On Ralph McInerny (1929-2010) as Aristotle's Man of Virtue

I can't seem to pull out an adequate excerpt;  you'll have to read the whole remembrance by Thomas Hibbs. Don't miss the comments section, either. Ellen Rice's list of things she learned from Dr. McInerny should be put on a poster, which I would then buy and hang on my kitchen wall, so that -- absent Dr. McInerny or any chance of meeting him in this life -- I could remember to learn those things, too.

In Case You Missed It Last Week

Here's the Anchoress on NPR, offering His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI some blogging tips.

Sit back with your con leche and enjoy!

Snowed-In Sunday

I did not manage to photograph the big van during the time it lay nestled against the next-door neighbor's wrought-iron fence, but suffice it to say that it was spiritual communions all around this morning. (and thanksgiving that no damage resulted from the abortive Mass-going attempt, either to vehicle or to fence).

After prayers, I went out with the camera and took some shots around the house.

The back of the house, with climbing tree and many footprints, human and canine.

My favorite back-fence corner, looking like a park beneath the red-budded camellias.

The tree I bought this house for:  also a camellia.

The other tree I bought the house for, even though it's technically in the neighbor behind's yard. The photo really does not do justice to the brilliance of the berries on this tree.

Nandinas are lovely this winter as well.

Some shots of the "nature sill" in the back porch  (carefully omitting the litter of boots, coats, mittens, and un-put-away Christmas boxes occupying most of said porch):

And finally, the scene which impelled me outside with the camera in the first place, and which I might make my new header photo:

I mean, really. What could be better than wooden pink flamingos in the snow?

UPDATE:  Aelred managed to get the little car out, so he and the big kids have gone to the Spanish Mass. We can't all fit in the little car, so the rest of us are at home, and I am making a spiritual . . . something . . . with a cup of coffee con leche, using sweetened condensed milk I got out when I wasn't sure anyone was going to make it to the store.

Working the Frugal Mojo: Toilet Paper and More

Aelred is doing our taxes this weekend, which process as we all know requires extensive sorting of receipts. At breakfast he commandeered Epiphany and Amicus to weed out the grocery receipts from the big miscellaneous box;  this exercise, beginning with someone's observation that, "Boy, we sure go to Bi-Lo a lot," gave rise to much discussion of food-and-sundries budgets and how to trim them.

And so I find my Saturday expended in pursuit of the cheap roll of toilet paper. Here are my findings so far:

1. According to some commenter on Amazon, you can buy case lots of the Sam's Club house brand for $.42 per roll. Of course, you have to buy the Sam's Club membership first and, if you're us, you have to drive to Panacea Falls to find the Sam's Club, because there's not one in Fiat. On the other hand, we'd only be doing this three to four times a year, and we wouldn't be buying only toilet paper, so possibly the savings would be worth the fee, the gas expenditure, and the hassle.

2. The best deal I found via Amazon groceries today is a sale on 96-count cases of Windsoft, at approximately $.55 a roll. Compare More TP Prices at Amazon (sponsored link)

Advantages include good deals on shipping and -- I hate to say it, because it's not really a top frugal value -- convenience. Besides, as with a Sam's or Costco membership, we'd buy in bulk lots, buy more than one item at a time, buy only several times a year. Still, convenience costs. More. Sometimes a lot more.

3. I am not alone. Lively discussions about frugal toilet paper and other household supplies here  and here (cloths and a diaper pail? Is there anyone out there who does this, and would admit it? As with the old cloth-vs-disposable-diapers debate,  would you lose in hot-wash costs what you'd save in not buying toilet paper? And would it be worth it to you?)

4. Don't forget the salvage stores.

5.  Funnily enough, the buy-quality-for-the-long-term axiom applies to toilet paper, too. I have tended, ignorantly and in haste, to buy the biggest pack of rolls for the lowest price on the grocery shelf and make my escape. If, however, cheap rolls are also skimpy rolls, and we go through my enormous pack of them in a week and have to go back for more, how much have I actually saved, in either money or hassle? (don't worry, I already know the answer to that question).

PLUS:

A frugal blast from the past:  Money-Saving Mom's 2008 Two-Week Grocery Experiment
Go ask Alice: Are you better than Amazon? Better than Sam's or Costco?
Shopping tips for the student pauper
Want What You Have:  Making a Master Grocery List

Little revelation of the week:  The spices on the Mexican-food aisle are roughly half the price of the same spices on the spice aisle. Am I the last person in English-speaking America to realize this?

And now I must relinquish the computer to Epiphany, that she might finish the Scarlet Letter essay I assigned some time back. We would all get so much  more done so much faster, I often think, if we didn't have to learn little things like patience and charity on the way.

Alfie Betta, R.I.P.

It has been a week of high-profile passings,  J.D. Salinger and, yesterday, Ralph MacInerny among them. In our household we mark the much smaller passing  of a betta fish of whom we had become inordinately fond.

Aelred brought him home two Easters ago:  flowers and chocolate for me, a fish for the children. We named him, jokily, Alpha Betta -- and for the last time, perhaps, I am going to point out that while beta is the second letter of the Greek alphabet (whence cometh our name for that indispensable 26-count strand of letters), the fish is called a betta. It hails from the rice paddies of southeast Asia, and its function in life is to hang around in standing water, protect its territory, and look gorgeous for the ladies. Against the time when a lady fish should happen along, the gentleman -- when he isn't flaring his fins at his own reflection in the side of the gallon pickle jar -- expends much effort in constructing a bubble-nest for the nurture of junior bettas. Of course, when you live in a pickle jar, you live in hope, and that's about as far as it goes.

For all his ornamental value, the betta is above all  a tough customer. Not only is he a fighter -- Alfie once rushed, in full furious sail,  a rubber lizard I had held up to the side of the jar -- but he is at need a traveler as well. Alfie rode the length of Tennessee and back numerous times in a jam jar in the big van's cup-holder, which may or may not have abbreviated his lifespan overall, but he never seemed worse for the wear. He is also, and this was very important to us, we thought, a hypo-allergenic companion-animal option. For a long time, Alfie was as close as we came to having a family dog.

For several days he had been looking and acting peaked, loitering uncharacteristically at the bottom of the jar, so we were not entirely shocked to find him lifeless yesterday morning.

"Where is he now?" Crispina wanted to know, after Aelred had given him a brief private funeral at the compost pile. "Can a fish go to heaven?"

Now, I know people who have refused all their lives to believe in God, because some hamfisted person once told them that the answer to that question -- for fish, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, and the like -- was an unqualified no. 

So I said to Crispina what I believe to be true:  that God, who knows the stars' names, numbers the hairs of our heads, and cares for the sparrow that falls from the sky, has it in Him to care for a fish, too. The advantage of having no immortal soul, if indeed it's true that only we possess such a thing, is that unlike us, a fish cannot choose its own eternal destruction. If indeed it is simply a part of all that creation which exists by God's love and goodness to reflect that love and goodness, we can hope, I think, to find its fuller, truer existence in our face-to-face meeting with its Maker. Hard as it is to comprehend not missing the things of this world which we love, our hope -- not our hopeful feelings, but our objective hope -- lies in the promise that we will not. And if we don't, it won't be because our loves have  somehow been anesthetized, but because we will find their objects, and more, in the face of God.

Maybe that's a lot to read into the life and death of a fish. On the other hand, I think it's what we're meant to read into whatever we're given to read.

So, little life who taught us much, be peaceful.

Blogging-Mother Confession #1

molasses cookies+gummi vitamins=breakfast of champions

but only sometimes

and they did drink milk, too

Links on the Death of J.D. Salinger

Althouse: "J.D. Salinger Has Died"

Maclin meditates on Catcher in the Rye

Jody ponders Franny and Zooey and Christ

Gregory Cowles on writers who die before their deaths; or, Salinger as the eternal Holden 
(good or bad? A lot of people say Whatever to Holden Caulfield)

Gawker:   Salinger as spokesperson for "alienated or precocious" teenagers. Were there that many of them before Catcher in the Rye? Did he speak for you, or give you an identity to hang onto? I honestly can't remember how I felt on first reading the book;  I'd heard of it for so long, and assumed I ought to be blown away by it, or at least that it ought to live up to what I'd heard was its "shocking" reputation. As it was, I think I just recall turning pages, wondering where the excitement was. Maybe I wasn't alienated or precocious enough? (I was later blown away by Nine Stories, though)

James Barron walks Salinger's New York. 

Stephen King eulogizes, sort of.

Roger Simon's Salinger-stalking story.

On the "period" artist and the potential for greatness


And then there are those unpublished manuscripts . . .  or so we've heard . . . 

Ironic, I suppose, that death opens the doors on a famous recluse (now, there's an oxymoron) . . .

Still Standing Amid the Rubble

 

Reuters:  Remains of Sacre Coeur Church in Port au Prince

via The Anchoress

Friday Poetry

Pangur Ban

Written by a student of the monastery of Carinthia on a copy of St. Paul's Epistles, in the eighth century


I and Pangur Ban, my cat,
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.

'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stay
In the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in  his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

Anon
from the Gaelic (tr. Robin Flower)
The Rattle Bag, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, ed.



(Of course this is a sponsored link. But it's a great book. Don't you need a copy, too?)

  

The Postmodern Bedtime Story

Or, Who Needs to Be Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? 

I haven't seen, myself, this retelling of "The Three Little Pigs." But Ellen Handler Spitz's insights into the import of this book's liberties with the story, for good or ill -- with the very idea of story, for that matter -- seem on the right track. For example,

Wiesner’s tale turns back on itself to reveal its form, and to show that a story can be protean, metamorphic, and infinitely malleable. We have to co-construct it. Indeed, one of its boons is that, since there is no right way to read it, adults, too, are put to the test intellectually, (Wiesner’s pigs are not just children). The book can be seen as an unexpected lesson in the ethic of storytelling.  

But has something been lost? Fear, after all, has been drained completely away. By letting the pigs out of the story, Wiesner has pushed us out as well. We have no need for empathy, no real worry any more about their fate, or our own, or about good or evil. When bad comes along here, you simply jump out of your story into another one: Click. Evil is therefore unreal. The pigs get away, but the wolf cannot. He exists only in the story. Unlike the pigs, he is trapped. And this is a deprivation. By eschewing an incantatory mode, by not luring children step by step into a transparent world and holding them spellbound as in a dream, this postmodern tale, artful and ingenious, wakes us up, and provides its own useful challenge to understanding. But there is a cost. The risk with the cyber-genre is that, with all its glitz, we lose the pity and terror which Aristotle extolled and Plato feared. Surely we need not make such a sacrifice. Think of Ovid, after all, with his Orpheus, Icarus, Daphne, and Phaeton: he did not write for children, but he proved forever that you can glide from story to story without losing the quiver, the throb, the core. Whatever the achievements of much new work in the field of children’s books—of  David Wiesner’s work in particular—I confess that I am still on the lookout for those rare treasures that can make us tremble mightily like Disney’s giddy piglets under their blanket when the wolf is at the door.

It does seem to me that a reader ought to learn to trust the story before he begins to examine how the story plays with his trust. That's interesting, but if it's only ever a game, then who cares?

via David Mills

More Thoughts About Homeschooling, Because If There's One Reason for Homeschooling, It's That You Can Never Think Too Much, and Thoughts Don't Keep Office Hours. Etc.

Anyway. A propos of the recent Robin West homeschooling kerfuffle, as well as several other rather simpleminded evaluations of homeschooling as a sort of religious-mind-slavery thing, here's an excellent follow-up discussing what "religious reasons" for homeschooling, or doing anything, might mean in reality.

Some highlights:

Alasandra points out that pagans and religious Jews might homeschool for religious reasons, not just scary bad Christian fundamentalists (she also points out how illiberal it is to restrict Christian fundamentalist parents from sharing their spiritual views with their children).

. . .

I am a conservative Christian who homeschools for 'religious reasons,' but my religious reasons include valuing children as individuals who learn best on their own path rather than in an institution in lock step with a government mandated program.  As a conservative Christian I believe that it is my responsibility to educate my children, not the government's.  Homeschooling, as an atheist/agnostic friend describes it, is just a beautiful way for a familiy to live, and that, too,  is in keeping with my religious beliefs about what a family is and fulfilling our family's purpose and place in the universe.

Read the whole post. It's well worth your time. There's nothing she says that I don't agree with.

Meanwhile, here are some things we've been doing: 

1. Losing sleep over the very prospect of college applications. It'll all be fine, but facing this series of hoops for the first time is a little cage-rattling. Epiphany, on her own, has been writing away to colleges which interest her and receiving boatloads (not to say overboatloads) of informational literature, and she's formed a hierarchy of desired colleges, to which more are gradually being added. Our "home" college, where her father teaches, is near the top of the list:  she already knows it, likes the atmosphere, and can receive a very decent liberal-arts education there for free. Currently, however, the college has no classics major, which is what at the moment she thinks she really wants to do. So at the top of her list is a competitive university which rather emphatically would not be free, though our home college participates in a tuition-exchange program which would make her eligible for a significant scholarship towards the cost of tuition. Several other colleges would be within her reach via this exchange program.

Meanwhile, she's simultaneously writing English and history papers, translating Latin, and trying to teach Amicus various kinds of dance turns. And I'm trying to figure out her summer, which already involves some weeks as a nanny for my cousin, his wife, their toddler, and their upcoming new baby;  probably some summer school at the college;  and of necessity, a tour of colleges. I'm envisioning that she and I will hit the road together and have some mother-daughter adventures of a sort we really haven't had since she was 3, which was the last time we spent days on end with only each other.

2. Sentence diagramming. Everyone's diagramming! The other day, Amicus and I worked on a sentence out of his science text:  Unlike the protista, the fungi have cell walls made of chitin, I believe it was. Not only do we now know this key difference between the protista and the fungi, through the magic of diagramming we also know that it is in the having of chitinous cell walls, specifically, that the unlikeness lies --  the sentence doesn't suggest, more murkily, that the fungi themselves, in their holistic fungi-ness, are unlike the protista. This seems an important, if hair-splitting, distinction. Actually, what's really important is that we practice thinking with this level of precision, and to think that small distinctions matter.

We also revisited the difference between direct objects and predicate nominatives, which he's encountering in Latin.

3. Money. Serendipitously, both the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts are doing money lessons right now.  Amicus is working on his personal-finance merit badge, which among other things has required him to write up a plan for acquiring a 42" television. This is the last thing we want, but a thought-exercise is a thought-exercise. So he and Aelred have spent a good deal of time at the dining-room table first locating a decently-priced television, calculating how much the family would have to save per month to acquire it in eight months, and then figuring how to trim other costs from the budget in order to have that money to set aside.

At the same time, Helier has brought home a bag of play money which we're supposed to do . . . something . . . with. With Crispina I've had him work on how much each coin is worth, and then how many of each coin you'd need to make a dollar. Crispina's math workbook has her skip-counting by 5 right now, so our coin of choice has been the nickel. I've also introduced fractions:  if we draw the dollar as a pie, and you want to talk about quarters, then you divide the pie into four slices, and each slice is a quarter, a.k.a. one out of four, or one-fourth. And so on. When we got to nickels and dividing the pie into twenty slices, Helier said he felt dizzy. Quarters and half-dollars are distinctly easier.

Speaking of fractions, right now Crispina's putting on the kettle to make jello -- my measuring cup is a 2-cup job, so we always observe what a half looks like when we use it.

4. Poetry-writing. Helier and Crispina and I have been playing around some more with rhyming couplets. They made up the sentence On the water floats a paper boat, and then we went through the alphabet thinking of things that rhyme with boat, settling at last on a rhyming line which involved a fan controlled by a remote. 

Here's the book from which I'm pulling exercises at the moment --



It's a nice resource for trying out (and learning to recognize) poetic elements and forms (and yes, we get the little kickback if you buy through this link). I don't expect children to write finished, polished creative-writing assignments;  you can't force someone to be a poet, and I think that really, for some children, the idea that "you, too, can write poetry" probably kills whatever enjoyment of it they might have had. What you can do, though, is show them that what impels poets to write is a love for the sounds of words and for wordplay.

So I teach poetry, at least to younger children, as a game, with no performance expectations. Today we had quite a good time with it. When I brought up the idea of two rhyming lines again, Helier remembered that they were called "rhyming couplets," and I have every expectation that from now on, this will be something both of them recognize and are equipped to write on their own if they want. The world won't end if they don't;  their lives won't be diminished if they don't. But should they want to, they've got the tools.

If you happen to subscribe to Mater et Magistra magazine, by the way, look for poetry-study pull-outs in the upcoming issue:  a study for younger students by my friend Margot Davidson, and a study for high-schoolers, using Laurence Perrine's Sound and Sense, by me. If you don't subscribe, maybe you should. And I don't get a kickback for that!

Pseudo-Name My Town

The big kids just wandered by and asked me if I'd thought of a name for our town yet. It has one already, of course, but I'm loath to use it, partly for privacy's sake, and partly because in my hubris I think I can do better. All surrounding towns now rejoice, collectively, in the name of Panacea Falls, but what can we call this town?

I've thought about Fiat. Fiat, North Carolina, has a nice ring to it.

Epiphany thinks I should call it Saturn or Jupiter. There's already a Mars Hill.

I've been pondering town names I like, chiefly in Tennessee, since that's the state I traverse most regularly. You got your Holy-Land town names, like Lebanon, and your classical Sparta, and then there's Bucksnort and not one but two Lickskillets (Lickskillet and Lick Skillet, where they take life more slowly, one presumes). A good town name -- that is to say, a convincing town name -- needs some magical balance between the rational explanation (town named for fallen hero of skirmish with feral mule) and the utterly inexplicable (one good Lick Skillet deserves another).

Of course, in Arkansas, as my friend Pauler would certainly point out, you've got a place named Oil Trough, and then you have London . . . reflecting a certain torn-ness, on the part of the town fathers in these various places, between what is and what in their wildest dreams could be, if only.

Anyway, I dunno.

P.S. Aelred suggests Hernia.

Saints and Sweethearts

Oh, go ahead. Rush the Valentine's season.

via The Curt Jester

Addendum:   Epiphany's contributions:

St. Gemma Galgani:  Passion8

St. Gerard Majella:  1der Wrkr

St. Faustina:  I Trust N U

St. Therese:  Lil Flowr

St. Francis:  La D Pov R T

Our Lady:  B It Done 2 Me

St. John Lateran

(I know, I know. We're just waiting for someone to claim him as a patron saint):

Ded

i

c8

ed

And How Bout I Start Another Category . . .  

John Donne:  X Cept U Ravish Me

Why I Love Betty

Because she's lovable. And she's onto the secret of how to change the world.

I heart her blue-and-white china, too. And her Oscar Wilde quotation. And stuff.

No, We're Not

Yours, Mine and Ours seems to have gotten sent back to Netflix. So we're watching The Dancing Pirate instead. Because who can resist the adventures of a Boston dance instructor kidnapped by pirates? I ask you.

What We're Doing Tonight

Watching this movie for the fifth time this week.

Some Things You Cannot Not Link To

Like this, from Eve Tushnet:

Here is one way you might become Catholic: You might accept that when you look out at the world, you see the world the Catholics see. I recently heard Alisdair MacIntyre say (I'm paraphrasing) that humans are unintelligible unless we are directed toward God. This is why the most compelling -- and, not incidentally, the most sublime -- atheism is the belief that life is absurd and suffering is meaningless.

 

To see the world the Catholics see is to accept some number (maybe only one) of the bizarre Catholic propositions about our lives. A few examples: Suffering is not meaningless and merely an evil to be avoided; humans have some actual purpose or telos that has some intrinsic relation to ethics; God is not just a goon, but a source of moral truth; God is not just a source of moral truth, but a Person and therefore a possible object of our love.

 

And once you see the world this way -- or, for that matter, while you're trying to figure out whether you see the world this way -- the "answers" or propositions become increasingly inadequate. You need not solely reassurances and commandments but Eucharist, liturgy, and art. You learn the difference between true statements about God and love of God; you learn, even, the difference between true statements about God and knowledge of God. Anything else is what St. Bonaventure decried as "reading without repentance, knowledge without devotion, research without the impulse of wonder, prudence without the ability to surrender to joy, action divorced from religion, learning sundered from love, intelligence without humility, study unsustained by divine grace, thought without the wisdom inspired by God."

Read the rest. Read it even if you think you're not interested in this kind of thing, and all your questions have been answered elsewhere.

And thank you, Maclin.

 

Friday Poetry

You're

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fools' Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked-for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.
Snug as a bug and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jar.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.


Sylvia Plath
Reprinted in The Rattle Bag, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, editors

Even More Haiti

Medecins Sans Frontiers (aka Doctors Without Borders):  planes diverted from landing in Haiti. What gives? The BBC wonders, too. Are all the celebrities pledging to go help out taking notes here?

More MSF:  setting up a plug-and-play hospital

Seismically unstable Caribbean a continuing concern;  U.S. techtonic weapons, not so much.

Aid workers:  Please resist the natural urge to adopt every wandering child in Haiti right this minute. How do I know that this is a natural urge? Raise your hand if you haven't felt at least a twinge of it, or entertained the thought of converting your dining room into a bedroom for, say, twenty. Of course, it's easy, as we view the images of chaos, to forget that many of those wandering adults would like to be reunited with those very children who so yank our heartstrings. 

Claim your aid donations on your '09 tax returns. 

Man treats own earthquake injuries with iPhone app. 

Ships passing in . . . probably . . . broad daylight:  the USNS Comfort and Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas.

Drive a 'Vette for Haiti. No, really.

Ah. The link button seems to have stopped working for the time being. I don't know whether or not that's related to the activity of the "autosave" mechanism, which has suddenly taken a page out of our new/old car's electronic door-locker module. That went, "lock unlock lock unlock lock unlock," without cease, until it was yanked from the car;  this is going, "Save save save save save save save save save . . . ," so that nothing else much works. I mean, it's nice to have such a thrifty little function and all. And I'm glad it bothered saving the ellpises I typed moments ago. But -- I mean, I'm not that obsessive-compulsive. Why is every inanimate thing I own that way?

I give up. For now.

March for Life, Real and Virtual Versions

Aelred and Epiphany left in the dark hours of the morning to join the college group on its way to Washington. Around here the rain is falling steadily and temps have dropped;  Amicus is farm-sitting this week for friends, and feeding the goats and chickens this afternoon was a distinctly muddy, chilly affair. So now I'm worrying that my travelers didn't take enough clothes, or enough of the right kind of clothes, though on the other hand, there's nothing like a little personal suffering to add a note of solidarity to protest. Besides, it's a sacrifice to offer up. It is easy for me to type these words, sitting comfortably in my chair with a cup of hot almond milk as the rain plinks and plunks on the porch roof, but that does not make them untrue. Still, I hope they manage to stay warm and dry.

Those of us who are staying home tomorrow have the opportunity to stand and be counted, via the Virtual March for Life. Tell your friends.

Beautiful Bug Photography by Thomas Shahan

Beautiful Bug Photography by Thomas Shahan

Posted using ShareThis

Still More Haiti Headlines

Biggest aftershock yet:  a new 6.1 temblor rocks already-devastated Haiti.
A miscellany from BoingBoing. I would not say so snidely that people need food more than Bibles. Still, when the missionaries  are beginning to sound desperate . . .

It is unnerving to hear so much noise in the night. All of this in the pitch black. If not for the Lord, we would perish with fear. Danger in the streets from gangs and thieves, danger by the water, the mountains continually rumble, and danger IN YOUR HOME.
Where? Where do you go?

 I am venting these feelings with the hope of sharing more of the human element involved here. People here have felt abandoned for years. The world goes by as they wait to die.

The longer they wait to help, the harder it will be to help…. and the fewer there will be to help.
…

 Eight days after the quake, helicopters pass over head but do not touch down.

No soldiers or police in the streets.

 People’s nerves are getting thinner because many feel we are not on the help map and we are just waiting to die. The tremors keep everyone on edge and they feel if death doesn’t come by another earthquake, it will come by starvation.

Each night that goes by, sleeping in the streets, dealing with tremors, running out of food, no help coming, all of this puts everything closer to the edge of a population earthquake. There are more and more thieves at night. Gunfire at night. Dogs everywhere bark all night long. The nights here are not restful but keep getting noisier and more dangerous. H/T

Meanwhile, the Bovina Bloviator points out what a windfall a disaster like this provides for credit-card companies, Little Miss Attila discusses proposals to bring Haitians to the U.S.  for medical treatment, and the DHM examines Wyclef Jean here and here.

All right, we have to go do school now. More later.

Random Winter Photos

It's been ages since I posted any photos, probably because uploading images from my digital camera to my computer is a roughly five-hour operation, and who has five hours to hang around waiting for photos to upload? Tonight, however, Aelred brought the zippy laptop home from the office, and so I have -- in the nicest way imaginable, you understand -- shoved him out of the dining room and taken over.

Here, for a start, are some pictures from the snow day. Remember the snow day? The one that the header shot's not a picture of? Right, that snow day. Some shots of the neighborhood that day . . .

. . . plus the Methodist Church . . .

. . . and the distinctly un-naked public square:

Meanwhile, the dog is oppressed by the close proximity to him of a child holding a camera . . .

. . . but remains philosophical, as dogs are wont to do.

I don't sew, like at all. Yet somehow, miraculously, Crispina managed to receive this handmade doll for Christmas, ostensibly from Santa Claus (the dress, I have it on good authority, came ready-made from Goodwill):

Epiphany's comment:  "Oh, look. You didn't make this one out of old tights."

Finally, some action shots of today's schoolwork (I wasn't making up the word tiles and the writing on the table):

(still working on that pencil grip . . . )

So Epiphany and I were talking about Thoreau:  first we diagrammed the sentence, "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there," then we asked ourselves, "Why the heck did he go there?" And then we found it necessary to talk about Rousseau, utopianism (and the fact that our stainless-steel cutlery is more or less all that's left of a particular utopian community), and Shakers, as you see. I also explained what "ibid" means. No idea what the scissors were for.

Monday Headlines: Haiti Updates, Updated Again

Adoptive parents plead for evacuation of orphanage children. 
More from CNN: daily updates
BBC: images of misery
Faith among the ruins
Bulletins from a missionary communicating with the world via a satellite dish rigged to a car battery
Press releases and other info from the Haitian Embassy
Be Not Afraid
Reporting and videos from students at Cine Institute in Jacmel

Reports from missionaries indicate that what's most needed right now is medical help. If you have medical skills, says one correspondent on the ground there,  get on any plane you can and come. If not, stay home. This goes for you, too, Joe Jonas. 

(the  "reports" link above also includes  a thumbnail history of Haiti's  repayment of its  monetary debt to France).

My friend Janet on the Louverture Cleary School.
Crisis Commons and more grassroots techie aid
MaxedOutMama examines words and deeds
More from The Anchoress:  Ed the missionary and "the living psalm of Haiti"

I have  precious little, myself, to add to the excellent coverage which other bloggers have been providing. In the face of tragedies like this, it's easy for the comfortable middle-class American to experience a sense of futility -- nothing to do but stay home -- which can even more easily degenerate into a species of moral numbness. For his birthday I gave Aelred a bumper sticker which reads, A Good Bumper Sticker Makes Me Feel I've Done My Thinking For The Day;  likewise, it's tempting to feel that I gave at the second collection, and now I'm done thinking about loving my neighbor. After all, if I'm impotent to do any more than drop a few bucks in the basket, maybe I'm just morally impotent . . . period.

The antidote, of course, lies in precisely the place where we get the phrase love thy neighbor:  the parable of the Good Samaritan. The point of the story is . . . well, it's manifold, isn't it? The story suggests that our neighbor, whom we must love, is not the person whom we help, but the person from whom we, against our will, accept help. The story also suggests that we don't get to pick and choose whom we help. People are shoved into our path, and it is our job to respond to them -- whoever they are, however "needy" or not we may judge them to be -- with charity.

Today, I can safely predict, no earthquake-stricken Haitians will -- in terms of physical presence -- cross my path. Of course I can continue to scrape together more monetary aid to send. But I can also bear this in mind:

It may be laughable to the universalist, but [Edmund] Burke's sense of tradition places us firmly in the only environment wherein we can learn to be wise and good. We are "to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society" . . . the family, the clan, the village, and hence by degrees to proceed towards a love to our country,  and to mankind. The politically correct slogan has it that we should "think globally, act locally." Burke might reply that to "think globally" is not to think at all, just as to "love mankind" is not to love at all. Learn virtue here. If you want to love mankind, cook a nice meal for your family. If you want to clean the world, do the dishes.

Esolen, Anthony. "The Enlightenment:  Liberty and Tyranny." The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. Regnery, 2008, p. 237.

So I'm going to feed Crispina, who's sick and just got up, her breakfast, and afterwards we'll clean her room. And that, small as it is, will have to do me for saving the world today.

Another Week of Mobilizing the Drones

Not those Drones. Do stop drifting about like a somnambulant manatee, Bertie, and explain your lengthy absence from Brinkley Court. Up to no good, were you?

No, I meant these drones. Never mind that a good half of the homeschoolers I have personally known would self-identify as liberal and non-religious, and I can't say that I've ever met a single homeschooling family living under a tarp. But why get bogged down in a rebuttal when Alasandra's done such a good job of debunking the myths here?

addendum:  if you've ever wondered where these people with "little education and no job skills" wind up after homeschool graduation, check out this conversation.

If this post sounds disjointed, well, it's been that kind of week. I wrote on Monday that I'd been sick;  today is Saturday, and four days into a five-day course of antibiotics, I'm finally starting to recall what the picture of health and vitality might have looked like. Amicus, who was also sick on Monday,  has made a full recovery, but  now Helier, Crispina, and Epiphany are distinctly pale, lethargic, and apt to be convulsed with coughing.

Still and all, we have managed some discoveries this week. Perhaps the greatest discovery was mine. I have owned my tile-topped kitchen table since 1986, when I first moved out on my own. It's no fine piece of furniture, being mostly made of fiberboard, with inset white tiles in its top. This table has moved with us from house to house, functioning variously as a kitchen table, a dining-room table, and a desk, depending on our space and needs. It's the table where most of our meals are eaten;  it's the table where art projects are undertaken, paint and glitter glue spilled. It is an indestructible, indispensable table -- and it's only taken me 24 years to figure out that you can write on it with dry-erase marker.

What a revelation! Forget the whiteboard on the wall. Forget running off game boards for math bingo. You just draw a dividing line down the middle of the table (assuming you have only two players) and write numbers in the squares on each side of the line. Hold up your addition-and-subtraction facts flashcards (or multiplication or division or square roots or whatever) and have players X out the answers on their side of the table. What could be easier? (having people not get mad when other people get a "bingo" before they do, that's what. But otherwise . . . )

AND you can lay out your noun and verb tiles to make two-word sentences, then diagram them in dry-erase marker, and have your children both label the parts of the sentence and copy the simple diagram. And if anyone asks, a kindergartener is perfectly capable of understanding subjects and verbs, and of writing a simple sentence diagram, though she might need help reading harder words.

Sometime mid-week, at an hour when he should have been immersed in schoolwork, I caught Amicus surfing around on the computer. When I pressed him, the truth came out:  he'd gotten fascinated by the development of what we now know as the King James Bible, and he'd be along to do his history and such as soon as he finished reading.

Well, I said in a flash of inspiration, why don't you research this a little further and write me a page or so about what you find?

Lo and behold, he did. Heretofore when it came to Amicus and writing . . . .  if I say that images of turnips at the blood drive come to mind, you will know what I mean. He consumes information as if it were potato chips, and he can talk about what he's consumed as if there were nothing else on earth worth thinking about, but getting whatever it is from his head onto paper -- drip, drip, drip.

This isn't a condition peculiar to Amicus, incidentally. It seems to be a common middle-school affliction, and my hunch is that it affects more boys than girls, though maybe I'm wrong about that. At any rate, this week it went away. He read and read and read, and even more gratifyingly, he wrote and wrote and wrote. He wrote at the computer, mind you, which obviated the whole difficult handwriting step. By the end of the week he had cranked out a couple of full pages, which for a first sustained effort was quite impressive. He worried that it wasn't perfect, but I assured him that that didn't matter, because next week's great lesson will be in the art of revision.

None of this would have happened, by the way, had I assigned him to write two pages on a topic of my choosing. Instead, we'd have had Turnip Meets the Bloodmobile again.

Epiphany's week included the startup of this semester's Latin class -- 34 lines to translate by Monday -- and ballroom dance, at the first meeting of which she and the other nineteen mostly-but-not-unanimously-girls learned the box step. She took a geometry test -- my one lingering regret about letting her skip the eighth grade is that we'll never be doing anything but playing catch-up in math, and Algebra II will likely consume her senior year. At any rate, she took this geometry test and made on it a grade which I, frankly, would have been overjoyed to receive on a geometry test. Still, while a passing grade, it wasn't perhaps as entirely respectable a grade as it might have been, or a grade reflecting more than a cursory mastery of the concept at hand.

So I waded into the dangerous swirling waters of math emotion. I said, well, of course if you're happy with that grade you can move on. I mean, if you're really happy with that grade . . . 

Sigh. Sometimes you have to make people unhappy on their way to greater happiness. And in fact, she has the looming specter of the SAT, with its math portion, to make her unhappy with results which might otherwise have been okay. The long and the short of it is that she'll be reviewing that chapter and re-taking that test, with -- it is to be hoped -- a happier outcome.

We have designated Fridays this semester as test-preparation days. She's been working her way through the big fat SAT-prep book we bought last summer, but we felt it behooved us to spend some serious time with it in the coming weeks and months. Now, generally speaking, we -- the cultural we, that is -- consider the idea of "teaching to the test" to be a bad thing, don't we? We think of this sort of teaching less as teaching than as training, as of circus dogs, for an exercise in hoop-jumping. And so it can be, if test scores are a dominating objective. But I have to say, Epiphany and I have found the test book to be a valuable addition to our normal course of study, if for no other reason than that it makes us reason our way through a lot of things which are largely intuitive for us.

Take the essay section, which she's been working on lately. Yesterday she came to me, book in hand, wondering why on earth their suggested rewrites of wordy sentences were so -- childish, I think she said. By this she meant that they'd boiled a lot of words down to a series of unmistakable monosyllables which did not sound as fine to her as the longer construction had. We read the sentences and the rewrites together and concluded that some useful rules of thumb to bear in mind were as follows:

1. no genitive constructions. Don't say "of" anything if you can possibly use a possessive instead.
2. no polysyllabic words, if such can possibly be avoided. If you think intend, write mean. 
3. the phrase "around the corner from my house" may be reduced to neighborhood

And so on. Not dreadful advice, by any means, either, though the real value of the exercise was in figuring out what the test people are looking for, whether those things indicate good writing in any universal way or not.

She also had to do an exercise whereby she wrote "abstract" words -- poverty, humility, privilege, etc. -- and then composed sentences demonstrating concrete manifestations of these abstractions.  All right, I fail the essay portion of the SAT, obviously. She had to write some real things. Not that abstractions aren't as real, or as equally things,  as denizens of the realm of the concrete;  here we see the limitations of the simple-direct approach. Anyway, shifting from abstract to concrete language and back again is one of the markers of the competent writer, and it's something Epiphany has been doing without effort for as long as she's done formal writing. It was good, though, to revisit this necessary shifting, because it's the kind of thing writers do intuitively, and sometimes intuition can crowd out conscious analytical thought. We had a long, good conversation about what constitutes an "abstraction," and how easy it is to go around and around in circular reasoning:  "Poverty is when a person is poor," etc.

Also, and inescapably, this is the kind of thing a nervous kid could easily blow on a test, if she hadn't been groomed a bit beforehand.

So, there you have it:   Another week of mindless drone-ism. But you knew already that that's what we all do.

Haiti: UPDATED

If you are looking for a way to help, you could do worse than to start here. Or here.

Relief agencies:  a comprehensive and still-growing list.

And you can pray, which is very much more than nothing.

More news:  

Race Against Time  
Rescue Efforts: CNN Updates
Miami Haitians Wait for News (the picture of these people praying with their rosaries is beyond moving;  pray with them, please, whether you use a rosary or not)
Coverage from the Sydney Morning Herald (graphic images and video footage)
Telegraph Blog:  From Devastation, a New Haiti?
Live-Blogging at The Guardian
Goofball report: Pat Robertson Blames "Pact With Devil"
(or;  Job's Friends Agree:  "We Told You So.")
Harry Potter Fans Mobilize
Donate With Compassion and Caution
How to Help When You Don't Have Money to Give
Pierre Toussaint: A Saint for Haiti

Kentucky Adoption Services has airlifted 150 children from an orphanage in Haiti to the U.S., and is in need of diapers and other supplies. Help them here. (correction:  children are cleared to travel to the U.S. but as of this morning, they still needed a plane. Not to mention the diapers and supplies). H/T


New York's Archbishop Dolan:  "Haiti is the broken, bloody body of Christ." (H/T)

I've Let the Day Get By Me

. . . without reminding the world that my sweetheart was born -- some years ago -- on this day. I've said it before;  I'd say it all again. 

Celtic Fun With Our Irish-Dancing Friends

They're not on till about minute 7 of this medley-ish video of a Celtic Christmas concert from several years ago, but enjoy some of our best friends showing their stuff.

From My Reading List

We have school to do this morning, and I'm pushing to finish a print project, so I'll leave you with a little grab-bag.


Pentimento on a community of the least of these.
Teaching Poetry at The Common Room.
Frabjous London Snow
WHO:  "Criticism Is Part of an Outbreak Cycle"
A Modest (and non-satirical) Proposal
Don't marry him, honey, he's a Neanderthal
Good News! Maclin revives Sunday Night Journal.
Miep Gies: Helped Anne Frank, Dies at 100
Heartbreak? Not.

Monday Morning Journal

I'm sick -- didn't go to church yesterday, didn't get dressed, just wandered around in a sinusoid funk and tried to read and sleep. At bedtime I took some stuff which looks basically like freon, and which delivers the effect of a billyclub to the back of the head. Sometime around midnight Aelred put his head in at the bedroom door and observed that what with the pillows I was propped up on, plus the boxes of Kleenex and such, there wasn't much room in the bed for him. I learned about this exchange only later -- say, around seven this morning -- when I found Aelred sleeping on the study couch. Apparently, when he'd pointed out that  he ought to bed down elsewhere, I had replied, "That's about right." And he wonders why I don't take medicine more often.

Amicus is sick, too. On Saturday, with highs of 36 predicted, his Scout troop had scheduled an all-day mountain hike, to be followed by an overnight in the church social hall. When the day dawned, clear and frozen, we bundled Amicus in his thermal underwear, his moisture-wicking socks, his fleeces, his coat and hat, and sent him off, thankful that at least he'd warm up walking, and he wouldn't be sleeping outside. When the rest of us went to the church for Confessions at four, we were a little surprised to find the Boy Scouts back already, but then again, cold as it was, we weren't that surprised, as we said to each other. They're tough, we said, but even they . . .

So, here's what really happened. They got to the church at nine. Leaders looked at each other. "Man, it's cold," they said. "What if we just made them walk up and down the greenway in town?" They looked at each other again. "Man, it's cold . . . "

The upshot of all this looking was that they all ran around the church two or three times in the cold, then went inside and worked on merit badges all day. In the evening they watched a film about citizenship, and in the morning, after a night on the hard social-hall floor, they went to Mass. Amicus came home with chills and that cement-head feeling which is all too familiar to me at this moment, so although the story of his Scout hike strikes me as funny, I'm sort of glad things fell out the way they did.

Aelred and Epiphany went off to school before lunch. Classes don't officially start until tomorrow, but Aelred has an adult-degree-program class tonight, and Epiphany's Latin professor couldn't wait till Wednesday to get a jump on the new semester. Amicus lay on the couch and read his history assignment:  one good thing about homeschooling, as days like this remind me, is that you never really have sick days. You have to be pretty out of it, much farther out of it than we have ever been, mostly, to be utterly incapable of learning something. All those National Geographics we have lying around are just made for sick days.

Meanwhile, Helier and Crispina and I started the morning by playing "War" with playing cards. Helier and I were playing last night on my bed when the thought struck me -- and I'm sure this is yet another example of being bludgeoned by the obvious -- that all this game is is a series of "greater-than/less-than" number sentences. Helier's new workbook has been reviewing this concept, and it's an easy enough one for Crispina to pick up on, so today we played a short round of "War," stopping with each pair of cards to write "2<5/5>2," and so on. Then they each worked in their workbooks, Helier on greater-than/less-than problems with three-digit numbers -- he had to identify whether a given number statement was true or false -- while Crispina's exercises, as it turned out, were all about identifying larger or smaller sets of objects. So the whole math morning tied together nicely.

Next, we got out the word tiles, separated them again into color-coded parts of speech, and built more sentences, which we then practiced writing:  "The small frog is green," and so on. Then Crispina copied more rhyming words, while Helier did an exercise in writing proper nouns. Afterwards, we read a chapter of Andrew Jackson and a chapter of Little House on the Prairie, observing that although Jackson lived a hundred years before Laura Ingalls Wilder, everyday life on the frontier in the 1870s was virtually the same as everyday life on what had then been the frontier (that is to say, the area where we live now) a hundred years before, if not more isolated and, in many ways, primitive. Not that 6- and 7-year-olds are prepared to have a lot of conversation about something like that, but it's worth at least pointing out, for future reference.

Other stuff on the current agenda: 

SAT and ACT prep with Epiphany, who will be taking those tests in April and May, and again in the fall. Thinking that taking SAT subject tests would be a good idea, though we will probably wait for the fall to do that.

Waiting for the drivers'-ed people to call me back.

Reading Anthony Esolen's Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. I have to admit that I'm not a fan of the in-your-face packaging of this series, though the books are well-done and intellectually valuable, and Tony's is, unsurprisingly, no exception. Our age is pitifully short of Renaissance men;   he is one in the best sense, a lover of wide knowledge informed by truth. At any rate, I've picked up and put down the book many times in the last year or so, but yesterday I tucked myself into bed and read straight through.

Here's just one highlight, from a discussion of the Middle Ages:

. . . No medieval thinker could say, with the Gnostic heretics of the first two centuries after Christ, or some German idealists after the Enlightenment, that this world is an evil illusion, a mere husk. The Incarnation of Christ -- his enfleshing -- forbids it. Christ was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. His mother nursed him at the breast. He worked with his carpenter father at the plane and the lathe. For the first time in Christian history, Christmas, the day that most powerfully celebrates the fleshliness of the Savior, assumes its place, second only to Easter, at the heart of the Christian calendar  . . .

Then the things about us are blessed, as the Incarnation shows. It follows that we should pay them heed. Saint Albert the Great taught his students to do just that. Albert was by vocation a biologist, gathering and classifying examples of flora and fauna, and compiling accounts of creatures he saw . . . In the same mind, Albert welcomed into his school the close study of Aristotle. Muslim philosophers in Spain and North Africa had long been fascinated by Aristotle's works, and had been attempting, without much success, to reconcile his metaphysical deductions with the Koran. So the works of the man whom the medieval schoolmen came to honor as simply The Philosopher had been reintroduced into the West via translations and commentaries from the Arabic, particularly those of Averroes, whom they honored as The Commentator.

What was important about this? Aristotle insisted, against Plato, that everything we know, we learn first from the senses. Now, many medieval thinkers hedged, believing that our finest way of knowing is by direct revelation of the truth, an illumination by God. But many agreed with The Philosopher, as did the great student of Albert, Thomas Aquinas.

Great stuff. The book is full of these synthesizing moments, ordering strands of history and thought which we're too apt to receive as oppositions:  Muslim vs. Christian contributions to the development of Western culture, for example.

The ideas and truisms on which we trade have, each one, a pedigree of long standing, and the more we know of those pedigrees, the better we think and reason and find our way.  As I say, I'm not nuts about the parading of the "politically-incorrect" label, because the writers in this series strike me as far less concerned with breaking trendy taboos than they are with writing what they find simply to be important, interesting, and true.

The label also points towards the unfortunate truth that in our current cultural conversation, knowledge itself is broken down into "liberal" and "conservative" narratives which at times can seem -- on both sides -- as concerned with cancelling each other out as with the pursuit of the good idea. Thus it is that a reviewer with the handle "History Buff" can claim that this book encourages children to be "passive in the face of history," and to believe that they can't "make a difference," when every page is full of small people whose thoughts, words, and actions, however imperfect, gave us virtually every good thing we have. 


 

And you know the deal with the Amazon links. We get the little kickback from them. But you know I'd talk about books anyway, and encourage you to read for yourself . . .

More News From the Realm of the Automotive

Readers will remember, perhaps, the saga of this past autumn, in which our smaller van was wrecked, various other options didn't pan out, and at last our next-door neighbor's Saturn came to live in our driveway. Let me rephrase that:  our next-door neighbor's Saturn came to our driveway to die. No, to be dead. Mostly. Every morning Aelred would go out with the cables, push the Saturn nose-to-nose with the big van, jump the battery, and motor away. At night, he would walk out to the college parking lot with his cables and wait around in the frosty air for someone to come by and jump the battery again. This car, as he pointed out repeatedly, ran beautifully on the highway;  it's a '96 model with 65, 000 miles on it, and except for the minor glitch of not starting, ever, anywhere, it has been his dream car.

So yesterday he took it to the mechanic, whose name is not Shaun, but Shawn, as I realized on reading the front of his coveralls today. But it's pronounced Shau -- Anyway. Shawn ran the electrical-diagnostic thingy over the car and, after some diagnosticizing, found the problem:  a computer module which had controlled the  electric door-lock mechanism, but which had lost its mind at some earlier stage, and refused to stop locking and unlocking the doors, over and over and over. Up down up down, lock unlock lock unlock. An earlier mechanic had diagnosed this malfunction as the cause of the battery's continual state of drainage, and had disconnected but not removed the module. So there it sat in its happy little corner, going lock unlock lock unlock lock unlock obsessively to itself, accomplishing nothing in the real world  except more battery drainage.

Now -- ha ha! -- we have a car that starts, with a brand-new battery to celebrate with, and the boys have a computer module to tear apart. At lunchtime I set it on the table in front of Helier;  his eyes got very big and round, and he said, "I can't believe I'm looking at the inside of a car."

Believe it, baby . . .

Homeschool Notes: New Term

Our Christmas break lasts until Epiphany -- the real Epiphany, that is, January 6, which coincides with the birthday of the child who bears the name of the feast as her pseudonym. Got that? Good. Anyway, we don't go back to school until the end of the twelve days, which means that this week has been a two-day school week, not that anyone has been complaining much.

The beginning of the winter term is always something of a touchpoint:  I ask myself what we did well in the fall and what we didn't, what got worked on and what needs more work, what we can do to propel ourselves with something like energy towards the end of the spring. I use whatever Christmas money I've got to lay in something new for each child, whether it's pencils and a pencil grip (everyone got pencil grips as stocking stuffers this year, as a matter of fact), a notebook or a book cover (Epiphany was surprisingly delighted with the two stretchy book covers she received for her birthday;  her English textbook is much prettier now), fresh math workbooks, new paper, or a little personal-sized dry-erase board (with Lightning McQueen on it, bought at Goodwill for 50 cents, and also surprisingly satisfying to the person who now owns it, who needs an extra incentive to work on his handwriting). This time of year, fresh is everything, and I'm in need of it as much as anyone.

Today after I'd done school with everyone else, Epiphany and I sat down and plotted out her schedule of work for the spring. Some things are constants:  math every day, for example, and a chapter of U.S. history a week, with some outside novels worked in (last semester:  Death Comes For the Archbishop and A Tale of Two Cities.) Some things are taken care of by outsourcing:  Latin and, this term, ballroom dancing at the college. And some things she and I do together, chiefly English.

Anyway, here's what she's reading and doing this term:





She's read up to the Transcendentalists in our text, the Glencoe Sixth Course American Literature, a standard public high-school text which we chose because it's got all the readings we need, conveniently located between two covers. We've ended up mostly ditching the study questions and writing assignments as too superficial and feelings-oriented;  as she said, "Who cares how I feel about the tide rising and falling?" Still, the readings are decent, the kinds of things everyone really needs to have read in high school, and to be able to talk about at least in passing. She will be reading selections from:

Emerson ("Concord Hymn," "Self-Reliance," "Nature")
Thoreau ("Walden," "Civil Disobedience")
Poe ("To Helen," "The Raven," "The Pit and the Pendulum")
Frederick Douglass ("My Bondage and My Freedom")
a series of spirituals ("Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Follow the Drinking Gourd," "Go Down Moses")
Sojourner Truth ("And Ain't I a Woman?")
Mary Chesnut's Civil War
Robert E. Lee (Letters to His Family)
Ambrose Bierce ("An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge")
Herman Melville ("Shiloh")
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
Whitman ("I Hear America Singing," "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," "Song of Myself")
Dickinson ("If You Were Coming in the Fall," "My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close," "The Soul Selects Her Own Society," "Much Madness Is Divinest Sense," "Success Is Counted Sweetest," "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died," etc)

This takes us up to spring break in March. We still need to hammer out a schedule for this year's big term paper, which I think will be on an historical theme (she's already done some smaller research projects in science and history this year), as well as covering Twain, Bret Harte, Jack London, etc. If we reach the end of the 19th century by the end of May, I think I'll be happy;  much of the 20th-century fiction she can read for fun, what she hasn't read already, and we can read Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Williams and so on together. My plan is for us to work through Laurence Perrine's Sound and Sense next fall anyway, so it might behoove us to come back to them after we've done that and equipped ourselves to do them something like justice.



We're also working on sentence structure and diagramming, commas and punctuation, and other grammatical and syntactical issues, as well as the good old five-paragraph essay. Up soon in her dayplanner, an essay on how The Scarlet Letter deals with the notion of sin, through Hawthorne's use of such devices as color imagery, Biblical allusion, and patterns of concealment and revelation. I think. Those are our three working points, anyway.

(forgot to mention that instead of doing the review questions in the lit text, I'm having her keep a reading journal, in which she can talk back to Emerson, Thoreau, et al. We've already discussed some themes she might keep in mind, and literary devices she might look out for as she reads.)

Her history reading more or less reflects what she's reading for English, which is nice;  the "spine" of the text gives some framework to the literature and primary-source material. Plus she's doing a good bit of writing for history, mostly evaluating various figures' mythologies.

We also worked a bit on planning her two half-credit requirements for next year, economics and U.S. government. AND we have a call in to a drivers' ed school up the road from the college, so it looks as though that's part of our spring picture as well. All that and the cha-cha, too.

Amicus's schedule has undergone the least tweaking;  sixth grade seems to be a fairly straightforward year. He's almost finished with his last general-elementary-math workbook, and should be picking up Saxon Algebra 1/2 in the next few weeks. I haven't been much of a Saxon fan, but we have this material hanging around, and I think the structure and the challenge of it will work for him as it didn't for his older sister, who at the same age tended to implode when things seemed too unfriendly, there on the page of problems. Flipping through the first few chapters today, I was almost ready to tell Amicus to drop the MCP Math and get on with Saxon, but I think he'll be happier breezing through a review of decimals and percents, for example, having just done them. (Note to self:  take him out to lunch soon and make him calculate the tip).

Otherwise, I still need to devise a few more assignments requiring sustained writing, both in terms of composition and in terms of penmanship. His regular work does require a good bit of written response, but we've left off doing copywork, which I think was probably a mistake. I'm thinking of having him make a book of selected passages from things he reads this term, copied out neatly. He's not too old for this kind of thing;  even now his fine-motor skills could use some training, without the added burden of having to think of something to say, which still ties him up in knots.

Crispina walked with me up to the office-supply store the other day to buy some more pencil grips, so that I can keep them in a basket by the kitchen table and nobody can complain of not having one. Naturally, pencil grips weren't all we bought:  I came out with two new math-practice workbooks which had been on sale, and which have nifty things like math-facts bingo, mazes, puzzles, and other game suggestions included. We've been reviewing addition facts by rolling dice, then writing the number sentences and solving them  -- this is where the Lightning McQueen dry-erase board is invaluable.

Today after we'd finished with math, Helier and Crispina and I, I pulled out a little tin of plastic word tiles. I forget where I got them, but they're like a magnetic-poetry kit without the magnets, and with color-coding. Nouns are blue, verbs are red, adjectives are green, and everything else -- pronouns, articles, prepositions, and punctuation marks -- are yellow. I had them first divide the words into piles (a little basic math exercise, that:  categorizing), and then tell me what they could about the words in each pile. So we ascertained that the blue team was nouns, and so on. I had them pick a word from the blue group, a word from the red group, and a word from the green group, and make a simple sentence. They then could add on more words to jazz it up. Finally, I had each one write his or her own sentence, Helier on his Lightning McQueen dry-erase board, of course;  Crispina in a Hello, Kitty notebook which also came from the Goodwill for 50 cents. Crispina went on arranging pairs of rhyming words -- duck/truck, dog/frog -- and writing those down as well.

After that, we read a chapter of Genevieve Foster's little biography of Andrew Jackson, which is lively and engaging. We started it yesterday, and in putting dates in our timeline book, we discovered something which fascinated us. Andrew Jackson was born in 1767. Laura Ingalls Wilder, whom we're also reading at the moment, was born in 1867. And the children's Uncle More was born in 1967. Suddenly, the idea of two hundred years made sense to them. We counted forward and backward to various other events as well, and it occurs to me now that we could even make sense of how long ago 1066 was by counting backwards from Uncle More, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Andrew Jackson. Turn back to 1067, subtract one, and there you are.





At any rate, for the two of them my goals for this term include more writing. Crispina and I also came home from the office-supply store with a little pack of ruled stationery, and yesterday the three of us came up with the text of a letter to one of the grandmothers, which I wrote on the board and they copied onto the stationery. Letter-writing seems a fun way to accomplish the same end as straightforward copywork:  they help to compose it, but the burden isn't on them yet to compose and write simultaneously. When I write the words for them to copy, they see what they look like (correctly spelled -- we've really never had much invented spelling around here), and they internalize the spelling as they write. Plus, hopefully they get letters back from time to time, these short folks for whom there seldom is any mail.

Meanwhile, we made good progress in math last term, but this term we want to have more fun with it, hence the games and puzzles. And the Lightning McQueen dry-erase board, of course.