Mon 2 Oct 2006
For those of you interested in family photos and details you can click over to Barney’s blog. He was visiting MD and decided to hop over to NJ to see the old home place. I am glad I don’t live there anymore!!! Barney says it is straight out of Bill Peet with broken down vehilces all over the property. There used to be 2 front doors where now there are vines. And while your looking at the house you can see a picture of one of our Thanksgiving guests with cooking skills.
Mon 2 Oct 2006
Tue 3 Oct 2006
I have been meaning to do this since Margaret asked about it last week.
We have continued to have our poetry colloquies (formal conversations) and I think they are a success. Poetry is a great subject for a colloquy because the more you read and discuss a poem the more it comes alive. Poetry is also a subject where too much rationalism dampens the joy. From what I understand of colloquies, they should not be teacher driven. The teacher should let the participants be the discoverers and poetry is uniquely suited to this sort of discovery. I challenge you to pick any poem and read it 5 times. You will most definitely understand more details on the 5th reading than you did on the first.
I have set up our colloquies by reading the poem and telling the children (ages 5-16) a little about the meter. Or I let them tell me what they notice about the patterns and meter. Right now we are working our way through The Classic Hundred Poems.
Chronologically we have just finished Shakespeare and are moving on to Donne.
We had lively conversations around Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to his Love and Raleigh’s answer The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.
Sir Patrick Spens is also a great poem for discussion.
Often I will throw out an obscure line and ask what they think it means. So far all the children have participated and Alex (5) pays close attention so that he can add something to the conversation. Even his comments are usually lucid.
I will try and work through an example of what we talk about with Shakespeare’s That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold.
That Time Of Year Thou Mayst In Me Behold
William ShakespeareThat time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
This is a wonderful poem for bridging the understanding from rational to poetic knowledge. Poetry, in order to truly reach our hearts, must start with the concrete and move to the intuitive. In these 14 lines Shakespeare takes us from what we know: the dying day, the dying year, autumn, leaves etc and makes the intuitive leap to the dying life thus wedding beauty to truth. The form of the poem is Shakespeare’s own pentameter which almost seems to be some sort of physical bio-rhythm, most certainly God-given. The rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. I just love that gg. My younger children have a harder time grasping all the abab stuff. It isn’t that difficult but the younger the brain the more abstract it seems. I don’t waste too much time trying to beat it in. They will get it someday.
This poem is relatively easy to catch the general meaning. The real joy is the beauty of the words. I asked the children about the line, “Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.”
We all enjoy letting the little guys give us their opinions first. Sometimes they are dead on and sometimes we all get a good laugh. I threw out lots of questions in order to get to the point that our intuition is born of our observation. I am a firm believer in trusting that intuition is usually based on something. Which brings us also to the point that we need to well grounded in scripture because there is a way that seems right to man but the end there of is the way of death. It is important to learn to trust and distrust intuition.
And that is what we got out of reading Shakespeare. We became more familiar with a sonnet and we began to understand the glories and limits of intuition.
My main goal is for the children to begin to OWN the poems and enjoy them. The first time you read any poem it almost comes across as gobbedly-gook. It is hard to love something you can’t understand. As you read and discuss a poem it slowly begins to make sense. As your brain begins to find meaning in the words the beauty mysteriously appears as if in a hologram. Often I am overwhelmed when a poem begins to take on meaning and beauty. It becomes emotional.
Wed 4 Oct 2006
Yesterday I had a lot of computer time. 5 of the people vying for our one computer are out of town. I had a blast last night clicking around LibraryThing. That site is a wonderland.
I think I have too many news sites and news bloggers on my bloglines. By the time I got finished reading the secular news and the Christian news I was thoroughly disgusted with the state of the world. I am glad yesterday evening I read Psalm 3.
I usually don’t blog about the news but I thought I would hit the roof when Mark Foley said he was going into rehab for alcoholism AND he was molested by a priest.
I just don’t get it.
What’s up with rehab?
I guess since you can’t repent for something that isn’t a sin,
when you cross a line in our society, the only penance is rehab.
How long is that gonna fly?
Am I supposed to feel sorry for him now?
Bless his heart he’s in rehab?
That man is going to end up on Jim McGreevy’s level of the inferno. I empathize with Dante in trying to find a place for all those politicians in hell.
Carmon blogged about Charlotte Church and her fall into the abyss. Add that to the the video clip of Amy Grant getting her Hollywood Star and you begin to wonder why anyone would allow their child to become famous. I have never been a harsh judge of Amy but she behaved like a spoiled, profane child.
Years ago we were supporters of Ligonier Ministries and subscribers to TableTalk. About 3 years ago or maybe 2, we started to receive almost nightly phone calls from a fundraiser for Ligonier. The guy would chat with my husband for a few minutes and then ask for money. My husband wasn’t born yesterday; after a few months of those phone calls he decided to withdraw all of our support from Ligonier and not renew our TableTalk. We figured something was up at Ligonier.
Therefore, we did not need to read Frank Vance to believe that someone was mismanaging that ministry. It is sad. A workman is worthy of the hire but I would rather see RC Sproul live off his book royalties than find out he and some of his family members are making $250,000 a year from Ligonier. This one income family of 11 can’t afford to help that ministry keep up their lifestyles. I am ashamed for them that they asked.
Ok, was there any good news at all yesterday? If it wasn’t for Library Thing I would be tempted to throw this box in the garbage.
As you can probably guess it is 90 degrees here today and the barometric pressure is up. It’s a good thing only the cute people are at home.
Thu 5 Oct 2006
I saw a few moths fluttering in the pantry and decided to order some moth traps. I ordered them Monday from this site and they arrived Wednesday. When we set up the traps yesterday we found out we had more than a few moths. Our whole pantry became a fluttery wonderland of moths. The little guys were beside themselves with joy. I must have gotten a bit of phermone on my hand when I set up the trap near the computer yesterday because a moth followed me around the computer keyboard yesterday afternoon.
I really need to redo our poetry notebook and our hymn books. I feel they reflect more what my older boys learned than what my little ones have done. I also thought of trying to bind our family poetry anthology. Any attractive, accessible binding ideas?
Where do I go for advice on homeschooling? The Common Room, of course. Although she didn’t know it, I have been listening to the Deputy Headmistress since my early days on the computer. She wasn’t known as the DHM back then but I won’t blow her cover.
One of the questions young mothers frequently ask older mothers is: does it get easier?
I always answer, “YES!”
But I wonder. This week my 6 oldest children are away from home and it has been pretty quiet with just the little guys. I think the little guys have gotten a bad rap.
I haven’t told anyone yet but Timothy got an early release from the Navy! That is a huge answer to our prayers. James is going to fly out to California Saturday and after a week they are going to be driving back home. I am not sure how long Timothy will be home but we can hardly wait to see him.
I got a Google hit for “what does cottleston pie mean?” Funny, I don’t know. It means hodgepodge to me. I borrowed it from Mr A A Milne.
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
A fly can’t bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
Why does a chicken? I don’t know why.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
A fish can’t whistle and neither can I.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.— A. A. Milne
Fri 6 Oct 2006
It came a little early for our family this year. Some of my children never even knew it could end in September. I used to have to beat them off the computer every morning. But once again it is all over. The bad time of the year begins. We won’t see the light of day until at least next February.
Baseball season has ended.
For our family, for the first time in many long years, it ended in September. The only real joy left for us is hating the Yankees. Oh, what sweetness hate can bring.
This year the boys were in a fantasy league with my dad, my brother and my brother’s son. Every morning, when they emerged from their Bible reading, they raced to the computer to check their fantasy standings.
Guess who won?
At the beginning of the season, the boys said they felt sorry for him. Sure he had been a college baseball coach for 40+ years, sure he has been inducted to more than one coaching hall of fame with another induction coming up, but after looking over their grandfather’s team they decided he had made some mistakes. He was going to lose big time. They were all going to give him a few trading breaks to make up for his bad picks. They didn’t count on the insider scouting reports on young players, the lifetime of wisdom. Grandpa left them in the dust. They never knew what hit them.
So this one’s for you Grandpa. Congratulations on being inducted into the EKU Hall of Fame but more importantly thank-you for beating those trash talkers.
Sat 7 Oct 2006
Lately, in between heavier reading, I have been picking up Hamish Macbeth mysteries at the library. Hamish is most definitely light reading. Some of the books are so short you can read them on a Saturday.
Jeannine introduced me in a round about way to Hamish. She was reading through M C Beaton’s Agatha Raisin series. I read a couple Agatha Raisin ( Do you know I have always had trouble spelling raisin?) books and enjoyed them but they did not grab my attention like Hamish Macbeth. I also tried to read another series that M C Beaton had written under the name of Sanders, oops I mean under the name of Marion Chesney. That series was the Edwardian Murder Mystery series and I couldn’t even get through 2 chapters.
Hamish on the other hand is an unambitious Scottish highland policeman in the small loch town of Lochdubh. While Agatha moves frequently Hamish is usually in the same place interacting with the same locals. We even get to know his dog & cat. Reading a Hamish Macbeth is a little like reading Miss Read; you can hardly turn a few pages without rushing into the kitchen to make a spot of tea.
I haven’t exactly been reading the books in order but Hamish is in love with the girl of the manor Priscilla Halburton-Smythe. She moves in and out of the novels. He is also plagued with trying to solve murders while trying not to get promoted away from his little village where he has found contentment. He doesn’t have too much trouble because Chief Inspector Blair is always ready to take the credit and that is fine with Hamish.
Here is a list of the Hamish Macbeth Novels in reverse order:
# 23 Death of a Maid (©2007)
# 22 Death of a Dreamer (©2006) 256 pp.
# 21 Death of a Bore (©2005) 272 pp.
# 20 Death of a Poison Pen (©2004) 256 pp.
# 19 Death of a Village (©2003) 256 pp.
# 18 Death of a Celebrity (©2002) 259 pp.
# 17 Death of a Dustman (©2001) 313 pp.
# 16 A Highland Christmas (©1999) 129 pp.
# 15 Death of an Addict (©1999) 256 pp.
# 14 Death of a Scriptwriter (©1998) 198 pp.
# 13 Death of a Dentist (©1997) 228 pp.
# 12 Death of a Macho Man (©1996) 213 pp.
# 11 Death of a Nag (©1995)
# 10 Death of a Charming Man (©1994)
# 9 Death of a Travelling Man (©1993)
# 8 Death of a Glutton (©1993)
# 7 Death of a Prankster (©1992)
# 6 Death of a Snob (©1991)
# 5 Death of a Hussy (©1990)
# 4 Death of a Perfect Wife (©1989) 192 pp.
# 3 Death of an Outsider (©1988) 208 pp.
# 2 Death of a Cad (©1987) 224 pp.
# 1 Death of a Gossip (©1985) 179 pp.
Mon 9 Oct 2006
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 1:7)
I know you think I only read fluff. So now I am going to trip all over myself trying to describe my personal thoughts on Dr James Taylor’s Poetic knowledge
I also came primed to learn more about Descartes. Several times panel members at the Circe Conference spoke negatively about the effects of Descartes’ ideas on modern educational thought. I, on the other hand, had never given Descartes a second thought, possibly not even a first thought.
The first 3 chapters were a little rough. I liked what I was reading but I got bogged down and was anxious to get to the chapter Descartes and the Cartesian Legacy. I could just image myself blogging about the cartesian legacy. Maybe I could even throw the phrase “cartesian legacy” around at parties while talking to skinny women who don’t read. Well, I finally got to chapter 4 and I have to say I am only just beginning to understand some of these ideas…..maybe. Oh, well I am only 44.
“Basically, Descartes has isolated one mode of knowledge, of the four described earlier- that of mathematically certainty, or dialectic- and imposed it on all the others.” James Taylor
“John Dewey taught that schools are instruments of social change rather than of education, and that is one reason why Johnny neither reads nor writes nor dreams or thinks; but real schools are places of un-change, of the permanent things.” John Senior
Now for the good news. Chapter 6 & chapter 7 of my copy of Poetic Knowledge
are almost completely underlined. Dr Taylor describes in those chapters what I would be tempted to call the marriage of Wendell Berry to Charlotte Mason. If the truth be told, in this cartesian world, I am failing miserably to educate my children but in the world of poetic knowledge I am at least holding my foot in the door.
If you are an agrarian interested in education then you will certainly want to read Chapter 6 The Integrated Humanities Program . Of course, this is what Charlotte Mason was saying a 100 years ago. I know the words “Charlotte Mason” make some of you nervous and I understand why….I really do…but she really was a genius at bringing life to content. Somehow we have got to understand that education is lifelong. This is an especially important concept for the homeschool mom.
I am just like most other homeschooling moms that I know. One day I am blasting systems and programs and the next I am scrambling madly to join them. I am always trying to get up the courage to follow the way of wisdom while fending off the demons of practicalities. It is a precarious undertaking and all the while I am having to fight my own laziness and sin.
I hope to add a myriad of quotes from the last couple chapters to my quote box. In the meantime instead of trying to regurgitate the book I will whet your appetite with a few quotes:
“According to Herhoeven, what passes for general education today is actually a barrier to knowledge in the absence of the poetic element of wonder.”
“General education is….a substitute for knowledge among people for whom that knowledge is too dangerous and too demanding….it creates and preserves mediocrity. It does not demand that contact with things, the piercing of man’s self-righteous subjectivity which is precisily the beginning of knowledge….At best it displays mountain peaks, but saves one the trouble of climbing them.”
“Plato and Cicero, for example, were always read and commented on in the literary mode, never in terms of argument or debate. The atmosphere was intended to be meditative, not disputatious. Thus, the conversations replaced the modern sense of lecture and were closer to the medieval idea of lectio where teachers spontaneously delivered a commentary on some text.”
The above quote is one good reason a mom and a teacher should seek to be well-read and well-versed in Scripture. If our children are going to learn from our spontaneous outflow we must have something inflowing.
“Poetry is not an advanced thing; it is as Latin is, a first thing. It is a child’s thing.”
“When one has cultivated the habit of seeing in the poetic mode, science loses its privileged and usurped position in the nature and order of knowledge.”
I will end with a quote and a question. You can read more quotes in the sidebar if you are interested or you can buy the book and read the last 2 chapters or if you are really smart you can read the whole thing!
“…..the question is: Is such a life possible in a highly industrialized, technological society based on the idolatry of materialism?
That, friends, is the question.
Tue 10 Oct 2006
Ok, Ok it is true that I have read several Hamish Macbeth
Here are a few other books that I have started or what is basically my personal autumn reading challenge.
First I will start with the books I am not really going to read but I got them from the library because they were there:
The Scottish 100
Who could resist a Scottish book by a guy named Duncan A Bruce? We all know the world would be in a heap o’ trouble without the Scottish and my grandmother was a Maxwell.
From Dawn to Decadence
I also got Robert Arbor’s Joie De Vivre
On my really-reading-right-now list I have:
Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth
All Things for Good The Steadfast Fidelity of Stonewall Jackson
Finally, I have every intention of reading these books before Christmas:
Taliesin
The Southern Tradition at Bay by Richard Weaver
Wendell Berry’s The Way of Ignorance
And that’s all. The sad thing about my reading lists is that I really do believe I will fit it all in. Andrew Kern asked me at the Circe Conference if I finished every book I started. He asked it in a way that gave me the impression that he didn’t. So I am trying to get up the courage to read parts of books and some of books without reading all of books.
What about you? Do you finish the books you start? Is it OK to just read a bit and then go on to other books?
Wed 11 Oct 2006
I guess you have seen the little Moms For Modesty button on my sidebar. I am definitely a mom for modesty. Modesty is one of the bees in my bonnet. When Emily grew out of 6x the troubles began. Her shoe size has also been a bit of a problem. She is a little girl with adult sized feet. She isn’t going to be short and round like her mother but tall and willowy like the Rollinseseses.
It has been a struggle. I mostly buy her clothes on Ebay because I can choose the labels I like: Laura Ashley, Hannah Andersson etc. The real problem though is that when we go to church we see lots of older girls being immodest. I do not like to be judgmental but it gets discouraging. I listened to some of the Mahaney’s talks on modesty and they suggest speaking lovingly to Christian girls and women who dress immodestly but I just can’t see that working. I am sure I would feel bad if someone spoke to me. I know the point isn’t whether or not I feel bad but these things are hard to get right. I guess I am becoming an old fuddy-duddy muttering in the pew, but where will it end?
The Mahaneys are speaking about Christian music this week. As a long time listener to Glad I love reading Bob Kauflin’s stuff.
The really confusing thing is that while I am discouraged over how the girls dress at church, some families are discouraged that our boys listen to country music. Well that is discouraging, isn’t it? How could good boys raised on Bach, Handel and Haydn like country music? I admit I do like an occasional country song. I sometimes even get teary over a country song. I can be brutally sardonic but sometimes country music breaks down the barriers.
How about this?
He said,”I just climbed out of a cottonwood tree”
I was runin’ from some honey bees
Drip dryin’ in the summer breeze
After jumpin’ into Calico creek
I was walkin’ down an old dirt road
Past a field of hay that had just been mowed
Man I wish you’d just left me alone
‘Cause I was almost home
Or this?
Dear Son, I know I ain’t written,
But sittin’ here tonight, alone in the kitchen, it occurs to me,
I might not have said, so I’ll say it now:
Son, you make me proud.I hold it up and show my buddies,
Like we ain’t scared and our boots ain’t muddy, but no one laughs,
‘Cause there ain’t nothing funny when a soldier cries.
An’ I just wipe me eyes.
I fold it up an’ put it in my shirt,
Pick up my gun an’ get back to work.
An’ it keeps me driving me on,
Waiting on letters from home.
Or this?
Remember when thirty seemed so old
Now lookn’ back it’s just a steppin’ stone
To where we are,
Where we’ve been
Said we’d do it all again
Remember when
Remember when we said when we turned gray
When the children grow up and move away
We won’t be sad, we’ll be glad
For all the life we’ve had
And we’ll remember when
The best thing about country music is that when it doesn’t make you cry it is a blast to make fun of.
I mean where else could you find Bin Laden rhymed with forgotten or hear Toby Keith say in an interview that his song, “I Love This Bar” could just as easily be, “I Love This Church.” You know the lyrics:
“lots of lookers
And I’ve even seen dancing girls and hookers”
Well, then again, maybe he’s right.
