arithmetic by Bompas Smith pp. 119-128; 159-162. Much
care with tables and rapid oral work.
B
A New Junior Arithmetic pp. 24-33; 60-63 (additional examples), or
continue.


Practical Geometry
A
Lessons in Experimental and Practical Geometry by Hall and Stevens
pp. 44-55
The School Set of Mathematical Instruments.

Further mathematical scope again afforded in geography (mapwork and
map questions, scouting activities, even music and dancing, which
require some mathematical reasoning (time keeping, for instance).

...in mathematics there must be no gaps. Children must go on from
where they left off, but they will be handicapped in the future
unless they can do the work set for this form.
----------

Form III and IV

Arithmetic
IV
Pendlebury's New Shilling Arithmetic pp. 128-141


III
New Shilling Arithmetic pp. 58-71


IV and III
Revise back work; examples may be taken from Pendlebury's New
Concrete Arithmetic, Book V


Geometry
IV
A School Geometry by H. Hall and F. Stevens pp. 171-181, and revise
139-170


III
pp. 27-33, 34 (Ex. 1-3), 35-41


Algebra
IV
A School Algebra by H.S.S. Hall, Part I pp. 63-74, 89


Further practice in arithmetic again afforded by some of their
science studies and handicrafts.
--------------

Forms V and VI

Arithmetic


VI
Pendlebury's New School Arithmetic, Part II revise pp. 260-306,
taking more difficult sums only.


V
Pages 279-281; 283-289; 306-313


Geometry


VI
A School Geometry by Hall & Stephens pp. 172-197, and revise 1-98


V
Pages 172-174; 176-184; and revise 1-68.
The School Set of Mathematical Instruments


Algebra


VI
A School Algebra by H.S. Hall. Parts I and II pp. 250-260; 264-268,
and revise 100-147.


V
Part I, pp. 169-175; 177-179

--------------------------------------------------

If I ever come across one of the above math books, I'd like to look
and see what ground is covered by the pages Miss Mason mentions.

To summarize this long and perhaps tedious post, I think we may still want to do more math than she did (some of us, anyway), but I also think she did more math than we think she did.

On Books

No book is... serviceable until it has been read and reread, and loved and loved again, and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it, as a soldier can seize the weapons he needs in a n armory, or a house wife bring the spice she needs from her store. Bread of flour is good, but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.

John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies

This is Aswan. 1958-1984

As a Straight Egyptian his original name was Raafat, but upon completion of the Aswan dam the Egyptian government gave him to Russia in return for their financial support of the project.

He became one of the most influential sires of the century, leaving behind 296 children , the majority of superior quality and world-wide fame, some of the more famous stallions being Kilimanjaro and Palas.

Aswan caught The Equuschick's attention when she noticed, as she would spend hours in the highly productive endeavor of looking at pretty horse pictures, that nine times out of ten whenever a horse caught her eye that made her catch her breath with that "special something" she would click on the pedigree, and find somewhere in there Aswan or Palas.

So she decided to make a game of it, and she practiced guessing whether he was in there or not. She has achieved an accuracy rate of nowhere near 100%, but over 60%, which is something.

Of course, she has not figured out to use this to her advantage yet. It seems rather a pointless skill to practice. But it is fun.


Aswan died two years after The Equuschick was born, and she is rather offended that her parents didn't take her to Russia to get his autograph.

Rules My Mother Never Told Me I Would Need to Make

Do not pitch coins into your sister's mouth.

Do not stand there with your mouth open letting your brother toss a dime into your mouth.

If you are going to be stupid and break this rule that I never made because I really didn't think I needed to make it because it seems to me that you just know it is an unwritten law of the universe that people of even lower than average intelligence who survive beyond the age of, say, two, or at most five, would grasp, I say, if you are stupid and let your brother toss coins into your mouth anyway, do not compound your foolhardiness with sheer idiocy. In other words, DON'T SWALLOW!

And if you break all these laws of the universe, basic common sense, and sheer self-preservation, do NOT come to your mother or your sisters expecting sympathy. Because honestly? You have got to be kidding me. I cannot give you any sympathy for opening your mouth and letting your brother toss a dime into it because I am currently wallowing in self-pity and pathos over all my failures as a mother. I must have failed. Because it goes without saying that if I had been a good mother you would know better than to open your mouth and let your brother toss coins into it and you would know better than to toss coins in your sister's mouth.

I guess our little mud puppy isn't growing up quite so fast as we thought she was.

Madeleine L'Engle

In my recent post quoting L'Engle, I stated that I did not care for her much of her theology. Two excellent follow-up comments were made, agreeing with the theology bit but pointing out that L'Engle is one of the best at handling the English language beautifully and well.

That I emphatically agree with. Her Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art is a book I highly recommend to anyone interested in the way Christianity and art intertwine.

Her novels are - of course - also quite good. The DHM read A Wrinkle in Time years ago; it enchanted all of us. A Ring of Endless Lightis one of the Equuschick's favorite books but not one of mine. We had one of our infamous long and loud debates over it, in fact. :) Part of my dislike might simply have stemmed from the fact that L'Engle quotes a poem that she attributes to Sir Thomas Browne when it was really not written by him at all. Inaccurate reporting of sources drives me crazy, and unfortunately colors my impressions of an entire work, whether it is fair or not.

But anyway. Do read "Walking on Water." It's a wonderful book.

Pride and Falling

My son knighted himself recently. He was writing his name on a cup and he wrote it out "Sir "First Year Boy." He told his friend that he should write "Sir T----."

"Because," our Boy explained in a very posh British voice, "of Sir Richard the Seventh and all that rot."

"And who is Richard the Seventh?" inquired The History Major.

"You need to catch up on your history!" responded the snooty little child, much to the chagrin of The History Girl.

He was wrong, though. Still, I'm pretty tickled. I think he confounded Henry VII and Richard the III. Not bad for an eight year old American who only just really caught on to reading.

And thanks to Pip from whom I stole borrowed this story.

Why the Chocolate Cookies Did Not Turn Out

Dutch-Processed or Alkalized Unsweetened Cocoa Powder is treated with an alkali to neutralize its acids. Because it is neutral and does not react with baking soda, it must be used in recipes calling for baking powder, unless there are other acidic ingredients in sufficient quantities used...

Natural Unsweetened Cocoa Powder tastes very bitter and gives a deep chocolate flavor to baked goods. Its intense flavor makes it well suited for use in brownies, cookies and some chocolate cakes. When natural cocoa (an acid) is used in recipes calling for baking soda (an alkali), it creates a leavening action that causes the batter to rise when placed in the oven.

More here.

See, Pip?! It wasn't your fault after all!

How Large is Your Room?

From one of Rachel Peden's three nature books [A friend has purchased and restored 23 acres of formerly barren land]:

She wanted it because at heart she is an earth lover and wanted a more intimate relationship with the tulip poplars, maples, sassafrases, sumacs, and white oaks, and the bittersweet and dewberries on the ground, the blackberries rising square stalked and thorny out of its woods, and the many birds that came to eat them. She wanted the splotches of reindeer moss and the gray-green lichens on the ground. She had familiarized herself with all of these. When I exclaimed about how much she knows, she replied modestly, "Well, you know, when you're interested in something, you learn about it."

Emphasis mine. That paragraph is richer and fuller if you can actually picture the distinct tulip shaped silhouette of the tulip poplars (and their exotic looking blossoms), the sharply pointed maples, the Dr. Seussian mitten shape of the sassafrass, smell the sweet fragrance of the sassafrass, taste the tang of wild blackberries, and remember the autumnal look of an old bittersweet vine tangling itself around a fencerow. Education is, after all, the science of relations.

The educated life is the interested life, and vice versa. All the college, homeschooling, private, or public schooling in the world does not make an educated person if it results in a person incapable of self examination and uninterested in the world around him.

Which is what Miss Mason was getting at when she said:

"Our aim in Education is to give a Full Life... We owe it to them [the children] to initiate an immense number of interests. Thou hast set my feet in a large room; should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking--the strain would be too great--but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. ... The question is not,--how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education--but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?"

How large is the room where your feet are set? About how many things do you care? How full is your life? And what is the legacy you're children will receive?

Carnivals, Get Your Carnivals!

Carnival of Debt Reduction, every week get some tips from your fellow bloggers on getting out of debt. These are people in the trenches with you, working hard to get back to financial solvency. Lots of good ideas here.

Somebody else has started a second general carnival of homeschooling- I'm not sure why we needed a second one. But if you're curious, you can see it here. The ORIGINAL homeschooling carnival, of course, was started well over a year ago by the Cates and has been going strong ever since. Entries for the next one are due by 6 p.m. today, and Why Homeschool has the details on how to submit those entries and where to send them.

Carnival of Family Life has some great stories about, what else? Living in a family.

The Book Den has the latest book carnival- yummy. YOu can read about the stupidest books ever written, why not liking JOnathan Lethem does not make you stupid, The Count of Monte Cristo, reading as a super power, a couple Harry Potter related posts and much more over there.

Know of any more I should have listed here? Let me know!

Multi-Level Marketing

Let me be blunt. I don't like it. My husband dislikes it even more than I. Recently somebody asked us what the difference was between multi-level marketing and what my husband does at the grocery store.

After all, the grocery store is really the end of a line, a long line, a multi-level line, if you will, of products being purchased, combined with other products and sold down to the next level, where some other processing is done and this it's sold down to the next level, and eventually ends up on the shelves of the grocery store. So why do we think MLM is so much different than selling stuff at the grocery store?

I had to think about that one, and it's tough because I really have a strong, visceral reaction to all forms of MLM and it's hard to think clearly about something that makes you want to kick and spit every time you hear about it.

Here are a couple of the things I object to about MLM. I'm wondering what everybody else thinks?

First of all, I really detest a business where the process and hype are marketed ahead of the product, or more accurately, in most MLM programs the process IS the product. The actual hands on product is more like the excuse. You don't make your money selling products in most MLM businesses. You make your money selling your soul friends and family on the process.

Which brings me to the second point that makes me gnash my teeth, and that's the way the majority of people (by no means all- the person who asked me this question being a stellar example of the glorious exception to the general rule) who get into MLM suddenly see their former friends and relations as target audiences. I get sick to death of never again being able to hold a conversation with these people that they don't drag their MLM product into the conversation on any pretense no matter how far fetched it might be. By hook or by crook and often by sheer chutzpah and non-sequitur they will manage to turn every conversation to their business, whether you are sobbing about your grandmother's death, rejoicing in your fortuitous thrift shop find, or merely scratched a bug bite in their presence. Is this a flaw in the business model or is it just that the MLM tends to attract people who don't mind being one note singers while using their friends as stepping stones to imagined wealth? And wouldn't that be a flaw in the model?

Every MLM scheme I see begins by hooking people in using what I consider deceptive and misleading tactics, emotional manipulation, or some other approach I consider incompatible with basic ethics and minimum standards for human decency. I have been told that X is selling this miracle food that cures everything from cancer to hangnails, not that he can claim it's a cure it's just that everybody he knows who has used it has gotten better, and he's selling it on the MLM plan because, noble minded and pure of heart soul that he is, he not only wants to heal the world (and get rich while doing it) he wants YOU to get rich, too. I've been told that another product will cure ear aches, diabetes, and flea bites (not that the seller can claim that it CURES anything, he's just mentioning that people suffering from all these things plus pimples have reported that all their problems went away once they used product Z and signed up to sell more of the same to others). Puhleeeze.

And we've all been subjected to the invitation to dinner that turns out to be an Amway presentation. I'd rather show up to a dinner where my 'hosts' admitted they weren't going to be there because they were going out to dinner and a show, but as long as I was there, they figured I wouldn't mind babysitting their seventeen children, three snakes, and a moose. Or you've visited a congregation and discovered that the three families that latched onto you in that flatteringly friendly fashion all turned out to be in the same upline and instead of being flatteringly friendly, they were more like starving leeches swarming a fresh blood source.

Or there's the conversation I had a while back at a yard sale with a near total stranger (more or less, I try to keep it at the 'more' level and she keeps trying to make it 'less') that went something like this, "I'm not really trying to get you to buy anything, because I never do that, I don't need to because we're making enough money to move to the Bahamas if we wanted to, but we stay here in our dinky house in the neighborhood two blocks from the bar because we just love it here in the 20 below zero winters and the 100 percent humidity summers with temps in the 90's and corn and flat ground and semi trucks as far as the eye can see and all our wonderful friends and acquaintances like you and we just couldn't bear to live where we couldn't see you so often [er, that would be twice a year when I can't avoid it], so I just wanted to mention blah blah blah blah MLM COMPANY OF CHOICE blah blah blah blah MLM COMPANY OF CHOICE blah blah blah blah MLM COMPANY OF CHOICE blah blah blah blah MLM COMPANY OF CHOICE blah blah blah blah MLM COMPANY OF CHOICE and I'm not saying that just because I sell it, blah blah blah blah MLM COMPANY OF CHOICE but I am not selling anything this is just a friendly bit of information I am passing on because Mama needs a new pair of shoes and to pay the electric bill I care about your wellbeing and want to see you succeed."

Again, that could just be the individual sorts that we know who sell that kind of thing, not the company itself. But if a business relies on those sorts of tactics to grow and it attracts that sort of person, then doesn't that indicate a flaw in the business model itself?

So far as I can see, MLM plans attract two types of people. Pushy, greedy people with tin ears who have no idea (or don't care) that they make everybody cringe when they show up, and naive people who will can't say no and will be embarrassed about it all later. MLM business tend to keep the pushy people, and some of the naive people who become desperate and have to push harder to get back out of it what they've put into it. The rest shriveled up and died from sheer embarrassment over what they did to their friends when they were young, silly, vulnerable, and very, very broke.

Whoops- updated to add a third category- but I don't think this one really counts because they aren't in it to make money but to save. The third category is those people who really like the product and they sign up because they can get better prices on the stuff they would like to be using anyway. These people are kind of like the ones who buy a membership to a buying club because they want the discounts there. They don't push the memberships on others and they don't do much, if any, recruiting. They are consumers not marketers.

I'm sure there's more, but those are the biggest issues off the top of my head. What do you think? I really want to know- unless you want to tell me how YOUR favorite MLM is really different and if I would just sign up under you we could pay off our house in six months. I don't want to hear about it, unless you want to put your money where your mouth is and pay off my house first- then I'll sign up in your down-line tomorrow. I do want to hear why you think Multi-Level Marketing is not just another Ponzi scheme, if that's what you think, (or if you want to persuade me that Ponzi schemes are noble business ventures), or why you think they are BAD.

Help me refine and correct my thinking here. Maybe I'm totally wrong. Convince me. I'll try not to kick and spit in your general direction. Or tell me why I'm brilliant, discerning, and just lacking on the details.

And if you're new here and enjoyed this post, you just might like this post. (Was that shameless self-promotion?)

Sunday Hymn Post

All hail the power of Jesus’ Name! Let angels prostrate fall;
Bring forth the royal diadem, and crown Him Lord of all.
Bring forth the royal diadem, and crown Him Lord of all.

Let highborn seraphs tune the lyre, and as they tune it, fall
Before His face Who tunes their choir, and crown Him Lord of all.
Before His face Who tunes their choir, and crown Him Lord of all.

Crown Him, ye morning stars of light, who fixed this floating ball;
Now hail the strength of Israel’s might, and crown Him Lord of all.
Now hail the strength of Israel’s might, and crown Him Lord of all.

Crown Him, ye martyrs of your God, who from His altar call;
Extol the Stem of Jesse’s Rod, and crown Him Lord of all.
Extol the Stem of Jesse’s Rod, and crown Him Lord of all.

Ye chosen seed of Israel's race, ye ransomed from the fall,
Hail Him Who saves you by His grace, and crown Him Lord of all.
Hail Him Who saves you by His grace, and crown Him Lord of all.

Hail Him, ye heirs of David’s line, whom David Lord did call,
The God incarnate, Man divine, and crown Him Lord of all,
The God incarnate, Man divine, and crown Him Lord of all.

Sinners, whose love can ne’er forget the wormwood and the gall,
Go spread your trophies at His feet, and crown Him Lord of all.
Go spread your trophies at His feet, and crown Him Lord of all.

Let every tribe and every tongue before Him prostrate fall
And shout in universal song the crownèd Lord of all.
And shout in universal song the crownèd Lord of all.

[John Rippon add­ed this verse in 1787]

O that, with yonder sacred throng, we at His feet may fall,
Join in the everlasting song, and crown Him Lord of all,
Join in the everlasting song, and crown Him Lord of all!

In the list of downloadable Mp3 files here, it's the second from the top. The version they sing is slightly different from this.

Ho hum.

The most exciting piece of The Equuschick's news for the day are her new pajamas, which are comfy and colourful and match the HG's new pair.

They are pink, which is actually not The Equuschicks colour of choice (black, you know, is the new pink, and the "in" thing) but these also have striking white and black 1920's flipper flapper lady pictures all over.

The 1920's cannot but remind one of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves and Picadilly Jim, and The Equuschick doesn't object to wearing much from such an adorable era. Except the ladies caps, which were silly.

---

Hospitality

"It is no coincidence that the people who are most aware that they are strangers & sojourners on the earth are the people who are most able to open their doors to the stranger..." - Madeleine L'Engle in "The Rock that is Higher"

I don't care for much of L'Engle's theology, but this passage struck me strongly when I read it a few years ago.

Book Reviews

Semicolon's Saturday Review of books- I love Sherry's book related quotes at teh start of every one of these.

A Good Novel and a Skiff Down the Stream

In How To Live On 24 Hours a Day, Arnold Bennett encourages his readers to use some extra time, however small, several days a week to pursue a course of study separate from their employment. He doesn't much care what it is, he says that there are people to whom literature is, forgive my pun, a closed book. He acknowledges that most 'self-improvement' plans do stress literature:

I imagine that in the majority of people who are conscious of the
wish to live--that is to say, people who have intellectual
curiosity--the aspiration to exceed formal programmes takes a
literary shape. They would like to embark on a course of reading.
Decidedly the British people are becoming more and more literary.
But I would point out that literature by no means comprises the
whole field of knowledge, and that the disturbing thirst to improve
one's self--to increase one's knowledge--may well be slaked quite
apart from literature. With the various ways of slaking I shall
deal later. Here I merely point out to those who have no natural
sympathy with literature that literature is not the only well.

In fact, he would rather no novels at all were read as part of this self-improvement effort. He tells those readers who planned on getting through the complete works of Dickens to revise their plan, and I think his reason is quite interesting, and also quite the indictment of our culture:

The reason is not
that novels are not serious--some of the great literature of the
world is in the form of prose fiction--the reason is that bad
novels ought not to be read, and that good novels never demand any
appreciable mental application on the part of the reader. It is only
the bad parts of Meredith's novels that are difficult. A good novel
rushes you forward like a skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the
end, perhaps breathless, but unexhausted. The best novels involve
the least strain. Now in the cultivation of the mind one of the
most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of
difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve
and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and that feeling
cannot be got in facing a novel. You do not set your teeth in order
to read "Anna Karenina." Therefore, though you should read novels,
you should not read them in those ninety minutes.

Understand that Bennett is writing for the average white collar (male) worker of Edwardian England. He's not speaking to the aristocratic classes with the ritzy British boarding school and some college in their backgrounds. And he assumes these average citizens will find Anna Karenina pleasant, easy, reading, as effortless as slipping down the stream in a fast current.

Fishies

And very large ones, too. I never got close enough to be able to tell what kind they were, but they were hugelymongous.

Plant Propagation

Forget rooting compound, fancy propogation techniques, or any other specialized technique. The key to plant propogation is in the plant you choose. I'm no expert, I'm just lazy.

Petunias and Moss roses are the way to go (picture below taken about three weeks ago).

They are easy, grow well almost no matter what you do, and they they look pretty. They bloom generously and grow quickly, too (below is a picture of the same bucket taken today).


These look slightly bedraggled because of the rain we had last night, but they are full of blooms and it thrills my soul to look at them just outside our deck doors.
Petunias are supposed to be easy to propagate from cuttings. I haven't tried with these yet. I did grow some from a cutting a few years ago by sticking the stem in water until it rooted and then replanting it.

About a week ago I was watering the moss rose (portulaca) to the left-as you see, it is thriving. But in watering it, I broke off several short stems. I have had some clay pots of soil hanging on my fence waiting for me to plant something in them, so I stripped the lower leaves and simply stuck the stems in the dirt up to the lowest leaf (I left perhaps two inches of stem bare of leaves). I watered it well every day, since these pots were outside, and clay pots evaporate the water quickly.


A week later, they are all still green, rooting nicely, and three of them are blooming. Again, because of the rain, they all look a bit bedraggled, and I don't think the FYG took a picture of the best of them. But considering how much growth the parent plant had in three weeks, I expect to have blossoms cascading down the side of the pots by the end of July.

Blossoms like this one.

That's six new flowering plants from one original plant. That's the kind of gardening I like.=)

UPdated to add this picture of the parent plant taken the 29th of June:

This is taken from the same angle as the shot at the top of the post.

Our Front Gate, Redux

I posted a picture of this pot here just a couple weeks ago. The weeds around this pot were so high, it couldn't really be seen from the road, so I put the pot up on the post.

Much to my parents' chagrin, I didn't want the weeds mowed because in the weeds we also have blackeyed susans, campion, spiderwort, milkweed, and solomon's seal. Sadly, somebody has gone ahead and mowed around my mailbox just this morning (without permission), knocking over a perfectly good tiger lily in the process.

But the container garden is flourishing, and safe from vigilante mowers. Isn't it lovely? I am so pleased with it, so gratified to find that something I planted is actually GROWING! It's exciting, especially when you click on the link above and compare that scruffy little pot of flowers to this exciting blend of reds and yellows, and to think this all happened in just three weeks time!

Mudpuppy

The children have been digging in and around what was once a small volunteer pond. At one point they dug a hole deep enough and in the right place that all the water promptly drained out. We no longer have a pond. But they have found clay, and they fill the area up with water from the hose on a daily basis and dig up clay. They have quite a clayworks set up. They process it in an assembly line, rinsing it of impurities, then piling it up to be bagged at the tend of the line.

I have no idea what they intend to do with the garbage bags of clay that are currently stored in my freezer. We make the children rinse off outside in the hose before they are allowed in, and their clothes get rinsed off at the outside spigots before going in the washing machine.

My yard looks like a bombsite and I miss the pond. I had plans for it. But the children are having the time of their lives, and the FYG, whose feet you see above, is 11 years of age and we are already seeing signs that this sort of destruction fun won't be amusing to her in another couple of years.

Recently she's started spending time really 'fixing' her hair, and she's interested in growing out some side bangs, and she even curls them, which I find completely astonishing. None of her sisters were as tomboyish as she (no, not even the Equuschick) and none of them tried a curling iron this young.

In another example, later today the older girls and another homeschooling mom and I have plans to watch some movies and stuff ourselves on guacamole. The other mom has four boys, two of whom are close to the FYG's age and they have been close friends for the last two years or so. The six young children (our youngest two and her four) are supposed to get together with the dads and do something fun. We've done this a few times before and the FYG has enjoyed herself. However, last time there was some reluctance on her part because they were going to be watching a movie she considers a boring boy movie. And this time she wrinkled her nose and said, "But I'll be the only girl." This has always been true in these sorts of outings, because she's closer in age to the boys than to her sisters, and it never bothered her before. She asked "Do I have to go?" And then she hit upon a brilliant idea- she's going to spend the afternoon and night with Granny Tea. They are going out to a luncheon with the DAR, where she will hear somebody speak on 'Early Domestic Arts,' and then they are going for a walk in the woods and will probably have tea or something girly-girl, but also age appropriate (she's not yet allowed to watch the movies we'll be watching). Granny Tea, being the good grandmama that she is, will enjoy the FYG's company as much as the FYG will enjoy being the center of attention from a doting Grandmama.

And so my little mudpuppy is growing up, but not too fast, as we can see by the picture above. And she's growing up gracefully and naturally, not being constricted into a small adult too soon, not being denied the freedom of movement and exploration that is the birthright of all children.

Because EVERYONE is interested in The Equuschick's Toe.

Who could not be?

It was a decent enough toe this morning, nothing remarkable perhaps, but serviceable, relatively clean, and decently covered with what is commonly called keratin.

But toes and their coverings not do not come with life-time guarantees, and The Equuschick, while spending the day outside cleaning stalls, clipping horses, and the like, found her toe in the unfortunate position of underneath Sky's hoof.

It is no longer a fairly decent toe, though you could now call it remarkable, as it is covered in more colours, hues and tints than your average toe, and it will soon be entirely without its respectable covering of keratin.

The Equuschick, as she told her mother, feels rather attached to this toe-nail in more ways than one, and is upset that she is going lose it.

But if she must, she must, and she might as well laugh at herself as much as possible.

The CD cataloging project has been temporarily stymied because someone appears to have misplaced the stickers we were using to mark the CD cases. Botheration.

At last count we were at 250 CDs. I was pleased to see that 82 of them were mine (yes, mum, all 82). The Girl asked me today which was my favorite CD... I could only exclaim in response that that was like asking a mother to pick her favorite child.

A Damsel Fly

I took this a couple weeks ago while on a nature walk. I didn't know that Damsel Fly's faces could be so cute. :)

Brownie Mix

This recipe comes from one of those self-published Once a Month cooking cookbooks, mustard yellow with a black comb-binding that's breaking and the pages are tearing out. You can tell we like this recipe very much because these pages are covered in chocolate stains. Mine is called Custom Cooking I, by Mary Carney. I don't know if there was ever a Custom Cooking II, and I don't know if she's still writing and publishing. We've had this since shortly after it was published in 1993, and I've found it a practical, basic bulk cooking resource. Most of the rest of the recipes are journeyman food- workaday, nothing spectacular or exotic, but a very useful cookbook for beginning bulk cookers.

The Brownie Recipe is also pretty basic, but you can't really go wrong with chocolate and this makes whipping up a batch of brownies on a whim easy and it's much more frugal than buying boxed mixes. We do use whole wheat flour mainly because that's almost all we ever have.

Combine in a VERY large container (some people might use a bucket- we have friends who mix large batches of food in a clean ice chest):

8 cups of flour
8 teaspoons of baking powder
4 teaspoons salt
16 cups of sugar
5 cups of cocoa powder

Cut in 4 cups of solid shortening (lard, butter, margarine, coconut oil...) until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

Cover this and keep it in a cool, dark place. Coconut oil and lard will keep better than butter or margarine. It doesn't need to be refrigerated.

To make an 8X8 pan of brownies, grease your pan and mix 2 cups of the mix, 2 eggs, and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. The secret to rich, moist, brownies is not to over mix, so just combine this until the eggs are blended. Pour mix into pan and bake 20-25 minutes at 350 degrees.

Seeing the World In a Grain of Sand

"Looking closely at the commonplace things of nature that are found on almost any small family farm, one becomes aware of a quality of miracle and infinity about them.

The more one researches these small things, such as the purple-blue
violet I picked in the yard this morning and brought in to examine
under a microscope, the more clear it becomes that nothing on earth
exists totally separate and unrelated, and that every living thing is composed of ever smaller parts.

From the purple-striped deep tube of the violet's petal a naturalist
could go on to an examination of the larger, related plant world, or a scientist could as easily discover the infinitely smaller parts of which the violet cells are composed. Either way, a thing as commonplace as an ordinary spring violet contains the essence of infinity."

Rachel Peden

This reminded me of C.S. Lewis' experience of something he called Joy, which he remembered first experiencing with intensity as a small child when his brother showed him a miniature garden he'd created in a biscuit tin:

"It made me aware of nature--not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant. . . . As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden."

Scheduling Tips

A few years back I was on a homeschooling list where it was said not to be relying on the Holy Spirit if you had a schedule. I am not an organized, self-disciplined person, and I have to say, this idea is piffle. The schedule is not the 'flesh,' my inborn laziness and utter distractability is the 'flesh.'

On the other hand, people like me can't just stick to any sort of schedule willy-nilly. We need some little self-deceptions to help us along. And we need to keep the schedule in its proper place. I never feel guilty not sticking to my schedule if something better comes up (the military plane that flew overhead this morning and waggled its wings in our general direction- that was cool). If we get really involved in discussing whether we are more disgusted by Macbeth or Lady Macbeth, I don't chafe if that discussion runs past the clock. If I hear of a terrific yard sale for fabric, I can drop what we are doing and go to that sale and pick up where we left off some other day. The schedule is our back-up plan, plan B. Real life is plan A.

One of those other useful self-deceptions is padding your schedule. That is, if I want to spend fifteen minutes on a topic, I allot myself thirty on the schedule. I've been doing this as long as I have had a schedule of any sort, so I was tickled to read that back in 1910, Arnold Bennett was recommending this very idea:

...[A]llow much more than an hour and a half in which to do the work of an hour and a half. Remember the chance of accidents. Remember human nature. And give yourself, say, from 9 to 11.30 for your task of ninety minutes.

Guilty As Charged

Arnold Bennett, in telling others How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, that is, to really live during our time on earth, to live more deeply, and to live the examined life rather than the unexamined life, reminds us that it is important to:

... think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year.

And this is a problem because.....?

How some things change and others don't.

I found a short internet survey that I took a few years back, and it was interesting to see what answers had changed. I'm sharing some of them; bits in italic are my current additions and commentary.


Ten Happy Things:
1) Seeing children in a library - Hm. Now it's watching children in the library with suspicion to see who is the likely candidate for repeatedly flooding our men's bathroom. Also, those children in the library are only there because their parents aren't. That's not happy.


3) pizza tomorrow night - Actually, we're not having pizza tomorrow night, but this does remind me that the Boy made his birthday meal list earlier today. He put both spaghetti & meatballs AND pizza on it, then giggled and said he guessed he should put something healthy on there too. He apparently hasn't figured out we're not a full service buffet yet.

5) almost reaching your goal of reading five books this month - Ah, those were the days. Happy today is the fact that I'm less than 100 pp from finishing a re-read of FotR.

6) Grandmothers who say things like, "I'm going to take our darling home, Grandpa" referring to you as the darling - They still say it. :-)

7) Beethoven's symphonies - That never changes
8) Bach's concertos - That Either.
9) Reading in bed - Or That.

10) having little brother who willingly offers to vacuum your bedroom - He hasn't done that in a while, but he gallantly helped his older sister with a car door earlier today. He also has figured out that if everybody in the world knows somebody who knows somebody else who knows somebody else, then actually everyone in the world is connected. "If you have a friend who has a friend who has a friend in China, just think about that!" A Smaller & Very Adorable boy he was discussing this theory with piped up, "But they don't know ME." Too cute.

Books and Bad Mommy Moment

You know those moments when you're jogging along in life, head altogether someplace else and somebody says or does something that- WHAM- yanks you back in the time machine to revisit one of those Bad Mommy Moments? Those moments when you really blew it, you regret it, but you can't change it and you still wonder just how much of a chain reaction of negative side effects you created for your poor guinea pig of a child?

That happened to me today, only it was more like one of those Bad Mommy two or three years. In the comments to this post, Brandy said,

"I, too, had my doubts when we first started reading The Wind in the Willows aloud. I was amazed to find my children (then 4 and 2) were more enchanted with Grahame's work than any book we had read thus far! This experience taught me that I had done my children a disservice by thinking that they were unable to appreciate beautifully precise language. "

Oh, how that made me wince, because I learned that same lesson, but it took me much longer and my poor child was sadly shortchanged by my thickheadedness. While still probing that sore and tender spot in my memories, preparatory to burying it once more until some other accidental nudge made it flare up again, I thought, "Well, maybe we shouldn't bury that. Maybe we should blog it. So people will understand why you are so passionate about this."

As most of long time readers know, we have adopted children when they were older than 'normal' (approximately kindergarten age). This story involves one of those children in particular. The previous environment was not the nightmare that movies based on a true story are made of, but it wasn't particularly healthful, nourishing, or nurturing, either. For example, I asked what sort of things the child liked to do, and I was told watch The Price is Right and another couple of game shows I didn't know. There were no books that I know of. The diet included no vegetables. And when the child came (at very nearly four years of age) her vocabulary was considerably below that of the home-grown two year old already in our home. It made for a difficult transition- for both of us, but it was naturally especially confusing for her, poor lamb. She had no idea what was happening to her and why and she had not chosen anything about her situation.

I remember one afternoon in particular where she fell very hard on our tile floor and was howling loudly. I wanted desperately to see where she had hurt herself so I could check for bumps, bruises, concussion, or contusions. She was howling so loudly I was sure something was very wrong, so I was frantically feeling her, asking, "Where do you hurt?" She kept slapping the floor where she'd fallen and saying, "I hurt right there." In her frustration with me, her cries were getting louder and shriller, and in my panic that a bone somewhere must surely be broken, I was getting louder and shriller as well (louder also just to make myself heard), asking some variation of, "But where are YOU hurt, where does it hurt? Where did your body get hurt?" And she answered every time by smacking the floor where she'd fallen and saying, "RIGHT HERE!" Suddenly I stopped, caught my breath and wracked my brains for a better way to do this. I asked her slowly and clearly, "Show me your boo-boo."
She stopped screaming, showed me the place that hurt, and all ended well enough. This seems kind of funny now. But I was shaken.

I had not ever used the word 'boo-boo' with any of our other children. We simply never used 'baby talk' at our house. This was a seemingly minor incident, but I realized that although this was a domestic adoption where we presumably were taking one American child who basically shared our culture into another American home, there was a cultural divide and a language barrier I hadn't even recognized, and it would have to be overcome.

Over the next few years we struggled and muddled our way through this, and I could not figure out how we were going to manage homeschooling her in the manner to which I become accustomed. We used REAL books, hard books, old books with complex sentence structure and advanced vocabulary, words that many adults in our society no longer used. She came from an impoverished, barren background, and really struggled to learn to read, to learn how to listen to other people (she really didn't know, having had few conversations with others). I put off using harder books with her because I thought if she was having so much trouble understanding the easy, straightforward stuff, she'd be lost with more advanced, complex imagery and vocabulary.

So for the next few years (2? 3?) we tried controlled vocabulary books, books that should have been easier for her, since they used words and situation she would be more likely to be familiar with. She struggled, and she felt frustrated. She felt like she wasn't as bright as everybody else because other people read more, read harder, and read more interesting books than she did and she couldn't understand her easy reading books.

I intended to get her reading up to a certain level using those books more suitable to a child of her background, years, and lack of vocabulary. I was doing what John Vernon and others in that comment thread- remembering that she didn't know those hard words, so I should adjust my communications to her level. Then we'd gradually transition.

But we never got to anything like a transition level- two or three years after learning to read she was still stumbling through I Can Read books, unable to tell me almost anything about them when she finished. We read picture books to her, and she was included in other family read alouds, but we didn't have her try her mind on any books for herself outside her easy reader level, because that would have been too hard.

And one day, after a night in prayer and tears, I thought, if I go on like this, she will never, ever, experience the wider world of delightful stories she reads for herself. She is already frustrated, and it can hardly frustrate her more to fail at something challenging and really hard and also interesting than it does to fail at something easy, insipid, and vapid.


So I pulled out King Midas and the Golden Touch (retold by Nathaniel Hawthorne). She was enchanted, wanted more, listened intently, wanted to know what happened next. She _cared_ about that story, that literary tale. She worked at it. It's not as humiliating to miss a word with three syllables as it is to miss a word with three letters. It's not embarrassing mispronounce Bacchus, not like mispronouncing 'bag.'

When she was ten, we read through one of Plutarch's lives, translated by North. This is college level stuff. Was it always easy? No. She cried at the start of that year, but I held her hand through it all and took it in easy paces and by the end of the year it was her favorite schoolbook. Will she ever be a scholarly and academic student? Probably not. Academics is not her strong point, but she has a billion and one other strong points, and she can READ, and read complex material. She can read and understand more than she ever would have if I'd continued to be afraid that it was too hard for her.

I had very good reasons for thinking this stuff was too hard for her. And every one of my sympathetic, concerned, and loving reasons was just another way of underestimating what she was capable of doing, of keeping her trapped in the same ghetto of the mind she'd come from. For most people 'the soft bigotry of low expectations' is just a cheap slogan. For me, it's the very real way I nearly failed my child.

Do not underestimate them. Do not dismiss things on their behalf because they are 'too hard.' Let them try. Let them stretch themselves. What you think is 'too hard' may not be the standard you think it is.

And While We're On This Topic

Here are there terrific articles on Whole Language/Look-Say/Anti-phonics:

Let's Kill Dick and Jane The only reason these books continue to be popular is nostalgia. The fact that so many parents still think these books are great teaching texts is itself a dismal indictment of the controlled vocabulary and a grim testimony of the effectiveness of the brainwashing we received as children.
In the fifties and sixties a small and unsuccessful reading reform was started by Blouke Carus. He'd been horrified at the poor quality of American textbooks when his son entered American schools after a year in a German school.

A few years later, while he was hospitalized for a stomach ailment, Carus read Arther Trace Jr.’s What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t, which compared the rich content of Russian textbooks to the vacuity of Dick and Jane readers in American schools. By 4th grade, Trace wrote, the Russian children’s reading vocabulary was nearly 10,000 words, while their peers in American schools had been exposed to a carefully controlled vocabulary of fewer than 1,800 words. Carus was inspired; he knew what he had to do: he would take on and break the monopoly of the dumbed-down Dick and Jane–style readers. His determination was fueled by the belief that it should be possible to “educate our masses as rigorously as Europeans do their elites …”

At the time that Carus got his inspiration, the public schools were thoroughly infested by a deeply rooted spirit of anti-intellectualism. The life-adjustment philosophy was the reigning paradigm, which decreed that 60 percent of all students were fit for neither an academic nor a vocational education and needed to be adjusted to their lowly role in society. The dominant reading philosophy was the whole-word (“look-say”) method, enshrined in the simple-minded Dick and Jane–style reading books, which taught children to memorize the shape of words through repetition and ignored phonics altogether. That was the mountain that Carus planned to climb.

The Whole Word Fraud:

Children forced into look-say (or whole word) classes learn English as if each word were a Chinese ideogram. This approach is slow and inefficient. Typically, kids can memorize about 800 "sight words" a year. Even by the sixth grade, so-called A-students could be expected to know only 5000 words. With this limited vocabulary, there is no newspaper or cereal box that they can read even half of, at the age of twelve. Worse still, children that age have more than 30,000 words buzzing around in their heads. They speak most of these words, and recognize all of them in conversation. They just can’t recognize them in print. Imagine the imprisonment and torture we are describing here. Your ears and your brain know 30,000 words, but your eyes know only 5000. You can get a migraine just thinking about this. By the end of high school an outstanding look-say student might know 10,000 words on sight, but by that time the volume of heard or recognized words has probably grown past 50,000. The victim of this abuse will be semiliterate for life. The victim will not be able to read for pleasure.

Which brings us to 'Thank-you, Whole Language:'

Thank you Whole Language. Thank you for your many pearls of wisdom. Thank you for Context Clues. Thank you for Prior Knowledge. Thank you for the Initial Consonant. Thank you for Picture Clues. Thank you for Miscues.

But most of all, thank you for my wife. The other day she and I were riding along the highway and saw a sign for a town called Verona, so my wife read "Veronica". It's very simple, you see. First she applied Context Clues (she knew we were looking for a name). Then she applied the Initial Consonant ("V"). Then she applied Prior Knowledge (she already knew of a name "Veronica"). She put these Whole Language strategies together and ... success! At least, as much success as we can expect, I suppose.

Thank you William S. Gray for inventing "Look-Say" and the "Dick and Jane" series of basal readers. Thank you A. Sterl Artley for helping Mr. Gray and for your phonics-bashing diatribes of the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to the National Education Association for giving Mr. Gray and his friends two years of free promotion in the NEA Journal in 1930 and 1931. Together you all had managed to essentially eradicate phonics from America's public schools by the 1950s and early 60s, when my wife went to school.

But more importantly, thank you for my wife. Awhile back she was reading a pamphlet about something that was described as "venerable". Now that's a word you don't see every day, so what did she do but cleverly pull out her Whole Language skills? Context Clues, you see, told her that she was looking for an adjective. Next was the Initial Consonant "V". Then out came the Prior Knowledge -- she simply thought of an adjective she already knew that was about the right length and started with "V". And voila ... success again ... she came up with "vulnerable".

There's more, much more, at every one of those websites, more articles, more links, more information.

Be subversive. Read a good book to somebody today. Tell somebody that 'ph' says 'f' and that in general when g is followed by i or e it makes the soft g sound.

Sesquipedalians and Children

In Sixpence in her Shoe, Mrs. Mcginley tells of an adventure a childrens' author she knows had at her publishers. She spotted a copy editor with a syllabus in one hand and a manuscript he was hastily revising for a new children's book in the other. The lady author asked, "Don't tell me there's a censorship problem in juveniles?"

The editor said certainly there was:

"We have to be very careful. Here is a book intended for children from six to nine. And this paper contains all the words that six-to-nine-year-olds are supposed to be able to understand. I have to take out all the big words not on the list and put in little ones."

The lady author decided she was done writing for the childrens' market, and thus the children lost another champion and were left with cardboard instead of bread. McGinley points out that nobody wants to take the credit for this binding of children's minds as tightly as ever a Chinese girl's foot was bound:

But the fact remains that somebody has set up as a gospel the rule that odd words, long words, interesting words, grown-up words must be as precisely sifted out from a book for, say, five-year-olds as chaff from wheat or profanity from a television program....
'Read-it-yourself' books now come cleverly planned around a vocabulary of three hundred fifty words or thereabouts, and the fact that they are often clever and occasionally brilliantly ingenious does not alter their crippling formula.

Just as there are no longer any delightful playgrounds with heartpounding slides and monkey bars, and children must ride bikes swaddled from head to toe in padding, helmets, and denim and it's a very bad mother who lets her children so much as bump their head when they're learning to walk (hello, world, I am one of those very bad mothers), we want to protect their minds from being challenged, stretches, or overworked, and so we end up with the sort of maimed existence Charlotte Mason deplored and that I saw evidenced a few weeks ago when a perfectly 'normal' American public schooled teen told me she'd did not know what a continent was and had never heard of Portugal and where was Europe anyway? Whew. I do get incensed at this stuff. These kids have been, are being, continue to be, defrauded. What about their parents? Their parents were cheated of an education themselves maimed by whole language, new math, and worse, and their parents before them suffered through the debilitating results of the Committee of 27 as far back as 1918. As Richard Mitchell pointed out:

They concluded, in other words, that precious few schoolchildren were capable of the pursuit of knowledge and the exercise of the mind in the cause of judgment. That, of course, turned out to be the most momentous self-fulfilling prophecy of our century. It is also a splendid example of the muddled thought out of which established educational practice derives its theories. The proposals of the Eliot report are deemed elitist because they presume that most schoolchildren are generally capable of the mastery of subject matter and intellectual skill; the proposals of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, on the other hand, are "democratic" in presuming that most schoolchildren are not capable of such things and should stick to homemaking and the manual arts.

Phyllis McGinley did not know where the dilution of children's intellectual food started, but she saw the deplorable results:

Are children never to climb? Must they be saved from all the healthy bumps and bruises of exploration? I suppose the theory drifted down from textbooks, those teacher's college-tested readers which are the common and insipid fare of elementary schools. Like many bad things, they were inspired by good intentions. Children, said the educationalists, must be gently led along the path to learning, seduced not prodded. So a vocabulary must be acquired in standard stages and according to procedures formed in a laboratory and stamped out by IBM machines. Probably modern textbooks are placider than... the theological treatises on which little Pilgrims used to sharpen their wits, but they cater only to the average or below-average mind. The genuine reading child is not an average person and he wants, even at six or seven or eight,gourmet fare. Yet so prophylactic has the whole business become that the good sap of invention is being squeezed out of both storybooks and schoolbooks. In cutting down the weeds we have also cut down the flowers.

And we have done more than smother word discovery; we have deleted magic and fantasy from children's lives. Most modern textbooks try to appeal to the young by talking about what they already know- their everyday activities....

There follows a long but delicious passage where Mrs. Mcginley compares a boring story in a second grade reader with a delightfully melodramatic tale from McGuffey's second reader and points out how much more exciting children will find the McGuffey story. She says that if they are stuck with the typical drivel found in readers of her time, the children will look for excitement in their comic books and remain 'only half-literate all their lives. They will be unable to spell out a message unless it is accompanied by a picture.'

There follows another long and equally delicious passage where she deplores the fact that illustrations and toys masquerading as books now lead the children's picture-book market, which would be splendid, she says, if the goal of 'reading were the formation of a taste for good art' rather than whetting the child's 'appetite for literature.' She has a better idea:

If ever I had time and courage enough, I'd write a children's book stuck plum pudding rich with great jawbreakers of words. I would use 'egregious'. I would work in 'monstriferous'. I would use 'sepicolous' and 'ubiquitous' and 'antidisestablishmentarianism' and nictate and supernumerary and 'internecine' and a hundred glorious others. And I think children would get the joke and flock to it- if, that is, the story were good enough. They are a braver generation than we suppose.

This probably explains the popularity of the Lemony Snicket books, and they weren't even all that good. Our children deserve much better from us. Don't keep them away from the older books because they are too hard, too old-fashioned, too difficult. These are not defects. Don't dumb down your vocabulary so that they will understand you- they understand better than we think and are more capable than we assume. Don't fear the sesquipedalians.

Habits

Arnold Bennett on the difficulty of developing new habits in the area of spending one time's well:

One may have spent one's time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been. To do something else means a change of habits.
And habits are the very dickens to change! Further, any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

~How to Live On 24 Hours a Day

Interesting comments

There were some sixty odd comments to that 'big words article essay thing in a newspaper' before the paper closed the comments. I was very happy to see that the vast majority were opposed to dumbing down our communications any further than we already have. There were a few objections, and the most coherent of those objections came from one John Vernon, from Markham Canada. Objecting to N. Witen's statement that "... as a native English speaker, it behooves me to actually know my language," Vernon suggested "... the writer's thoughts are better communicated than [sic] writing .... "it benefits me to actually know...".

It is obvious from the rest of the exchange on the word behooves that Vernon meant the writer's thoughts would be better communicated BY writing 'it benefits me....' Here's the rest of that exchange:

Gimma A Break from Canada replied: "Actually, "behooves" is an excellent word for the sentence, since it does behoove us to know our own language...."

Swifty J from Mariposa, Canada said: "John, the poster was clearly using the word in the primary sense: "to be necessary or proper for, as for moral or ethical considerations; be incumbent on: It behooves the court to weigh evidence impartially."

Just try putting "benefits" in that sample sentence. F for usage.

John Vernon from Canada complied with Swifty's directive: "It benefits the court to weigh evidence impartially. Otherwise, trust in the judicial system will decline". My English teacher would have suggested behooves in an attempt to expand my vocabulary, but it is understandable and it is no F.....

SWifty J from Mariposa Canada pointed out, "John: you've changed the meaning of the sentence, and you had to add a second one to try to salvage part of the lost nuance. In other words, you've sacrificed precision in the name of serving readers who don't understand "behoove." I suppose this isn't a big problem if you know your readers are just learning the language, but IMO such gymnastics really shouldn't be necessary for general audiences."

John insisted his altering the sentence did not weaken the point he was trying to make: I agree that I changed the meaning of the sentence but only slightly. The second sentence was necessary only to add substance and I think is necessary in either case.


Swifty J objected, and he had the last word in this exchange: "John: changed the meaning only slightly? Where is the sense of moral and ethical duty? Largely absent, in spite of the second sentence.

The more sensible approach would be to say "the court has a moral and ethical duty to weigh evidence impartially."

But wait! How can we be sure that today's reader really understands the metaphor in "weigh evidence"? Maybe "check out every side of the story" would guarantee that nobody's left behind. Come to think of it, "impartially" sounds snottily polysyllabic and will surely confuse some readers; "without taking sides" would be better, no?

There. Now we have something almost anybody can understand: "the court has a moral and ethical duty to check out every side of the story without taking sides."

But wait! Aren't words like "moral" and "ethical" kind of complicated when you stop and think about them? There are whole wings of libraries devoted to just those two words, so maybe we need to replace them with something simpler. OK, now we're down to: "for the court to be a good place and do the right thing, it has to check out every side of the story without taking sides."

I can see an obvious role for this kind of writing: as part of an exercise for explaining words such as "behoove" and "impartially" -- roughly at the grade 3 level.

I retract part of my previous post: this morning I'm even more firmly against spoonfeeding the reader by avoiding so-called "hard" words. Children and ESL learners should be building up their vocabularies to the greatest extent possible, even if it means reading with a dictionary close by at all times. Down with dumbing down.

I like Swifty. I think John an amiable but slightly mushminded fellow- he'd also said that newcomers to the language couldn't understand behoove, and didn't that matter to anybody? Several people pointed out that sure, it mattered, but they would never learn it if, thanks to people like John and Clive Beck, words like behoove were banished from conversation. The way the unlearned would learn it is if we keep right on using the words they don't yet know.

The whole exchange reminded me of this passage from Phyllis McGinley's Sixpence in Her Shoe (every reading mother should have it on her shelves) where she is speaking of the paltry selection of quality books in her local library. She says:

Children, of all people, deserve the best. At this age, their tastes are forming. From the first nursery rhyme to the last Arthurian legend, they should have what even their elders do not often get in a story- accomplished style, honest motivation, characters proficiently drawn.
And while those qualities can be found here if one searches, the mass of the writing is limp, listless, unoriginal, mediocre, and humdrum. Plots are insipid or mechanical. Too many pictures smother the story. And even when the writing lifts itself above accepted 'juvenile standards,' its vigor is drained away by that leech among publishing structures- the Law of the Right Vocabulary....
The masterpieces among them [juvenile literature] never pall. They are the true escape literature, and in them one can run away to a genuine but different world, where virtue triumphs and struggle reaps its rewards. After all, there is only one test for a good book for children: can it be read without pain by an adult?

...Children are adventurous. Something rich and strange delights them.

She supports here thesis with a lovely example from her own family. one of her daughters, then five, was ill and wanted her mother to read to her. Mrs. McGinley began with Wind in the Willows because it was near to hand, but as she read:

I began to have misgivings. The adventures were satisfactory, but Kenneth Grahame had not been tutored in the new school of talking down to children. His vocabulary, his wit, his plotting gave no quarter to limited comprehension.
"Look dear," I said, "preparing to shut the pages, these are awfully
hard words. I think the book is too old for you."
The patient was not only firm, she was distraught. "I don't care," she cried. "I don't care if it's too hard for me. I don't care if I can't understand the words. I just want to hear that story."

(previous posts mentioning Sixpence here and here. Perhaps a dozen other places as well).

The controlled vocabulary, political correctness, and probably television have done more to reduce the regions of our minds and send thousands of perfectly good words into archaic usage and daily extinction than centuries of illiteracy. Save the words! Use a sesquipedlian several times each day.

Mama Squirrel Rants

And it's good reading. REading her post and the links reminded me of one of those painful incidents from grade school.

I think I must have been in maybe fifth or sixth grade. I know I was riding the school bus home, a tedious, hot, tiresome, a demoralizing experience at the best of times. My seatmate and I were having a discussion about swearing and what words were really cussing and what words weren't. She held that saying, "I swear" was swearing, but "God bless it" wasn't. I said that 'God bless it' was swearing just as much as the other, more common usage about God acting on the object of ones wrath, because both were using the Lord's name in vain, and that's what swearing was really all about, so unless you were praying or really meaning to invoke the Deity to bless somebody, you were using His name in vain.

At which point the swearing boy in front of us who had prompted the discussion in the first place turned his head and demanded to know what made me an expert on swearing since I never swore and what was up with that anyway.

I responded, with righteousness in my head and no love in my heart, "I don't have to swear because my vocabulary is large enough to say what I want to say without using those words."

He waved his hands in my face and said loudly and mockingly, "Ooooh, she thinks she's so great because she uses big words like 'vocabuly,' oooooh, what a show off, she can say 'vacabuly,' huh, but she can't say @*#$&$^." Naturally, everybody else on the bus laughed at me and no doubt my priggishness totally deserved the drubbing it received, but I felt the gulf between me and my fellow students gaping wide and black at my feet. I did not believe I'd used an impossibly big word (in fact, I knew plenty harder words that I already knew better than to use around my fellow students because they would assume I was being snooty). I was shocked, and even felt some twinge of pity for the poor soul who thought using the word 'vocabuly' was elitist, and I still think the fact that it was is an indictment of the school system and its products (which does include the parents of those children).

I wasn't old enough or widely read enough to be able to express it yet, but I felt in my bones that while I did not belong there and needed to escape, some day I would, while he would forever be trapped in the much narrower confines of his own skull.
As Mama Squirrel says:

Our collective gift of language is one of the most democratic things we have (please take "democratic" as a positive idea there). It is being able to read and understand the greatest ideas that have been written, and express our own as well, that keeps us from slavery--including slavery to propaganda. What kind of a Brave New World would we be living in if we were limited--by political correctness or any other such foolishness--to using "story" for "narrative," "very big" for "prodigious," and "teach" for "instruct?"

Highly recommended read. Plus, the word-spotting possibilities are terrific!

Carnival of Homeschooling

Judy Consent of the Governed hosts this week, and we have a homeschool road trip! Here are some of my favorite stops along the way:
Hearthside has a terrific post on the difference between parlor tricks and real learning and how schools are crushing the love of learning in children. She used to teach kindergarten, btw, so this is no outsider pointing fingers.

Barbara Frank has yet another example of that kind of Groupthink whereby public schooled children being taught one side, and only one side, of a controversial issue and being taught that it is not a controversial issue.

Are you noticing a trend here? Elisheva at Raggamuffin Studies has another post that caught my eye. She writes about some nasty struggles homeschoolers in CT are undergoing just now, and points out that the source of this encroaching statism is

the idea that the state has a kind of ownership of the child and merely contracts to the parents the duties of raising the child as a servant of the state. This is not an American value. Neither is it a democratic ideal; it is, rather, a fascist concept. The Constitution of the United States clearly demonstrates that a government governs at the pleasure of the citzenry. Government is the servant of the citizen, not the master. Citizens are not the servants of the state, rather they direct their government to do certain, constitutionally defined jobs in order to protect their liberties and live their lives.

This is an excellent post, well sourced and researched, and as an added bonus I particularly like her family's 'substitute' for the Pledge of Allegiance, something I've never been entirely comfortable with myself. I like what she does instead very, very much.

This post about vigilante obstetrics may seem a little off the beaten path for homeschoolers, but homeschoolers are themselves off the beaten path, aren't we? If you are pregnant, might be pregnant, or know somebody who might be, you'll want to be forarmed with this important information (the Reader's Digest version is 'don't let your doctor give you Cytotec, and of course, in order to be informed about that, you need not to ever let your doctor give you a drug you don't know anything about).


Pass The Torch is asking for homeschoolers to share their best tips for new homeschoolers in a Mr. Linky fest this Friday. To find out more, visit here.

Those are the things that interested me. I think, having homeschooled since 1988 and with my youngest child nearly 9 years old, I am much more interested in the philosophy and political issues these days than the how-to and what-to questions, but newer homeschoolers will find those sorts of posts as well. Grab a snack for the road and see what other pitstops there are at his week's carnival!

Simplified Life

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.

Walden, by Thoreau

And it no doubt shows the undusted state of my mind when I tell you that what grabbed my attention is his statement that these things had to be dusted daily.

Enlivening the Mind

One of Miss Mason's themes is that if you enrich the mind in one area, it carries over to other areas. It's a variation on the theme that the more you know, the more you can know. Studies, said Charlotte Mason, are a delight. And just as rest from your labor can actually improve your labor by giving you a fresh outlook, delighting yourself in knowledge in one area, exercising your mind, can have benefits elswhere, in seemingly unrelated areas. The benefits of a wide and generous education are broad, the limits of a narrow education are constraining: "our hope is that henceforth we shall bring up our young people with self-sustaining minds, as well as self-sustaining bodies, by a due ordering of the process of education. We hope so to awaken and direct mind hunger that every man's mind will look after itself." As for those without this awakened mind, "their future intellectual requirements will be satisfied by bridge at night and golf by day."

One of the methods Mr. Bennett suggests for really living on 24 hours a day is to spend some time, even a very little time, every day actually applying the mind to something outside itself:

You practise physical exercises for a mere ten minutes morning and evening, and yet you are not astonished when your physical health and strength are beneficially affected every hour of the day, and your whole physical outlook changed.
Why should you be astonished that an average of over an hour a day
given to the mind should permanently and completely enliven the whole activity of the mind?

A Boy, His Dog, and a Book

Two more of our favorite books that qualify as 'boys' books are Where the Red Fern Grows and Summer of the Monkeys. Both are by Wilson Rawls. Where the Red Fern Grows is is a book to break your heart over. Summer of the Monkeys is lesser known, but very nearly as good, plus it doesn't leave you sobbing at a gravesite at the end. Depending on your temperament, that may make it better.

Last night we watched the recent (I think '98, which is recent enough) remake of Summer of the Monkeys. Naturally, the book is much, much better, and the main character in the movie was so spiteful, bratty, and filled with anger in the movie that it was hard to connect with him. IN fact, our children bonded with the monkeys more than they did the obnoxious little boy. I was talking with a friend about the differences, and she asked me if either of Rawl's books was a true story. I wasn't sure, though I thought I'd read somewhere that Where the Red Fern Grows was largely based on the author's life as a boy in Oklahoma. So I did what we all do these days. I Googled.

What I did not know is that the story behind this author is every bit as compelling as his terrific books- and it makes a great 'boy' story of its own. I found that story at in an online article by Jim Trelease, Read Aloud Handbook author (among other books). Where the Red Fern Grows was, the author said, pretty much a recounting of his own life as one of the hard-scrabble poor in Oklahoma. Like the HM's great-grandmother (and at about the same time) they grew up on the farm that was his mother's Cherokee allotment (in the case of the HM's great-grandmother, I think it was her father's Cherokee allotment). Rawls and his sisters were homeschooled a few years, and his mother did most of the homeschooling by reading good books to them. They later moved to an area with schools, and he attended for a few years and dropped out in the eighth grade. During his years of homeschooling, his mother lit a fire within him when she read aloud and then gave him Jack London's Call of the Wild.
Rawls wanted to write books like that. He wrote a lot of stories as a young man during and in between construction jobs from South America up to Alaska. His spelling wasn't very good, apparently, and neither was his grammar, and oddly, in spite of having already told us that Rawls did have several years of formal public school ending after the eighth grade, Trelease blames these defects entirely on the homeschooling and 'lack' of formal education. At any rate, Rawls had a trunk full of those unpublished manuscripts. Just before he got married, he burned them.

Later when his wife learned about this, she asked him to try and rewrite one. That was Where the Red Fern Grows, and he was so worried about what she would think of it that he left the house, unable to bear watching her face while she read it. He called later to see what she thought. His wife Sophie loved it, and told him to come home and they'd work on the pesky spelling and grammar issues together. Trelease says:

Since Sophie had formal education, she polished up Woody's spelling and grammar and together they ventured into publishing.

What makes this story even more delightful is the story behind how we got that story behind the original story. Rawls spoke at many schools and libraries, and he loved to tell that particular story. Trelease says that anybody he spoke to who had heard Rawls always said that this one of the most inspirational author stories they'd ever heard. So Trelease had to track down a copy of it. This turned out to be much harder to do than he'd imagined, but he finally succeeded and not only got a copy of the speech, he was able to get it on tape!

You can read more and HEAR an excerpt of the author telling his own story right here at one of Jim Trelease's author profiles taken from his book Hey, Listen to This! In spite of Trelease's cultural assumptions and confounding of public education with the ability to spell and punctuate well (we all know this isn't necessarily so, and it's the homeschoolers winning the spelling bees after all), it's a good read.

The Homeschool Picnic

Went swimmingly yesterday. Everybody behaved. There were no fights, no major injuries. One child tripped on a branch in the water, somebody got bitten by a horsefly, a pick up soccer game was too near our windows but we redirected it before anything broke. The HG sat in a wooden lawnchair that broke beneath her. I have never seen anybody fall quite so gracefully. She made not a peep, kept her ankles crossed like a lady and ended up on the ground perfectly composed and sitting straight up, looking rather astonished. Somebody asked how she had the self-control not to shriek, and she said it wasn't self-control, it was simply that she was too shocked to move.

Granny Tea and G-pa came over for dinner. Unfortunately, I overcooked the enchiladas and they were dry, but everybody was nice about it. The Headmaster's Father's Day Present didn't come in the mail until yesterday anyway, and we listened to some of it last night.
G-pa liked his present so well he asked if he could keep it.=)

Recently in the comments to this post at Cindy's, somebody said that you could make that delicious chip dip using Velveeta and Ro-tel (we never use Ro-tel, just our brand of salsa) using cream cheese instead. We tried that last night, and it was a huge hit. It's at least three times better than the Velveeta version, and is probably half the price. We used two boxes of cream cheese (.99 a box) and one jar of salsa. It's light, fluffy, creamy, and real. So I will never be buying another box of Velveeta for the rest of my life. See what blogging can do for you?

What Changed?

Where there are no distinctions there can be no superiority, perfect equality affords no temptation. The republics of Europe are all (and we may say always) in peace. Holland and Switzerland are without wars, foreign or domestic: Monarchical governments, it is true, are never long at rest; the crown itself is a temptation to enterprising ruffians at HOME; and that degree of pride and insolence ever attendant on regal authority, swells into a rupture with foreign powers, in instances, where a republican government, by being formed on more natural principles, would negotiate the mistake.

From Common Sense, by Thomas Paine

Republican governments cannot always 'negotiate' the mistake, and they are not always willing to anyway.

Here is an interesting website with the military history of HOlland. Here are some pertinent points:

By the mid-17th century the Netherlands was the foremost commercial and maritime power of Europe, and Amsterdam was the financial center of the continent. Inevitably, the Dutch and the English, the leading maritime trading nations, came into conflict. Two Anglo-Dutch Wars were waged during the 1650s and 1660s. Other wars, costly in lives and money, followed against England and France.

...In the late 18th century a struggle broke out between conservatives and those who desired democratic reforms. The conflict became moot after Napoleon I incorporated the Low Countries into the French Empire in 1810. After the fall of Napoleon, the Kingdom of the Netherlands was restored, with the addition of the territory that is now Belgium, but the union was short-lived. In 1830 the Belgians revolted and established their independence.

... During World War I (1914-1918), the nation suffered hardship through loss of trade as a result of the Allied blockade of the Continent. During World War II (1939-1945), the Netherlands was occupied by the Germans and suffered heavy destruction. ...In the colonies, the Netherlands lost a war against nationalists in Indonesia, which gained its independence in 1949.

As for Switzerland, according to this website, during the years from 1536 to 1798:

A few families control state affairs. Several rebellions put down by military force: repressed aspects of history in a country so proud of it's [sic] tradition of democracy.

Between 1798 and 1802:

Helvetic Republic Revolution in Switzerland. Farmers in occupied territories become free citizens. Centralistic parliamentary republic according to French model. Occupation by French troops and some battles of Napoleon vs. Austria and Russia in Switzerland.

There was a Civil War ending the Helvetic Republic between 1803 and 1815 Napoleon enforced a constitution of his liking created during 'negotiations' he 'mediated.' There was another brief Civil War in 1847. They did avoid World War 1 by a staunch policy of armed neutrality (those advocating we eliminate all weapons take note). But they avoided WWII largely by collaboration with the Nazis in the matter of looting and stealing.

I guess the truth is nothing changed. While what he had to say about ruffians, pride, and insolence is true enough, Thomas Paine was far too optimistic about human nature. It isn't true that perfect equality affords no temptation. There are certain types of people who positively chafe against 'perfect equality' (as though it could be achieved by legislation anyway) because they desire to be superior. There is no external condition which guards mankind from temptations.

So long as we are dealing with human beings, war we will always have with us.

Vanity, Vanity

Today was - as was posted - our homeschool picnic day. The children had a blast in the creek and I was terribly amused to see one child, standing in the middle of the creek, wringing out the water from his clothing before diving back in again. It was quite a sight.

Some People....

Can you say "Chutzpah?" Of course you can.

Here was my response:

... I am absolutely floored. Your questioner has a 'guest' staying with her for a long period of time.... [at least] two more months, and he 'won't' eat what she prepares and serves? !!!!
And he COMPLAINS about not having enough for seconds? Who RAISED this person?

I think I would tell him (with a smile on your face and a sympathetic tone dripping with honey) how much you regret that you don't have enough money in the budget NOT to eat leftovers, but if he'd like to go out to eat at a restaurant for the meals where you're eating leftovers and come home after you've all finished, you totally understand. And keep right on cooking what you normally cook.

The Biblical command says to practice hospitality. There is nothing in that command requiring you to run a catering service and break your budget. Practicing hospitality is meeting a need, not breaking your family's budget to meet somebody else's impudent demands.

I have a child with several food allergies, and I NEVER ask other people to cater to those. When we are invited over, I thank them, and I bring food our child can eat. If she can eat the meal our host prepared, lovely. If she can't, it is my responsibility to provide the back-up plan.

Seriously, this guest is not expecting biblical hospitality, he's treating his hostess like she runs a boarding house. Unless he's paying for that privilege it needs to stop.

In Which the DHM Plays Instapundit

Yawn.

Cheer!!

Thanks.=)

Clams

These (and several more) clams were found by the kids down at the creek today.

At Our House

Blogging will be light today. We have a couple of things going on. The HM requested his Father's Day Dinner this evening instead of yesterday. In a rare alignment of the stars and schedules, everybody in our family will be off work and home today until nearly teatime when the HG abandons us for the library books. I do have some items in the drafts queue, but I think I'll save them for another day.

In about two hours the homeschooling group will descend upon us once more for an event scheduled months ago, although not in quite so hectic a fashion as last time. But since I don't go anywhere anymore if I can help it (and I usually can help it), everybody must come to me.

Today's event is merely a homeschool picnic. Everybody brings their own sacklunch and lawnchairs. We offer the use of our bathrooms. We'll provide water, iced tea, or lemonade. We'll have a walk down the trail through the woods to the creek and the children are welcome to wade in the creek if they don't mind the risk of leeches.

There will be no supervised or planned activities, except those that the FYG and the little girl staying with us have planned. They have arranged an elaborate list of games and activities to keep any children six and under entertained. They have an organized list of games, songs, and activities. They have also hatched conspiracies to wheedle any and all babies away from their mothers for the duration of the afternoon. The FYG, looking ahead, even purchased a large and rather nice stroller at a yard sale a few days ago so that she could maximize her baby-watching capacity.

I have suggested that those interested bring their nature notebooks for sketching stuff, and if we need to, we'll bring out some field guides (I have an entire bookcase dedicated only to field guides). The weather will be hot and sunny (that's the weather almost every day just now- the corn is drying up and the leaves are curled into pointed swords looking more like yucca than swords. Pray for rain).

I did not request an RSVP since it doesn't matter to us this time whether ten or a hundred come. But so far, I've heard from the representatives of nearly thirty people and expect more.

Should you get withdrawals just thinking of not hearing from the Common Room for our usual dozen posts before lunch, may I suggest that you read or reread the Equuschick's hilarious post about scheduling and organization? The comments on yesterday's hymn post are unusually interesting for one of our hymn posts. Silverblue, of course, has the recipe carnival up.

Maybe you should read the Equuschick's laugh making post after you read this link, which I printed out to share with all the Progeny and the family living with us just now, because it's going to make you gnash your teeth and maybe cry a little in frustration or heartache. At least, I hope it will. If it makes you shrug your shoulders, don't tell us. Let us preserve some illusions about our erudite and elite breed of readers. Thanks to Mama Squirrel for pointing that one out.

Speaking of that yardsale where the FYG bought a stroller, we bought something like 90 packages of buttons (they were only a dime each) and 14 bolts, yes, bolts, of fabric. It was 2 dollars a bolt. The lady had planned on opening a quilt shop and the landlord either reneged or never understood what she thought they'd agreed on. Ouch. But we love our fabric.

And speaking of fabric, because of this connection and another, an extra roll of the very pretty fabric used to make the tablecloths for this year's First Lady's Breakfast (yes, THE First Lady) is leaning against the wall in our living room just now. JennyAnyDots is to make tablecloths from it for the local DAR to sell as a fund-raiser. She's going to be a very busy little seamstress, is our Jenny.

Pip and Jenny are taking driving lessons at the local high school, their first time setting foot on a public school campus other than the university their sister attends. They are not impressed, but then, we knew they wouldn't be.

The youngest two have had a grown spurt, some 2 1/2 inches in 6 months. I had to buy the FYB all new clothes yesterday because literally overnight all his pants were high waters. I did not buy the shirt with the three monkeys on it saying "Hear no sisters, see no sisters, talk to no sisters," but I did laugh at it in the store. I did buy him the cammy pants, thus securing my place in his affections forever and a year.

The Cherub has not been sleeping soundly of late. The family visiting us are early risers, and last week the Missus of that family arose at 5 to make her husband his lunch and found our Cherub in the kitchen eating bananas. We have hung cowbells on her door, but we may need something more attention grabbing. Speaking of attention grabbing, one of the bolts of fabric we purchased at that yard sale is bright orange with white outlines of daisies nearly a foot in circumference. Jenny will make the Cherub a jumper out of it and she'll look like walking creamcicle and can never be lost in a crowd, or even on a dark night.


And while I am sure there is more I could share, some of it more than I should share, I have timed this post nicely to coincide with other people besides me finishing the breakfast dishes, the lunches, and the dressing of the Cherub and other homely morning tasks, so this concludes our 'that's the way it is' bulletin of the morning. =)

Have a lovely day, and if you like, check in later to hear how the picnic went.

Good-bye Rituals

While googling for something else altogether, I found this interesting quote from Tertullian:

You will not dismiss a brother who has entered your house without prayer.—"Have you seen," says Scripture, "a brother? you have seen your Lord;"—especially "a stranger," lest perhaps he be "an angel." But again, when received yourself by brethren, you will not make earthly refreshments prior to heavenly, for your faith will forthwith be judged. Or else how will you—according to the precept Luke 10:5 —say, "Peace to this house," unless you exchange mutual peace with them who are in the house?

Chapter 26, On Prayer

I thought that interesting because my husband always makes sure we pray together as a family before we leave on a journey, and whenever we have believing houseguests he also likes to gather everybody together to pray for their peace and safety before they embark on their journey home.
Who knew he'd been practicing a tradition so ancient.

Sunday Hymn Post

Hymn One
He who was manifested in the flesh,
Justified in the spirit,
Seen of angels,
Preached among the nations,
Believed on in the world,
Received up in glory.

Hymn Two
If we died with Him,
We shall also live with Him:
If we endure,
We shall also reign with Him:
If we shall deny Him,
He will also deny us:
If we are faithless,
He abideth faithful;
For He cannot deny Himself.


Sound oddly familiar, but you can't put a tune to it?

Eminent Biblical scholars believe that fragments of other primitive Christian hymns have been preserved in the Epis tles of Paul and in other portions of the New Testament. Such a fragment is believed to be recorded in 1 Timothy 3:16

The "faithful saying" to which Paul refers in 2 Timothy 2:11 also is believed to be a quotation from one of these hymns so dear to the Christians...

Are you a song-filled Christian? The first Christians were, and if we are to be imitators of Christ, then we should remember:

The first Christians sang hymns. The Saviour went to His passion with a song on His lips. Matthew and Mark agree that the last act of worship in the Upper Room was the singing of a hymn. "And when they had sung a hymn, they went out unto the Mount of Olives."

In times of joy and times of sorrow, the early Christians responded with song. They were able to do this because those songs were in their hearts, part of their daily practice:

Paul admonished his converts not to neglect the gift of song. To the Ephesians he wrote: "Be filled with the Spirit; speaking one to another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord."

And his exhortation to the Colossians rings like an echo: "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts unto God."

The praying and singing of Paul and Silas in the mid night gloom of the Philippian dungeon, their feet being made "fast in the stocks," also is a revelation of the large place occupied by song in the lives of the early Christians.

One of the saddest experiences we've ever had was to attend an area wide homeschool meeting for high school studetns. A pastor opened the meeting by asking, "I'd like to begin by singing some praises to God. Can anybody here play the piano? No?" Disappointed to have no volunteers, he determined that it would not then be possible to sing. Our girls, having grown up in an acapella tradition modeled on the first century church, were shocked. This was bondage indeed. How 'fortunate' that Paul and Silas in prison felt no such requirement for instrumental accompaniment.

The singing of the early Christians was simple and artless. Augustine describes the singing at Alexandria under Athanasius as "more like speaking than singing." Musical instruments were not used....
"A Christian maiden," says Jerome, "ought not even to know what a lyre or a flute is, or what it is used for." Clement of Alexandria writes: "Only one instrument do we use, viz., the word of peace wherewith we honor God, no longer the old psaltery, trumpet, drum, and flute."
Chrysostom expresses himself in like vein: "David formerly sang in psalms, also we sing today with him; he had a lyre with lifeless strings, the Church has a lyre with living strings. Our tongues are the strings of the lyre, with a different tone, indeed, but with a more accordant piety."

If you haven't grown up this way it can be awkward, uncomfortable, outside your comfort zone. But think of it as a chance to let your children grow up feeling free to bring into songs of praise at any moment.

Both Tertullian and Origen record the fact that there was a rich use of song in family life as well as in public worship.*

*No reference is given for this, but inquiring minds would love to see the original sources for this.


Quotes taken from this interesting PDF file.

I'll take that as a compliment.

"I used to watch musicals and think that no one ever burst into song like that, and then we moved in with your family," she said. "It's interesting. You guys sing for everything... about what you're doing, while asking someone else to do something. You just burst into song."

yep. :)

Book Reviews

This week's Saturday Review of Books is up at Semicolon. I love seeing what's being read and by whom and what they have to say about it.

Here's the cast of characters and their books thus far:
1. Laura (The Birth House)
2. Laura (My 25 favorite under-appreciated children's novels)
3. Steve Emery (Busman's Honemoon)
4. Mt Hope Academy (All New Square Foot Gardening)
5. Mt Hope Academy (Maybelle the Cable Car)
6. Literary Feline (Rainbow's End)
7. Framed (Come Back to Afghanistan)
8. Kevin S (Close Range)
9. Carrie (Inkspell)
10. sage (The Year the Lights Came On)
11. Monica
12. Jennifer, Snapshot (Friends for the Journey L'Engle/Shaw) 13. Correct Link (Friends for the Journey L'Engle/Shaw)
14. Jennifer, Snapshot (Five Languages of Apology)
15. MFS (Happy Bloomsday!)
16. CoversGirl (The Alchemist)
17. Musings of a Lady (Five Children and It)
18. Musings of a Lady (Bird by Bird)
19. JustOneMoreBook.com (Oliver Has Something to Say!)
20. Wendy (Lucky)
21. Wendy (The Flea Palace)
22. Wendy (The Alchemist)
23. Joy (Strangers on a Train)
24. coffeeteabooksandme (The Organic God)
25. Stephanie(Misletoe Murder)
26. Bonnie (The Maltese Falcon)
27. Becky (Wildwood Dancing)
28. Becky (Coraline)
29. Becky (Alas, Babylon)
30. Becky (The Worthing Saga)
31. Sandy D. (Nine Parts of Desire)
32. Sandy D. (Fair Weather & Devil in the White City"
33. Miss Erin (In the Serpent's Coils)
34. Carol (Catwings)
35. Petunia (The Djinn in the Nightingales Eye)
36. DeputyHeadmistress (another great boy book)

Add yours and read some of theirs- doesn't it look interesting?

The Chestry Oak

The Chestry Oak by Kate Seredy is a wonderful book for boys- courage, self-
sacrifice, self-control, discernment, freedom and liberty,
responsibility- these are all qualities held up for admiration and
which the young lad must attain- lives depend on it. Unfortunately, it's out of print and growing harder to find.

The first time I read I cried. Both my older girls cried, too. buckets full. And I started crying just trying to explain to my dh what was so wonderful about the book. Of course now I am setting you up for failure by raising expectations impossibly high.

On one level it's about young Prince Michael, a little boy who is a prince in Hungary during WWII and how the Nazis come and take over. His father is secretly fighting for the resistance, but his job is to pretend to be a Nazi- and the boy must keep this secret no matter how ashamed he is of what others think of his father, and those others also try very hard to make the young boy ashamed of his father. There are horses and promises and honour and loyalty and nobility- and it's just sooooo good. There's another level, as well, and that extra depth is something all good books seem to have in common. More on what that other level is about later.

I knew I would love it when the Chestry Coat of Arms is given, and the family motto is "Fear only God. Harm only evil." I wasn't disappointed.

On the eve of his birth, the ancient bell always used to announce the birth of a new prince or princess, cracks while pealing the eleventh of 12 peals for the birth of a young prince. The people see this as an omen of tragedy to come, but they greet this news by singing "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." A few years later when the Germans invade Hungary, the people begin to realize just what evil is in store for them. Young Michael's nurse tells him the story of his birth often (he loves it) and near the opening of the book in one of these ritual retellings she says to him,

"...we know that the Lord in His infinite mercy has given man means to conquer evil, for evil walks alone and each good man is the brother of his neighbor. All together, shoulder to shoulder, we conquer fire with water, water with walls of earth, killing frost with the smoke of many fires, marauding beast with cunning and with guns. And always, against all evil, men will pray. Men will build a wall against it of many prayers, of holy songs, mortared with faith."

Seredy illustrated it as well, and her illustrations are, as always, engaging, somewhat mysterious, and most children can spend a lot of time studying them.

This was the first book I read that prompted me to look for other copies of it so I could ensure that all of my future grandchildren
would be able to read it. Currently we own three copies, have four children left to go. Yes, I am probably part of the reason this book is so hard to find and the prices are being driven up. I feel guilty with such a wealth of riches, but they are well loved. We found our first copy by accident at a used bookstore. IT was priced at 6.00, more than I will usually spend for a used book I don't recognize, but we did recognize the author, so we bought it and were so glad. Then my eldest child decided she needed her own copy for her children, so she bought one herself at ebay. I got the 3rd at ebay as well. It was in a lot of three books, all hb, for only 10.00. I'm guessing that since it was in a lot of 3, nobody but me noticed one of them was the Chestry Oak. The other two were okay, lightweight, not terribly memorable. The third turned out to be the best copy of the CO that we've go- the other two are rather battered.


I have figured out why, for me, it packs such an incredible emotional wallop. I read it and cried through the last two chapters. But it affected the Progeny deeply, too. The Equuschick at 14 read it and disappeared for a few minutes when done, to sob privately on her bed.
The HG read it at 16, and cried through the last 4 chapters. Later we were all in the kitchen dishing up supper and discussing the book. HG said it's the greatest book ever. Equuschick says she concurs, but ( I can't tell you the but, it would be a spoiler). HG y.o. says it has a happy ending- we all agree and all three start crying.
Poor Jenny, then 10 y.o. is watched us all sob ( that was when I could say that we none of us cried easily), and asked nervously, "Do I have to read this book?"
"Of course," we all blubber. "It's a wonderful book. We loved it!"
I asked my husband to read it out loud to Jenny and Pip, as I did not think I could stand it. In fact, I couldn't even stay in the room when he did read it because I couldn't bear it.

Which brings me to one of those sublevel themes. The Chestry Oak is a symbol of the valley and the heritage of the Princes of that valley, going back over a thousand years. Every year when a young prince is seven, he plants a young acorn, repeating the Chestry Oath. When the Nazis come, the Chestry Oak dies, but young prince Michael saves an acorn to plant when his father tells him it is safe.

The father, grown Prince Michael, must send his son away, out into another world. And he sends his son away, knowing he will never see him again, sending him to his old nurse with the words of the ancient Chestry Oath every prince repeats when he plants the acorn each generation, "With tender hands I place this seed upon your bosom."

Young Michael, unbeknownst to him, is the seed, and this is the task of every parent- to do our best to help our children grow straight and strong, knowing the meaning of right and wrong, good and evil, and equipped to choose the good. But in the end, we must let go, and with tender hands, release a piece of our hearts. And that is why I cried so hard when I read the Chestry Oak the first time.


Suitable for family read aloud for all ages, if you can read without choking up. Suitable for children ages perhaps 10 and up to read on their own (I speak of reading level only). Probably of the most interest to parents and to children about 8-12. Horse lovers will adore it, as will history buffs, and I think it's an excellent 'boy' book.

Shuck and Jive

Well, I've found it.
I've used the phrase "Shuck and jive" for years, I'm not sure I really enjoy the meaning.
Does anyone else have any input of a definition of the phrase?

From:
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

1 result for: Shuck and jive
Dictionary Entries Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source
shucking and jiving
–noun Slang.
misleading or deceptive talk or behavior, as to give a false impression.
Also, shuck and jive.
[Origin: 1965–70; shuck2 + -ing1]

And how am I supposed to follow *that?*

The Equuschick had the computer before I did. I was going to get online, post something, and then continue with the CD cataloging project (150 done... many more to go). I stopped to read the Equuschick's post first. Several minutes later, my side still hurts from laughing. And I really don't know how to write a follow-up post. The Equuschick - while forgetful - is also brilliant, a mostly excellent experimental cook, and too cute for words. Don't you all wish you had a sister like her?

A purpose Larger then ourselves

Foxnews interviewed the the author of "Fatherless America" (about a 5 minute run time once downloaded). One of his main points was that at a playground the mother will naturally say, "now be careful" and the father will naturally say, "now see if you can get to the top".

Both pieces of advice are essential for a child's growth. Be careful & climb!

On Organization

That is to say, The Equuschick's particular type.

The Equuschick's brain needs help. It has always been like that, for as long as The Equuschick can remember, which granted isn't very long, but she hopes, that if there had been a time in her life when her brain contained information for longer than two minutes before heading to lunch at the local Buffet, her family would have let her know in their surprise and shock.

It isn't exactly that her brain loses thoughts altogether, it is that they travel often. They come back, but they only leave again at the moment they're wanted. Each individual thought drives out the other, as the whole seven million of them clamor for attention like so many needy toddlers. Eventually, the most important ones, like "you need to buy paint for the barn," who have been driven out by the more interesting ones, such as "I wonder what would happen if I threw an egg at an electric fan," give up altogether and go to Hawaii for a vacation.

When The Equuschick's paycheck comes and she sits down with pen and notebook to budget what she will need for the week, she searches her brain for these important thoughts, but they are stubborn and do not come.

It is not enough that the useful thoughts play croquet in foreign countries while The Equuschick gives herself a headache trying to get them back, she can't get the interesting ones out. The whole time she is trying to remember what it was she needed to buy, an uncooperative and recalcitrant side of her brain wants to be choreographing a Dressage freestyle for Sky, set to the soundtrack of Pirates of the Caribbean. Also, it likes to pretend The Equuschick can figure-skate, which she cannot, and it also tends to come up with clever puns and one-liners all on its own, with no provocation. (These, at least, she can usually remember, but sadly she's the only one who knows the whole dialog so no good comes of it.)

People, oh how she hates them, keep telling her to write things down. Dude. You have to REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS YOU WANTED TO WRITE DOWN.

If you could carry a pen and paper with you wherever you went and never forget where you put it, all would be well, but The Equuschick would need a notebook for writing down where she put her other notebook, and it would go on so forever.
She is reduced to writing on her hands, but there's only so much epidermis one can look at in a public place without arousing attention and The Equuschick has alot to write down.

People say "If it is important to you won't forget it", but people who say that have well-sealed brains, and not more devoted hearts. It is not sympathetic of them to say that and The Equuschick doesn't like it.

Her only hope is to scatter public reminders of her tasks, routines, necessary duties, bills to pay, etc. all where they will be in her public view numerous times a day.

Where the dogs are concerned, this means that all heartworm preventative, flea and tick medication, ear cleaners, grooming supplies, treats and etc. were all kept in a neat stack on the very top of her dresser by her bed.

Granted it looked very cluttered, but it was by this method that The Equuschick managed at all.
But after a while it began to be more than cluttered, things came in danger of being lost, which would be nothing short of a catastrophe because shortly after they were lost The Equuschick would have forgotten they even existed and The Zeus would get heartworms and die and The Equuschick would be utterly broken in her grief and guilt.

So she got a box, a neat little plastic thing, and put everything in the box and stuck it a neat corner of her room.

And she got a very pink stick-it pad, a kissing lips stick-it pad, in fact, guaranteed to attract even her rather challenging attention, and wrote in big bold letters "DO YOU NEED TO GIVE THE DOGS THEIR HEARTWORM PILLS TODAY?" and stuck it on her bedroom mirror where she will see it when she gets up and when she goes to bed and when she wanders into a room to get a book or to check her calendar, and slowly but surely the message will sub-consciously sneak its way into one of the very few secure corners of her brain.

She has three, she thinks, and one of them is locked even from The Equuschick herself, and that is where she remembers things like songs and tunes and how to carry some of them, and what little she knows of horse-back riding and typing, and where she remembers lines from movies and how to write. She doesn't know how she does these things, to stop and think about it would incite internal panic and the flu.

But somewhere there is a corner of her brain with seventeen padlocks and a code known only to the keeper of this corner, and when The Equuschick decides with firmness that this is something She Must Fundamentally Know or Die, she leaves the room while this door is mysteriously opened by the little goblin keeper who resides therein, and he ushers in the information and locks the door behind him, to be released upon command while The Equuschick is politely not looking, and when all is secure The Equuschick comes back to her brain.

And that is how The Equuschick functions.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Daily Lit Blogfest

So you've signed up at DailyLit so you, too, can join the rest of us in reading on the installment plan. What did you choose and why? Tell us about it and link here (also helping me try out the wiki thing). Don't be shy. Because if you're shy then I'll be all embarrassed and stuff to have this empty wiki sitting here bare and exposed to the world. It's like one of my recurring nightmares- inviting people to a party and nobody comes. And that's almost as bad as the one where you dream you are out in public when you suddenly realize you are in your underwear (if you're lucky) and it's only a matter of time before everybody else notices. You wouldn't do that to me, would you? I didn't think so.

Here's what I chose:
Common Sense, by Thomas Paine: Er, because it was short, and because I wanted to read it again.
On the Origin of Species - Because it's been on my 'TBR' list for a while.
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day- The title sounded interesting, and it was short.
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford- I have had FMF on my TBR list for two years now, anything by him, since reading up on the 20th century and finding him on nearly everybody's important 20th century authors list. Sadly, that was the first time I remember hearing of him.
Walden, by Thoreau, because Pipsqueak and Jenny are reading this for school right now.

Click on the link below and add your name and the URL to the post where you've explained what you chose and why. Because you love me too much to see me all humiliated, and besides, the whining and pleading is getting embarrassing and somebody needs to make it stop already.

The Most Common Resource of All

You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality.

...One doesn't necessarily muddle one's life because one can't quite manage on a thousand pounds a year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas, and balances the budget. But if one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one's life definitely. The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.
[ ]
We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had,
all the time there is

How To Live on 24 Hours a Day, by Arnold Bennett

Taking the Family to an Art Museum

Taking Small Children to an Art Museum


We have been going to art museums regularly with our children since we had five children, ages 2, 3, 5, 8 and 9. The reason we didn't go so regularly before that is because we spent five years overseas on a small island where the only art museums I knew about were too
expensive. When we got to the states, one of the very things we did was to buy a family pass to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska.
That year, all family birthdays and other special events merited a free trip to the art museum and a picnic.


It has not all been a bed of roses. From these jaunts, I have learned more about what NOT to do, and so, by default, have also figured out what TO do. Based on mistakes we have made, here are some suggestions for make your trip to an art museum a pleasant experience.

Call the museum in advance and ask if they have any special things for children. Some museums have way cool playrooms where you can take a break and the children can release some energy, but these rooms are often well hidden. Some supply packets of activities to do, but only on certain days or certain hours.


For those of us with small children, find out about the stroller
policy. Some don't allow them at all but do allow back-packs. Some
have the opposite policy. Some rent strollers for exorbitant fees,
some offer them free (may the Lord bless the policy makers at those museums for a long, long, time). You can work around any policy, but it helps to know what it is before you show up with the one piece of equipment that museum does not allow.


Look up the museum online. Find a good search engine (Google.com;
Altavista.com; dogpile.com; and metacrawler.com are some I use. I
like Altavista because it has a family filter you can turn on). Many museums will have images of their exhibits, some even offer virtual tours. Look this over yourself first. Then look at it with your children. Have each of them choose one thing that they _must_ see. And, if time is limited, limit their options to works of art on the same floor).


Talk about the paintings a little bit- not too much, but do get their interest. When our son was three years old, he was enormously enamoured of all things military, so in preparing for one museum trek I focused on the paintings of soldiers, armour, weapons, and his other love- dogs. The dog or soldier needn't be the subject. All that matters is that the painting has a dog anywhere in it, or likewise a piece of armour or weaponry. In fact, for your purposes (which is to engage the child's attention as long as possible so that you and the other children can have time to look) the harder to find that object is, the better. I would find the dog in my preview, and then, with my son in my lap would go through the paintings on the computer tour a bit faster, and *occasionally* say something like, "Oooh, can you find a dog? What do you think that dog is doing? What would you do if that were your dog?" I do not do this long enough to bore my son.


Later go back over the online samples of the museum exhibit. Right
click on the images and select 'save as.' Pay careful attention to
which file you are saving this picture in and name it something that will make sense to you. Do this repeatedly, as many pictures as you like. Make sure that you include any art works that _you_
particularly want to see at the museum. This is important.


Now go to a program such as printshop (this is what we have, I know
there are others). Select make a card. Choose pictures from the art
exhibit for your card. Some of them will be the whole print, just
reduced in size so as to fit conveniently on your card- this needn't look pretty, like a real card. Put as many pictures on the card as you want and can fit on the page, just make sure you can recognize the pictures.


Some of the images you will crop so that only a detail- a hand, a
foot, a small animal, a flower or piece of jewelry- is shown. Print out your cards on regular paper, fold them up and put them in your purse.


You give these to your children when you get to the museum, but more on that later. If the museum has no online exhibit, try to find prints in art books, or ask the museum for any brochures they have when you get there (or call and ask them if they can mail you anything).


Next, and this 'clever' little idea is one borne of desperation and
more than one museum trip that ended in tears (mine), _Go over the
rules for behavior in an art museum before you go, as you get into the car and as you drive and as you walk out of the parking lot and get into the elevator and rise up and go down.


And it is especially, in particular, and most vitally important
(especially if you come from a small town where there aren't any
elevators) to firmly go over the rules for getting on and off of
elevators (I still feel kind of sick thinking about why we needed to add this to our list of things to do, but that's another story). The most important elevator rule of all is that no child gets on or off the elevator before the grown-up has made sure that the door is being held open. In fact, elevator safety is so important, that if you have an elevator in your town, it might be a
good idea to head over there for some practice in elevator rules and safety first. It is not fun to realize what your children do not know as they are shooting down an elevator in a Seattle parking garage, unaccompanied by adults, and screaming all the way.


Also, and I speak from experience, review what to do if anybody gets lost or separated, and what will happen to that child who gets himself lost or separated when thou findest him and gettest him home!


I'm sure we all know to go over the rules about no touching- and I
would add that the museum guards take their jobs very seriously and
that some children are naughty, and this makes the guards nervous around all children, so they should be careful not even to _look_ like they might touch the painting. I tell the children that when the guards have so many naughty children that it makes them nervous to see children too close to paintings, that it is good manners for the nice children to make sure they don't make the guards even more nervous about children than they already are. Naughty children can be very impulsive and quick, and the guards would be failing in their duties if they gave your children time to prove whether or not they were naughty, so don't be irate if a guard says something to your child and your child 'wasn't even going to do anything!' You know your child, but be fair. The guard does not.

Before you step inside the museum, make sure you are all well-rested and fed (I have even sneaked in banana chips for a toddler to nibble surreptitiously). We take snacks to nibble on in the car or at a nearby park- this is particularly important since we have never lived closer than an hour from an art museum, and usually we are two hours away. Hungry children are cranky children, and frankly, so are hungry adults.

Before you start looking at pictures, make sure you've all gone to the bathroom, washed your hands, brushed your hair, and perhaps gotten a drink of water.

NOW hand out the 'cards' you printed out. Tell them it is a
scavenger hunt, and that while you tour the museum, they will be
looking look for the originals- I hope I don't need to tell you
experienced mothers that you should be very careful to choose one or two particularly obscure details from the paintings you especially desire to see? I did not do this on every museum trip, but our trips went more smoothly when I did. I also sometimes made different ones for toddler/preschool crowd (and they loved them) than I did for the older bunch.


It is also important to tell your children that this is _not_ a race- there will be NO prize to the child who finds all the paintings *first.* You might tell them there will be a prize for the child who can remember the most detail about some of the paintings. That really isn't necessary, but it might be something your family enjoys. What is necessary is that the children do not rush through only looking to see if they can check off the paintings on their cards.



Finally, we like to end our trip with a visit to the gift shop where we each get to spend some change on a postcard with an image we saw and liked during our visit. The children know they will be picking out a post card, so while we are touring the museum, they are also taking the time to look and see which painting they would like to 'own.'

This list of tasks probably sounds exhausting, but the nice thing about it is that if you do this just a handful of times, other visits will be more pleasant as well. The children will not have 'learned' that art museums are boring, and they will have (mostly) pleasant memories of their visits.

Pillowcase Skirts

I've seen the pillowcase dresses, and our girls wore some when they were toddlers. But you can make pillowcase skirts for girls past the toddler stage, too. Cute!