The Opinionated Homeschooler

2012-01-18T17:51:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday, Great Girl

She observes that she is 10,000 years old today. (For the puzzled: there are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary, and those who don't.)

As a special present, she was notified of her acceptance into Big State U. today. Now she has to decide if she wants to go, or wait another year and apply to other places.

2012-01-17T17:55:00.000-08:00

Teenspeak

Confiscated from note-passing homeschoolers (okay, Great Girl and her girlfriend) at Math Team today, a conversation, copied verbatim:

Schreib nicht mehr im Latein.

Possum sī volo.

Du hast die Lebe gewonnt.

Gratias vobis ago omnes. Voluptas mea est.

Kopfhande.

Iam possum mori laeta.

Jetzt?

Nescio quid sit verbum illud.

Diese Minute. Wenn wir hier sitzen.

Fortasse in multīs annīs sī non hodie. Spero non me mortūra esse hodie.

Das ist sehr schade. Vielleicht morgens?

Est tristissimam. Vive cum eo.

Ich lebe weil ich will und nicht weil du hast mir gesagt, dass ich soll.

Non intellego linguam Germanum bene.

[Non-math-related note-passing is brought up short at this point, and perhaps just as well.]

My personal favorite part is "Vive cum eo." Seems like I've heard that phrase somewhere before, and it wasn't in Horace....

2011-09-11T17:03:00.000-07:00

September 11, 2011

In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped:
I said, Thou art God, my times are in Thy hands.

-Offertory prayer for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Image by Lewis Williams

2011-09-07T09:23:00.000-07:00

Notes From the 2011 Texas Drought
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Woke up this morning with a pounding headache and the feeling of a massive head cold. Eudoxus had opened all the windows to take advantage of the freak low temperatures over night (low of 60!), and the house was full of the odor of smoke. When I stepped onto the front porch, I was assaulted by the heavy pall over the city. The sky is gray tinged with blue, and it smells like everything is on fire. The morning news said that the Bastrop County fire is now 30% contained. Two dead, at least half of Bastrop State Park destroyed, nobody knows how many homes and buildings.
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It's so petty to complain about burning sinuses and headaches when people's homes are being destroyed, or while they wait in hotels to find out if they will have a home to go back to. Not people far away, but people I know, people I saw at church Sunday, or friends of friends. Then you hear on the radio that the AFD just got to a fire in a field uncomfortably near to the Opinionated Dwelling, and start to think about putting together the things you'd need if you had to evacuate fast. Last week, the highway nearby was closed down because someone's compost pile had ignited. They weren't burning brush nearby or anything; it just went up in flames. As one of our neighbors remarked, that definitely sets a hard-to-beat standard for composting.
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Helicopters overhead all day yesterday and this morning: the Starflight helicopters from the local hospitals, scooping water out of Lake Travis to go drop it on the Bastrop fire.

Travis is already over 30 feet down. Some enterprising soul has put together boat tours of "lost towns," previously submerged by the damming of the Colorado, building foundations now again visible. There was similar excitement in 2006, when the lake levels dropped so low someone saw a woman's skeleton. Police were called, but it turned out she had drowned 700 years ago. Pretty awesome.

Bringing us to this thought: the news stations keep showing lists of the Top 10 Worst Summers in the city, and one can't help noticing that half of them start with 20--. Just saying.
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We walk across our yard, where our lawn used to be, and there's just brittle crunching. We're just trying to save our big elm tree, but it's looking bad. All through the neighborhood are dead and dying trees. Water restrictions mean there's two kinds of citizens; the ones who obey the restrictions, and the ones who keep their trees alive. There's not going to be much left of the urban canopy by winter. All the hotter and drier next summer, then.
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There is something very odd about clicking to the BBC News website and seeing the name "Bastrop" on the front page. For a moment I remembered the weirdness of living in California in the 90's and having Waco (and later, Jarrell) suddenly be places everyone knew about.
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Everyone feels terrible about the loss of life (fortunately still low) and homes; but the wildfires are the death blow for Texas ranchers. A spokesman was explaining that the "bright side" of all this is that the loss of cattle and horses from the fires has been very low; because there aren't any left.
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Cats have been found mutilated in nice suburbs in the north of the city. One cut in half; others torn apart. A few years ago, there was a young man doing this to cats, and everyone was afraid it was another disturbed soul. But it turns out to be coyotes, desperate for food and venturing into residential areas, even during the day. Besides coyotes, deer, raccoons, foxes, and opossums are being seen in broad daylight as they hunt for anything at all. The Parks and Wildlife Service says people are bringing in abandoned litters and fawns, as the mothers give up on trying to feed their young and just try to survive on their own.
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Nearer the beginning of summer, it seemed like everyone was battling pest infestations. I've never seen the spiders and cockroaches (I mean, "palmetto bugs") so bad in the house. Great Girl's fencing salle was invaded by rats. After one of our scorpions boarded an airplane for Alaska and stung a passenger, an ABC Pest Control guy showed up on the local news, explaining that critters are being driven indoors to find "food" (anything--paper, insulation) and water. The pest control folks are doing a land office business. Or they were; the infestations have greatly died down, because the creatures are all dead. This is a summer without mosquitoes and without fire ants. Pet owners are rejoicing in the absence of fleas.

But of course, we're missing the higher parts of the food chain, too. When I put out the bird feeder in July, it would be swarmed by starving birds and emptied in hours. Now I put it out, and only a few grackles and jays show up. I should be hearing songbirds and mockingbirds every morning, and mourning doves and cicadas in the heat of the afternoon. But it's weirdly silent.
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Rick Perry says he doesn't believe in man-made global warning, that it's just a natural warming trend. Then he's pretty savvy to be trying to move to D.C., because if this is an irreversible natural trend, Texas is just going to spontaneously combust. Come to think of it, though, Perry's own house burned down three years ago, so maybe he's just learned to cowboy up.

So have we all, really; people talk with straight faces about "cold fronts" bringing the temperatures a little below 100. It seems natural for the children to be inside all day, every day: the heat is dangerous, plus the ozone (and now the smoke) polluting the air. And when they do try to go out, they're back inside in minutes. We've done a good half-year of homeschooling since May; what else is there? Even folks with kids in school have had their kids doing review and early preparation work over the summer, so they won't go stir-crazy when the computer games have gotten old. Some have wondered if this year's TAKS scores won't take a measurable boost from the drought.
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I love this city. I love Texas. But the charm is starting, just a bit, to wear off.

2011-09-01T06:14:00.000-07:00

Not much posting lately due to lack of internet access other than my phone; but I had to link to this controversial article in the NYT--by a mathematician who ought to know better--advocating a rerurn to the educational policies of the 1950's that ruined American math. All in the name, of course, of "21st century skills." Read it, and if it starts to sound like a good idea, slap yourself and then read Robert Pondiscio's excellent commentary. Don't neglect the comments on Robert's post.

2011-08-19T05:50:00.000-07:00

6 Things I've Learned in 10 Years of Homeschooling

It occurred to me the other day that I've been officially homeschooling for ten years come this September. These things are hard to calculate--how many moms have we all met who announce bubbily, and probably with some truth, that they're homeschooling their three- and one-year-old children?--but since Great Girl is beginning Tenth Grade this year, I'm happy to call it ten years. And somehow I've begun to feel like a veteran: I was invited this summer to give a talk at a homeschooling convention on "classical" homeschooling (My first convention! Good Lord I wish I'd had a shot of whiskey before I got up to talk. It went pretty well, but that's another post, one that might or might not get written), and moms of Wee Girl's age-peers often have a disconcerting confidence that I have advice to give. So, then, behold my accumulated wisdom.

1. The only real advantage of homeschooling over every other educational method is one-on-one tutoring. So don't sacrifice it easily.
Not very pithy, but the most important thing I've learned. Every civilization that has educated children knows that tutoring is top choice. Every study that's been done has shown that individual tutoring beats classroom learning, no matter how good the classroom teacher. So while there may be reasons to choose that co-op, or that popular math series that promises it will teach your child all by itself without your ever having to sit down next to him and get your brain dirty (*cough*teachingtextbooks*cough*), think carefully about where the proven advantage of homeschooling lies. It's not having better curriculum than the lousy public school committee-designed textbooks; it's not the better environment; it's you, sister. In the only words of John Holt that I ever agreed with: Teach your own.

2. The best curriculum is the one you actually use.
Yes, you recognize this one because I stole it. It's still true. You know it's true. Please ponder it before you place that $2,708 order from Rainbow Resource.

3. Books are your dearest friends.
It's so easy to replace them with screens. E-books, The History Channel, Khan Academy, iPod games ... and this isn't to say these are always bad choices. My own children all mastered reading early with the help of the relentless positive reinforcement of the old-school CVC phonics of Reader Rabbit. Languages are natural candidates for computer learning, as is any sort of drill (flash cards, touch-typing). Electronic technology can be the right choice. But it can also be a crutch and an addiction. Let's wire their little brains for the printed word first, then use screen-time when it makes sense.

Corollary:

4. Silverfish are your deadly enemies.
Exterminate. Exterminate. Raid has a fantastic product, Max Bug Barrier Spray With Auto Trigger. It's like automatic weaponry for bugs. I don't know its effectiveness versus other options; but I can assure you it's the most emotionally satisfying silverfish repellent on the market, until they invent tiny nuclear devices.

5. No one learns anything from posters.
I finally realized this when I asked Great Girl a question on taxonomy, and she had no clue. I reminded her that it was on the taxonomy poster that had been on the stairway landing for five years. She didn't recall that the poster even existed. Similar incidents have convinced me to give away all those lovely educational posters I acquired over the years, keeping only the ones that are pretty and create an aura (however misleading at times) of this being a House of Education. Also the Periodic Table with pictures of each element, and my cleverly made reversible large wall maps of the world and U.S., which are frequently used for reference. Oh, those maps do deserve their own post, with photos. (/smug)

It surprised me to come to this realization, since I recall so vividly every word of every poster in every elementary school classroom I ever attended. In retrospect, I think it must have been the sheer boredom that drove me to find something to look at and read and contemplate. The same reason, I suspect, that Great Girl knows the twenty-odd saints depicted in stained glass at our parish church in intimate detail.

This may seem like a very minor Thing To Have Learned; but I believe it relates to points 1 and 3. It's so easy to convince ourselves that children will soak up their education passively from the environment, so an hour in front of a worthy cable show, or the perfect wall timeline, will cause learning to happen. But everything we know about learning points us the other way: it's a dynamic process. You have to do something, you have to engage in some way for the little synapses to dig deep enough trenches (neurology is not my field, but you know what I mean). I'm betting that if I had had the girls play Pin the Tail On the Geographic Feature with the map I just took down from the dining room wall and tossed in the Giveaway box for this weekend's Curriculum Share, they would have gained something from it. But when it just hangs there, it's literally just wallpaper.

6. The Three R's are Everything
Yes, yes. Languages are best learned from the cradle, if you're in a position to make that happen; music should be started early; science and art make a child's heart sing. No one is saying to do nothing with your children but reading, writing, and math. But these are the things that must be taken seriously. If it's not realistic to sit next to every child at every moment for every subject (see Point 1), then do so for the Big 3. Make these the focus of your one-on-one time, your curriculum research, your self-study if you're afraid you didn't receive a good enough education to teach them yourself. A young person leaving high school who has achieved genuine mastery of letters (such that he can read broadly, comprehend, criticize, synthesize, and extrapolate), composition with ease in a variety of styles, and mathematics through calculus, will be able to handle anything. Don't you wish you had? I do. Let's get going.

2011-08-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

Love 'em and Libum
Ho ho. A little Latin humor there. In an uncharacteristic attempt to be like one of those homeschooling Catholic mommybloggers who posts pictures of beautiful craft items or baked goods, accomplished by her well-groomed eight children in an immaculate house (wearing clean clothing even) between their studies of Latin and medieval history, as a tie-in to our whirlwind tour through world history we have baked Roman libum.

Libum is a kind of hard-baked mini-cheesecake, flavored with bay leaves and soaked in honey. The photo here shows exactly how they came out in my imagination. I would have taken a photo of how they came out in actuality, but "cheesecake soaked in honey" was a phrase ensuring their demolition shortly after their existence was announced. I am pleased to say that Middle Girl did all the work except the putting-into and taking-out-of the oven, which partially accounts for their less than photo-perfectness. The lack of crucial culinary details in the recipe, which came from Calvert's workbook accompanying Hillyer's Child's History of the World, was also an element. But really, there's not so many ways you can combine ricotta cheese, flour, egg, and honey (and one bay leaf) that will not be popular with the populus.

Note: The Calvert workbook is really quite good, the first half being fill-in-the-blank outline pages for each CHOW chapter, and the second half being a wide variety of auxiliary activities designed for those with no instinct whatever for craft/activity tie-ins. At $33 new, I found it was worth the $17 I paid for it used.

2011-07-22T19:01:00.000-07:00

Review: Classic Tunes & Tales
Ready-to-Use Music Listening Lessons & Activities for Grades K-8

Classic Tunes and Tales teaches elementary-age students the title and composer of fifty familiar melodies from classical pieces, while introducing fundamental concepts of music theory. Though designed for classroom use, it can be used with no adaptations for a single student.

The fifty lessons are divided into five levels (Level I = grades K-2, etc.). Each lesson begins with a largely unnecessary (once you've done a piece or two) lesson plan, followed by a brief explanation of the piece and introduction to the composer. At the end of each lesson are one or more activities for learning concepts ranging from tempo (Level I) to duple, triple, and compound meters (Level V). The core of the lesson, though, is the musical excerpt, simplified to the point that even an untaught duffer like myself can plunk it out on a piano or keyboard, together with lyrics.

Lyrics! Yes. The key to this curriculum--which will either amuse or horrify you--is the putting of words to each melody which help the student remember the name of the piece, the composer, and some aspect of the music. For instance: call to mind the familiar melody to the Largo from Dvorak's New World Symphony. Now:

Lar-go means - very slow
By - D-vor-ak
He wrote - the "New World" sym-phony
for - Amer-ica.

Or--and you will know immediately what the tune is here--

Toreador Song written by Bizet
From - an op-era
Carmen was its name.
Takes - place in the nineteenth century
Spain's bullfighter escapade
A soldier falls in love
and Carmen too
A tragic op-er-a.

Admittedly, this can be a painful exercise for the teacher. But I have to tell you, they remember the music. Certainly there's a risk that the child will resent you when he's thirty and attending Don Giovanni and finds that, while everyone else has "La ci darem la mano" going through their heads, all he can think is "Mozart he wrote an opera - called Don Giovanni - the ghost shook the hand of Giovanni - and that awful man was gone in a blink." You'll just have to weigh that against the increased odds that the grown child will be buying tickets for the opera, or symphony, in the first place.

You do need a keyboard of some sort, no matter how primitive, for Classic Tunes & Tales. However, contrary to the complaints of Amazon commenters, it doesn't actually require recordings of the full musical pieces. And at any rate, this is the 21st century; you don't need to pay $14.95 for a CD of Dvorak when you can pay $.99 to download the Largo only.

As with so many excellent curricular items, Classic Tunes & Tales is out of print, and the Amazon sellers offer it for exorbitant prices. A quick Googling however will turn up prices much less than the original $28.95.

2011-07-19T16:18:00.000-07:00

Book Review: The Educator Classic Library

Not your ordinary series of illustrated children's classics. Released in 1968, this set of twenty books is unabridged, hardily bound, and in an 8" x 11" hardcover format that lies open easily on a child's lap. The Educator Classic Library's unique feature, though, is a 2 1/2" outside margin on each page, in which challenging vocabulary is defined, explained, and often illustrated.

These marginalia add a new depth to each book. In chapter 27 of The Virginian, we read "Till Yesterday a Crow Indian war-bonnet had hung next it, a sumptuous cascade of feathers." In the margin, a picture of such a war-bonnet, and the note: "War bonnets were worn only by the Plains Indians, and among them only by a few, most honored men. Each eagle feather represented an award by the tribal council. Individual feathers worn in the hair were marked to show what the deed was that they honored.

Below that, drawings of four feathers with different markings, showing "Killed an Enemy," "Cut Enemy's Throat," "Cut Throat and Scalped Enemy," and "Many Wounds." How did I go for over forty years without having learned this stuff? Similarly, one reads Black Beauty and acquires an encyclopedic knowledge of tack and other horsey stuff, and Captains Courageous brings an easy familiarity with nautical jargon that Patrick O'Brian fans would envy. Besides specialized vocabulary, ordinary words likely to be new to young readers receive quick and clear definitions in the margin.

Poking around at the usual places for obtaining out-of-print books, one discovers that most extant copies are described as "Acceptable" or "Reading Quality," the battered-but-intact condition of the books being a testimony to their having been well loved. Ours aren't getting any nicer.

2011-07-19T06:01:00.000-07:00

5 Off-the-top-of-my-head best children's animated films

1. Miyazaki's Spirited Away.

2. Rocky & Bullwinkle (I didn't say feature films).

3. Jan Svankmajer’s Alice. The best version of Alice in Wonderland, ever.

3a. Svankmajer’s Faust. Eschews Goethe and goes directly to the European tradition of the Faust marionette plays.

4. Wallace and Gromit, Curse of the Were Rabbit.

5. Shakespeare, The Animated Tales. Again, not feature films, but beautiful and original pieces (using the original language, not rephrased) by talented Russian directors and animators.

Update: Eudoxus adds Lotte Reiniger's 1926 silhouette animation film The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Check it out (excerpt):

2011-07-15T05:49:00.000-07:00

Comments Enabled

Sorry about the previous limitation of comments to "Team Members" only. This has been fixed. Back to deleting spam.

2011-07-13T13:57:00.000-07:00

Review: Thor, in 3D

This is what happens when you have a Wee Girl who cannot be babysat by anyone, and a Great Girl who has only that one evening free to watch her sisters while you and husband go out to Alamo Drafthouse, the go-to place for all Austin parents who only have time for dinner-and-a-movie if they happen at the same time. You look at the listings, decide that Thor in 3D is the least bad offering, and off you go.

First, the 3D-ness. This was my first 3D movie of the new sort, and it was fairly cool at first (though glasses on top of my already necessary glasses isn't entirely comfortable); but after a while I just stopped noticing the effect. It was like when THX came out--remember "The Audience Is Listening"?-- and it sounded so fantastic compared to plain stereo ... for a while ... and now when I mention THX to people younger than me, they generally have no idea that the sound in the theater is anything special, because they're used to it. It took me about twenty minutes to reach THX-in-the-21st-century level with 3D. In fact, I only tended to notice it when it worked badly, as in the cavern-world scene, where foregrounded stalactites and stalagmites formed a flat frame at the front of the stage, very much like a theatrical set.

So. Plot? Caution: spoilers ahoy. Benevolent all-Father god sends his beloved Son to earth as a mere mortal. Son offers up his life to save humanity, upon which he is returned to life by his Father's decree, takes on his divine power, and defeats the very enemy that thought it had vanquished him. It's not a plot I remember from the Eddas and sagas, but perhaps it was in something else.

Now here's the thing that mesmerized me through the entire movie. Except for the CGI scenes set in Asgard and cavern-world, the whole thing was filmed in New Mexico. With, presumably, New Mexican extras. Now since the crew was actually in New Mexico, it cannot have escaped their attention that New Mexico is nearly 50% Hispanic (not to mention 10% Indian). I've spent a lot of time in New Mexico, and it immediately struck me that every single person on the screen was Anglo. Now it was northern New Mexico, which is a little more Anglo than the south, but still heavily Hispanic. Not a single Hispanic face, in the foreground, in the background, anywhere. One scene shows farmers from all around coming to see the thing embedded in the meteorite in the crater: centuries of Hispanic farmers in New Mexico, and yet somehow all the farmers in New Mexico-under-Asgard are Anglo rednecks, played for laughs. One extensive scene is in a hospital. Now medical work in New Mexico, from doctors to orderlies, is very Hispanic (see, for instance, the hospital my Opinionated Self was born in). Somehow Thor manages to be taken to the only hospital in the state with a completely Anglo staff.

What was up with this? Maybe they figured Asgard is going to be populated by Nordic types, reasonably enough, and they don't want to draw anyone's attention to this by providing alternatives on-screen. But then why film it all in New Mexico? Oh and by the way, not a single sign, street sign or advertisement or hospital sign, is in Spanish. Maybe it's not worth going on and on about, but it distracted me through the entire movie, and I still can't figure out the motivation.

So, Thor in 3D. Meh. And, ???

2011-07-13T08:14:00.000-07:00

Happiness Through Acquisition (or, Maazel Tov!)

One of the great blessings/curses in my life is the discard store for our city's public library. It's five minutes drive from my house, and is open Thursday through Sunday, making it the perfect "We've finished the week's lessons, let's go book-shopping!" destination. And all children's books, no matter what, are 50 cents each. And it's free air conditioning (today's high will be 103), in comfy chairs, reading books--they don't even mind if you bring your book from home!--while the children lounge on the giant stuffed panther in the children's area, reading away. Friday afternoon at three, you know where to find me.

And occasionally they have real finds. Last Friday, I lucked into four 2-CD sets of operas for one measly dollar each: La Fanciulla Del West (with Placido Domingo), Cavalleria Rusticana (Maria Callas), Die Fledermaus (Kiri Te Kanawa), and--I could hardly believe this--the original CD of Maazel's Porgy and Bess. Which last is on the stereo right now, in all its glorious sound, while Wee Girl works her way through The Littles and Middle Girl does air pressure experiments in the kitchen. A little homeschooling picture postcard are we (or would be if I would get off the computer and go do something worthy).

2011-07-13T05:03:00.000-07:00

Just Like One of Those SAT Analogies

Eudoxus and I just about fell of the bed when the manager described the attack: "The kid was in mid-air, flying. Like a Spartan from 300. Except he was a banana."

When Middle Girl gets to the Battle at Thermopylae, this is so going to be in my head.

2011-06-15T05:36:00.000-07:00

Flash: Once Again, People Smarter Than You Prove the Examined Life is a Mirage, You Deluded Puppet of Your Selfish Genes

So the proliferation of complex human behaviors, caught up in intricate webs of culture and learned behavior, which appear with regularity in our mass media outlets as being now explained by "some researchers" as having a simplistic "Just-So" evolutionary story to explain them, begins to tire the reader. But I can't resist this most recent one.

"People Argue Just To Win, Scholars Assert." (I'm sorry, who did you say asserted? Oh, "scholars." Thank you.) Yes, yes, you thought the Areopagus and Demosthenes, the Ciceronian orations, the French salons, the great Church Councils, all of that was tied up with complicated motivations bearing on politics, religion, and the great ideas of human history. Put those books away: it's just a spasm of our brain chemistry, acting out over and over again a primordial urge to evolve through debate smackdowns.

I would try to put into words the hundred things wrong with this way of thinking, but since it wouldn't be an attempt to apply reason to the badly thought out, only my genetically hardwired attempt to assert dominance over you, opinionated reader, I will leave it where it lies. Let me just observe, since I can't resist, that I'm charmed by the evolutionary psychologists of the article who are trying to convince me through their well-laid-out reasoning that I ought to believe their story.

2011-06-14T20:22:00.000-07:00

Summer Vacation

... in the House of Math. Eudoxus, even from afar in Europe where he is discussing set theory and other things I don't understand, is making sure the girls keep their mathematical engines in tune by sending questions, and I am tasked with the usual grunt-work of math lessons. If the opinionated readership cares to try, you may match your wits against the opinionated offspringen.

15-year-old level:
(summer math team questions)

Let {a₁, a₂, ..., a_n} be a set of real numbers, such that a₁ < a₂ < ... < a_n. We define the power sum of {a₁, a₂, ..., a_n} to be a₁i¹ + a₂i² + ... + a_niⁿ.

Given any n, let S_n be the sum of the power sums of all non-empty subsets of the set {1,2,...,n}.

S₈ is -176 - 64i. What is S₉?

8-year-old level:

(sent from Daddy)
To prepare yourself for fighting the dragon, you need a suit of armor and either a sword or an axe. You have three suits of armor, five swords, and two axes. How many different ways can you prepare yourself for fighting the dragon?

(lesson work from Mommy)
Evaluate [-(216/125)]^(-2/3)

3-year-old level:

(sent from Daddy)
You have a pizza and a cookie to eat, and you're trying to decide what order to eat them in. One order is to eat the cookie first and the pizza second. What is the other order?

(lesson work from Mommy)
Find the difference between 6 and 4. [using number line]

Personally, I'm going for the 3-year-old level math questions for the win, Alex. No rest for the non-mathy; I'm working my way through the Art of Problem Solving math books, starting at Introduction to Algebra and planning to move on to Geometry, Counting & Probability, and Intermediate Algebra, in the hope of at last comprehending the math I aced in high school by dint of short-term memorization.

2011-06-09T06:37:00.000-07:00

Zombie Blog

We have had a good draught of that Reanimator potion, and the blog is rising from the grave. Not like the modern 28-days-later speed zombies, but rather night-of-the-living-dead zombies (we are classical homeschoolers, after all). Slow and lurchy.

When we last left you, Offspring #3 was out of control, Offspring #1 was in the throes of adolescence, of which we shall say no more, and Offspring #2 was suffering neglect amidst the continuing center-stage drama of her sisters. Things are much calmer now: we have a proper diagnosis and a good prognosis, a leveling of hormones, and a very planned-out curriculum with lots of hands-on Mommy time and artsy-craftsy projects that make the formerly neglected child hum and squeal with joy through much of her day.

So it must be time to blog again. We have up for discussion movies, diocesan drama, literature, academics, and personal items of little interest to most potential readers of this blog.

But first I need to go through the comboxes and delete all the Russian pr0n spam.

Brains!

ETA: I hear that Certain People are unable to comment because Blogger tells them they aren't Team Players, or Team Members, or somewhich. I will try to sort that out. If any more technically minded person knows what to do, I'm all ears.

2009-06-22T19:21:00.000-07:00

Re: Silence

From Joel in the comments box below:

Homie! It's been two months! Where are you?

Good question. Facing the facts, I suppose. The chief of which are these. We have an almost-two-year-old toddler with developmental delays, to which difficulties she has recently added the quite age-appropriate Super Tantrums, with the interesting twist of preferring to bang her face savagely into the floor as she screams, resulting in bruises, cuts, and bloodied nose and lip. On the other end, a child in the throes of adolescence, who needs a surprising amount of parenting time for someone who so often just wants to be left alone in her room to sulk. And then the middle child--who I am striving not to neglect utterly, both emotionally and educationally, as the continuing daily drama unfolds with her two sisters.

To be frank, I no longer have time to blog. And haven't for some time, even when I was blogging regardless. A conversation in the confessional a few months back went essentially like this:

Her Opinionated Self: ... also, I've neglected my regular prayers, especially in the evenings...
Father Direct: Why?
HOS: Oh, you know, there's so much housework, and caring for the children, and all....
Fr. D: Can't your husband give you a little time in the evening?
HOS: Well truthfully he does, really he makes sure to give me at least half an hour to myself.
Fr. D: And you do what in that time?
HOS: Um ... I blog, sometimes? And I read other people's blogs ... and such ... you know.
Fr. D: Oh yes, I know. Looks like we've found some prayer time for you then, have we?

So. Actual prayer--not the kind silently offered on the fly, but with a quiet heart and settled mind, has been more frequent as blogging and blog-reading have been less so; and I'm reading more actual books, too. And spending more evening time with Eudoxus, with no computer screen diverting my attention. It's been nice.

If I had a 'real' job, the kind where they're required by law to give you a lunch break and a chance to go to the bathroom without someone flinging themselves against the door shrieking while you pee, I might squeeze in some blogging. But I don't.

Is this goodbye? I think so. I'm toying, however, with trading in the bloggage for a website: less of the fleeting thoughts of the moment, daily flung into the cyberpit, and more of a permanent edifice, added onto on occasion. Still focused on homeschooling, and Catholica, and Catholic homeschooling, and other things of interest, modeled perhaps on the late Gerard Serafin's Praise of Glory site, which grew continuously and wonderfully, forestlike. If, when, such a thing has been successfully planted and seems likely to grow, I will provide a link to it from here.

Thank you and goodnight.

2009-04-24T12:45:00.001-07:00

Two Recent Quotes

... that sum up nicely the tenor and relative success of Offspring #1's homeschooling career:

1. "You know what's really amusing about Planck's Constant?"

2. "Punic, Peloponnesian, whatever."

I think she's not so much headed for the liberal arts.

2009-04-23T08:01:00.000-07:00

Accurate Moments in Televised Religion (caution: spoilers)

A category that sprang to mind while re-watching Carnivale last night. These aren't the best moments necessarily, but after cringing nearly every time religious faith or practice, or just the ordinary lives of believers, is portrayed on television (or movies), it's wonderful when, every couple of years, you see a moment that makes you say "Aha--they got it."

1. Brother Justin Crowe, the Methodist minister in Carnivale. Not just that the writers had the creativity to make the demonic preacher neither fundamentalist/evangelical nor overwrought Catholic, but an ordinary Methodist revival preacher; but they got the historical details right, too. Methodism has changed over the last seventy-odd years, but the nitpicky details all seem to be correct. And they don't even mention the word "Methodist"; [I'm willing to be corrected on this point]; you have to figure out for yourself who in the 1930's would have a pulpit in the middle, wear a cassock, have a bishop, and do revival preaching. A wonderful job.

In fact, bonus points for the writers noticing that most churches do have an organizational structure, and if strange things start going on, the bishop (or whoever) is going to be paying a visit pretty promptly.

2. David Caruso's character, in the first season of NYPD Blue, confessing to his parish priest. This may be the first and last time I've ever seen Catholic confession on TV or film that wasn't in a little dark wooden box and behind a screen, with some startled and horrified priest, who clearly doesn't know the penitent from Adam, listening to it all. Caruso's Detective Kelly, despite not being portrayed as a religious zealot, actually knows his priest (shocker!), and confesses while the two are outdoors, in a way familiar to most American Catholics who went to confession in the '90's: somewhat casual but reverent, face-to-face, and actually sounding like a real confession rather than a cheap device for narrating the plot or making the priest or penitent seem weird or threatening.

(Unfortunately, fifteen years later, I've never seen another realistic confession on the screen. My favorite bad TV confession was Scully's hour-long stint in the box, as a framing device for that week's plot. A real priest would have said in the first two minutes, "So, do you have an actual sin to confess?" Or "If this is going be very long, would you please make an appointment? Mass starts in fifteen minutes and there are eight people in line after you.")

3. Andre Braugher's Detective Frank Pembleton in Homicide, upon discovering his clueless "spiritual but not religious" partner took Communion when he went to a wedding Mass:

Pembleton: You're not Catholic and you took communion?
Bayliss: Yeah. Is that wrong?
Pembleton (smiling): If my God wins, you're screwed.

Non-pious banter about religious practice among laypeople! Nary a devout nun nor earnest priest in sight!

4. X-Files snake-handlers vs. mainliners. "Signs and Wonders": Deep South snake-handling fire-and-brimstone preacher out of central casting, played against the tolerant, educated, mainline Protestant minister who is quietly despairing at the credulity and unsophistication of the local yokels. This doesn't really belong on a list of "most accurate" portrayals, except in the sense that the final twist shows that some writer actually paid attention to the idea that a certain kind of progressive Christian theology denies or finesses so much as to be anti-Christian, and that the fundie preacher's insistence that Christ "demands our very lives" is, in fact, the genuine Christian faith.

5. Carmela tells off Father Phil in The Sopranos. When everyone else whips up a "bad priest" character in seconds by making him some combination of (a) gay, (b) predatory, and (c) vow-breaking hypocrites, the Sopranos writers knock it out of the park with Carmela's epiphany of what's wrong with the (technically) chaste but spiritually immature Father Phil:

"I think that you like the whiff of sexuality that never goes anyplace.... I think you have this m.o. where you manipulate spiritually thirsty women. And I think a lot if it is tied up with food somehow as well as the sexual tension game."

Ouch. It hurts because we've all seen it, or some variant of it.

Any others?

2009-03-20T17:03:00.000-07:00

"Ain't Nothing To Comment On"

Lone Star proud! Did you think that, in giving us the 2004 scandal that was the "Texas miracle," Houston explored the limits of our state's educational policy malfeasance? Or was that challenging standard definitively met and exceeded the next year, when the Texas Supreme Court had to strike down the state's blatantly unconstitutional system of school funding for the fourth time?

No, turns out we hadn't reached bottom yet, y'all. The Dallas Morning News reports that South Oak Cliff High in Dallas has plumbed the depths of educational disgrace, reinvigorated southern stereotypes, and set a new standard of shame for Texas schools, by officially instituting student cage fights as a combination disciplinary method and faculty spectator sport:

The principal and other staff members at South Oak Cliff High School were supposed to be breaking up fights. Instead, they sent troubled students into a steel utility cage in an athletic locker room to battle it out with bare fists and no head protection, records show.
...
Investigators found that security monitors routinely used "the cage" – a section of the boys basketball locker room barricaded by wire mesh and metal lockers – to force problem students to fight out their disputes.

In one incident documented by investigators, a security monitor tried to fight a student in the cage, but [former principal] Moten intervened and broke it up. In another incident, the report said, Moten told security staff to put two fighting students "in the cage and let 'em duke it out." According to the report, students told their teachers that they were "gonna be in the cage" over arguments with their peers.

Eudoxus thinks this might be something that could be implemented profitably in the graduate program.

2009-03-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

We Know Where You Live

Dana has the full scoop on this report prepared by U. of Iowa students for state legislators on the subject of homeschooling, but I was struck by this anxious little paragraph at the end, on the difficulties of enforcing intrusive regulations within private citizens' homes:

Little data exists on how often homeschooling laws go unenforced.... Furthermore, many states have no way of knowing if the information given by homeschools is accurate. For example, in Iowa there is no way to know if the attendance records are being accurately kept.

My! Really? If only there were some way to figure out if those homeschooled kids were actually showing up. In their homes. Where they live.

I know in this economy state budgets are tight, but surely we can find a way to fund school investigators to go to every homeschooling family's residence and inspect the attendance records. After all, it's for the children.

2009-03-01T06:38:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: pre-1985 children's books

Yesterday was our public library's yearly sale, at which they let the public buy, at unbelievably cheap prices, library discards (most of them in great condition) and books donated by the public. Many donations are of high quality; but the fact is that the public libraries simply don't want and can't store most of their donated materials.

This was an opportunity to see if the ban on pre-1985 children's materials had already been implemented, and the answer is: sort of.

Among the library discards, a few were pre-1985, and they were available on the shelves. I picked up a lovely out-of-print Carolyn Haywood, among other nice finds. Given that there were literally thousands of children's discards, it's not surprising that nobody was able to pick through them for publication date.

There were no donated children's materials available for sale, however. In the past, about a quarter to a third of the children's books were donated items: I've gotten some of the Offspringen's best books this way. There were still plenty of donated items shelved in non-children's areas (you can tell the donated items because they have no library markings), and a well-stocked "vintage books" section: but no donated children's books. Since there were certainly hundreds of children's books donated to the public library over the course of the year--the legislation banning the sale/distribution of pre-1985 children's books is quite recent, and only went into effect in February--I can't help wondering what happened to them all. The landfill, sadly, is the most likely option; the library can't afford to store unwanted materials in the hope that Congress might reconsider this ghastly and ill-advised legislation.

2009-02-26T07:51:00.000-08:00

Firemen in Congress

The unabated progress of the overreaction-to-headlines CPSIA should sicken the heart of any lover of older children's books.

It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.

Surely you wouldn't endanger your children's minds, I mean bodies, by permitting a book published before 1985 to fall into their little hands. What was the year before that, when books suddenly qualified as hazardous to the young? It's almost as if Congress were aiming for symbolic significance.

Since the law became effective the very next day, there was no time to waste in putting this advice into practice. A commenter at Etsy, the large handicrafts and vintage-goods site, observed how things worked at one store:

I just came back from my local thrift store with tears in my eyes! I watched as boxes and boxes of children’s books were thrown into the garbage! Today was the deadline and I just can’t believe it! Every book they had on the shelves prior to 1985 was destroyed! I managed to grab a 1967 edition of “The Outsiders” from the top of the box, but so many!

I'm so glad we've already stocked our shelves with high-quality pre-1985 literature--much of it nearly certain never to be reprinted, as it will never again be popular enough in American culture to make reprinting cost-effective. The local public library is having a big sell-off this Saturday. We'll see if pre-1985 children's books are available, or if the book ban has already been implemented here.

2009-02-11T06:53:00.000-08:00

Lincoln's Birthday

Today is the birthday of our sixteenth president. Now you could wait another week for the lame congressionally invented excuse for a three-day weekend called "President's Day," or you can celebrated individual actual presidents and their individual actual achievements on their individual actual birthdays. We at the Opinionated Household opt for the latter, as you probably've guessed. (If I ever write a post on 10 Reasons We Go To The Latin Mass, this principle will be one of the reasons: Holidays, Feast Days, and Commemorations have meanings which are usually linked to their day of celebration. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to celebrate Ascension Thursday on Thursday--40 days after the Resurrection--and not on the following Sunday. Etc. But I digress.)

So if today is Lincoln's Birthday at your house too, here are a few resources we like. Please add your own, for any age up to and including adult. I need a good adult work on Lincoln to read.

Offspring #2 likes her old Step Up to Reading book, Meet Abraham Lincoln. It's still in print, but is now somewhat confusingly listed in the Landmark Books series, which great old series was originally intended for the middle school ages. In fact there are two Landmark books for older readers: Abe Lincoln: Log Cabin to White House, which is in reprint, and Lincoln and Douglas: The Years of Decision, which unfortunately is not.

O2 this year moved up to Ingri D'Aulaire's Abraham Lincoln, heavily illustrated in the D'Aulaires' distinctive style. And we sang a round of "Old Abe Lincoln" from her Wee Sing America CD, which song by the way is how I happened to know that he was the sixteenth president without having to look that up on Wikipedia.

And Offspring #1? She's still finishing up Ferdinand and Isabella, but I think next it would be good for her to read Carl Sandburg on Lincoln.

Offspring #3 will have to be content for now with sucking on pennies.

Other Abraham Lincoln resources which I don't have, but wish I did and have been assured are good:

Abraham Lincoln's World. Genevieve Foster. Gives the broader historical context of what was going on world-wide in the mid-nineteenth century.

Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator. From the Chidhood of Famous Americans series.

Other suggestions?

2009-01-31T12:01:00.000-08:00

Uh, no.

From the chapter on the Eucharist I'll be teaching tomorrow:

Precepts of the Church. "The Church is our teacher and guide. One way the Church guides us is by giving us precepts, or rules, that state some of our responsibilities. One of the five precepts of the Church says that Catholics are to participate in the Eucharist on Sundays and on holy days of obligation.

For the non-Catholic readership, the "precepts of the Church" are ecclesial requirements that govern the relationship of the Catholic to the Church. One of them is that Catholics must receive the Eucharist at least once a year, during the Easter season; another is that Catholics attend Mass at least every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation. These are minima for active ecclesial life: better of course is to attend Mass as often as possible (it's offered daily in nearly every parish in the world) and to receive as often as conscience permits.

But this odd mish-mash of the two precepts ends up with a command to receive the Eucharist as a matter of obligation, regardless of state of grace; a command not only nonsensical but (in Catholic eyes) quite dangerous, as receiving when not in a fit state is a serious matter. It's like an owner's manual that should say "oil machine blades at least once per month" and "cover blades when in use" but instead says "oil machine blades when in use."

And this is actually by far the best of the textbook series our parish's textbook committee (which I got to be on, I presume as the token homeschooler) was allowed to consider. At its worst, this series--RCL's "Faith First"--has some errors (as above) and fairly dumbed-down language, especially for Scripture readings. Others were much, much worse; despite the USCCB's thumbs-up, some had clear agendas at odds with orthodoxy, and many were so riddled with errors you could pick a page at random as a sort of game to see what bizarre mistake would show up.

"Faith First," though, at least takes Scripture seriously, providing large dollops of it throughout, starting each chapter prayer with something that used to be a Bible verse, and generally presenting Scripture as an integral part of Christianity. Imagine! Of course I can't help comparing sometimes Offspring #2's Little Visits With God, which expects tiny tykes to memorize verses like "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof," and "I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord," and to look up the verses for themselves when a little older. Still, our CCD textbooks do a much better job than the average, even affirming in the 8th grade book that Catholics ought to read the Bible every day. I just about keeled over when I saw that. Nine years ago, when I put Offspring #1 in her CCD class and started sitting in, I was blown away by the diligence with which CCD seemed determined to bear out the caricature of Catholics as folks who wouldn't know the Bible if it fell on them on their way out of Mass. For all the "post-Vatican 2 Church" fluffiness of the Catholicism-lite textbooks (Eudoxus memorably remarked, upon perusing the CCD book, "It's hard to believe you guys produced Thomas Aquinas."), the openness to Scripture that was supposed to be a great fruit of the Second Vatican Council was nowhere evident.

There's still some unfortunate substance to the caricature. My CCD kids universally come to third grade never having opened a Bible, not knowing the difference between the Old and New Testaments, and utterly unfamiliar with all things Scriptural. I still have to debrief the Offspringen after CCD classes (my favorite Things They Learned in CCD is: Christ used unleavened bread at the Last Supper because yeast hadn't been invented yet), and I take for granted that they will learn Absolutely Nothing about the Bible that I don't teach them myself. And even though our textbook committee looked at the 7th and 8th grade level books for each series we considered (as those are the years preparing for Confirmation in our diocese), I was surprised (silly me) to find that even at that late date, verses and passages from Scripture are adapted--pretty heavily--to make them, I suppose readable by the young and stupid. Expectations are pitched low, way low. And the children, who being children will live up or down to the expectations placed on them, are robbed--of the beauty and truth of Scripture, of the inheritance of the Church, and of the right to be challenged in their understanding.

I leave you with the verse that begins Chapter 2 of my third-graders' textbook, Psalm 104:24:

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.

No, I beg your pardon. The putative verse cited as "Psalm 104:24" in our textbook is rather this:

Lord! the earth is full of your creatures.

And to prove the claim, now that it has been rendered fit for children, a picture of a dolphin graces the page. Alas. To think that we once produced St. Thomas Aquinas.

UPDATE: Mrs. Darwin Catholic shares her daughter's CCD text's rendering of the 23rd Psalm's "He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake":

You guide me along the right path.

Isn't it interesting how the children's versions so often consist of telling the Almighty things He might not know?

2009-01-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

Paging Homer Simpson

I'm not making any judgments about the particulars of this story that showed up on one of my homeschool discussion groups. I'm just passing along some great quotes.

Krispy Kreme rep: "By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies."

American Life League rep: "We challenge Krispy Kreme ... to separate themselves and their doughnuts from our great American shame."

2009-01-03T08:12:00.000-08:00

" 'Fire!' " he shouted.

This is what comes of being married to a person who thinks about this sort of thing for a living, but I've become addicted to the Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks. Not just orthography pedants, like the people who cluck over the misuse of it's/its on shop signs, these are rather obsessors over the various meanings and implications of quotation marks: do they mean the text has been quoted? or is irony implied? or is the real meaning the reverse?

The amusement factor comes from the common misuse of quotation marks to convey, rather than any of the above conventional meanings, mere emphasis. As a commonplace example, not long ago I spotted a workingman's pickup with this hand-lettered on the side: We "Fix" Appliances. Which, of course, makes you wonder what they in fact do to your dishwasher.

The all-time best (or "best") example:

As commenters note, it surely means either "This starts fires" or "Let there be a fire alarm." Or, perhaps, a Magrittesque "Ceci n'est pas une sirène d'alerte du feu."

2009-01-01T19:40:00.000-08:00

Yuletide Juvenile Reading

DarwinCatholic has been reading A Christmas Carol to the younguns, and overthinking the Muppet version of the Dickens classic. Personally I like to introduce Boz through the weird but child-pleasing story "The Magic Fishbone." (Or, if the Darwins prefer to launch the children right in to full Dickens mode, I think that if they consult volumes III and IV of their lovely old set of Miller's My Book House, they will find representative chapters from The Old Curiosity Shop and David Copperfield, beautifully illustrated.)

We in the Opinionated Household have been doing Christmastide read-alouds as well. Offspring #2 enjoyed E. T. A. Hoffman's Nutcracker, and highly recommends the edition illustrated by Maurice Sendak. If you haven't read the original, it's much, much weirder than the ballet version.

Offspring #1 loved James Joyce's "The Dead" for her holiday read-aloud, and if you haven't read it yourself since college, go read it again as an older and presumably wiser person. This would also be a good time to read at least the first story of Dubliners--Joyce wrote the stories in a definite order, developing certain themes, and "The Sisters" at the collection's beginning is a companion piece to "The Dead" at the end. This would be a good time to rent the wonderful John Huston movie version, but then any time is a good time for that.

2008-12-24T18:37:00.000-08:00

For while all things were in quiet silence, and that night was in the midst of her swift course, Thine Almighty word leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne, as a fierce man of war into the midst of a land of destruction.

-Book of Wisdom, 18:14-15

2008-12-21T19:38:00.001-08:00

220 of 238 people found the following review ... energetic

In the post below, I link to the text Offspring #1 will apparently be using in her Real Analysis class. Just to see if it would help me grasp what on earth "real analysis" might mean, I read the Amazon reviews, and found this one. Amusing reading, even if it does leave me no closer to understanding the topic than before, and pitifully glad to have been a liberal arts major.

OK... Deep breaths everybody...

It is not possible to overstate how good this book is. I tried to give it uncountably many stars but they only have five. Five is an insult. I'm sorry Dr. Rudin...

This book is a good reference but let me tell you what it's really good for. You have taken all the lower division courses. You have taken that "transition to proof writing" class in number theory, or linear algebra, or logic, or discrete math, or whatever they do at your institution of higher learning. You can tell a contrapositive from a proof by contradiction. You can explain to your grandma why there are more real numbers than rationals. Now it's time to get serious.

Get this book. Start at page one. Read until you come to the word Theorem. Do not read the proof. Prove it yourself. Or at least try. If you get stuck read a line or two until you see what to do.

Thrust, repeat.

If you make it through the first six or seven chapters like this then there shall be no power in the verse that can stop you. Enjoy graduate school. You're half way there.

Now some people complain about this book being too hard. Don't listen to them. They are just trying to pull you down and keep you from your true destiny. They are the same people who try to sell you TVs and lobotomies.

"The material is not motivated." Not motivated? Judas just stick a dagger in my heart. This material needs no motivation. Just do it. Faith will come. He's teaching you analysis. Not selling you a used car. By the time you are ready to read this book you should not need motivation from the author as to why you need to know analysis. You should just feel a burning in your chest that can only be quenched by arguments involving an arbitrary sequence {x_n} that converges to x in X.

Finally, some people complain about the level of abstraction, which let me just say is not that high. If you want to see abstraction grab a copy of Spanier's 'Algebraic Topology' and stare at it for about an hour. Then open 'Baby Rudin' up again. I promise you the feeling you get when you sit in a hottub for like twenty minutes and then jump back in the pool. Invigorating.

No but really. Anyone who passes you an analysis book that does not say the words metric space, and have the chaptor on topology before the chaptor on limits is doing you no favors. You need to know what compactness is when you get out of an analysis course. And it's lunacy to start talking about differentiation without it. It's possible, sure, but it's a waste of time and energy. To say a continuous function is one where the inverse image of open sets is open is way cooler than that epsilon delta stuff. Then you prove the epsilon delta thing as a theorem. Hows that for motivation?

Anyway, if this review comes off as combative that's because it is. It's unethical to use another text for an undergraduate real analysis class. It insults and short changes the students. Sure it was OK before Rudin wrote the thing, but now? Why spit on your luck? And if you're a student and find the book too hard? Try harder. That's the point. If you did not crave intellectual work why are you sitting in an analysis course? Dig in. It will make you a better person. Trust me.

Or you could just change your major back to engineering. It's more money and the books always have lots of nice pictures.

In conclusion: Thank you Dr. Rudin for your wonderfull book on analysis. You made a man of me.

(Spelling fixed. Hey, he's not an English major, is he?)

2008-12-21T18:47:00.000-08:00

What We're Using: Teenage Edition

Hard to believe Offspring #1 will be a teenager when our new academic year starts in January. Her list of curriculum and resources is much shorter, since she has 45-60 minute study periods, while O. #2 has 15 minute lessons and lots and lots of being read to out loud.

Math
Real Analysis. Whatever that may be.

English
Perrine's Structure, Sound, and Sense

American History
America: A Narrative History (vol. 1)

German
Rosetta Stone
Mastering German: Level 1

Chemistry
Apologia Exploring Creation with Chemistry. No, I'm not a Creationist.* Yes, I have to go through the Apologia texts in advance and redact out the "evidence suggests that man lived with the dinosaurs" parts. So go find me a good, systematic secular junior high level science curriculum that intelligently incorporates experiments doable at home. Nope, I couldn't either.

Latin
Artes Latinae: Level 2. Finishing up at last this semester, I hope.

Faith
Our Quest for Happiness: Through Christ Our Lord.

Now if you clicked on any of those links and blanched at the prices, keep in mind that a $100 text always has a last year's edition that is now $5. Used older editions are the way to go.

*I find it annoying that the word "creation" has been co-opted to mean a particular view of the origins of life and the planet to the point that some of us are left explaining that we believe in creation, but aren't Creationist.

2008-12-20T23:24:00.000-08:00

What We're Using [FINAL UPDATE!]

Enough about First Communion gear. December is here, and that means the end of the Opinionated Household's academic year, and of course preparation for the next.

Offspring #2 just turned six, which means she's starting first grade (by our rules), and gets a formal curriculum.* For those who are thinking about their own elementary level curriculum, or anticipate doing so in the more normal summer months, I list below what I've got planned, with links and a few comments.
*All you unschoolers can just be quiet now.

Scope & Sequence: Core Knowledge Sequence: Content Guidelines for Grades K-8
This is the condensed form of those What Your Nth-Grader Needs to Know books. Where those books contain the academic material itself, Core Knowledge Sequence just lists it, and you find it using your own resources.

I'm not wedded to CKS, but it's quite useful for subjects I don't know much about (i.e. art and music), and breaks down general science and history/geography into manageable chunks for you, so you have an idea of a reasonable amount for a child of that age to cover for the year. Most importantly, it helps you spot gaps, so your child doesn't get to high school knowing nothing about the Seneca Falls Convention, or the Alhambra, or geometry.

Math
Curriculum
Key to Decimals - Key to Geometry - Key to Algebra. Yeah, she's good at math.

Practice Problems
A Beka Arithmetic 4. I don't care for the A Beka math curriculum, but I like the workbooks for review and drill, as they're reasonably enjoyable, visually interesting, and less spirit-crushing than your usual stark page of practice problems.
Math Drillsters. Timed drill can, in fact, be fun.

English
Curriculum
Learning Language Arts Through Literature: The Red Book. LLATL, the best homeschool English curriculum (excepting their disastrously bad high school level books) with the worst name, continues to be our main English curriculum. Unfortunately, Common Sense Press years ago completely transformed the series, splitting one book into several, adding unnecessary readers, and hiking the price to eyebrow-raising levels. I use the older series, last published (I think) in 1994. It's getting a little hard to find: probably because the horrible spiral binding would fall apart fairly quickly. As usual, Bookfinder is your friend.

Vocabulary
Wordly Wise. A new item for us this year, as Offspring #1 never needed any vocabulary practice.
The Golden Book Illustrated Dictionary. A dictionary you start reading and can't put down; from the Golden Age of Golden Press.

Grammar & Orthography
God's Gift of Language A (A Beka).

Literature: Poetry
Oxford Book of Poetry for Children (ed. Blishen). Wonderful collection; mostly poems not written for children.
The Golden Treasury of Poetry.
Kingfisher Treasury of Shakespeare's Verse.

Literature: Prose
The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends, Adapted from the World's Classics. We focus on the Great Stories of western literature throughout the elementary years, and I love this compendium. Anne Terry White collects adaptations of several Greek myths, Beowulf, The Chanson of Roland, Tristram and Iseult, the Persian Epic of Kings, and the Volsunga Saga. The Greek section isn't as thorough as (say) the D'Aulaires, but it includes extensive and faithfully rendered passages from (for instance) Euripides and Sophocles.
The Iliad and the Odyssey. Illustrated by the Provensens, as was the book of myths above. Beautiful art, and an adapation that carefully preserves important passages, such as the campfires of the Trojans compared to the night stars.
Andrew Lang's Fairy Books. Skipping around among the books, reading for now just the stories that have become cultural touchstones.
Aesop's Fables for Children.
The Golden Children's Bible. I put this in the literature, not faith, section because it does the best job of any children's Bible out there of both (a) including as much Biblical material as possible, including some fairly obscure stories, and (b) preserving the sonorous language of the Authorized (King James) Version that has become integral to English literature. The editor's goal is not doctrinal but literary.
The Canterbury Tales. Again, from Golden Press.
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. And again ... Notable in these early '60's Golden Press books, besides the confidence that children should be read the classics of western literature, in suitable editions, with outstanding illustrations, is the confidence that difficult language can be used without confusing or putting off the young readers or listeners. There are words in these books I didn't know. And given the controversies over the vocabulary capabilities of modern Americans (Google "USCCB" and "ineffable" for some inside baseball here), it's interesting to see what levels children were, not so long ago, thought capable of rising to.
D'Aulaire's Book of Greek (Norse) Myths. Classics, and rightfully so, with abundant detail, though with less faithfulness to the literary sources than the Golden Book versions.
Gilgamesh.

French
Rosetta Stone. Only the 'B' exercises, so she never sees how the words are written. Oral only. Fortunately we got Rosetta Stone back when you could get used copies on e-bay.

Science
The Core Knowledge curriculum says we're supposed to start with animals and their habitats, which seems as good a subject as any. We'll be using different resources for different science subjects as the year progresses, of course, but I can't be bothered planning that far in advance.

Who Lives Here? Animals of the Pond, Forest, [etc.]. Gentle little introduction to critters and the swamps they live in.
The New Golden Treasury of Natural History.
About Animals. This is where I put in a plug for the 1975 edition of the Childcraft children's encyclopedia. It's a huge educational bargain; it's interesting, full of good information, recent enough to not have been made irrelevant by later events and discoveries, and book sellers can't get anyone to buy them. A nice set languished on the shelf of our local used bookstore for weeks recently, and was finally broken up and sold as individual volumes for 50 cents per.

History & Geography
A Child's History of the World.
The Golden Geography: A Child's Introduction to the World.
Through Golden Windows: Stories of Early America. As with the Childcraft volumes above, an example of an excellent, engaging, and educational book that, as part of a children's series, is dirt cheap as a separate volume.

Music
Piano lessons. From someone who is not me.
Wee Sing (various) and the Adoremus hymnal.

Art
Art Adventures at Home 1.
Look Again. Another reason to find the 1975 Childcraft. As far as I can tell, it's the only edition that includes this marvellous introduction to art and sculpture, both classic and modern.

Faith
Maria Montessori, The Mass Explained to Children.
Baltimore Catechism #1.
Little Visits With God.

2008-12-18T15:11:00.001-08:00

And About Time, Too

People are noticing that the Newbery Award is your guide to depressing, issue-laden bibliotherapeutic yawn-inducers. Started with this post on the School Library Journal blog:

Right before the announcement of this year’s Newbery winner, I had two surprising encounters. First, a librarian at my local public library confessed that she had no interest in learning “what unreadable Newbery the committee was going to foist on us this year.” Then, a few weeks later at an education conference, I was startled to hear several teachers and media specialists admit they hadn’t bought a copy of the Newbery winner for the last few years. Why? “They don’t appeal to our children,” they explained patiently. (more)

Got linked by people falling over themselves to point out that they'd noticed the Emperor's sartorial deficiencies a long time ago, and finally the blogstorm got picked up on the Washington Post's radar. My favorite quote, from an ALA flack:

"The criterion has never been popularity," said Pat Scales, president of the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association. "It is about literary quality. We don't expect every child to like every book. How many adults have read all the Pulitzer Prize-winning books and the National Book Award winners and liked every one?"

You see, if the kids aren't devouring these books, it's because they're just too lowbrow, like their parents who probably wouldn't know a Pulitzer if it fell on their morning newspaper. It's the children's fault.

By the way, I hadn't realized that Hendrik van Loon's Story of Mankind was one of the early Newbery winners, back when ordinary librarians got to vote, and they just counted the ballots. Van Loon's book, though a bit dated now, is one of the lesser-known homeschooling standards, used by parents who would prefer an engaging world history written by a fairminded and respectful atheist to a dull, unreliable one by a religious partisan (yes, I mean A Beka and Anne Carroll, for a start).

(HT Joanne Jacobs)

2008-12-11T16:43:00.000-08:00

The Dresses

Less to say about First Communion Dresses, except that they're far less varied and interesting than they used to be. Few mothers sew anymore, and a dress bought off the rack at Burlington Coat Factory is going to look very much like most other dresses. An unfortunate corollary is that the quality of a girl's First Communion dress is now simply a function of how much money her family has to spend on it. When they were all handmade and no two dresses looked alike, how attractive, stylish, fancy, or ornamented your dress was, was simply a function of your mom's sewing skill and available time.

We were very fortunate in having Offspring #1's dress made by an extremely talented friend of the family (you can see it in the photo below). Consequently I haven't spent much time looking at dresses, but have dug up a few interesting tidbits. First, definitely click here for proof that life was better, or at least more interesting, in the days when your mother made your dress. Now whatever you think of the suitability of that particular piece of sartorial audacity for the solemn occasion, it takes a pretty cool mom to sew you a groovy minidress with the (briefly) trendy shoulder cape for your First Communion. All it lacks is white go-go boots.

Finally, it seems that in Switzerland and nearby areas, the custom at First Communion was (is? I'd like to know) to wear a simple alb and wooden cross--both boys and girls--and a white wimple for the girls instead of a veil. Given the huge amounts sometimes spent on First Communion gear and parties in some quarters, the disappearance of sewing as a cultural norm, and some scarily materialistic attitudes toward First Communion in some parts of the Catholic world, I wonder sometimes if this isn't the wisest course.

2008-12-10T20:19:00.000-08:00

Seasonal Linguistics Humorvia Language Log

2008-11-28T19:00:00.000-08:00

The Gear: The Prayer Book

There are three standard gifts for a child receiving his First Communion: a rosary, a prayer book, and a scapular (or scapular medal). And just in time for this post, you have only 13 more hours (at time of posting) to put in your bid for FRANK SINATRA'S PRAYER FIRST COMMUNION PRAYER BOOK!!! Yes, my friends, for only $100,000 (free shipping!), Frankie's little prayer book can be yours. Ring-a-ding-ding!

Just in case the auction ends before you read this--and you will surely bemoan your fate at missing such a significant piece of Italian-American heritage--a picture of it is provided at the top of this post.

I can tell you what it looks like on the inside, too. The cover is somewhat thick and padded--in the first half of the century it was common for the cover to be celluloid, that stuff they used before plastic was invented--and while the cover may just have a plain cross, often there is a scene, usually featuring Jesus and/or Mary, appropriate to the sacramental occasion. The covers are often fastened together with a tiny metal clasp. Inside the front cover is probably set a crucifix. The prayer on the opposite page will be the "Prayer Before a Crucifix," a standard and well-loved, if somewhat saccharine, post-communion prayer that would have given little Frankie something to do after having received other than fidgeting in his uncomfortable suit.

The rest of the book will mostly have the Order of the Mass, with ink drawings so you can tell what part of the Mass from what the priest and server are doing, with a description and some appropriate prayers to be praying at the time, other frequently used Catholic prayers, and an examination of conscience to help with confessing those seven-year-old sins (Did I disobey my parents? other lawful authority? Did I look at bad pictures on purpose? etc.).

The most surprising thing about these old First Communion prayer books--and you'll note that the eBay seller has carefully avoided mentioning this, or showing any objects next to the book--is that they are extremely small, about four by three inches, or even smaller. If you glance down at the previous post, you'll find that several of the little girls are clutching a tiny rectangular object: that's their prayer book.

Despite their tiny cuteness, the often good condition these are found in (one might even suspect some of the children didn't use them much), and the reasonable price at which they can be had, these old books aren't rescued for First Communions today, since the Mass that they're meant to guide children through is so different from the modern post-1064 Mass as to make the books irrelevant. Prayer books and missals in general, while still around, are far less central to the Catholic prayer life since the Mass began to be said in the vernacular, memorization of standard prayers was deemphasized, and confession fell into the desuetude from which it's only beginning to recover.

But since the Opinionated Household likes to go to the old Latin Mass anyway, I snagged one of the less battered prayer books from the 1920's for Offspring #2. No, not Sinatra's.

2008-11-27T05:35:00.000-08:00

First Communion Madness

The day is approaching when even the most sensible, balanced Catholic mother (I'd like to think that's me) starts to get a little fevered: the day of her little girl's First Communion.

For the non-Catholics among the Opinionated Readership, take a quick consult on Wikipedia's pretty much on-target article on First Communion. Then check out the merchandising. There, that should give you an idea. Did you think the Catholic Eucharist was about transubstantiation, going to confession, experiencing mystical union with Christ? Silly you. The Eucharist, perhaps; but First Communion is about the dress, the veil and gloves and shoes, the party, the gear (rosary, check; prayer book, check; scapular medal--do we do that in this parish?), and the photographs.

Why does Father start to hyperventilate when you ask if your Uncle Fred can bring his video camera up into the choir loft? Why did mothers of the parish nearly riot the year they learned that the parochial school kids would be receiving at a (photogenic) prie-dieu*, but the CCD kids would have to stand to receive? Why do the boys' parents just hear "suit and tie," but the girls' mothers are given a sternly-worded handout about requirements for dresses? Because it's almost spring, and it's time for First Communion, and the Mothers are preparing their little girls for the event of their childhoods.

*A prie-dieu is this:
First Communion Madness is why the Opinionated Homeschooler is already obsessing on the details of an event that will not take place until spring. Come, obsess with me.

The Veil

Offspring #1 had a beautiful dress, hand-made by a family friend, that happens to fit #2 very well (she's taller, but thinner for her height, so instead of ankle-length it goes partway up the shin). Violating my usual rule about not posting pictures of the Offspringen, here's a pic of #1 in all her adorableness. Doesn't she look pious? Hard to believe it's the same child who slouches around the house now in the throes of adolescence.

As you can see, instead of a veil she has a beaded fabric coronet, of the same brocaded material as the dress. But Offspring #2 wants a proper veil, so off I went in search.

The first thing I discovered is that all First Communion veils today look alike. There are basically three kinds: plastic comb with plain netting; plastic headband with plain netting; and plastic tiara with plain netting. Bows, flowers, rhinestones, and/or plastic pearls are glued onto the plastic headpiece.

Not that they aren't cute, but the cheap ones ($15-20) look ... cheap ... and even the pricey ones ($50-$90, I kid you not, for a piece of plastic--did I mention it was plastic?--with a short polyester net hanging down) still often look like dress-up clothes for some little girl who wanted to be a princess bride for Halloween. And there just isn't anything beyond those three basic styles.

The next thing I discovered, as noted above, was the insane cost. Even the low end is high for what you get, and only in a society in which almost no one sews (sure wish I did), and in which children actually get a say in purchasing pricey items with their parents' money (that's the only way I can conceive that the rhinestone tiaras got so popular), could the plastic glittery fairy Disney Princess look appear with such a high price tag.

Depressed, I searched around for other options, and discovered a treasure trove of old photos of girls at their First Communions. There are hundreds, thousands of them out there. Which makes sense; it's been a photo-heavy event since cameras were invented. If a Catholic girl in the last hundred years had no other photo ever taken of her, she had a First Communion picture taken. There's an amazing variation in dress and veil styles, partly because of variations in time, place, and custom (especially the move away from Catholic girls covering their heads at Mass), but also because until about twenty years ago, First Communion dresses and veils were sewn by mothers and passed down to younger girls in the family.

Today, dresses and veils for First Communion are factory manufactured, bought off the rack, and so limited to the most popular styles. The materials tend to be cheaper, and since labor costs are the big markup for clothing, there's much less in the way of decorative stitching, embroidery, lining, or other extras. Not being any hand with a sewing machine myself, at last I was convinced that I would have to search eBay for "vintage first communion veil" until I found a non-plastic, non-princess, hand-made veil. But there are so many decades, with so many changing fashions. Which style to search for?

The Photos

Let's start out about 100 years ago, before Pope Pius V issued Quam Primum (1910), which, in an effort to combat Jansenism (short take: a rigorist quasi-heretical tendency that, among other things, emphasized the need to have a detailed intellectual comprehension of the doctrines of the Faith before one could be a full Communicant in the Church), lowered the age of First Communion from 12-14 to the "Age of Reason," about seven years old.

The photo to the left shows a German-American girl from just after the turn of the century, who would have been twelve or a little older. Check out the elaborate headpiece for the veil. The darker material isn't a hairdo--girls at that time wouldn't have been exposing more than the hair just above the forehead at Mass--and I think must be colored fabric flowers.

Note some other things. The veil is doubled--this seems to have been standard until very recently--and reaches almost to the hem of her dress. Other photos from this era have veils down below the hem, even to the heels, in a bridal style. She is wearing dark leather ankle boots and dark stockings rather than the now-universal white shoes and tights; this is common, though not universal, in photos from around the turn of the century.

Finally, notice that this is a professionally done photo taken in a studio. All early First Communion photos were taken outside the church building, for the straightforward reason that, until the mid-20th century, Catholic churches were very dark by modern standards, or even by the standard of Protestant churches at the time (which tended to have more windows of clear glass). You just can't take a good photo by candlelight. Sure looks like the concept of spending lots of money on your daughter's First Communion had an early start.

Here are a couple more great old photos from early in the century, a French girl to the right, and a Czech girl to the lower left. Note again the long veils and elaborate, hand-made headpieces, in differing styles according to the local custom. Both girls look like they are 12 or so, an estimate borne out by the pre-1910 styles of their dresses and veils. The Czech girl, who bears a startling resemblance to Ozma of Oz, has quite the veil, and a dress and pose that suggest the Czechs were somewhat less rigorist in their Catholicism than the notoriously Jansenist French.

While I think all three of these veils are far more interesting than the modern commercial veils, still, they're just a little much for a hundred years later. The day of really big headgear as a standard form of couture for women has gone.

But if I had to draw from the distant past, I'd take the Czech look. Maybe it's just the way she carries it off.

Moving forward, here's a girl from a 1918 photo (right). Her veil has no ornate headpiece, apart from the bow tied under her chin, and more resembles a mantilla than a bridal veil. The bow seems to have been a favorite decoration for little girls of that era: I've got photos of my dear departed grandmother, topped by a bow that looks like it would carry her off if there were a brisk wind.

Still, minus the bow, this would be a possible style today, due to its simplicity. And so I've kept "mantilla" included as a search term, especially since the style has been in continuous favor in Latin America and the American southwest throughout the century, really until the 1970's and the advent of the non-head-covering veil (but more on that later), and so it should be possible to find examples that aren't too antique to be usable.

From the following year, 1919 (left), a veil with a headpiece from the other end of the fussiness spectrum. It's hard to tell from the darkness of the background, but there seems to be some sort of foliage crown, with net (tulle?) blossoms on top. The whole thing looks quite big for such a little girl, and one almost wonders if this started life as a mother's or aunt's bridal veil. Though the photo was taken on the cusp of the 1920's, it seem to belong to a period almost 20 years previous.

Moving into the Roaring '20's, there is a sudden uniformity of headpiece styles. I couldn't find any of the wild variety of style of the previous decades, all of them instead copying the '20's-style rounded "flapper" hat, covering most of the head except the face. See the little girl in the prie-dieu, above, who seems to have the flapper "bob" as well as the hat.

Here's another from the mid-'20's, with dress to match the decade. (More on dresses later, too.)

I don't think the flapper look is a historical style that can be easily resurrected, and I don't plan to try, though I did see a couple of these available. Besides being strongly dated to one particular era, though, they generally haven't aged well, and I doubt any kind of cleaning could bring back their original white.

Forward, to the 1940's and '50's, when the dominant style was a more subdued floral coronet, with doubled veil (still long, but shorter than in the past). Dresses were shorter also, and stockings were often replaced by socks. In the photo to the left, from 1947, you can again see the influence of ladies' hat styles, and almost see the pillbox hat on its way.

Some time in the 1950's there became popular an odd sort of stiff tulle crown arrangement, making a kind of vertical halo across the head from ear to ear. Where this came from is a mystery: the headpieces of the previous decades seemed to take their cue from the ladies' hats in fashion, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't anything in the '50's and '60's that could be responsible for this look.

The attached veils were quite short, often single instead of the traditional double veil (almost certainly a holdover from the bridal symbolism of a veil in front of the face that has been lifted back over the head), and lacking any ornamentation on the veil itself other than a thin pencil edge, or even no finish at all. These begin to dominate in mid-century, and by the 1960's there doesn't seem to be anything else (except for Hispanic girls, who were still wearing the mantilla style).

I can't help finding this style unattractive, and unfortunately it was replaced not by a nicer kind of headgear, but by almost no headgear at all: the wearing of hats, mantillas, and chapel veils vanished almost overnight from mainstream Catholic culture. Only the symbolism of the veil remained, and the meaning of it--covering the head at church, as was the custom among Christian women and girls for almost two thousand years--had gone. A short piece of netting, usually unadorned, was held in place almost invisibly by a comb, or by a tiara or coronet (with the veil attached to the back or absent completely, leaving the head uncovered (as with Offspring #1 in the photo above), instead of to the front, as with the coronet style of the 1940's and '50's). The hairstyle became of increased importance accordingly.

So it seemed that I was going to have to find a veil at least fifty years old, if I wanted something pretty for Offspring #2. And that's why eBay exists. So that every American can exercise her inalienable right to find, and bid feverishly on, a 1950's Vintage Veil Headpiece First Communion Catholic (to use the odd titling method of eBay sellers). And behold:

From 1959 (according to the woman whose it originally was), the last gasp of the floral coronet style, with doubled long veil, embroidered edging, and an embroidered cross with silver threadwork. Less than twenty bucks. I'm going to have to have it dry-cleaned, and the thin elastic that goes under the chin is certainly dead and will need to be replaced, but it will still be a bargain. My work as a First Communion mother is underway.

A historical footnote

There is a stratum of First Communion photographs from the Second World War, in which the girls are not Catholic, and are not making their First Communion. Catholic families taking in Jewish girls to hide would have First Communion photos made as evidence that the girls were really Catholic, and many of these photos have been preserved as part of the archives of the Holocaust.

How well the ruse worked is questionable--in most of the photographs, the girls look considerably older than the usual seven years old--but maybe there was enough variation in the age of First Communion to make it plausible. To the right is one such photo, of a girl who is visibly the least happy of any of the photo subjects I've posted here. The story with the photo says that she survived the war, stayed with the family who took her in, and now lives in Israel.

Next: The Dresses and The Other Necessary Gear

2008-11-25T13:19:00.000-08:00

Disgusting Rebus of the Day

Homeschooling connection: Learning about parasites (science); tips on personal hygiene (health); stroller jaunt over to the pharmacy (P.E.).

Ick.

2008-11-15T18:29:00.000-08:00

Saving Money: Homeschool Edition

First, go read Yahmdallah's post on Depression-style thrift. I second all of his suggestions, and here add the money savers that have worked for the Opinionated Household. Please add or link your own, and remember: everybody starts at a certain level, so some tips will be unnecessary (already doing them), and some will be overkill (you don't need to save that much).

1. Don't bathe/shower at all. This is just to one-up Yahm, who suggests bathing every other day to save water costs. This, my friends, is because he lives in Colorado, where you never go to bed naked and lying on top of sheets, with the fan blowing directly over you and your beloved, and still wake up drenched in sweat.

But in the summer, we go for weeks without bathing the children just by letting them go swim every day in the neighborhood pool. A few hours of chlorine soaking, followed by a hair rinse in the cold-water shower, and they're cleaner than the bathtub could make them. If the grownups can get up at a decent hour, morning lap swimming can replace showering at least once in a while.

2. Radicalize. You're already hopelessly eccentric just by virtue of homeschooling, so why not take one more step off the grid? Don't reduce your cable: stop watching TV. Don't order off the dollar menu: stop going out to eat. Stop using credit cards, or use them only for convenience, paying them off every month.

And did Yahm say that was like saying "Stop driving"? Well, stop driving. Walk, bike, use the bus. We haven't given up the car completely, but we use it much less; and a side benefit is that Offspring #1 has discovered the liberation of being able to get around without relying on parents for a lift.

3. Stop selling your unused books and curriculum. This may seem counter-intuitive, but think about it. If homeschoolers stopped selling to each other, and just gave away what they weren't using to other homeschoolers who needed it, we'd all be getting free curriculum. You say you can't afford to buy Curriculum Item X if you can't re-sell it later? Then you can't afford to buy it at all--there's no guarantee it will be in sellable condition later, or that it won't have become undesirable for some other reason. eBay won't let us buy and sell curriculum anyway, and the used book stores only give us pennies on the dollar, so why squeeze money out of other homeschoolers who are also trying to make it on one income? Bless someone else with it, and trust that what goes around, comes around.

4. Take groceries seriously. Eudoxus and I have been doing competitive shopping, and at this point we're feeding a family of five for $100 a week. I took a notebook with me for weeks, writing down the unit prices of the food I bought for our week's menus, and doing a lot of comparing, between brands and between stores. That's how I found out that CostCo actually saved me nothing: if an item's on sale at CostCo, it's on sale at H.E.B. (I strongly suspect the wholesalers are doing the discounting). The only difference is CostCo makes you buy a huge amount of whatever it is. Wal-Mart for medications and personal items (sunblock, toothpaste, etc.)--only buy food at the grocery store.

Like Yahm says, store brands are usually just as good; and in this part of the country, you can often get Mexican brands that are just as good and usually cheaper than even the store brands.

The big grocery savings, though, come from replacing processed foods. Nearly any processed food we were buying, we discovered we could make at home from scratch for less money: applesauce, pesto, muffins, boxed mac and cheese.... Now I just need to get baking my own bread and bisciuts.

5. Hanging out the laundry is working well. My main concern was the time it involves; but I need to hang out laundry about every other day, and it turns out that I'm outside with the little ones at least that much anyway, so I just combine toddler supervision with mild clothesline aerobics; no time lost. I only use the dryer now if it's raining or so soggy with humidity that nothing is going to dry, and we're saving quite a lot of energy.

6. Did I mention no going out? That includes fast food. Even little people can fix their own sandwiches, throw them in the soft-sided cooler with a piece of fruit and some crackers, and there's the day's lunch-on-the-run with no effort to Mommy at all.

7. The big energy expenditure around here is, of course, air conditioning. In the real dog days, I'm not above taking the kids to the bookstore and letting them read in comfy chairs, taking advantage of the free AC. Swimming in the evening takes off the edge so everyone can sleep. Fans, lots of fans. People did once live here without air conditioning, you know. This year, the AC is our big challenge for saving money, so other tips in this regard are welcome.

2008-10-31T18:22:00.000-07:00

It's a Soft World After All

While I'm tossing out the occasional post on my favorite homeschooling resources, let's put in a word for the Hugg a Planet pillow globe. Despite an awful name, a disconcertingly amateurish website, and a product photo that looks like the west coast is giving birth, this is a great globe. Not a novelty toy, the borders are accurate, the labels are abundant, the colors and markings are clear and bright: this is a real, working globe. But it's a real pillow, too: the cloth is tough and well-sewn, and the stuffing is soft and resilient. It's a cushion that's been built for abuse by energetic children.

Like all homeschoolers, a good globe was one of our first investments. But when you're cuddled up for reading time, and the book mentions Greenland or Fiji, the last thing anyone wants to do is hop down, fetch the globe, and hunt for the place. But the Hugg a Planet, I promise you, will already be in someone's lap (though sometimes we have to shove the cat off of it), making the location of foreign lands quick and fun.

For an extra ten bucks, the Hugg a Planet will include (literally; it's tucked inside a velcroed pocket just west of California) a Hugg a Moon, with seas and mountains labeled, as well as the locations and dates of American and Russian landings.

And then it won't be long before you're contemplating your genuine, if previously unrecognized, need for a Hugg a Mars.

UPDATE: Insanely, Amazon is asking $48 for the basic, no moon included, Hugg a Planet. Go straight to their website instead, or here for a $3 discount.

2008-10-31T08:42:00.000-07:00

Annual Halloween Rant: 2 Principles & 12 Questions

John Aielli, the dj for our local university radio station, just finished explaining the old chestnut of how the Church created All Saints' and All Souls' Days to preempt the pagan festivity of Samhain, now to be called Halloween. You see, the Church just renamed the pagans' favorite holidays, laid over a thin veneer of Christianity, and voila. So, you know, if you celebrate so-called "Christian" holidays, you're really celebrating pagan festivals.

This year, I will skip the argumentation and simply lay out some principles, followed by some questions for consideration.

Principles:

1. Anyone who reads the accounts of early Christian missionaries (e.g. the Confession of St. Patrick) or the accounts of early Christian historians (e.g. Bede) will quickly discover the intense distaste the early missionaries had for anything and all things pagan. These guys were hardly poster boys for inter-cultural tolerance.

Go read some of these materials, and then come back and tell me how the monks "baptized" pagan holidays, customs, or other things so that the people could carry on with no changes in their lives--just new names for the old familiar paganism.

2. Despite the firm presuppositions of Victorian folklorists that most folk customs and holidays have ancient roots, scholars since have thoroughly debunked that notion. Customs and holidays die out quickly without reinforcement from the surrounding culture and real belief in the things represented by the customs.

Questions:

1. If All Saints and/or All Souls were meant to "baptize" Samhain, why do they occur in the two days following Samhain, with the more appropriate day (All Souls, aka Day of the Dead) a whole two days off?

2. Why would significant feast days of the universal Church be established to supplant pagan festivals in small, outlying areas of Christendom?

3. If the Church cared so deeply about the Celtic areas, so as to establish major feast days simply to co-opt Celtic feasts (Christmas for Yule, Easter for Ostara-worship, All Saints/All Souls for Halloween), which major Christian holidays were established to co-opt pagan feast days in other parts of the Christian world: northern Africa, central Europe, Scandinavia, Iberia, etc.? If there aren't any, why not?

4. Why would feast days be established for the entire western Church to coincide with Celtic holidays, when it was typical for a feast day to be celebrated at different times in different places? Why wouldn't the day have been established/moved only for the Celtic areas?

5. Why did All Saints' Day first appear in the third century, when missionaries hadn't even reached Celtic areas?

6. Why are All Saints' and All Souls' celebrated in the Eastern Church, far from Celtic areas?

7. If the feast day was moved to coincide with Samhain, then besides Questions #1 and #2, what is the evidence that either (a) the feast day in the West was moved for that reason (remember, it was moved by Pope Gregory, who was off in Rome), or (2) the two festivals were even celebrated at the same time in Celtic areas?

8. Why, when most of the former Empire was Christianized anyway, would popes be establishing holidays (or moving them around) to accommodate pagan festivals?

9. How many festivals did the ancient Celts, and ancient Romans for that matter, have? How hard was it to establish a feast day that didn't fall on or near a pagan feast day?

10. Why do the feast days that supposedly used to be pagan festivals (Christmas, Easter, Halloween) happen to be the holidays that are the biggest deals in 20th century North American culture, when a little research will show that they were not, in fact, very important feast days until well after the Middle Ages? What are the "pagan" roots of Epiphany and Pentecost, which were the two most significant holidays in the Eastern and Western Churches for more than a thousand and a half years?

The big Question: Other than the coincidence (or near-coincidence) of dates, what actual evidence is there for the "took over Samhain/Yule/Ostara" theories?

The little Question: Whose interests are served by the conventional wisdom that Christian feasts and customs have their origins in paganism?

Discuss.

2008-10-26T06:43:00.000-07:00

Little Visits With God

So excommunicate me, but after looking fruitlessly for years for a decent Bible study resource for little people, I finally found exactly what I was looking for in a Lutheran book. Little Visits With God, which has been around since 1957, is a gentle and wonderful collection of two hundred short stories of boys and girls in everyday situations (a cut finger; helping with chores; arguing with siblings) who talk about each situation with a parent, looking at matters in the light of the Bible verse that begins each section. There are questions and an appropriate prayer at the end of each section, and then a longer Scriptural passage for the parent or older child to look up.

Little Visits manages to pull all this off without being treacly or preachy, which is pretty impressive given the low success rate this kind of material tends to have in that regard. Each section is short enough to keep little fidgety attention spans occupied; and the verses are short and (slightly) simplified (they're based on the KJV, which I prefer anyway since it's the language that's become part of our cultural heritage), easily memorizable by the very young. It's been perfect for introducing Offspring #2 to the Bible, and I heartily wish I'd known about it when Offspring #1 was younger.

Yes, it's Protestant: but it's Lutheran, and Lutheran theology is vastly closer to Catholic theology than most Catholics realize. While Baptist (for instance) materials are unusable without major reworking, there's very little in Little Visits that needs to be adjusted, and even then it's mostly a matter of addition--for instance, adding discussion of the Sacrament of Penance to sections on repentance and forgiveness. Substantive differences in theology are too rarefied to make an impact on a book for the very young.

Because Little Visits has been in continuous print for fifty years, it's pretty easy to find a used copy. Comparing my 1969 edition to the modern edition, the few changes are primarily formatting and an updating of children's names: Jerry has become Jeremy, Jim is Jordan, Winifred is Shanika. Check out the comments for more reviews by happy parents. (Don't be confused with its description in many of the Amazon comments as "devotional"; that's just Protestantese for "Bible Study with prayer," and not what Catholics would call a devotion.)

2008-10-21T06:14:00.000-07:00

Beyond Debate

Debate is big among homeschoolers, particularly among Evangelicals, and most of my exposure to debate and public speaking comes through talking to Christian homeschooling moms, who are a pretty traditionalist, old-school set. So I was taken aback to learn from Joanne Jacobs that debate on the high school and, increasingly, college circuit has morphed into something quite different.

Scholastic debaters no longer aspire to combine erudition and inspiration. And neither do presidential candidates, nowadays. Debate in schools has been undermined from within and without.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on "post-modern debate," apparently approved of by many debating coaches as a legitimate approach. The main elements of the post-modern style are incomprehensible speed-talking, and meta-argument:

The policy topic for this year's debates is agriculture tariffs, and typically the team that goes first chooses a specific position to argue. The opening arguments in one round at Towson sounded like a tape recorder playing with the fast-forward button held down.

Elaine Zhou, a senior at New York University, spewed arguments about why the United States should end tariffs on ethanol from Brazil. Doing so would improve U.S.-Brazilian relations, keep Brazil from becoming a failed state that would seek nuclear weapons, reduce U.S. reliance on fossil fuels, and thus help save the planet. The team had clearly done its homework, and Ms. Zhou gave citations for each argument.

But like many other participants, she fired those arguments so fast that the uninitiated might not recognize her sputtering as English. Ms. Zhou had nine minutes to make the first strike for her two-person team. The flood of words — and occasional gasps for breath — ended abruptly after a digital timer chimed that the first part of the round had ended.

Valarea Jones, a student at Towson University, sat at the other end of the table, scowling. She now had three minutes to cross-examine the NYU team. "Why did you make a conscious decision to read as fast as you did?" she asked. And later, "Do you think that debate is multicultural?"

Go read the whole WSJ article above for background (including the weird YouTube connection), but I thought the telling point was this:

This debating style began in the 1970s as a populist movement against the more traditional oratory that had always characterized both college debate and political speechifying.

No, really? The disastrous move in education has always been the one away from "All children must be given the education previously preserved for the social elite" to "What passes for education among the less socially privileged must be considered just as worthy as that given to the social elite." This is populism in the service of the upper classes, who have nothing to lose by praising ignorance and idiocy passed off as worthy learning, so long as their own children are guaranteed a genuine and rigorous education. From steering girls and racial/ethnic minorities into "just as good" home ec and vocational tracks in the 1950's, to lauding po-mo "oratory" in state schools today, educational faux populism guarantees the status quo. And sets up the masses for the first demagogue--who has learned from Cicero and the Lincoln-Douglas debates instead of from Laurence Tribe--who actually knows how to use the rhetorical arts to persuade.

And they'll be all the more vulnerable because they'll have been taught that they're the slick talkers.

2008-10-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

Plus, Our College Football Rocks

Forbes listed our lovely Jewel of the Hill Country as the number one "Best Bang for Your Buck" place to be in the coming Depr... er, prolonged economic correction, with the other Big Texas Cities also making it into the Top Ten. A little startling, perhaps, to those of us who remember the last property tax assessment we received (hey, when there's no state income tax, you've gotta get the money from somewhere), but nice. Unless it brings a new influx of Yankees. (Don't tell them about the allergies: it'll be an exciting surprise.)

2008-10-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

Sure Hope the Hobos Don't Steal the Laundry From the Line

Yahmdallah links to an amusing Village Voice article on surviving the coming Depression. Some other article I was reading while surfing (this is like how the Desert Fathers would write "Somewhere in St. Paul's letters it says..." when they couldn't remember the link either) mentioned that homeschoolers might fare well, as they could sell their mortgage-laden houses and buy where the schools are lousy and the property concomitantly cheap. We'll see if it comes to that, but it's true, there's a certain advantage to the portability of homeschooling in this kind of economy: we can pick up and go anytime, anywhere, should Eudoxus' employment require it. (Not to mention that, unless the State goes out of business or he stabs the dean, we're in tenured security.)

Nevertheless, like everyone else, the Opinionated Household is looking for ways to lower the bills. I cracked out the clothesline at last and hung out some wash, rediscovering that solar-powered laundry drying is not just cheaper, but fast and easy in Texas weather pretty much year-round. I did have to get some more clothespins, and, assuming that the MegaloMart H.E.B. would have them, searched fruitlessly for a while before appealing to two lounging teens with employee badges for assistance. They moseyed over to the laundry aisle, and one rummaged around haplessly, then offered me a box of safety pins, asking "Is this what you're looking for?" I observed that those were not clothespins. "You know, I don't even know what those are that you're talking about." Feeling a hundred years old, I explained that some people dried their laundry by hanging it up on lines, by means of clothespins. "Oh! You mean those wooden things? I think I know what you mean. You know, I've never seen that done before." The other teenager then mentioned that they carried no such thing at H.E.B., but that oddly, several other people had asked for them in the last few days. Funny.

2008-10-08T13:16:00.000-07:00

Tragic, And Yet Funny

If you're the parent of a moody adolescent, that is.

Yes, I know. Please don't leave angry comments.

2008-09-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

The Value of a Book: Or, Why I'm Not an Economist

While coming up with the list of good reads for avid and early readers in the post below, I was surprised and depressed to see that a book I paid a dollar for is actually worth about $50.

Why depressed? First, since I don't wish to sell the book, its "actual value" is irrelevant to me. Maybe even negatively relevant, since knowing the 5-year-old is using a sneaker as a bookmark in a book worth $50 instead of $1 is likely to tempt me to scold her unduly or even forbid her to read the book except under controlled conditions.

Second, the point of a book is to be read. Scarcity and high cost--linked issues of course--cause a book to fail to achieve its proper end. I want my friends and I to read good books and to give them to our children, and this is better done if the book is cheap and available.

A week ago, at our local Goodwill store, I spotted a book with a familiar spine tossed into the bins of books-to-be-shelved. (These bins, by the way, cause the destruction of about one in five books thrown--literally--into them by the store employees, and are an abomination upon the earth.) It turned out to be the rarest of all the old Landmark history series, The Exploits of Xenophon, in pristine condition (it was at the top of the bin). I knew, from past attempts to find a copy, that its value was between one and two hundred dollars. Even so I haggled with the cashier who tried to charge me $3 for it--sure it was in the Hardcover bin, but children's books are only supposed to be $1--being the petty miserable creature that I am.

So what is the "actual value" of that book? Or any book? Other than books of genuine (yes, I'm question-begging here) historical value as objects in themselves, I hold that a book's value is in the worthiness of the story it tells, augmented by the physical beauty of the book in its illustrations and (to a lesser degree) its outward attractiveness, with a bonus for physical durability, in the case of children's books (thus the happy circumstance that library bindings, which destroy the value of books for collectors, mean that cheapness and durability go hand in hand.) When I bought Flossie and Bossie, I thought it underpriced at $0.99: though not in the best condition, it's a book of high story quality, suitable for the children of even quite puritanical parents, and illustrated by a talented artist. A bargain, I thought: why, I would have paid $2.99 or even $3.99 for it.

Obviously I would like others to have access to a good book, in the interest of increasing the reading of worthy and valuable books. This requires availability and affordability (linked issues of course). A $50 book is not those, and will not be read by those who ought to read it, leaving the world worse off. A sane person who has acquired a rare and excellent book (I know Xenophon's quality from having checked it out from the Big State U. library for Offspring #1, who raved about it--and checking it out wasn't easily done, either, as the BSU library people knew how much it was worth) for $1 should surely wish it reprinted and available, even at a theoretical "cost" to herself of $199. A sane person should happily put it in the hands of a child old enough to enjoy the exciting true-life adventure story of Xenophon's Persian Expedition, without fretting that it will be put back on the bookshelf a week later less $50 of "value."

To the Darwins: Should I find another copy of Flossie and Bossie at a price worthy of a sane world, I will happily show my contempt for the Market by giving it, free, to your beautiful and precociously reading daughter.

On the condition you let her write her name in it. In pen.

2008-09-29T16:12:00.000-07:00

Talking Beasts and Precocious Readers: UPDATED

The Darwins have encountered that bane of many hyper-literate parents: what do you have a young child read who is past the beginning-reader phase of Frog and Toad but just isn't interested in the school-based adventures of Harry Potter and doesn't have the life experience to make sense out of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis?

The Opinionated Household has been through this twice, and after much trial and error with Offspring #1, we were pretty secure in offering the same books to #2, with success for the greater part. Here then is the Opinionated List of Books for Little People with High Reading Levels.

1. Caroline Haywood. The writer of the Betsy and Eddie books was the Beverly Cleary of the previous generation. Haywood writes at a level close to that of Cleary--maybe a little simpler--and her children are charming and realistic. Many of Haywood's titles are back in print, to my joy.

2. My Father's Dragon. Everything a small child could want in a book: adventure, talking animals, a cuddly dragon, and not too long.

3. Uncle Wiggily. After reading a few dozen of Howard Garis' stories of the Gentleman Rabbit, I felt fairly sure I could whip up a macro that would churn out any number of them. (Garis originally wrote them for newspaper publication, which explains in part the stories' brevity and exhausting conventionality.) Offspring #1 had only a cheap Dover edition containing a few Uncle Wiggily stories, and I stumbled on a couple of battered out-of-print collections when Offspring #2 was a baby. Both children read them, and re-read them, and re-re-read them, compulsively at Kindergarten age. #2 even started to talk like Uncle Wiggily for a while, and refused to read anything else whatsoever.

4. Flossie and Bossie. Eva Le Gallienne apparently never wrote any children's book other than this tale of talking hens, which is a shame, as her talent was huge. Again, talking animals are the key to its appeal for the advanced young reader. Beautifully illustrated by Garth Williams (the illustrator for Charlotte's Web and Little House on the Prairie), and easily the most beloved book of both my girls. Ever. I bought our battered copy for $.99, and haven't ever seen it again. Bookfinder has it for $44 and up. It's a crime that it hasn't been reprinted.

5. Oz. Baum was no great shakes as a writer, but as with Uncle Wiggily, repetitive language and narrative devices that drive parents to drink are the key to little person popularity. There are dozens and dozens of books in the Oz series, all featuring roughly the same characters, storylines, and conflict resolutions, so one need never run dry. And, again, talking beasts.

Update: How could I have forgotten these? Both of these are small books, just right for the developing attention span.

6. The Enormous Crocodile. I'm actually not a huge fan of Dahl; but this book of his is written for younger kids, and is extremely funny, especially if you are capable of pulling off a couple of British accents. Secret plans and clever tricks!

7. Wren. The true story of an adorable little girl with cerebral palsy, and her life with her devoutly Catholic family and lots and lots of animals, written by her mother, Marie Killilea. Both my girls loved it.

2008-09-24T05:55:00.001-07:00

Quatuor Tempora

Today is the first of the three Ember Days for this quarter of the year. Ember Days are an almost-lost discipline of prayer and fasting on the traditional days of penance--Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday--at regular intervals through the year.

Ember days (corruption from Lat. Quatuor Tempora, four times) are the days at the beginning of the seasons ordered by the Church as days of fast and abstinence. They were definitely arranged and prescribed for the entire Church by Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) for the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after 13 December (S. Lucia), after Ash Wednesday, after Whitsunday, and after 14 September (Exaltation of the Cross). The purpose of their introduction, besides the general one intended by all prayer and fasting, was to thank God for the gifts of nature, to teach men to make use of them in moderation, and to assist the needy.

Given that Texas is still experiencing severe drought conditions--the parts that aren't under water--Ember Days have continuing relevance. This might be a good week to pray for more rain, and less rain, and to perform acts of charity and bailout.

The etymology of the English term for the tempora is interesting. The OED surmises that the Anglo-Saxon ymbyre, meaning period or rotation of time, converged with the Latin tempora, meaning about the same thing, and buttresses the theory with the Old Swedish ymber-dagan for Ember Days.

The tempora occur in winter, in the week following St. Lucy's Day; in spring, after Ash Wednesday; in summer, after Pentecost Sunday; and in fall, after Holy Cross (which would be this week). A traditional handy mnemonic for remembering when the Ember Days cycle round:

Sant Crux, Lucia, Cineres, Charismata Dia
Ut sit in angaria quarta sequens feria.

Catching little jingle, isn't it? Leaning here on my questionable Latin: "Holy Cross, Lucy, Ashes, Charismata Days/ That there may be following four holy days of obligation." Which really doesn't make a lot of sense.

Now the tempora used to have a much bigger profile as fast days went, being the last relic of the ancient tradition of observing not just Fridays, but Wednesdays and Saturdays as well, as days of fast and penance. The Portuguese came up with the marvelous custom of taking the fish and veggies permitted at your one evening meal, breading them, and deep frying them. Penitentially, of course. Missionaries took this tasty idea with them to Japan, and behold:Yum.

UPDATE: A commenter at New Liturgical Movement mentions the German mnemonic for the Ember Days:

Asche, Pfingsten, Kreuz, Luzei,
die Woch' danach Quatamber sei.

Also, the NLMers point out that, because Holy Cross was on a Sunday this year, for some obscure reason this means that the Ember Days for fall are on the week following the week after Holy Cross. Okay.

2008-09-24T05:42:00.000-07:00

HSLDA: Making the World Safe for Homeschoolers

Breathe easy. Your dues to the Home School Legal Defense Association continue to enable it to Fight For Our Homeschooling Freedoms (TM).

This coming Monday, September 29, homeschool parents will be able to pick up a complimentary tall size (12 fl. oz.) cup of Pike Place Roast from Starbucks.

This promotion is part of Starbucks “Great Start for Great Teachers” promotion, and is now open to all teachers.

HSLDA intervened when we were alerted that homeschool parents were not included in the promotion.

We are pleased that Starbucks is recognizing the contribution of homeschool parents by extending their program to us.

In order to pick up your free cup of Pike Place Roast you will need to present evidence that you are a homeschooler.

Maybe the expression of horror and mortification will constitute adequate evidence that I'm a homeschooler?

2008-07-07T21:16:00.000-07:00

I Don't Think That's Quite What She Meant By That Phrase

From the April 7-14 U.S. News & World Report article on the Pope's upcoming visit:

A parishioner at St. Mary, Mother of God, a church in the vanguard of a movement to return to the traditional Tridentine mass, Hays says it's not just the Latin but other elements, such as the priest's facing the altar, that help restore a sense of what Catholics call "real presence" to the ceremony.

2008-07-07T04:55:00.000-07:00

Chagall
Marc Chagall was born this day in 1887. Condemned by Hitler as a painter of degenerate art. A good friend of Jacques and Raissa Maritain.

“All that I paint, all that I do, all that I am, is just the Little Jew of Vitebsk.”

2008-07-06T20:16:00.000-07:00

Stranger Than Hagiography

Today is the feast of St. Maria Goretti, a girl who was stabbed to death by an attempted rapist who forgave her murderer before she died.

Five years ago:

A man described by authorities as a known sexual predator was chased through the streets of South Philadelphia by an angry crowd of Catholic high school girls, who kicked and punched him after he was tackled by neighbors, police said on Friday.
...
When Susanto tried to run, more than 20 girls chased him down the block. Two men from the neighborhood caught him and the girls took their revenge.

"The girls came and started kicking him and punching him, so I wasn't going to stop them," neighbor Robert Lemons told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Susanto was later treated for injuries at a local hospital.

The girls were from St. Maria Goretti High School.

2008-07-06T19:46:00.000-07:00

Pushy : Driven :: Soapy : ?

Turns out there's such a thing as too educational. Case in point: the Top 500 SAT Words Shower Curtain.

And for you who prefer your children to review their lanthanide series while they lather, you can get the Periodic Table instead.

2008-07-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

Speaking Up on Dumbing Down.

Disclaimer: The following comments are not intended to belittle the piety, favored devotional practices, personal worship experiences, educational attainments, or vocabulary level of any reader and/or anybody he or she happens to know. Nor am I attacking a bishop uncharitably; I'm just disagreeing with him. He did invite us to "Speak up!" you know. Twice.

Bishop Trautman, Chair of the USCCB's Liturgy Committee, has this to say to you, John and Mary Catholic (you remember who you are from last time, don't you?).

Hard to add much to Amy Welborn's comments (latest here; previous here--do go and read both) except to say that, if you've managed to offend the equanimous (what? where's my dictionary?) Mrs. Welborn, you've certainly offended both John and Mary Catholic. Go and read.

Meanwhile, if you want the cut-to-the-chase summary, here are the abstruse (oops) words and phrases that His Eminence believes will prevent you, John and Mary, who clearly struggled mightily on the SAT Verbal section, from being able to participate fruitfully in the liturgy:

ineffable
prefiguring sacrifices
inviolate virgin
suffused
unvanquished champion
consubstantial
incarnate
sullied
unfeigned
taste sweet to the heart
gibbet
wrought
thwart
dew
we pray you
bid

Remember also that you cannot be expected to comprehend (oh, sorry) sentences with more than fifty words or ornate syntax (sorry sorry).

Now please read the disclaimer at the beginning again. Okay. Rant begins.

Are you kidding me? My five-year-old knows what "dew," "bid," "we pray you," "wrought," "thwart," "unvanquished champion," "unfeigned," and "gibbet" mean. Because we read to her lots of books, chiefly hero stories and fairy tales, full of unvanquished champions, inviolate virgins, and malfeasors (oops again) who are often enough by story's end hung on gibbets for the birds of the air to peck their flesh. And I tell her what the words mean, when she can't derive them from context. My twelve-year-old knew all of the words except "ineffable," which she proceeded to deduce correctly from the Latin effari.

"But Opinionated Homeschooler! Most children don't have that kind of book read to them! Most adolescents haven't been taught Latin verbs! What about all those other Catholics, who may be getting their vocabulary from Wheel of Fortune and USA Today? " Well yes, that's exactly the point. You learn, you become educated, from being spoken to, read to, and taught as a person capable of instruction. Not by being protected from difficult but precise and beautiful language, lest you should run into "consubstantial" smack in the middle of the Creed and run off, trembling, to the Baptists.

Bishop Trautman, who, by virtue of his consecration, has the right and obligation of instructing the Catholic faithful incumbent (sorry, my bad) upon him, instead of welcoming the opportunity to bring Catholic discourse up to the level Pope Pius IX presumed in 1854 when he released Ineffabilis Deus for the promulgation (dang) of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (I mean, the Not Sinful Start), is fighting tooth and nail to keep Big Words out of the Mass. This is what the phrase "soft bigotry of lowered expectations" was invented for.

Did that penultimate (whoops) sentence have too many words? Anyhow. Maybe the benighted John or Mary will even be moved to learn a little Latin.

2008-07-06T15:28:00.000-07:00

Why Have Children Just ...?

Refresh that hoary old list of Famous Homeschooled Americans.

If Gomez had a family chapel, by the way, this would be it. Oh, those wacky Capuchins.

2008-06-23T20:28:00.000-07:00

Raca

a predestined fool,
a high-toned fool,
a fool of nature,
a B-sharp and B-flat fool,
a heavenly fool,
an earthly fool,
a jovial fool,
a happy and frisky fool,
a mercurial fool,
a handsome and lively fool,
a lunatic fool,
a tipsy fool,
an erratic fool,
a tasseled fool,
an eccentric fool,
a fool with bells,
an ethereal, Junoesque fool,
a laughing and sexual fool,
an Arctic fool,
an abstracted fool,
a heroic fool,
a fool from the top of the barrel,
a genial fool,
a fool of the first barrel,
a predestined fool,
a foaming fool,
an august fool,
an original fool,
a Caesar-like fool,
a pope-like fool,
an imperial fool,
a consistory fool,
a royal fool,
a cardinal fool,
a patriarchal fool,
a papal-bullish fool,
an original fool,
a synod-like fool,
an honest fool,
a bishop-like fool,
a ducal fool,
a doctoral fool,
a flag-waving fool,
a monkish fool,
a lordly fool,
a fiscal fool,
a palatial fool,
an extravagant fool,
a leading fool,
a puffed-up fool,
a magisterial fool,
a beginning fool,
a total fool,
an oversexed fool,
an elevated fool,
a fool with a diploma in folly,
a priestly fool,
a messmate fool,
a boss fool,
a licensed fool,
a triumphant fool,
a lickspittle fool,
a vulgar fool,
a superfluous fool,
a domesticated fool,
an echo-like fool,
a model fool,
a faded fool,
a rare and foreign fool,
a stupid fool,
a courtly fool,
a fleeting fool,
a polite fool,
a well-connected fool,
a popular fool,
a wild fool,
a familiar fool,
a noble fool,
a remarkable fool,
a full-grown fool,
a petted fool,
a bone-biting fool,
a Latinate fool,
a recovered fool,
an ordinary fool,
a savage fool,
a feared fool,
a driveling fool,
a transcendent fool,
a slack-jawed fool,
a sovereign fool,
a bloated fool,
a special fool,
a coxcomb fool,
a metaphysical fool,
a secondary fool,
an ecstatic fool,
an oriental fool,
a categorical fool,
a sublime fool,
a predicated fool,
a crimson fool,
a violent fool,
a born fool,
an officious fool,
a middle-class fool,
a well-drawn fool,
a feathered fool,
an algorithmic fool,
a topmasted fool,
an algebraic fool,
a major fool,
a cabalistic fool,
a thought of a thought of a fool,
a talmudic fool,
a scholarly Arab fool,
an alchemist's fool,
a queer fool,
a compendious fool,
an Aquinas fool,
an abridged fool,
an abridging fool,
a hyperbolic fool,
a Moorish fool,
an Aristotelian fool,
a papal-bulled fool,
an allegorical fool,
a proxy fool,
a tropological fool,
a begging-friar fool,
a pleonasmic fool,
a tenured fool,
a capital fool,
a slyboots fool,
a cerebral fool,
a surly fool,
a cordial fool,
a double-chinned fool,
a gutty fool,
a high-handed fool,
a choleric fool,
a well-hung fool,
a splenetic fool,
a scribbling fool,
a lusty fool,
a giddy fool,
a legitimate fool,
a kitchen fool,
an azimuth fool,
a hardwood fool,
a celestial-circle fool,
an andiron fool,
an appropriate fool,
a wretched fool,
an architrave fool,
a rheumy fool,
a pedestal fool,
an elegant fool,
a perfect fool,
a twenty-four-karat fool,
a famous fool,
a bizarre fool,
a happy fool,
a transverse fool,
a solemn fool,
an absurd fool,
an annual fool,
a touchy fool,
a festival fool,
a cap-and-bells fool,
an amusing fool,
a well-aimed fool,
a bumpkin fool,
an up-to-date fool,
an agreeable fool,
a stumbling fool,
a privileged fool,
an out-of-date fool,
a rustic fool,
a boorish fool,
an ordinary fool,
a hard-swotting fool,
a constant fool,
a gallant fool,
a harmonious fool,
a luxurious fool,
a determined fool,
a quick-footed fool,
a hieroglyphical fool,
a figurative fool,
an authentic fool,
a protective fool,
a valuable fool,
a hooded fool,
a precious fool,
a full-cut fool,
a fanatic fool,
a Damascus-bladed fool,
a fantastic fool,
an arabesqued fool,
a lymphatic fool,
a Persian-pursed fool,
a panicked fool,
a farting fool,
an alembic fool,
a speckled fool,
not a boring fool,
a proven fool.

-Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book 3, Ch. 39, trans. Burton Raffel. I'll leave Ch. 26 for someone else.

2008-06-23T20:07:00.000-07:00

But I'm Making a Dress From Flour Sacks

See how well you would have fit into a Steinbeck novel, via the 1930's Marital Scale (shamelessly stolen from DarwinCatholic).

The O.H. scored a 41, not too shockingly. Like I needed an on-line quiz to tell me I'm a whiny, selfish, spendthrift with no work ethic. Heck, I got the same results via a quiz like this one last Saturday evening. Just an occupational hazard of being a GenX Slacker.

2008-06-15T12:43:00.006-07:00

Now, Child-Free!

Not usually having an occasion to watch television for obscenely long stretches--I can't seem to concentrate for real reading with a temperature--I find real immersion in the Evil Medium to be an eye-opener. What's up with the PBS talking-heads shows, anyway? A few times in the course of the morning, there was reference on various shows to childless adults (in discussions of gay marriage, Social Security, etc.), except on PBS it's consistently "child-free adults." What?? Who thought "child-free" was some kind of neutral term? When does the "-free" suffix indicate anything except a bad thing of which one would wish to be rid? Error-free, bug-free, disease-free ... child-free.

Oh well. At least they're showing a terrific peformance of Swan Lake right now. This is what I like to see my tax money used for.

2008-06-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

Catholics in the News

Sick as a dog with a fever this Sunday morning, so I'm watching the Sunday morning talking heads shows, and it's almost as good as having gone to Mass, what with all the Catholics all over the news.

First, much discussion of possible VP picks. Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, touted as a possibility for Obama's running mate, aiming for both the female and the Catholic votes, which were seen as going for Hillary. But Sebelius has recently been asked to refrain from receving communion by her bishop, Abp. Naumann, which is not-quite-but-almost excommunication. While Obama certainly doesn't care, and it's unlikely to bother many of the pro-Clinton Catholics whom Obama is wooing, I'm guessing he doesn't want to step into the middle of this particular mess, which seems custom-made to polarize the Catholic vote.

Meanwhile, wunderkind Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is being mentioned for the McCain ticket. Interesting: young enough to offset the age issue, I guess, if you somehow see their ages as averaging out; but will the demons in his background--which seem more Louisiana than Catholic--be too offputting for the electorate?

Moving from politics to Hollywood... Steve Carell, of NBC's The Office, is starring in the upcoming Get Smart movie, which looks fun. Apparently he's a good buddy of Stephen Colbert, another practicing Catholic (and CCD catechist) whose hilarious send-up of "King of Glory," which we've all been forced to sing ad nauseam by handclapping, tambourine-waving folk choirs who seem to think Catholic hymnody began and ended in the 1970's, was a hit a couple years ago on the Catholic Blogging circuit. If you missed it, definitely check it out. It will be cathartic (unless you're not a Catholic, in which case it will just make you grateful).

Must mention that there's a political connection here, too. One of the morning shows (sorry, they're all bleeding together) had a great little interview clip of Carell interviewing McCain:

Among Daily Show staffers, Mr. Carell's trademark moment came after a round of Republican debates in New Hampshire in late 1999, when he interviewed Arizona Senator John McCain. After asking Mr. McCain about his favorite poem and his favorite movie -- a little light banter from this amusing fellow from Comedy Central! -- he suddenly went straight and asked Mr. McCain about his record-breaking spending in a Congressional subcommittee, contradicting his claim to be a fiscal conservative.

"McCain was completely like a deer in headlights," recalled Mr. Rocca. "The silence was just horrible and deafening."

Mr. McCain's aides were slack-jawed. "Then he breaks the silence with, 'Just kidding.'

And of course the big story, the sudden death of Tim Russert. My favorite memory of Russert was during the 2000 campaign, when he interviewed Al Gore and George W. on back-to-back Sundays. He asked Bush about his appearance at Bob Jones University, where it's still a matter of policy that the Catholic Church is Satan's tool of deception and the Pope is the Antichrist. Bush gave the usual bluster about Some of My Best Friends and Relatives are Catholics, and how they weren't offended, so, you know, it's all good. Russert replied that he was Catholic, and he was offended, leaving Bush to flounder. Ha! Then he nailed Gore, who's just fine with both execution and abortion, on his demurral in the case of pregnant women on death row. Gore gave his usual bluster on choice and a woman's control over her body: Russert responded with the obvious questions about how you could talk with a straight face about someone's control over their body if you were just about to kill them, and why you would delay killing someone so as to preserve a life you just a minute ago said doesn't exist. Leaving Gore to flounder in the classic Russert interviewee deer-in-the-headlights manner. Ha again! Chalk one up for the much-maligned "seamless garment" theology. A great Catholic moment in politics.

(Update: They just showed a bit of that second interview, where Russert got Gore to flat-out deny that an unborn child is a human life.)

(Update #2: It was affecting to see Maria Shriver on Meet the Press mentioning that Russert carried his rosary with him at all times.)

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace.

2008-06-09T18:51:00.000-07:00

Truly Scrumptious Children's Books

We just rented Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for family movie night, and got to thinking. What other children's books could we think of, by authors who didn't write primarily for children? We decided it didn't count if the writer's juvenile efforts are well-known (C. S. Lewis, for instance, doesn't count). Likewise we didn't include books not originally intended for children, such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

Ian Fleming, the James Bond author of course, wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Dickens wrote The Magic Fishbone, beloved by Offspringen #1 and 2. Pearl S. Buck wrote The Story Bible and The Man Who Changed China: The Story of Sun Yat-Sen for the Landmark series of children's history books. Shirley Jackson likewise contributed the excellent Witchcraft of Salem Village to the Landmark series. Ian McEwan wrote The Daydreamer, also popular in the Opinionated household. Thackeray wrote The Ring and The Rose.

What else?

2008-06-06T20:11:00.001-07:00

Back to the '80's

This is best watched with the sound off. Really the music was always beside the point anyway.

I must excuse myself by observing that I spent the early '80's in the U.K., and so New Romanticism both attracts and repulses me.

(H.T. Rod Dreher)

2008-06-06T16:26:00.000-07:00

Back to the '70's

When we hear the dreaded "S-word," we homeschoolers inhale and unload our full list of social activities on our hapless interlocutor. You think "homeschool" means my kids are shut up in the house all day? Chess club drama class campfire kids programming lessons swim team park day playdates fencing salle German tutor oh and did I mention she's taking a math course at Big State U.? "Carschooling": when you're committed to so many socialization-promoting activites, classes, co-ops, and extracurriculars that you have to keep workbooks in the van so the kids can get some normal lesson time.

Well that's all changing now, judging by the conversations I've been hearing lately. Most of us are on one, or one-and-a-bit, income, and usually with more children than average, and the gas prices are hitting us hard. Suddenly choices must be made, and Scout meetings in McManorberry may not make the cut.

Here's the questions for my fellow homeschoolers: Are the rising gas prices affecting your homeschooling? What's got to give, and what are you still willing to drive for? We've given up a Park Day with wonderful women because of the thirty-minute drive. The city pool with the diving boards is being passed up for the smaller neighborhood pool a few blocks away.

And how about walking, biking, and public transportation instead of the reliable Soccer Mom Minivan? Where will you still go, just not by car? Today I walked over to the post office with Offspringen #1 and #2 in tow, and mailed a package to my niece in Red Countyville up north. The shipping cost was less than the gas would have been, I noticed. This afternoon, after biking home with Eudoxus, Offspring #1 took the city bus by herself up to the store to buy a birthday present for a friend. (I walked her to the bus stop, which she liked; waited with her, which she thought unnecessary; told the driver where she needed to get off, which caused eye-rolling; and then explained "It's her first time on the bus by herself!" to which the driver smiled and nodded and said "I'll take good care of her!" causing her to nearly slither under the seat in mortification. My maternal work was done, except for the next hour of fretting. But I digress.)

Want to know how your neighborhood rates in the brave new world of $4+/gallon gasoline? Find out at Walk Score. We rated a 77--"Very Walkable." The scoring isn't perfect; we did well for schools, not because of Big State U. two miles away (which is one of the reasons we moved into this neighborhood), but because the chiropractor's school around the corner somehow got counted three times. Still, a useful, if rough, indicator.

2008-06-05T19:53:00.000-07:00

You Wouldn't Let an Unlicensed Brain Surgeon Operate, Would You?

What is it lately with the obsession over teaching credentials? All the half-decent teachers I've ever known have said their time in the school of education was mind-numbing and useless, and that their real teaching skills came from experience.

Here's a credentialed teacher for you. And here. And here.

If these incidents--all reported in the space of two weeks--had involved homeschoolers, there would be a bill before Congress right now to criminalize homeschooling.

2008-06-04T05:52:00.000-07:00

Harris Poll: Homeschoolig Bad, Public Schooling Worse. And a bit of Whining.

The 2008 Harris Poll gauging public opinion of various forms of education is out. 2000 people were asked about the general and particular educational quality of regular public schools, public charter schools, private schools (secular and religious), and homeschooling. Oddly, public schools and public charters came in last, even behind homeschooling; but if you look at the breakdowns, homeschooling trails by a big margin when respondents were questioned about any of the particulars.

Now of course this is an opinion poll, and there's obvious absurdity in people thinking they have any sort of handle on the overall or particular academic success of homeschooling. I don't have a good idea of how well most of my friends' kids are doing in their home education. So it's tempting to dismiss it.

But I think it's a bad sign that we're regarded as so horribly backward in subject areas and socialization. Because public perception drives legislation, and lately we're seeing a spate of anti-homeschooling commentary.

We know that our kids have good educations and play well with others. Homeschooling has been around for decades, and in the last decade has soared in visibility. Why are we seen as so educationally ineffective? And what can we do about it?

Our parish bulletin announces the names of the parochial school children who win or place at PSIA (like UIL, but for private schools, which in Texas includes homeschoolers). But not the homeschooled parishioners. One year Offspring #1 placed first in mathematics for her grade at State, beating out hundreds of kids from the toniest private schools in Dallas and Houston. Every year she's gone to state and done extremely well in core subjects. But only the parish school results may go in the bulletin (yes, I asked). I do know something about the achievement of the homeschooling families in my parish, and they're impressive: scholarships, awards for virtuoso musical performances, admission to top-tier universities. But I didn't find out about them from the newspaper or the parish bulletin.

I'm not mentioning this just to whine. We don't need the parish to validate our kids. (Though considering that the Diocese seems very concerned that our children are properly Socialized as Part of their Parish Community, you'd think some recognition might contribute to that.) But the comboxes and opinion polls continue to show that most non-homeschoolers think our kids are sitting in the basement reading the Bible. Changing the public perception has to start in communities, including (especially) parishes.

But would it even matter if we had more publicity? For years, homeschooled kids have been dominating the Howard Scripps Spelling Bee, the National Geographic Bee, and lesser-known events (looked into chess lately? why do you suppose the US Chess Federation has effectively banned homeschool teams at the national level?). What has it gotten us? The confirmation bias entrenched in perceptions of homeschooling means that reports of individual achievement are seen as outliers, not disturbing the ugly stereotypes in the public mind. As Dana at Principled Discovery points out, public opinion of homeschooling is actually slipping.

In a country where the party beholden to the NEA is about to control the White House and Congress, where the courts don't seem to be on our side, and where the current administration has effectively federalized education, this could mean real trouble.

2008-06-02T16:24:00.000-07:00

Here We Go Again

Friend-of-blogger "Sophia" below gives a link to the little Parade Magazine tidbit flying around the internet right now, which is short enough to give here in its entirety:

Should Home-Schooling Be Illegal?

In February, a California state appeals court ruled that unless parents have recognized teaching credentials, they must send their children to school. The judge, citing a state education law, said that “parents do not have a constitutional right to home-school their children.” Parents and politicians were outraged, and the court will rehear the case this month.

At stake is the education of the 166,000 California children who currently are home-schooled. But the court decision also could influence laws across the country. Nationwide, up to 2 million children are taught at home. Experts estimate that the number is increasing 7% to 12% a year.

“If upheld, the California ruling will send shock waves nationwide,” says Richard Kahlenberg, the author of a number of books on education. He says the case “pits those who believe parental rights are paramount against those who place a premium on well-educated citizens.”

Right now, only six states have strict regulations for home-schooling, usually requiring parents to have their curriculum approved, to show test scores and, in some places, to submit to home visits. Fourteen states, including California, mandate only that parents notify the state of their decision to home-school.

There's an accompanying meaningless poll, already reflecting the widespread dissemination of the URL to homeschool groups across the country.

The article itself is difficult to muster outrage over, as it's obviously just meant to boost traffic to the website. There's a ridiculous little quote implying that homeschooled children won't be well-educated citizens, meant to push buttons, clearly a successful strategy judging by the stratospheric number of comments. As has been observed before, there's no longer a judgment to be upheld; that train left the station when the court decided to re-hear the case, so either this Kahlenberg guy doesn't understand what "uphold" means, or the article writer got an out-of-date quote. And of course there's no reason to think that the court decision would "influence laws across the country," which is presumably why the article writer failed to offer any. (The writer appears to think that "constitutional" in the vacated judgment refers to the U.S. Constitution, which it does not.)

There are some interesting points, though. The mini-article is all over the place, asking in the title if homeschooling should be illegal (no state is going to make it illegal; even the Governator figured out that he better hop right into the fray on the side of the homeschoolers). But the poll only asks if parents should have to be credentialed teachers; and the text itself only seems to appeal to some sort of toughening-up of laws regarding homeschooling in various states deemed too lax. The whole thing has the air of "tell us if you love or hate the idea of homeschooling."

The sweeping question of the title makes me, yet again, despair. Non-homeschoolers worry endlessly about the tiny fraction of homeschooling families: yet the frequency with which it's suggested that the entire enterprise should simply be criminalized is exactly what keeps the HSLDA in business, keeps homeschoolers paranoid, and ensures that no real problems among homeschoolers will ever, ever be talked about openly. And articles like this, even though they're clearly just meant to increase traffic, contribute to the idea that if you don't like what someone else does with their freedom, by golly you should make sure it's taken away from them.

The comments boxes contain the usual silly comments and generalized arguments from anecdote on all sides. It's interesting to see how often "they're hiding child abuse" and "they should be made to have teaching credentials" rear themselves. There's a good discussion of them both at Principled Discovery, including the impact of credentialing on the likelihood of abuse. Well worth reading.

After a few hundred (thousand?) outraged comments, the whole thing will blow over. Until the next opinion column. My friends, I think our time is better spent preparing lessons.

2008-06-01T07:28:00.000-07:00

Picky Eating

Ian at Musings has a gutsy post up calling homeschoolers to task for their children's bratty behavior. He specifies large families, but in my experience having a large family only magnifies issues: I've seen plenty of rotten and uncorrected child behavior in one- and two-child families.

Interestingly, most of the objections are directed at his criticism of children not eating what they're served. There are a couple of valid points made in response.

First, it's arguably the polite thing to simply not eat food you're served that, for whatever reason, you can't or won't eat. This is what we've trained our children to do: you don't complain about the food, you don't explain why you can't or won't eat it, you just smile and say "It's great!" when asked, you push it around with your fork, and you trust that your parents will give you a sandwich when you go home.

Our kids are vegetarians (they get it from Eudoxus), and anybody who has had to hang out with the more militant of that tribe--particularly vegans, for some reason--has reason to thank us for training our children to just keep quiet about it, eat the bread and salad, and have some beans and rice when we get home. Some friends of ours who are Orthodox Jews have this down pat; you don't burden others with your eating limitations, you don't make them feel guilty that they don't have anything you can eat, you don't announce to them ahead of time what your children can and can't eat, you just decline politely and keep your own snacks in the car.

Second, as at least one commenter at Musings observes, in the days when it was a virtue to eat whatever was placed in front of you, not only was vegetarianism rare, but it was a safe bet that what Joey's mom was serving for dinner would be in the same general culinary class as what your own mom was serving. I really don't believe it's realistic to think a five-year-old must be trained to gulp down sushi, borscht, or gorditas con chicharron when they've never seen such foods before and are suddenly confronted with them.

Or maybe I'm just raising bratty kids. Thoughts?

2008-05-15T18:45:00.000-07:00

Weirdest Objections to Homeschooling Ever

This is a little dated, and unless you've been hiding under a rock you know that a panel for a district court in California made a strange ruling that's since been vacated, so the underlying tempest is all gone now. But the nasty little opinion column is noteworthy both because it showed up in the generally sane LA Times, and because it features some of the oddest accusations I've ever seen leveled against homeschooling.

Weird primum:

For-profit charter schools specializing in "home schooling" -- and collecting your tax dollars while doing it -- have not only cast a cloud over the concept of home schooling but have rankled teachers who see the state's limited education dollars being diverted from traditional schools.

Charter schools collect your tax dollars because they're public schools. The teachers in them are public school teachers. Charters don't specialize in homeschooling, though they may specialize in "home schooling," if the scare quotes have the meaning "not." This seems to be saying "one reason homeschooling is bad is that we don't like public charter schools."

Weird secundum:

If home schooling forums on the Web are indicative of the views held by parents of learn-at-home kids ... [etc.]

"We read some things while surfing that seemed extreme, and it made us wonder if the internet is a reliable source of information and a reasonable basis for making generalizations."

Weird tertium:

It's evident that the vast majority who teach their offspring in front of the television do so because they don't want their children to be subjected to such dangerous doctrines as evolution, abortion, global warming, equal rights and other ideas abhorrent to the evangelical mantra.

Whaaaat? Where did this "in front of the television" thing come from? Homeschoolers are notorious for their puritanism with regard to television. The whole "homeschoolers are mostly fundies" myth is familiar, as is the litany of slanders, but I've never in the last decade heard the accusation that we make our kids watch too much tv.

Weird quartum:

There has always been something decidedly elitist and anti-democratic in home schooling.

I don't even know what to make of this one, straight out of the McCarthy era. "There's always been something sinister about those pinko homeschoolers, I tell ya." It's a great slapdown, though. I look forward to using it myself in the future. You know, there's always seemed something decidedly elitist and anti-democratic about newspaper reading.

2008-05-15T07:27:00.000-07:00

Recent Viewings

Thank heavens for Netflix. Especially since they tell us in a few months our tv screen will turn to static and we can throw away our rabbit ears antenna.

Spoilers ahoy.

No Country for Old Men. I preface this by saying how depressing it's been that not a single person I've talked to has recognized the title as an allusion to Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium." Why We Homeschool.

Anyway I'd read McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian, and felt like I'd finished. The movie features his familiar Mystery of Evil character, a walking refutation of Hannah Arendt's thesis of the banality of evil, and at this point a kind of highbrow Elm Street Freddy. Yeah, he has his own sort of ethical code, gotcha. Next concept, please.

Cloverfield. Exactly like watching Eudoxus play Half-Life for two hours. All about the special effects, which frankly isn't a terrible reason for watching a movie, with standard horror flick plot, characters, dialogue, episodes. Look! The ginormous beast ravaging Manhattan has finally gone down under the military's bombs! Sure we can't actually see it through all the smoke, but surely it's dead at last! Let's all breathe a sigh of relief as the soundtrack swells! What could be bad?

Atonement. Pretty good. I haven't read the book--I remember DarwinCatholic didn't care for it--but the film version was effective. You get fair warning about the surprise ending when certain events play quickly backwards, particularly the un-typing of a crucial note, and when there's a sudden series of poor artistic choices: the incredible coincidences of the newsreel showing Chocolate Magnate and Lola to be married, in a chapel that happens to be near enough for Briony to attend; Robbie acting and speaking completely out of character in Cecilia's flat; the spurious, tacked-on happy ending for Robbie and Cecilia, filmed in a deliberately conventional style that doesn't fit the rest of the movie.

2008-05-14T19:59:00.000-07:00

Stormy Weather

Tornados to the north, thunderstorms and big hail fed by the hot hot and humid weather. If the rotation area turns south, the computer goes off and we rouse the Offspringen out of bed and cower in the downstairs hallway. Hope the Darwins are keeping away from the windows.

Last week I listened as the tapping of rain on the skylight turned into the rapping of hailstones, and then a puzzling thumping all over the roof. A look out the window showed our road dappled with white. Big old hailstones, the biggest I've ever seen live and up close. Offspring #2 and I sat out on the porch swing and watched the ice fall out of the sky. And watched our new-to-Texas neighbors watching in dismay as their expensive cars got battered. We grabbed a couple of stones--O#2 got one a good three inches across--and I thought briefly about going for one of the really big ones, but sanity prevailed.

Everyone stay out of the low water crossings. Remember a dozen people died in the 2001 flood because they thought sure their SUVs could cross the water.

Update: The first cell missed the city, but the second front hit us square on. Massive hail, high winds, and continuous lightning right after midnight, and this morning parts of trees scattered thickly across the neighborhood. 20,000 homes without power from falling tree limbs. Regular reader A. in comment box reports two broken windows. No word yet from the Darwins or from Eudoxus' parents (who got whacked by the first front, the one with the rotation). What fun!

I hear in some parts of the country, they have robins to tell them spring is here.

2008-04-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

All Your Children Are Belong To Us

A stupid law is being proposed in Michigan to require all homeschoolers to register with the public schools and provide information about their families. Why? Don't worry:

Ron Koehler, who is the assistant superintendent for organizational and community initiatives at the Kent Intermediate School District (KISD), said he thinks having the information would enable the intermediate school district to inform parents about programs and classes that may be available to home school students.

Yeah, and I have a bridge in New York I'd like to sell you. Why does a public school rep think he has the right to demand that families not using the public schools identify themselves and hand over their private information?

"They're still our students and families," he said.

Uh, no. They're not.

I'm past being amazed through this last decade at the eagerness with which both lefties and righties are willing to hand over our freedoms and privacies to the state, in the name of making sure that Something Bad doesn't happen. From warrantless phone tapping of citizens (because they might be discussing a plot to blow up something!) to the endless mantra of "How can we know those homeschooled kids are being educated and not abused?", we're all agog to know what our neighbor might be up to that might be Bad.

I'm not a libertarian--quite the reverse--but I have a hopeless nostalgia for the principle of probable cause. It's not worth the cost of allowing the state warrantless, at-will access into people's homes and lives, just to make sure terrorist plots are foiled, or children aren't being beaten. It's sure not worth that cost to make sure kids are passing geometry.

2008-04-05T21:37:00.000-07:00

Books Read in 2008
(Updated continuously)

Concept filched from DarwinCatholic.

Baptismal Instructions - St. John Chrysostom
Eclipse of the Sun - Michael O'Brien
The Thanatos Syndrome - Walker Percy
The Third Man - Graham Greene
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

2008-02-06T04:45:00.000-08:00

We Pause for Station Participation

No blogging for a while. See you on the other side of Lent.

2008-01-26T14:21:00.000-08:00

Academic Education for All?

[These thoughts were prompted by an exchange with Joel (a thoughtful guy and former teacher) on Yahmdallah’s blog, in turn prompted by an article in the Atlantic Monthly, proposing uniform national standards for public schools, combined with complete local autonomy at the school level (freed of teachers' unions and school boards) to determine how best to go about meeting those standards.]

Joel asked: Would farm kids really be better served by a school that requires three years of math and a foreign language? In short, yes.

Let's look at some history. In the 19th century, most rural children didn't attend a secondary school, for the very straightforward reason that there weren't any available except in cities. Families who could afford boarding school could send their children, but this was a small minority. (By the way, the widespread idea that the 3-month summer break originated in the need for rural children to bring in the harvest is a myth: 19th-century rural children often took breaks in spring and fall, when there was indeed agricultural work to be done, but the long summer vacation is a twentieth-century invention.)

When secondary schools began to be seen as important to the country’s future at the turn of the century, there ensued a debate about the curriculum, which traditionally had been the “classical curriculum,” consisting of preparation for classics-heavy college entrance exams and emphasizing Latin and Greek. Proposed instead was the “academic curriculum,” with less emphasis on classical languages (though usually retaining Latin) and more inclusion of modern languages, mathematics, and history. The academic curriculum was widely popular in both rural and urban areas as an ideal education for American children.

By the 1940’s, though, progressivist ideas had begun to take hold, the proponents of which, galvanized by the increasing use of I.Q. tests, mass immigration from Central Europe, and the entrance of more women to colleges, began to push the idea that the academic curriculum (which they opposed for all but the college-bound, in marked contrast to the express desires of teachers and parents) was wasted on certain people--namely, immigrants, blacks, women, and the rural poor--who were destined for menial or non-employment at best. Despite near-universal resistance from both teachers and parents, educational experts and teachers colleges pushed progressivist education in place of the more popular and populist academic curriculum, and by the 1950’s such never-before-seen “subjects” such as home economics, shop, and secretarial classes were universal in American secondary schools.

Black families and the families of immigrants fought tooth and nail against public schools for their communities that basically provided nothing but “education” in mechanics, laundering, and other non-academic subjects. They largely lost, and while we’re blaming family breakdown and poverty for disastrous school performance, we might ask ourselves where some of the much-lamented cultural indifference to learning originated. (The immigrants were fortunate in that, many of them being from Catholic countries, the parochial school system stepped in and provided academic educations for most of them. Black Americans weren’t so lucky.)

I don’t think we’re moving forward if we look at some group of kids (say, rural farm kids) and say “they won’t need a college prep education.” First, if you don’t provide one, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Second, it seems very 19th-century to assume that the children of farmers will grow up to work on the family farm; and certainly these days agriculture sure does benefit from college education. I think the folks at Texas A&M down the freeway would be surprised to hear it doesn’t. So yes, I’d say that farm kids would indeed be better served by a school that requires three years of math and a foreign language. Every child, everywhere in the U.S., no matter what his or her parentage, sex, color, or culture, is as entitled to an academic education as any other child.

I do think the Atlantic article doesn't provide a panacea; you're quite right that a lot more things will have to change before education is set to rights in the U.S. But I think national standards are part of that; and I think a serious commitment to providing a college-preparatory education to every child in the U.S.--not just the ones we guess will make use of it--is fundamental to that goal also. It’s time to undo the disasters of progressivist education. And the "common-sense"--but ultimately unAmerican idea--that we can identify which children won't need it, is one of those disasters.

2008-01-15T05:47:00.000-08:00

It's Not Paranoia If They're Really After You

Daryl Cobranchi has been following this horrible tragedy.

Naturally, the cry goes out: This wouldn't have happened if only there were better regulation of homeschoolers!

Surely the reporters aren't so credulous that they can't see the politicians are trying to deflect attention onto the nebulous "homeschoolers" and away from anything that might land at their own door (like failure adequately to fund/staff programs already in place). There was already a system in place, and it failed spectacularly. People are going to be fired over its failures. So more regulations, aimed at homeschoolers, are going to work when the regulations and programs already in place didn't work because nobody paid attention or followed through?

From the NYTimes:

Mitchell L. Stevens, an associate professor of education and sociology at New York University, said school officials, who are required by law to report suspicion of child abuse, were society’s best watchdogs of how parents treat children.

“Home schooling removes children from a lot of that surveillance,” Mr. Stevens said, adding that the vast majority of home schooling families are “overwhelmingly trustworthy people who place a very high value on parental autonomy.” And thanks to the advocacy of the legal defense fund, he continued, “they have been largely successful since the late 1980s in getting the law to favor parental rights.”

One example of that, in 1991, disrupted an effort by the District of Columbia to regulate home schooling, with rules that included unannounced home visits and required teachers certification for parents doing the instruction. Christopher Klicka, senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association, met with District officials, told them they were on shaky ground because of the 1st, 4th and 14th amendments, and the rules were rescinded.

Unannounced home visits. From representatives of the state. With no probable cause. For families who have done nothing illegal. On the grounds that "surveillance" is necessary because school officials are "society's best watchdogs." At the risk of losing my blog's apoliticality, I'd like to think many Americans are a little wary by now of government intrusion of privacy on the grounds that something bad might happen. Note the simpering "'overwhelmingly trustworthy people'" remark. Translation: "I'm sure you're trustworthy. So why would you oppose strangers dropping into your home unannounced to see what you're up to? The Innocent Have Nothing To Fear (TM)."

So would more stringent homeschooling regulations have made a difference? From CNN:

A social worker at the school where the oldest girl was a student tried twice in April to get city agencies to investigate.

We've all read dozens of these homeschooling abuse cases over the years. I've yet to see one where there wasn't either (1) already a state agency involved, which was supposed to be doing the watchdogging, and/or (2) the children weren't in fact homeschooled. Someone let me know if I missed one. But if the social services, child welfare, foster care, and/or truant officer systems are already aware of the potential problems in a family, how on earth is regulating homeschooling going to improve matters? In this awful case in D.C., where nobody listened when the systems already in place were alerted, an unannounced visit would just have found the bodies earlier.

2008-01-07T06:54:00.000-08:00

We Three Kings

Sunday was, of course, Epiphany, aka the Twelfth Day*, aka (in these parts) Dia de los Reyes. Offspring #1 had intended to bring some chalk to Mass for a blessing, but was stricken down by a stomach bug, leaving me to knock on the sacristy door, hoping Father wasn't going to ask incredulously "You want me to bless what?"

Fortunately, as I was about to launch into an explanation of Epiphany Door Blessing, Father Patrick's eyes lit up as he saw the chalk, seized it, and launched into the proper blessing**:

Bless, O Lord God, this creature chalk, to render it helpful to your people. Grant that they who use it in faith and with it inscribe upon the doors of their homes the names of your saints, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, may through their merits and intercession enjoy health of body and protection of soul. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. [And then a little sprinkle with holy water.]

He then informed me delightedly that he had memorized the blessing in seminary (not long ago for him) and had been waiting for a chance to use it.

So home I went. In case you're wondering what you do with Blessed Chalk, you write the following over your door:

2 + 0 + C + M + B + 0 + 8

... which means, Christus Mansionem Benedicat, 2008, i.e. May Christ Bless This House through the year. And since CMB happens to be the initials of the traditional names of the Magi, and since Epiphany falls near the beginning of the year, it all fits together nicely.

Now I have a stub of Blessed Chalk in the junk drawer. Save it? Bury it? Give it to the Offspringen for games of Blessed Hangman in the driveway?

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

*"Twelfth Night" isn't Epiphany, but the eve or vigil thereof, and so is technically the eleventh day of Christmas, aka Pipers Piping.

**Except for a certain confusion regarding the names of the Wise Men, who came out something like "Casper, Melthasor, and Balcher," which I figured probably didn't invalidate the blessing or anything.

2007-12-31T06:08:00.000-08:00

Aaaargh again ... LA Times edition

Another reporter takes the HSLDA's politicized, sectarian statements as objective fact about homeschoolers. In "Home-schoolers rally to Huckabee," (again with the hyphen--they really need to update their stylebook), you get this paragraph:

About 9,000 of Iowa's students are home-educated. Nationwide, the number is 2 million and rising steadily, according to Michael P. Ferris, who runs the national home-schooling association. Home-schoolers are distributed fairly evenly among the states. Though an increasing number are ethnic or racial minorities, the majority of families are evangelical Christians.

Now first off, the HSLDA, much as they love to represent themselves as such, are most decidedly not "the national home-schooling assocation." They are a national home-schooling association. How much Googling does a reporter need to do in order to find, oh, say, NHEN?

Secondly, do we have to go through the handwaving about the "most homeschoolers are evangelical Christians" cliche again? Is any journalist anywhere ever going to notice the NCES study showing fewer than 30% of families having a religious motivation for homeschooling?

Our local paper picked up this story and ran it, without managing to notice that this town is noted for its massive non-evangelical homeschooling community (it got mentioned in Mothering Magazine once, though).

Update: Oooh! I'm famous!

2007-12-23T17:25:00.000-08:00

Speaking of funky priestwear...

"Klerikale kopfbedeckungen." No, really. (HT Fr.Z.)

2007-12-21T13:36:00.000-08:00

Coat of Many Colors Dept.

The winner of the Ugliest Vestment Contest has been chosen!

Personally, I thought first prize should have gone to Cardinal Arinze's "Don King" mitre (see above), which surely got mucho bonus points for being featured on a celebrity pate.

2007-12-19T17:51:00.000-08:00

My I Hate Wikipedia Rant

Why do so many people, including a dismaying number of homeschoolers, consider Wikipedia to be a great resource for doing research? The enthusiastic comments at Joanne Jacobs' site, for instance, depress me. Wikipedia is not at all a place I would send a student, even--especially--for a first overview of a topic.

Too many times, I've looked up information on something I already knew a fair bit about, and have been appalled at the low quality and the nonsense quotient of the articles. (For instance.) The entries on Catholic subjects tend to be lifted wholesale from the old public domain Catholic Encyclopedia, to which I can just go directly, thank you very much. Entries on just about everything tend to stress the interests of the average internet user, meaning I can't just give my daughter free rein to use Wikipedia because biographies often have an extensive and prurient discussion of the sex life, known or speculated, of the subject; and absolutely everysubject has a list of every science fiction movie, novel, or tv show that relates in even the most tangential way to the subject of the Wikipedia entry. The articles are distorted toward the interests of the general internet public (not to be confused with the actual general public); and while it may sound insufferable of me to say it, a good encyclopedia article ought instead to be proportioned to what is important, not to what the readership wants to read about most.

Take the entry for T.E. Lawrence. In an article eight pages long, over a page is devoted to Lawrence's sex life. Another page and a half is devoted to random trivia, much of that also concerned with his sex life (scars on the buttocks!), and most of it pointless (did you know a road in Plymouth was named after him?).

Students don't just pick up information from their reading; like all children, they're looking for indications from the adult world about what's important, what ought to interest an educated adult, and how information is organized. Sending them to Wikipedia first teaches them that sex, controversy, trivia, and attenuated links to sci-fi are the most important part of everything, and that Powerpoint-style bullet points are the preferred method for conveying information textually. No thanks.

2007-12-06T06:19:00.000-08:00

Which Kind of Homeschooler Are You?

A quick comparison of Advent projects:

Cottage Blessings
Amy Welborn

The first link is the sort of homeschooling that, while certainly admirable, makes me want to curl up on the floor with a bottle of gin.

I thought we were doing well to have both an Advent wreath and a Jesse Tree this year. We had a live Christmas tree for a day, courtesy of my mom, but decided it would be better not to have to call the EMTs for Eudoxus' asthma, and relocated it to the back patio, where it looks charming (and is easier to water).

2007-10-18T09:15:00.000-07:00

Quote of the Week

"We did not exterminate the Armenians,” Ankara says in effect, “and, by the way, we’re going to not exterminate the Kurds, too.”

2007-10-06T16:14:00.000-07:00

Il ne faut pas gemir

Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, tipped off by neoCath blogger Mark Shea, is in a tizzy about the latest French bestseller No Kids, about how awful your life will be with children:

Everywhere you look in France these days, you seem to see its cover: The words NO KID in English, followed by "40 Reasons for Not Having Children" in French. It is a huge bestseller. Her 40 reasons are often funny and personal ("Don't become a travelling feeding bottle," "don't adopt the idiot-language of children") sometimes bitter ("you will inevitably be disappointed with your child") and often designed to puncture the idealized notion of motherhood that poisons Western societies.

Michael Blowhard makes astute points in the comments about the failure to understand that this is the French version of humor. He links usefully to an earlier piece of his on French child-rearing concepts generally:

What I want to do here is to play anthropologist -- to highlight the fact that the usual cluster of American assumptions about how to raise and interact with kids is specific to America. For example: Many Americans assume that it's imperative to vacation someplace where the kids will be happy or "enriched." Traveling someplace the parents want to see while letting the kids contend ... Why, that would be selfish and unloving, and even worthy of condemnation.

Michael's blog entry was inspired by an article in the Toryg-- I mean, Telegraph, on French child-rearing methods:

A few days before that, sitting in a café near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, which is unabashed baby central, with my (French) husband, I saw something even scarier. A tiny child, just walking, was trying to catch up with his chic and slender mother, who was furiously pushing the buggy deliberately too fast for the baby to get close to her. The child was crying frantically, red in the face and holding up his tiny arms begging her to carry him. There was no way he could catch her. And she knew it. "Non, non, non," she screeched in a high-pitched voice. She strolled ahead faster leaving the baby in the dust.

Well, follow the links and make of the French and Americans what you will. All I have to add is anecdotal data. My oldest has a French fencing coach, Maitre Jekyll-Hyde, who swings instantly from an indulgent, good-natured benevolence (for klutzy adult fencers, very young children, and beginning adolescents) to six feet of hard-nosed, shouting, abusive intimidation (for everyone whose check has cleared for the full year of fencing). Parents are horrified and indignant; the kids worship him and do everything they possible can to please him. They dislike having the other (gentle, encouraging, American) coach substituting: it's like Stockholm Syndrome. Maitre J-H doesn't believe in praise, so on the rare occasions that he mutters "Good footwork" or "Nice parry," the kids are in rapture for days. I've seen him with his own children: his tiny daughter is cosseted; his school-age son gets no slack. After years of trying and failing to break Offspring #1 of whining, Maitre did it in one go, with a steely look and "What ees thees voice! No whi-neeng! I do not want to hear that whi-neeng again!" There are days when I aspire to parent like Maitre.

Or maybe not. One interesting feature of the comboxes at all these posts was the quickness with which commenters, once past "What's wrong with these French?" go through "different cultures parent differently" to "the way we parent as Americans is deeply flawed," with the standard laments over how hard we push our children to succeed academically, and how we smother them with love and affection and inappropriately make them the centers of our lives. Now there may be some truth to both charges. But the former consistently fails to be backed up by data; if anything, American parents, compared to parents in countries where children seem to manage much better test scores in math and science, really don't push their children enough. And this complaint that we stress academics too much is old, so old that I worry about its link to traditional American anti-intellectualism and distrust of book-larnin'. But I will leave that point alone lest it devolve into meditations on unschooling.

The latter point, about centering our lives too much on our children, has easy targets in the attachment parenting and homeschooling movements, in which parents--particularly mothers--appear to sacrifice their freedom, careers, and adulthoods for the sake of the children. Now while I suspect that American society is not, in fact, infected with a need to sacrifice all For the Sake of the Children--as Exhibit A, think of how long it's been since anyone took that phrase seriously as a reason to forego or delay divorce--the concept certainly came to us from the nineteenth century Cult of Domesticity that took deep root in English Victorian society, and which keeps on feeding into homeschooling culture via the "Charlotte Mason method." Mrs. Mason's books, a summation of the century's cult of domesticity, are monuments to domesticity, and teach a philosophy of child-rearing which makes every act, gesture, and casual remark of the parent (chiefly mother) the seeds of the child's destiny.

[The] atmosphere in which the child inspires his unconscious ideas of right living emanates from his parents. Every look of gentleness and tone of reverence, every word of kindness and act of help, passes into the thought-environment, the very atmosphere which the child breathes; he does not think of these things, may never think of them, but all his life long they excite that 'vague appetency towards something' out of which most of his actions spring. Oh, the wonderful and dreadful presence of the little child in the midst! (Parents and Children, 1904)

Dreadful is the right word, I think.

The French may not be as emotive as we Americans, or as concerned about our children ending up in therapy, or "losing their love of learning" from too much academic pressure; but that doesn't mean our own ideas of child-rearing have to change to be more like some other culture's. If there's an American genius, it's the ability to sift through other cultures and take the parts we like, without apologizing unduly for our own. We aren't as harsh as French parents; we're not as soggy as the English Victorians; we're not as pushy as the Japanese. It's great to look to see what others are doing, especially for the occasional reality check (can I admit, with reference to Michael Blowhard's first linked article, that playing with small children bores me, too, and I suspect that it was less of an issue for parents when families were bigger?).

After all, I can't imagine the French reading Sears & Sears and deciding they have to be more like the Americans.

2007-10-04T16:33:00.000-07:00

A Comprehensive Education at the Kitchen Table

Not much time for blogging lately, but I couldn't resist the juxtaposition of these two recent items.

First, the NEA has reaffirmed their official statement regarding homeschooling (first passed in 1988; apparently 19 years of experience has not caused the NEA to alter a word):

B-75. Home Schooling The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience. When home schooling occurs, students enrolled must meet all state curricular requirements, including the taking and passing of assessments to ensure adequate academic progress. Home schooling should be limited to the children of the immediate family, with all expenses being borne by the parents/guardians. Instruction should be by persons who are licensed by the appropriate state education licensure agency, and a curriculum approved by the state department of education should be used.

The Association also believes that home-schooled students should not participate in any extracurricular activities in the public schools.
The Association further believes that local public school systems should have the authority to determine grade placement and/or credits earned toward graduation for students entering or re-entering the public school setting from a home school setting.

Meanwhile, from the WSJ, this on kids overburdened by homework:

I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point U.S. schools decided that if you can't teach 'em, test 'em...or pile on more homework.

The result is that my son's life -- and by extension our family life -- is a constant, stress-laden stream of homework and tests and projects. It overshadows everything we do, always hanging over our head. It affects our weekends, our meals, our vacations, our work time, our playtime, our pocketbooks.

And to what end? Maybe I'm missing something, but when did schools determine that the best place for kids to learn math, science and English is at their own kitchen table?

So which is it? Do teachers think parents are able to teach their own, or not?

2007-09-05T05:54:00.000-07:00

September

Cristina at Home Spun Juggling has a post, featured in this week's Carnival of Homeschooling, on the bittersweet memories of Labor Day, the beginning of fall, and the return to school, and wonders how her own homeschooled children feel this time of year.

My own memories include the fun of new school supplies; the sadness at the end of summer; the excitement of new teachers, new subjects, and seeing old friends again; the relief that came with the cooling of the air (down to highs in the 80s!); the fall webworms hanging from the pecan trees, the tiny new toads hopping around by the creek, hints of green starting to appear in the summer-browned lawns; and most of all, the sense of a year of childhood behind me, a year of life to come before me.

My children experience a shift, too, if not the same one. We do our hardest work during the summer, when it's too hot to do much outside, and there isn't much else going on (we take our long break from Thanksgiving to New Year's), so part of the shift is to less schoolwork. Homeschool activities usually follow the ISD schedule, as library and rec center spaces become unavailable in the summer, reserved instead for out-of-school activities. So now that we have our spaces back during the day, math team has started, chess club, drama.... The brutal summer weather begins to mitigate, and families start to come back to Park Day.... Bikes and roller blades replace swimming.... Daddy goes back to teaching and we all fall into our comfortable autumn rut.

2007-08-31T05:03:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Texas

"There are times you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in those webs."

2007-08-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

Habemus Infantem

Healthy, beautiful baby girl, born July 16. 20 1/2" long; 9 lb. 4 oz. (I'm only 5'2", if that gives a clue how uncomfortable those last few weeks were).

From her namesake:

"I would like the angels of Heaven to be among us. I would like an abundance of peace. I would like full vessels of charity. I would like rich treasures of mercy. I would like cheerfulness to preside over all. I would like Jesus to be present. I would like the three Marys of illustrious renown to be with us. I would like the friends of Heaven to be gathered around us from all parts. I would like myself to be a rent payer to the Lord; that I should suffer distress, that he would bestow a good blessing upon me. I would like a great lake of beer for the King of Kings. I would like to be watching Heaven's family drinking it through all eternity."

2007-07-15T11:54:00.000-07:00

Last Post for a While

Tomorrow morning I check into the hospital for the birth of Offspring #3. All seems well, but prayers are of course appreciated. (Note to potential burglars; husband and relatives will be at the house frequently.)

Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. Not a bad birthday.

2007-07-15T10:52:00.000-07:00

St. Christopher, Cover Your Ears

Jennifer recounts some road rage on the way to Mass, prompting my own memories of church-related ira viae.

First. Our city has two north-south freeways, connected by various east-west throughways which weren't designed to be major thoroughfares and so have some eccentricities. The freeway entrance we use the most is a two-lane street with the fun feature that the right lane will take you southbound (leftwards) on the freeway, while to head north (rightwards) on the freeway you must be in the left lane. There's a tiny sign telling you this, right before the intersection where it can do no earthly good, and your first time through you will end up going the wrong direction on the freeway and turning around at the next exit.

Unless, upon getting to the intersection and discovering you're in the wrong lane, you come to a complete stop and signal your forlorn hope of changing to the correct lane, thus preventing all the cars behind you who wish to get on the freeway from making that light (and it's a long cycle). When the light at last turns red, you may cross lanes and get on the freeway, while the drivers stuck at the light behind you curse you and your progeny, yea unto the fortieth generation.

Now as the driver immediately behind such a deeply confused person, I felt it not uncharitable to sound the horn a few brief times, in the hope of conveying the complex sentiment that "While I sympathize with your predicament, one which all of us here shared on our first journey through this intersection, I--speaking for myself and for the drivers of the thirty cars behind me--must insist that you resignedly accept your fate, continue through the intersection to your fated southbound direction, and make a u-turn at the next exit."

But no. The minutes dragged on, my lane unmoving. The light turned yellow, then red; the offending driver crossed the intersection into the northbound lane and continued onto the freeway, and those of us behind him sat to wait for the next green. Upon which I lost it, and began banging on the steering wheel, and hurling imprecations (moderated for the ears of the amused children present) for several cathartic minutes.

Then the car next to me, in the blessed northbound lane, honked, and from the corner of my eye I could see the driver gesture at me. Furious, I turned toward this interloper into my private road rage moment, and saw--Sister Mary W., pointing and laughing at me, then banging her own steering wheel in imitation. Then laughing her head off some more. Much worse than being piously reminded that the Lord sees all, is being made forcefully and empirically aware of the fact that Sister sees, if not all, quite a lot.

She laughed at me the next few times we met at church, too. Aaagh.

Second. Our church is downtown, where parking is scarce; there are a dozen spaces for parishioners in the so-called "parking lot" in the alley behind. Almost late for Mass, I swung into the (one-way) alley in the remote hope of an empty space. And mirabile dictu, there it was! Waiting for me. So I wouldn't be late for Mass.

Then suddenly a smaller car swung wrong-way into the alley from the other end. I hit the brake, and the little car zipped neatly into the one empty spot. I didn't honk; but being human, several less-than-flattering thoughts about the driver were just beginning to crystallize in my head, when I saw him jump out of the car and sprint toward the sacristy door. Oh--good morning, Bishop.

I guess if there's anyone with a good reason for rushing into Mass right before it starts....

I didn't even block in His Eminence's car with mine.

2007-06-29T07:55:00.000-07:00

Xtreme Censing

Do you cringe when that short deacon at your parish swings the censer at apparent random? Flinch instinctively when Father does the asperges as if he's aiming for your head? You must watch how they do the censing at Santiago de Compostela. (The fun starts at about one minute in.)

Just tell yourself, if you die during Mass, first-class ticket to heaven....

2007-06-20T14:51:00.000-07:00

Of Moths and Men

Yahmdallah is scared of moths. Hey, stay out of central Texas, we've got an unusual number of big ol' hummingbird moths (see above photo) flocking this year. They really do look like hummingbirds--they're big and they hover in place while they feed. One of them laid a clutch of eggs on our porch post, to the infinite delight of Offspring #1.

But I don't care for unidentified visiting reptiles. Behold the latest e-mails off our neighborhood listserve:

E-mail #1:
Hello neighbors,
Is anyone missing a five foot long black and gold snake? It appeared
in our front lawn this morning.

Please email me offlist immediately if this snake belongs to you. We will otherwise take it to the creek later this evening.

Thanks so much!

E-mail #2:
Hello again,

Through the space between the lid and container, propped open with a stick, the snake made a break for it around 4 p.m. It's happily slithering its way around [neighborhood] as I write.

I am not doing any yardwork any time soon.

2007-06-05T06:23:00.000-07:00

Baby Name Madness

Five weeks from The Event, and we've settled on the little one's name; but it's still fun to look around at the baby name blogs and software. For a long time, the best naming tool on the web was the Baby Name Voyager (whipped up by Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Name Wizard), which lets you consult the Social Security Database for the last 100-odd years to see just how popular your name choice has been. You can reach back into another era for unexpected names capable of rehabilitation, or just find out in time if your name choice was uber-trendy five years ago and is now sooooo 2002.

Wattenberg now has a new tool, just as cool and useful: the Nymbler. Based on Wattenberg's database of names linked by cultural attribution, you just plug in some names you like (or names you would like except there's something not quite perfect about them), click, and you get a menu of other names you might like. Plug in your children's names and see what your naming style says about your preferences. Add names you like from the list, click again, and get a refined list of name choices.

It was impressive to see what names Eudoxus and I had showing up on the list when we entered our top choices. Though it was a little disturbing to find out that we were also likely to favor Nimrod, Napoleon, and Gottlieb for a boy (having entered Balthazar and Linus--the software wouldn't take Bede), it was nice to see Willa, Ursula, and Ada (two names we'd considered for a girl, and one we wished we had) suggested. Confirmation at least of the consistency of our naming preferences, if not of our pragmatic wisdom in name choices.

Go, play with it.

2007-06-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

Serrefine, Coryza, and the Tragedy of Clevis

The high drama of the Scripps National Spelling Bee is over for another year, and, as with this year's National Geographic Bee, ends with a victory for a homeschooler, Evan O'Dorney. This year's winner illustrates not only the continuing dominance of homeschoolers--four of the top 15 finishers were homeschooled--but the increasing variation in what "homeschooling" can mean: O'Dorney represented a public independent study/homeschool, Venture School, which appears to be a sort of public umbrella school. Or something.

Best quote:

"My favorite things to do were math and music, and with the math I really like the way the numbers fit together," [O'Dorney] said. "And with the music I like to let out ideas by composing notes - and the spelling is just a bunch of memorization."

2007-05-30T12:27:00.000-07:00

Review: Betty Lukens Through the Bible in Felt

For many years, Baptist and Evangelical Sunday schools have been using Betty Lukens felt figures as a simple, vivid, and attractive way to teach Bible stories to children. There being nothing inherently Protestant about feltboards, it's high time more Catholic parents (and maybe some CCD teachers) knew about these gorgeous, detailed, high-quality felt pieces.

There are a LOT of them: more than 600 pieces, including just about every character, major and minor, from the Bible (though of course some figures stand in for multiple persons); enough animals to sink Noah's Ark; and every biblical object imaginable, from plain rocks (large for sitting on; small for stoning people with) to the fantastic multi-materialed statue from the king's vision in the second chapter of Daniel.

The set comes with a Teacher's Manual, which tells each story in an elementary-level style, 182 stories in all. Each 1-2 page story is accompanied by two panels showing the feltboard at different points in the narrative, a numerical list of felt pieces needed to tell the story (the pieces are all numbered, though not always very clearly, and indexed in the back of the Manual--I recommend photocopying the numbered index and keeping it with your pieces), the scriptural references for the story, and a "memory verse" relating to the story. The Teacher's Manual makes using the massive set surprisingly uncomplicated.

Two caveats. First, this is not a cheap set: $80 for the basic, unmounted, small-size set; scenery backgrounds, feltboard, and filing case not included (though you can probably get a discount ordering through a homeschool catalog). A whopping $340 for the large, mounted set with backgrounds, feltboard, and filing case.

But. Did I mention you get 600+ ultra-nifty, high-quality felt pieces? The additional scenery backgrounds (you get the basic outdoors background with the basic set) are cool, but probably not necessary: my children have been perfectly happy to let their imaginations fill in the backgrounds. The feltboard is even less necessary: buy $2 worth of light-blue felt at the craft store, glue it to a large (roughly 20" x 26") board, and you have a perfectly serviceable feltboard. Go wild and make the reverse side dark blue for nighttime or Creatio ex Nihilo scenes. The smaller sized set is preferable unless you're teaching a large class of a dozen or so students. And the filing case, by all accounts, is more a time-consuming liability than an asset: zip-loc freezer bags, labeled "Animals 123-150" or "Buildings 200-210" and stuffed in a small cardboard box, make an ideal filing system.

Second, you have to cut out the felt pieces yourself. And after you've cut out all the pieces you've assembled for the first few Bible stories, you'll start wondering if you've committed to felt-cutting as your new lifetime hobby. But soon you start re-using pieces, and it will only take a few minutes to cut out new pieces for the next story.

Being a Protestant resource, there are the expected blips: no Deuterocanonical stories are included (though with so many, many pieces in the set, nothing is easier than to pull together the right pieces for, say, Tobit, Raphael, the miraculous fish, and even the dog). The stories as told in the Teacher's Manual include a brief and gentle moral at the end, which often benefit from some tweaking: I cross out the repetitive appeals to know God's plan for your life and replace them with reminders to form and follow your conscience, for instance. The only serious theological problem I've run across is in the story of the Second Coming, which combines an Evangelical "Rapture" theology with the heresy that only the saved will be resurrected. Catholics will have to skip, or radically re-tell, this lesson.

The best thing about Betty Lukens is that kids love the feltboard, and remember the stories. The myriad biblical characters suddenly have faces to go with the names; the bright colors give the stories a Technicolor-quality that makes me think of old Hollywood robes-n-sandals epics like The Ten Commandments. When I'm cutting out felt pieces in public while waiting for appointments, someone raised Baptist will always come over and tell me how much she loved the felt Bible stories of her childhood.

Finally, I discovered some unexpected bonuses. Older children find it fun and easy to enact non-Biblical classic stories with the pieces: Paul and Priscilla might as well be Philemon and Baucis; they're all in robes and togas after all. And while you really can't let small children go wild with the felt pieces, unless you're prepared to invest a few hours of your evening in re-sorting them while you ruin your eyes trying to make out the tiny numbers printed on the felt, you can certainly let them play with the pieces from a story after it's finished. The Peaceable Kingdom, once Mommy's done, goes wild and the bears eat the sheep while Adam and Eve have a Pythonesque fish-slapping fight. The pillar of cloud over Mount Sinai becomes a volcanic eruption--run, Israelites! Don't trip over that golden calf!

All right, maybe something's just weird about my children.

2007-05-20T14:56:00.000-07:00

"Chicken Chicken Chicken": Chicken Chicken in Chicken's Chicken Chicken

Offspring #1 turned in her first research paper this week, and I discovered I had no clue how to grade it. Now I always thought that, despite the badly cliche'd objection to homeschooling that "You can't possibly teach them everything they need to know through high school," I need never fret about literature and composition, being able to wave my M.A. around impressively and all.

But while I can comment on Stanley Fish, and explain my ennui with Bloom (is he going to coast on the Anxiety of Influence forever?), and even share my love of Udolpho with the Offspringen (#1 only made it through a few chapters before feeling compelled to write her own parody, upon which I promptly introduced her to Northanger Abbey), I cannot tell what a sixth-grade research paper on Pythagoras ought to read like. I gave her an 'A' on the theory that she did her own research out of actual books, without recourse to the internet; produced recognizable paragraphs, an intro, and a conclusion; and turned in a third draft free of egregious grammatical or spelling errors. I added a '+' for titling the paper "Pythagoras" and not using the standard MLA title format, i.e. "Sex, Lies, and Right Angles: Pythagoras' Role in the Queering of the Periclean Golden Age."

My difficulty is a lack of models. What does a sixth-grade paper look like? The usual grade-level descriptions give little help. About the only thing I could definitely determine is that she should be using approved citation format, whatever that is. I do remember being taught citation format in high school from an ancient publication--it explained, among its rapturous discourses on proper index card use, how to rotate the typewriter platen a half-line up, to get superscripts--and learning MLA format in one evening my freshman year of college. Besides the fact that MLA citation format changes every few years, and that it varies among academic disciplines, middle school seems a bit early to be getting started on mastering something that takes only a few hours to learn when it's needed.

Turns out there is, though, a resource for all your academic report and presentation needs (via Language Log). And there's a related video for the second-graders in our ISD who are supposed to learn how to assemble a Power-Point presentation (no, not kidding).

2007-05-12T15:34:00.000-07:00

Put Down the Henty and Back Away Slowly

Rich Leonardi has noticed how good Barbara Willard's juvenile historical fiction is. Well, as they say, if you liked those, you'll love the whole Clarion Books series, where Willard's most popular titles started out.

Clarion Books were published by Doubleday in the late 1950's and early '60's as "a new fiction series by outstanding authors, featuring exciting events in Catholic world history, told in fast-paced adventure stories bringing the past to life, designed to appeal to boys and girls of today."

I've gotten hold of many of these titles, and Offspring #1 gives them unreservedly two thumbs up. They're about late elementary to middle school level and informative without being obtrusively educational. And they're generally less expensive used, even adding shipping costs, than the softcover reprints.

Finding the Clarion titles is made trickier by Houghton Mifflin's use of the "Clarion" name for their line of children's books, making "Clarion" unusable as a search term for the used book finding engines. Here's what I've been able to find over the years; I'd be grateful for any additions to my list from readers. Reprints are indicated; descriptions are (mostly) by Doubleday.

Boucher, Alan. The King's Men: A Story of St. Olaf of Norway
An Icelandic boy joins King Olaf in his struggle to unite Norway and establish a Christian kingdom.

Brady, Charles. The King's Thane
Beorn earns his thaneship by serving under the heroic hunter Beowulf in Northumbria.

Brady, Charles. Sword of Clontarf
A boy plays a man's role in the battle to preserve Christianity in Ireland.

De Leeuw, Adele and Cateau. Where Valor Lies
A young Parisian joins the crusade of King Louis IX and fights to free Jerusalem from the Saracens.

Garnett, Henry. A Trumpet Sounds
Political and religious strife during the reign of Elizabeth I involves a young English boy in a dangerous mission.

Garnett, Henry. The Blood Red Crescent (reprinted by Lepanto Press)
A young Venetian helps repel the Turkish invaders at Lepanto in 1571.

Hubbard, Margaret Ann. The Blue Gonfalon (reprinted by Lepanto Press)
A French peasant's son earns knighthood during the First Crusade in 1099.

Lomask, Milton Cross Among the Tomahawks
Two Huron Indian boys become Christians under the influence of Jesuit missionaries in early Canada.

Lomask, Milton. Ship's Boy With Magellan
A Spanish boy joins Magellan's crew on his famous circumnavigation voyage.

Pauli, Hertha. The Two Trumpeters of Vienna
Four young friends each play a part in the liberation of Vienna from the Turks in 1683.

Polland, Madeleine. Chuiraquimba and the Black Robes
An Indian girl and her brother from the jungles of Paraguay are aided by Jesuit missionaries.

Polland, Madeleine. City of the Golden House
St. Peter and the early Christians.

Polland, Madeleine. Fingal's Quest
Adventures of a young monastic student enslaved in sixth century Gaul.

Willard, Barbara. If All the Swords in England (reprinted by Bethlehem Books)
Twin brothers in the service of King Henry II and Thomas Becket witness the martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral.

Willard, Barbara. Son of Charlemagne (reprinted by Bethlehem Books)
The majesty and vigor of Charlemagne's reign unfold in the story of his favorite son.

2007-05-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

M'aidez! M'aidez!

Today is May Day, the socialist worker holiday; otherwise known as the feast day of St. Joseph the Worker.

I've gone on at length elsewhere about the accepted falsehood that "most Christian holidays are just pagan holidays made over; this was done to promote conversion in pagan countries." A pleasant and surprsing by-product of the internet is that, more and more, people are realizing that there are no actual historical grounds for the common claim, and in fact compelling historical reasons to think it untrue (like for instance the unrelenting hostility of early Christian missionaries to any traces of pagan worship among new converts).

Anyway today we have what is an exception to that rule. Pope Pius XII, at a gathering of the Catholic Association of Italian Workers in 1955, announced the institution of a new Josephite feast day expressly to counter the socialist holiday (which was itself supposed to counter religious holidays in socialist and communist countries):

Our intention in doing so is to bring all men to recognize the dignity of labour. It is our hope, that this dignity may supply the motive for the formation of a social order and a body of law founded on the equitable distribution of rights and duties… We are certain that you are indeed pleased, for the humble working man of Nazareth not only personifies before God and the Church the dignity of those who work with their hands, but he is also the constant guardian of yourselves and your families.

St. Joseph, patron of workers and of pregnant mothers, pray for us!

2007-05-01T06:03:00.000-07:00

Thank You

I've been riding this particular hobby horse for a while now. Great article from Chemical and Engineering News.

More parents are also deciding to homeschool their children beyond middle school, and as they do so, they are discovering that the availability of already prepared chemistry curricula is quite limited. The situation is especially challenging for secular homeschoolers, who say there are virtually no secular high school chemistry curricula out there for the homeschooling community.

One caveat: please, no more of "the homeschooling community." As if you could have a "community" composed of people for whom the sole common denominator is that they don't want to be part of any educational "community," public or private. Especially annoying when some ignorant columnist or politico runs with that particular ball and starts calling on "the homeschooling community" to do this or that. But that's for another blogpost. Onward...

Many secular homeschoolers end up modifying one of the Christian curricula, simply because those curricula are the only ones available. Or, like the Strouds, they cobble together their own curricula, which many say is incredibly time-consuming and nearly impossible for parents without a science background. Some parents with older kids end up sending them to a community college for chemistry courses. Some join co-ops where they can pool their resources with other parents. Some gloss over or skip chemistry altogether....

Barrett says she would love for someone to come up with a secular high school chemistry curriculum that is academically rigorous yet parent-friendly. Even better, she says, would be for someone to produce an entire high school science curriculum, including chemistry, biology, and physics, and offer hands-on labs to go along. She wonders whether it would be possible for a chemist to adapt a college-level chemistry textbook for homeschoolers and include labs that can be done in the home.

Amen. We use the intro chemistry text used by our city university for non-science majors: it's thorough, accurate, comprehensible (things that couldn't be said for the high school chemistry text we tried briefly to use), and doesn't assume a high school chemistry background. Labs are a combination of experiments from an old chemistry set manual (from back in the days when they figured kids could take a few risks with chemicals) and the virtual interactive labs from the CD-ROM that comes with the textbook.

One failing of the article: while it does a good job of pointing out the frustration many homeschoolers have in trying to find decent non-Christian science curricula, the author makes it sound as if it's just convinced atheists who don't want any texts that mention God. Actually there are many of us who just object to a (very much) minority religious Creationist worldview that corrupts the majority of homeschool science texts, even chemistry materials. The "C"-word doesn't show up at all in the article; but it's the elephant in the living room.

Anyway, sounds like there are several promising curricula in the works. Hooray! Maybe Offspring #2 will be able to profit from them.

HT to Daryl.

2007-05-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

Patron saint of fencers

"Nor was [Ignatius Loyola] the only swordsman turned religious.... Even more formidable was Philip Latini (1605-67) of Corleone, Sicily, an illiterate cobbler turned swordsman. He learned to fence from the Spanish mercenaries based in Palermo (Spain then ruled Sicily), and became so expert that he was known as "Corleone, the best blade of the Island." A local crime boss named Vinuiacitu (literally, "wine-turned-vinegar") sent one of his followers, Vito Canino, to see if the man could best Corleone at swordplay. The issue was soon settled: Corleone cut off the assassin's arm. Terrified that Vinuiacitu would wreak revenge, he took sanctuary in the local church until the coast was clear, staying there for a week, during which time he repented his swordfighting ways and in 1632, at age twenty-seven, became a Capuchin friar. In June of 2001, he was canonized for his piety and good words as Saint Bernard of Corleone."

~Richard Cohen, By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers and Olympic Champions, 2002

Via the Holy Whapsters