But Does It Come With a Flipped-Up Tie, a Pointy-Haired Boss, and a Nihilist Dog?

Here's what the mailbag coughed up for us today:

Baby's First Cubicle. Ah, yes. Why be outside, lying on your stomach in the clover with wrens twittering over your head, when you could be doing pretend spreadsheets, sending around pretend inter-office memos, and forwarding pretend email jokes?

Or, if office geek isn't really your bag, how about this?

I mean, I'm all about encouraging other people to do the housekeeping  . . .

And why the heck does it say "Girls Only?" Son, put down that mop AT ONCE, and track some mud on the floor for your sister to clean up. 

We gave away all our Little Tikes-type stuff when we moved from Tennessee to North Carolina. Having declared myself officially out of the market forever, I haven't exactly been paying attention to what's trending, as they say, in Plastic-Land. Now I'm afraid to contemplate what else might be out there.

 H/T 
(and a tippa to Judy, too, for sending the link around)

PS:  6-year-old, her eye happening to fall on the image of My Cleaning Trolley:   I want that.

8-year-old:  We could get a bunch of those and play Dilbert.

Just what I was hoping for.

Friday Poetry

Pastoral 

Crouched in the yard,
he brings his dirty hands up to his mouth.
No, No, I say. Yuck. Hurt. 

These are sounds he will recognize.
I say them when he takes an orange
with its hidden seeds and allergenic juice.
No. Yuck. Bad orange. Or reaming
from his mouth a wad of bread,
a lump of odorous cheese.
The fire will hurt.
The stick will break and stab you
in the heart. The reckless wheel,
the cool suggestive music of the pond.

Overhead, summer spreads its blue scarf;
a light wind bends the hollyhocks;
birds, trees --
everything the way I might have dreamed it,
he stands in the grass,
weighing a handful of berries,
a handful of stones.



Ellen Bryant Voigt
The Forces of Plenty
W.W. Norton and Co., 1983

Homeschool Planning Notes: Binders!

We've watched The Trouble With Angels so many times that we can't just say binders, with a plain old comma or period. It's always binders! 

This time, though, we don't mean those. We mean 3-ring notebooks, without which, &c.

If things have been quiet-ish around the ol' blog, it's because my days have been consumed with 1) trying to finish this year's school and 2) putting together ironclad plans and procedures for next year. And while we've always used binders to make sure that work got done and not lost, now we're moving to a higher plane of binder-dependence entirely.

I first ran across the idea of a 2-binder system for each child somewhere on the 4-Real Learning forums, in a conversation about workboxes. Someone -- and I now forget who -- described a system whereby each child has a binder for weekly work which, as it is completed, goes into a binder for the year, a "work completed" binder which, at the end of the year, serves as a kind of yearbook of the child's achievement. While I've always hung onto files and folders and workbooks and notebooks, this seems like a neat way to keep things ordered so that the child can go back and look over old accomplishments without having to track them down in the filing cabinet. You can shelve the "year" binders neatly, and there you are.

Of course, the key to all this is that you have to have your weekly work lined up, so that you can slip things into the assignment binder for the child to access at the proper time. As you go, you can put in a fun math puzzle, a coloring page, a form for journaling an indpendent-reading book, a page of copywork, a crossword puzzle, or whatever else strikes you as a good thing for your child to do in a given subject on a given day, but for me, at least, it's essential to have the core work planned out and ready to pop into the child's binder. For the older children, too, the assignment binder has to be set up so that the child can work more or less independently, with everything necessary to sustain life right there at this fingertips (okay, so I haven't figured out how to binderize meals yet, but give me time . . . ).

Many of our next-year's books arrived this week, and I have some ready-made lesson plans at hand, which makes things considerably easier:  I could just copy off the timeline-research project which will be Amicus's history course for next year, 3-hole-punch it, and put it in his binder for him to access. For the youngers, since I'm tweaking a set of ready-made plans, it's a matter of making up daily lists which pull from the lesson plans, with space to add more activities and books as I continue to plan.

Epiphany's assignment binder is the most-nearly finished, so I thought I'd share what, specifically, is in it.  It's nothing exciting to look at, but I did take some pictures which I can't post right now because the zippy computer is all packed up. Maybe later I'll post an all-binder (not binders!) photojournal, though that might be kind of boring. We're aiming for complete here, not cute.

Her binder includes, first, a contents page, so she knows at a glance what's in it and where to find things. The contents right now are:

* a daily schedule for the mini-courses we're doing this summer:  math, grammar & composition, science and history review.

* a booklist for summer reading and independent reading through the year

* a daily summer-assignments syllabus

* Useful forms:  note-taking, book-journaling, etc. I printed her out a number of these, with a note to make more copies as needed, whenever she reaches the last blank form.

*12th-grade course of study  (scroll down for the link to the forms)

*calendar

* weekly lesson plans with  assignments  blocked in  for all the books we currently have:  humanities, English, chemistry, math. I'm still putting together the half-credit economics course. I'm using the "Plan List" form (scroll down the page at the link and you'll see it), with a big box for notes (I've already put in, for example, contact info for the author of her chemistry text, who welcomes student questions). The form comes in .doc format, so I've typed in many assignments, while I'll pencil in others as I plan. I saved each page in its own file, so that I can easily go back and amend a page and reprint it if I need to. 

With the weekly lesson plans I'll also include printouts of readings, where she's not using an actual book. I've made a workbox/bookshelf station in the hall, near my own work space, with boxes for both Epiphany and Amicus:  their assignment binders, their "completed" binders, and their books for the year, which I'm still amassing. My goal is that no one will have to hunt for anything;  it'll all be right there. At this station I've also made a box (actually a milk crate) for myself, with my big resource binder, the prepared lesson-plan binders for the youngers, our timeline book, and various worktexts whose pages I'm going to be photocopying to put in assignment binders, rather than letting them work directly in the books (for hand-me-down purposes). Meanwhile,  I'm working on a similar station for Helier and Crispina  in the kitchen, where we do most of our school.

I'll post more about preparations for their binders as I finish  them. Currently I'm working on Amicus's year, so that he, like Epiphany, will have a detailed course of largely-independent study at his fingertips. He'll be doing pre-algebra, the World History timeline course in CHC's middle-school lesson plans, grammar, composition, a schedule of literary reading, life-science, and a course in growing in the virtues, courtesy of the Marianists.

But more about all that later. Hm, has anyone had a "planning" blog carnival lately? Anyone want to have one?

Which reminds me that "What I Learned This Week By Opening One Book" will return this Friday. Prepare!

CORRECTION:   Make that next Friday. Helier's First Communion's this Saturday, I'm the First-Communion teacher . . . the book talk, she is not happening now.

From Our Mailbag: Poetry Out Loud

Well, I mean, it's not literally a bag. I'm not even sure our mailman has one. Every day he drives up to the house next door, opens the gate, strides up the walk, and deposits a handful of mail in Rebecca's box. Then back down the walk he strides, back through the gate he sidles, back into the zippy van he clambers and drives all of five feet to our house, where the entire performance is repeated, sans gate. When I picture my mailman, it's in purposeful mid-stride -- next door he has to be extra-purposeful, because Rebecca's gate and fence enclose a not-entirely-cheerful dog, which is why he sidles out so fast -- clutching before him a fistful of mail. The image of a juror in Twelve Angry Men comes to mind, but I don't know why. The mailman doesn't seem a bit angry. And, though I'm not implying any causal relationship, he doesn't carry a bag.

All that hot air to say that  I got an email from a reader today which raised an interesting question:  how exactly do you recite poetry out loud?

On the one hand, it might seem not that interesting a question. Waddya mean, 'how?' You just do it. On the other hand, poetry can be tricky, especially if it's traditionally rhymed and metered. How do you recite it so that, simultaneously, it sounds like poetry, and you don't sound like Miss Judy showing everyone how to do "Round and Round the Garden?" Or to put it another way, say you're a teenager and you want to participate in  Poetry Out Loud, and not only do you not want to sound like a singsonging dork -- a very natural desire among teenagers, I am told -- but you also want the poems you recite to sound, in the appreciative ears of the audience, like something other than the ol' phone book.

Now, I answered this email while cooking dinner. Actually, I answered it while Crispina was cooking dinner, stirring away at a cast-iron skillet of ground turkey over an enthusiastic gas burner, so I fear that the answer I gave was not very complete, but it went something like this:

The issue, really, is voice:  the poem, which has its own voice, finding another voice in yours. Being served by yours, maybe, is another way to put it. And the things which makes this difficult is the enormous gap between the voice of a metered poem and -- well, pretty much every other noise we currently know. I've been told that something like 85% of our natural speech falls into the pattern of iambic pentameter;  still, our plays aren't in poetry, really, any more, and we don't sit around of a winter's night chanting verses handed down to us orally, with a rhythm to make us remember them. Maybe poetry is how we talk, but when we go to read or recite a poem aloud, that doesn't really sound like us.

So, what to do? It's good to understand meter, of course, though we can get the sense of a poem's rhythmic movement simply by reading it aloud and bearing down hard on the stressed syllables. I tend to bang on the table when I read poems aloud -- see "singsonging dork," above. By the way, it is also a natural desire of teenagers not to be related to someone who does things like this, especially in restaurants, but they will thank me someday, I'm sure.

Obviously, if you're performing a poem in front of an audience, you probably don't want to bang on the table, if there even is one. At the same time, you want to make it clear that you're not simply reading prose. And I think -- though I'm not really sure -- that the key to this is to think in lines. That's one of the simplest, starkest differences between poetry and prose, though of course there's prose poetry, but we're not going there now. Poetry is in lines. In poetry, the line triumphs:  over the sentence, over the paragraph, over any other level of logic which might be operating. The logic of the poem is the logic of the line.

This is why I'm driven crazy listening to people read poems as if they were bank statements -- well, no, because bank statements are in lines, too. Let's say the newspaper, even though that's boring. Anyway, if you want to know how to drive me crazy, read me a nice Shakespearean sonnet as if it were a chunk of prose. Don't stop for those line breaks! Just keep on rolling.

A mentor of mine, in one of my abortive graduate-school phases, taught us to observe line breaks when we read. You weren't supposed to stop, exactly. You don't go, Whose woods these are I think I know, 2 3 4, His house is in the village, though, 2 3 4 . . . When you get to the end of the line, you just -- pause. A tiny bit. Delicately. A little lift, not enough to chop a thought in half, should a thought be enjambed from one line to the next, but enough to indicate that there's a little step there in the path, and you have to step down it. The thought's not unimportant, of course, but because this is a poem, the thought is less important than the line which reels it out.

If you're thinking in terms of the line, too, you begin to notice what's going on in a given line, all the ways the poem helps itself to be heard aloud. Alliteration, for example, reinforces the rhythm, as the poets in Old English knew.

Nu sculon herigean    heofonrices Weard

Even if you're not especially trying, it's almost impossible to read that line of Caedmon's arhythmically. You'd about burst a blood vessel trying to override its motion. Even in a modern English translation, the sound of these lines isn't prosaic:  The Creator's might   and his mind-plans, as the second line is rendered in the book I'm holding right now.  You try passing the time of day, la di da, by remarking, "The Creator's might and his mind-plans," and see if it doesn't come out sounding like something with four stresses. Maybe, if you're the teenager, reading some Old English verse aloud (in translation if nothing else) would be a good exercise:  this poetry was meant to be spoken or sung, and it means to sing even if you can't.

For a change of pace, you could try "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," with that lapping lake-water and the bee-loud glade and all. Yeats apparently came to loathe that poem, because it was all anyone ever wanted to hear him read, but it is a mouthful of good sounds, line by line by line.

Really, I think the thing to remember is that a poem is not a speech. Soliloquies in Shakespeare plays are also poems, but poems aren't really soliloquies. That is, they're not just about what they say. If they were, we wouldn't bother;  we'd just say, "Man, I'm getting old/Look at the daffodils!"

Nope, poems are as much about their sound as they are about their sense -- to borrow a turn of phrase. And I think a good recitation is one which acknowledges the sheer delicious pleasure of the sound, line by line, without obfuscating the sense.

If that's remotely helpful.

UPDATE:  Truly, it is happy mailbag week. Reader Sarah writes: 

I'm very irked, too, by people's ignoring line breaks and otherwise reading poems, as you say, as if they were newspaper articles. And I think it's exactly right that people do this because they don't want to seem like "singsonging dorks"- I know because I used to do it too until a professor corrected me.  I wanted to prove I had a kind of adult intelligence that could follow the logic of a thought without being distracted by rhythm. But I was missing the importance of what Coleridge says about the nature of a poem- that it is "that species of composition which has as its first object pleasure, not truth." (Hope that quote is correct.) The truth is important, of course,  but a poem doesn't simply yield up its truth on demand; it requires that you submit to its pleasure first.

This submitting to pleasure is very hard for us to do, I guess especially as modern Americans, because we feel we should always be goal-oriented; but poetry requires us to forget about our goals for a little while - and this opens a little door in our minds to let in something beyond our own agendas.  I think this is why poetry is important to culture and also to Christianity- it gives us freedom from our predetermined goals- even our highest goals- so that we can get a glimpse of a truth beyond our wills.

Happy mailbag, lucky me, for having such wise and thoughtful readers.

Anatomy of Conversion

From my friend David Mills, whose writing was part of the complicated anatomy of my own long conversion:

When first attracted to the Church, one naturally notices the areas where she says "no" to one's assumptions and beliefs, the same way the immigrant to a foreign country first notices all the differences and especially the differences that make his time there harder — different ways of queuing up in shops or different relations to time and schedules, for example, or different attitudes toward private property. But the experience ought to lead one to a deeper vision of the whole, in which the questions cease to be so pressing because the beauty and coherence of the whole become more obvious. The immigrant adapts to the differences, and begins to understand and enjoy the culture they express, and eventually to think and feel the way the natives do.

Although, and this is something converts should remember, he will never think and feel exactly as they do because he did not grow up there. What for them is instinct will always be for him to some extent analysis followed by choice. Many practices will always feel awkward and many ideas dubious because he does not know everything they know, even if they don't know all they know. The Thing he loves will always be a mystery.

The particular arguments and answers were important to me, but increasingly so as confirmation of the whole. I was moving from the point where I could think the Church is right about this but wrong about that, so that the decision to join was prudential and comparative — Where can I serve God best? How does it look next to the alternatives? — to the point where I could only believe that the Church was right about everything or reject her, the point where the decision to commit or not had to be total and final.

Here again the process was like falling in love: There comes a time when you must either marry the girl or break up with her. If you don't do one or the other, you will be trifling with her affections, which is an offense not only against charity but against truth. And imprudent for you as well.

Read the rest. 

H/T


ALSO:  The Permanent Scandal of the Vatican or, Why, Having Married Her, We Don't Divorce Her Now.  

If Only Second Sight Meant You Watched Where You're Going

"I'm going to have a tough life." 
                              Crispina, on falling down the back steps yesterday


Relax, aunties and grandmothers. No stitches this time. 

Friday Poetry: More Mystical Thrush

from Robert Frost: 

Come In

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music--hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went--
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.
                February 1941

GOOD PIRIT MAP FOR YOU

The other day, I found this superlatively helpful missive shoved under my bedroom door:

And in case I should find the pirits and the kweksad and the skeltin (u o!) too scary, here's the flip side: 

More Steeleye Span: Rosebud in June

Appropriate, because here in Merry Olde Fiat, we have rosebuds in late April, a phrase which doesn't lend itself quite so well to versemaking as "Rosebud in June."

When Epiphany was a little girl in her Infants' School in Cambridge, they used to have a "Rose Queen Festival" every June, with a Rose Queen chosen from among the seven-year-olds in Year Two. As the headteacher told me, the festival had originated in the 1930s, when the school began, as a May Queen celebration, but the weather was always so  dreadful that they moved it to June, when conditions might -- it was always hoped --  be marginally better.

Truly Faskinatin' Business, That

MM on medieval maps, with a spot of etymology.

The Mystical Thrush

The friend who told me the other night about the thrush and its deviated windpipe has sent me a selection of thrush-themed poems, from a little anthology which it has been his avocation to compile. In honor of, um, almost the end of National Poetry Month, which seems to have slipped by me yet again, I thought I'd share a few of them here.

For starters, here's a tiny gem from Richard Wilbur:

On Having Mis-identified a Wild Flower

A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.
                                               1987

And this, from Philip Larkin:

Coming

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon--
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

                                         1950

My friend's collection also includes poems from Eliot, Keats, Edward Thomas, Wordsworth, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and many others. In virtually all of them, as my friend notes, the thrush's song -- which always seems to have its own life, apart from the humble brown bird -- intrudes on the speaker's consciousness as a kind of auditory vision, if such a thing can be said to exist (as distinct from an auditory hallucination, that is). The thrush is always mystical . . .

Sophie's Option

William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice chronicles the self-destruction of a woman who has survived the Nazi death camps by the terms of one soul-destroying decision. Told that she will escape the gas chamber if she sends one of her two children instead, she chooses her small daughter and watches her walk to her death, taking with her an entire future -- not only her own but, as it turns out, Sophie's as well. From that moment the rest of her life unfolds as a series of self-negating sexual relationships, ending in a double suicide with her deranged American lover.

As I lay awake in the small hours of this morning, I couldn't stop thinking about that novel as a backdrop to a news item I ran across yesterday, in which a Florida doctor lost his license in a -- I suppose you could, if you were being honest, call it a case of "wrongful death," although the fact that a death had been the desired outcome renders the whole thing kind of convoluted. Here is the story:

The Florida Board of Medicine revoked a Sarasota OB-GYN’s medical license last Friday for aborting the wrong baby of a mother pregnant with twins. Dr. Matthew Kachinas mistakenly killed a healthy baby girl instead of her twin brother who had Down syndrome and possible congenital defects. State records showed that Kachinas made a $250,000 liability settlement with K.M. for “an incident” on the day of her selective termination.

Dr. Matthew Kachinas performed abortions regularly, but never before had attempted this particular type of procedure, known as a “selective termination.” This procedure targets a specific unborn baby, usually when one of the babies is diagnosed with an abnormality, often in the second trimester. In such cases, the unborn baby is killed with a chemical injection that stops his heart. He shrivels up and dies in utero, while the other baby is left to develop.

Dr. Kachinas agreed to treat a woman, identified as K.M. in the records, who was 16 weeks pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl. Doctors counseled K.M. that “selective termination” was an option after learning that the male baby had health problems, including a possible heart defect and Down syndrome. The female baby appeared normal.

A week and a half later, K.M. returned to the doctors at Florida Perinatal Associates, who were monitoring her high-risk pregnancy. An ultrasound revealed that the healthy baby girl had been killed and that the baby still alive was the boy with Down syndrome. The mother returned to Kachinas several days later to abort him as well.

Statistics indicate that between 80 and 90 percent of women who receive a diagnosis of Down's Syndrome in their unborn children follow their doctors' counsel -- that "termination" is an "option" -- and abort their children. The option all too easily becomes the norm, if not the imperative. The instance of "selective termination," in which one or more unborn children are sacrificed while the more "desirable" are allowed to live, points even more strongly to a sort of mundane, dreary, everyday Sophie's Choice, in which the stakes for the mother aren't life or death, exactly, but the life I wanted vs. the life I've been handed instead.  The outcome for this mother is an empty womb, empty arms, the rest of her life bereft of these children, whom another child can never precisely replace. She is bereft also of knowing what she might have been capable of -- what love was hidden in her heart  -- had her children lived. When offered a choice, in a time of anguish and confusion,  she sacrificed not only the gift of her children, but the gift of a self whom she was afraid to meet. 

It's an easy platitude, that death is preferable to the pain of being unwanted, but if "want" is the sole parameter for the value of human life, then most of us, probably, don't deserve to be walking around. At some point, someone or other is bound not to have wanted us:  that person we were unrequitedly in love with sophomore year in college, that HR director who didn't consider that our manifest gifts lined up with the job description. And many of us, let's face it, were not as children, and maybe are not as adults, precisely what our mothers would have ordered. Mostly our mothers love us anyway, but even if they didn't, would our lives -- the lives they gave us, willingly or unwillingly, to be our own -- be not worth the trouble?

As I say, I lay awake in the dark thinking about all this, and Sophie's Choice was the audiobook in the background of my mind. I don't expect that K.M.'s story will play out as luridly as Sophie's;  in any event, we'll never know the rest of her story, which is surely a blessing for her and for us. Life, thank God, is not a novel. Still, inasmuch as we do use words like "story" and "journey" to frame the things we do, I think we can say that in one way or another, this mother's story, like Sophie's, will be shaped by this choice, and that however far she may travel, she will never simply walk away from it.

H/T

Meanwhile, consider  the implications of Nebraska's new legislation (about which I have mixed feelings), and more, at Mystical Rose Design, where Lucy et al. are hosting Pro-Life Tuesday.

More Birding Fun

Not that we're really birders qua birders or anything, but we did just download this nifty coloring book. There is a page devoted to the Carolina Wren;  we spent some of our time on the blanket in the grass today coloring wrens and trying to decide how to describe their shape, exactly. "Fat" won out by virtue of being easily spellable.

Some Brief Notes

Stayed out late last night singing Bob Dylan songs in Latin, so this is all I can manage. In fact, I've hardly managed anything all day -- I mean, not managed, as such.

Homeschool today involved watering our gardens, observing the sprouting of seeds (mainly morning glories, sunflowers, and a couple of pumpkins in Helier's garden), lying on a blanket in the backyard grass while we did math and reading, and then watching the pair of wrens who've nested in our bird bottle coming and going. The dog happened to wander into the forsythia under the bird bottle, and they were most seriously displeased, so we forbore from trying to observe the babies at close range.

A friend at this Latin/Dylan shindig last night told me that the thrush has a divided windpipe, which is why it can trill the way it does. Listening to one of the wrens calling from the pecan tree, it occurred to me to wonder whether the same is true of its branch of the family, so to speak:  its sharp little recitative sounded very like a tiny, tiny soprano Buddhist monk splitting his notes.

People had wanted to camp in the backyard tonight, but when I said tentatively yes, so much drama ensued -- who was going to sleep in the tent, who was going to make a tent, and out of what, and with how much help from me when? -- that I waxed exceeding crabby.  Never ask me to find something for you to make a tent out of while I am hanging out the laundry. Make a note of that.  Anyway, I put the kibbosh on the whole enterprise, bad mean mommy, but  everyone seems to be over it now.

Until about five minutes ago, there were teenagers doing the tango  -- Crispina calls it the mango -- in my de-furniturized living room, but they're not there any more.

Sunday Photojournal

On Holy Thursday the big girlies -- Epiphany and Hilaria -- walked up to Main Street and bought me these lovely little napkins in a consignment shop:

I had meant to post a picture of them earlier, but forgot;  anyway, we used them with delight all through the weekend of the Triduum, and here they are, a sweet and wholly unlooked-for surprise from two teenagers who shoot the less-pleasant teenaged-girl stereotypes all to pieces.

After Hilaria went home, she and her mother sent us -- above and beyond, truly, as the pleasure was all ours -- the most fabulous thank-you gift. It came the other day:

The company is Kitchen Garden Seeds, and the catalog in and of itself is a delight. You can see here what I ordered with my gift certificate:  bi-color sweet corn, Painted Lady runner beans, columbines, old-fashioned nasturtiums, lovage, garden sorrel, winter savory, anise hyssop, breadseed poppies, coleus, Johnny-Jump-Ups and Black-Eyed Susans. Much of this got planted yesterday, though some things will need to be started indoors, and I have to save the poppies till the fall or early spring. Meanwhile, our dollar-store Morning Glory, nasturtium, and Four O'Clock seeds are sprouting, as are the sunflower and marigold seeds which I saved with great assiduousness from last year's flowers.

In other news, dandelion-wine-making proceeds apace. That is, we've done the following: 

1. Strained the pretty-much-fermented/at-least-no-longer-foaming mix through several layers of -- well, the directions call for cheesecloth, but I used  clean old cloth napkins -- into a measuring cup, as shown. The result is this attractive pale-gold liquid. It smells fairly nice;  I tasted a little bit, just to see, and I can report that the flavor is not unpleasant -- is quite wine-like, in fact -- though it does have a bit of an aftertaste to remind you that this is the fruit not of the vine, but of the lawn. Still, it's not bad.

We'll see what it tastes like six months from now, when we uncork these bottles:

Not that we've corked them yet, mind you. I decanted the strained wine mixture into sterilized beer and olive-oil bottles, as it happens, and slipped -- these are water balloons, which were all I could find at Dollar Tree in the way of balloons -- over the mouths of the bottles. This was on Wednesday. As you can see, from the get-go the two larger bottles still had quite a bit of fermentation going on. Maybe this was the mix towards the bottom of the crock, where most of the yeast had settled. At any rate, the balloons on those bottles inflated almost at once. I wasn't sure whether we'd see any fermentation action out of the smaller ones, but by the next day, they too had blown up their balloons, and as of yesterday, all four were still fermenting away on the shelf in hall, where I put them to get them off my kitchen counter already:

 

Eventually, of course, the balloons will deflate, and when they've stayed deflated for twenty-four hours, we'll cork or otherwise top the bottles and put them down cellar, where they'll stay until next Thanksgiving or so. Relatives can take it under advisement that we will not be handing these out for Christmas presents this year -- not until we're sure you all won't curse us for inflicting the stuff on you. We'll try it on ourselves first, and if we don't die, then we'll see.

I was writing about Miquon Math and Cuisenaire rods the other day.  Here is one thing you can do with them, according to Crispina: 

And here's the window above my desk, with a bowl of flowers she brought me, just because: 

Through the window you can see the back porch, and the dog's leash hanging up. He has his shrines, and I have mine.

What I Learned This Week By Opening One Book

 I learned that even though we're not using Miquon Math as a curriculum, I really don't want to sell the Lab Sheet Annotations. We've had a set of Cuisenaire Rods for years and used them sporadically, as much for building things as anything else, though now that everyone knows the number value attached to each size and color of rod, even free play with them occasionally leads to small discoveries:  one seven rod is the same length as a four rod and a three rod, for example.

Helier has been working on subtraction with regrouping -- and for the record, I really don't get why the words carry and borrow "need never be introduced," as the authors say, because they seem just as useful in the context of the idea that we're simply rearranging numbers without changing how much is on our plate, so to speak, which I gather is the whole idea behind the term regrouping. At any rate, here's a game in the Lab Sheet Annotations which I think I'm going to try with him and remember when it's Crispina's turn:

Cut out of oaktag or cardboard a stack of squares, 10cm x 10cm, and use them with orange rods [10s] and white rods [1s] as models for hundreds, tens and ones.

What you want to demonstrate, say the authors, is that "regrouping does not change the simple three-digit name of a number." So say you have the number 343. As the authors note, it's crucial that the child understand that something like "2 hundreds + 13 tens + 13 ones = 3 hundreds + 4 tens + 3 ones."

So you can explain this concept by arranging your 10cmx10cm squares and orange and white rods to make the idea visual. If you had enough orange and white rods (we don't at this juncture), you could line up ten orange rods for each hundred and then shift them around to demonstrate that, no matter how you move them, the numbers are happening in something like a ziploc bag, from which nothing can escape and into which nothing can else can penetrate. You have the same amount, however you want to shake-and-bake it. The thought occurs to me that you could accomplish exactly the same thing with dollars, dimes and pennies. We've been saving allowances and counting up what's in the piggy banks lately, so have had a lot of conversation about what 116 cents means in dollars, or how many of which kinds of coins you have to have to make a dollar and go to Dollar Tree and buy little plastic bases for kickball, like the ones Miss Crystal had at Cub Scouts Tuesday night.

Now, this general idea of numbers in a ziploc bag may seem screamingly, boringly obvious to many of you, but I'm fairly sure that it's something I never understood as a child. What went on in math problems just seemed completely arbitrary, and getting something right was a matter of sheer luck, which never seemed to strike me when I needed it.

And although it now seems clear and obvious to me, too, it's the kind of thing I would not have thought to explain. Helier, fortunately, seems to get the concept;  he whizzes through two-digit subtraction with regrouping, and as long as he's recalling his basic facts clearly, he gets everything right without appearing to try all that hard. In fact, he told someone recently that "subtraction" was his favorite subject.

He and Crispina both did math at the breakfast table today, leading Epiphany to comment that she wishes she had liked math at their ages. I wish so, too, both for her and for me. Better late than never, however, and while this tiny regrouping revelation won't make any difference to my "extremely moderate" high-school GPA, or to Epiphany's cumulative average in math classes, either, it will help me to make things that much clearer for the younger ones, and that is something.

Many thanks to Paul, MM, Betty, Lissa, and Lindsey for their contributions last week (which I've simply moved up with the widget to begin this week's link list):  self-knowledge through the lens of a fictional character, the mystery of the chrysalis, and more.

The linky widget is open, and all are welcome to join in. Bang out a little item -- doesn't have to be fancy or long or even in complete sentences -- about something you read this week, include a link to this post, and enter your link in the widget. It'll be open all weekend -- what could be easier?

Friday Poetry

I have mentioned our Cambridge parish's "Millennium Book" (pub. 2005) before. It's a collection of all kinds of surprising things:  anecdotes, photographs, listings of items sold at parish auctions, and the like. Rereading it last night, I discovered this, which had first appeared in The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse:

Vision of Him

Through the Uncreated
     Uncleft, Untrod,
Breathed for a moment
     Sorrow of God.

And lo! It fell starlike --
     Trembling to cease
In His infinite gladness,
     Infinite peace.

     Out of that tremor
     Time was made,
Worlds crept into being,
     Young and afraid.

     Slowly, by beauty,
His creatures grew wise,
Slow dawned its wonder
     On opening eyes.


Men watched adoring
     His waters roll,
Deep flowed His colours
Through sense and soul.

   
     Moan of creation --
     Rapture that stirs--
Blindly they learned it,
     Years upon years.


Till clearly one spirit
Cried on His Name
From all her lovely
And earthly frame.


Light could not veil it,
   Nor darkness dim,
Flesh but receive it --
     Vision of Him.


Deep sunk His answer,
The Word that sufficed --
     Out of her body
Cometh His Christ.

And here, because it's at least as fascinating as the poem, are some excerpts from the little biography which accompanies it:

Amy Clarke (1892-1980)  retired to Cambridge after being Head of Classics at Cheltenham Ladies College . . . It surprised us all that someone as small as she was should have been so successful a teacher, especially as she never raised her voice. In Cambridge, too, as in her school, she was greatly loved and respected. Even Fr. Morcom never called her 'Amy.'

. . .

One anecdote deserves particular mention. One evening she was marking papers and had lost all count of time when there was a knock at the door and she answered it. A large burly man stood there and said that he had come to read her electricity meter. Most people would have been suspicious at that time of night, but Amy showed him wehre the meter was and went back to her marking. Presently the man came into the room where she was and said, 'and now I want all your money.' Amy was too careful to keep much money in the house. She took her purse and produced the equivalent of thirty or forty pence. Whereupon the man suddenly collapsed into a chair and burst into tears. Eventually he explained that he was not used to his form of activity, but being in desperate need of money, had nerved himself, and all for nothing. Amy took pity on him and made him some coffee, and the two sat drinking coffee. After he had gone she rang up the police.

Amy was always a well-organized person, and it was a matter of some surprise when one Sunday, after settling in her usual pew, she got up and went to the back of the church for something she had forgotten. She died the following week.

For some reason, the phrase they don't make them like that any more springs unbidden to the forefront of the mind.

Bonus:  Samuel Menashe at the New York Public Library.
H/T

 

   

Speaking of Books

Get ready for another round of "What I Learned This Week By Opening One Book."

No idea what I'm going to write about. Can't remember anything I've read.

So if you don't know, either, take heart. Something will come to us.

Books in House = Academic Success in Child

So says a study uncovered by my tireless blogging friend Joe Carter. Here's an excerpt:

After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home — and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect — gives children an enormous advantage in school.

“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.

“This is a large effect, both absolutely and in comparison with other influences on education,” adds the research team, led by University of Nevada sociologist M.D.R. Evans. “A child from a family rich in books is 19 percentage points more likely to complete university than a comparable child growing up without a home library.”

This effect holds true regardless of a nation’s wealth, culture or political system, but its intensity varies from country to country. In China, a child whose parents own 500 books will average 6.6 more years of education than a comparable child from a bookless home. In the U.S., the figure is 2.4 years — which is still highly significant when you consider it’s the difference between two years of college and a full four-year degree.

Dolly Parton, among others, has intuited this kind of thing for years. Her "Imagination Station" program promotes childhood literacy via a kind of book-club approach, sending a child an "age-appropriate book" a month from birth until the child enters kindergarten. It's an idea on the right side of common sense:   a child is more likely to be a reader if, from the time he is born, books are part of his environment. 

Still, this study raises questions about the efficacy of a program like "Imagination Station," laudable though it is. Academic success, it appears, depends not so much on a given child's receiving "age-appropriate books" as it does on his being exposed to the hodgepodge of books which reading parents collect over the years, and on -- presumably -- seeing his parents read them, and choose to read them, over the lure of the television or the XBox. A home library of five hundred books or more will surely include books the parents themselves read as children and loved enough to hang on to, and that -- the I adored this book/now you read it syndrome -- has got to have some impact as well.

On the other hand, parents can value books precisely because books are alien to their environment. One commenter on Joe's post at First Thoughts writes movingly about the difference in her own life wrought by a set of World Book Encyclopedias. Her father, a poor cotton farmer, sacrificed to buy these books, the only books in the house, which . . . well, you know all the cliches about books' opening up new worlds, but the fact that they're cliches doesn't make them untrue.  When we were home at Christmas, my mother gave me our family's old set of world Books, circa 1973, and for days the children pored over them. Books about everything! What more could anyone want? The children in that cotton-farming household, whose parents -- though relatively uneducated  -- regarded books as something worth having, grew up to earn advanced degrees and, if I'm remembering right, to be teachers themselves.

So . . .  well, I can't pursue this further right now, because there's a line for the computer, and I've got to print out some school transcripts for a summer-program application that's otherwise ready to go in the mail. But I am wondering about all this, and about the making of readers in general. Several other commenters on Joe's post lament that, despite their own love for books, not all their children have grown up with a hunger for reading. Can you make a person love reading? Or is it a horse/water kind of thing? All my children thus far are enthusiastic readers, though what they prefer to read is a mixed bag . . . Anyway, I've got to leave this hanging for now, but conversation is most enthusiastically welcomed.

And I'm not trying to diss Dolly Parton, by the way, or the idea of sending out free books to children. Just wondering about the whole picture.

Wild Mountain Thyme

Addendum:    My friend Ethan suggests a listen to  "The Braes of Balquhidder,"the song at the roots, so to speak, of "Wild Mountain Thyme." Here are the lyrics, so you can sing right along.

Also, more from the Corries here, courtesy of Pentimento.


Sandy Denny (a rather Elfine-ish video):




The Corries:



The Silencers (very MTV-1980s-ish video):



Joan Baez:



Baez with Dylan:

A Midsummer Night's Scream

For the past several years, the homeschooled high-schoolers in our area have put on an annual "formal ceili" in place of a prom. A step-dancing friend of ours calls dances for the kids several times during the year, and this one follows the same formula -- some Irish folk dances, some German and Russian folk dances, some waltzes, some swing dancing, at least one funky line dance, and the Cotton-Eyed Joe -- except that pretty invitations are sent out, and everyone dresses up in prom attire.

Last year's prom cost us maybe $20:     we got Epiphany's dress and shoes at Goodwill;  she borrowed my filmy white scarf;  I made her a corsage of flowers from the yard;  we contributed raspberry-lemonade punch and sugar cookies to the refreshment table. This year Goodwill has marked up their formal dresses to $9.99, but hers is a little black knee-length number which still cost about $5. Her black spike-heel "I'm-only-wearing-these-for-something-to-take-off" shoes came from another consignment shop for about $8. The raspberry-lemonade punch was a hit, so I imagine we'll be making that again.

This year, as last year, Epiphany's on the prom-planning committee, and it has fallen to her to devise a theme and decorations. As of last night the planners have settled on her original suggestion, A Midsummer Night's Dream, but some of the other theme ideas have been "slightly amusing," as she says. Ask a boy to suggest a prom theme, and you're going to get Zombie Apocalypse -- any monkey could tell you that.

Anyway, A Midsummer Night's Dream it is. Aelred proposes to turn up in green tights, and I have suggested that they offer a prize to anyone who comes wearing an ass's head. In the meantime, we've got to gather some foresty decor. Of course, the dance isn't technically at Midsummer, but May is a better time from the flower perspective;  the roses will be blooming, and possibly this year the corsage won't wilt in the car on the way to the festivities. Daylilies are all very well, but they don't call them daylilies for nothing.

The prom date is May 8, and any teenagers in the greater Fiat-Panacea Falls area are warmly invited. Dates (the non-calendar kind) are nice but not necessary.

Wut Kinda Dawg Is That?

 A blurry dawg wut hates  to have his pitcher took, that's wut. I done wrote about him befower, but I caint thinka nothing else to write about rat now.

OK, Ernest T.,  you can go on home now. 

Because it's State Dog Breed Day around here, as I have just now this very minute declared. And this is, more or less, the North Carolina State Dog. He's not all the way the State Dog;  he has labrador-retriever ears which look a little undignified on the State Dog standard-issue body.  Here is what he would look like with the right ears:

No no no. Not that. This:

And if he'd taken deportment lessons, and we quit dropping quite so much food off the table all the time, he would look like the dog below right:

He is descended, so I read, from the Hanoverian Schweisshund, several specimens of which were brought to the American colonies from Germany by members of a certain Plott family, by whose name, over successive generations, the hounds they bred came to be known. The Plott Hound was bred to hunt coon and bear;  our dog has been known to climb the big pecan tree out back in pursuit of a squirrel. From the fastness of the front porch he defends us stalwartly, with much hackle-raising and a big, musical bark, from Mrs. Bea McCutcheon, age 96, and her equivalently-aged one-eyed Pekingese.

Up close and personal, he is a gentle-tempered, patient dog, especially with children. Like most hounds, he can't be let off-leash outside the fenced yard, and he drools a lot, which takes some getting used to. He's an active, energetic dog who could hike all day without getting tired, but in the house he's just as happy to lie on the futon, or cower under the desk by my feet if there's any weather going on.

Here is a Plott Hound treeing a bear (dark, but you can see one dog up on a branch of the tree): 



This one's treeing a cat. The voice and tail action are awfully familiar:

 

So, there you go. State Dog Breed Day. Do any other states have official state dog breeds? I had never heard of the Plott Hound till we moved here and began looking for a dog -- they kept showing up in my searches of local shelters (though not nearly as often as pit bulls showed up . . . ).

And now that we've learned all this, it's time to go do school.

Steeleye Span: The Lark in the Morning

My favorite comment on this video:  "The 70's were different - not only did musicians sound like musicians - people looked like people."

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Throw Out the Easter Grass . . .

Caption this picture, and I'll send you the rabbit, assuming nobody's eaten its head off already.

Bluebells

Backyard Babies

Wrens. One of the parents was yakking away at Helier and me yesterday afternoon when we were out gardening. It always amazes me that one tiny bird can be so utterly melodious and cacophonous at will. Today both parents were away someplace, so Crispina and I crept up for a closer look. I thought I was just showing her a nest, but lo, we counted two outsized yellow beaks in there before backing quietly away.

Listen to the wren's song.

A sonogram demonstrating a Carolina wren's scolding call.

Here's the wood thrush -- I found one of these singing his heart out in the apple tree last week.

Dandelion Wine

Steeping . . .

And fermenting . . .

Mmm-mmm. I took these pictures Friday;  as of today, the fermenting batch is still bubbling, though not so much, and I'm about to boil up the steeping batch with orange juice and rind, plus a handful of raisins, then once it's cooled, strain it and set it up with some yeast to start the bubbling business.

What I Learned This Week By Opening One Book

The Sagas of Icelanders it is.  

I picked the book up last night:  there it was on the bedroom shelf,  a nice fat read, and Aelred had  given it to me several years ago for my birthday or something, so no time like the present, I thought.

Here's my favorite excerpt so far, concerning a feast at which King Harald, having conquered much territory in Norway, holds court at Trondheim:

Of all his followers, the king held his poets in highest regard, and let them sit on the bench opposite his high seat. Farthest inside sat Audun the Uninspired, who was the oldest and had been poet to King Harald's father, Halfdan the Black. Next to him sat Thorbjorn Raven, and the Olvir Hump. Bard was given the seat next to him and was nicknamed Bard the White or Bard the Strong. He was popular with everyone and became a close companion of Olvir's.

Now, I could travel far and wide before I found another tidbit of information so absolutely gratifying as this, that King Harald had inherited from his father a poet called "Audun the Uninspired."  Uninspired, and he serves two kings and gets the warmest seat in the house. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun, in the way of the government job at any rate.

What fascinates me most about these sagas is  the very telling of them. They read like nothing so much as paintings from which the concept of perspective is utterly absent:  not only medieval paintings, but even ancient Egyptian paintings come to mind, with their paper-doll people and incredible busyness from which, if you look long enough, an actual narrative begins to emerge. There's that famous painting of the man hunting birds from a boat with a slingshot, for example, which looks chaotic at first -- all those disparate birds swarming around the man's head, the tiny adult-looking person crouched between his feet -- precisely because there's no depth, no formal composition save juxtopositions of large and small human figures (the man is large, his wife medium-sized, his child small, just like the Three Bears, though unlike Baby Bear, the child isn't childlike).

OK, where was I? Oh, well, the Sagas read an awful lot like that Egyptian painting. Everything that happens is written down:  Every son of a given man, with nickname, whether he has any role to play beyond that of mere existence or not. Every nickname assigned to a given man, whether the nickname makes sense or not. If the reader stops to ponder why Olvir is Olvir Hump, while his brother Eyvind gets called Lamb, then the reader is left to eat their dust in the road. We have been trained to think that nicknames mean something and are themselves part of the story, if not the story itself, but not these Vikings. Nope, it's "Kari the berserk had two sons with these names about which there is nothing that interesting and you should have no questions;  now move along. There's some treachery and killing up ahead, and we want to get to it."

Actually, the internal logic of these stories in many ways strikes me as similar to the internal logic of a child's story. The storyteller tells, and tells, and tells -- and then this happened, and then this, and here came this person, and this happened -- and if the storyteller really is a child, the story just stops:  "And then they got the mail. The end."

If the storyteller is a Viking, the story also more or less just stops:  "And this long, long story has ended up being about Egil, and he got sick and died, and many years later a really, really hard skull was said to be Egil's. The end." Of course, unlike a child's story, a Viking Saga's various small actions add up to greater sweeps of action, as in the disinheriting and revenge of the sons of Hildirid. Men's petty injustices to each other accumulate and trigger larger injustices. Largely, though, the "plot" of Egil's Saga, at any rate, mimics the randomness of daily life, a collection of happenings among people, which may or may not wind up meaning something, against the big bleak backdrop of pagan stoicism.

So I don't know that that counts as "learning" anything, really. I read a bit, and this is what I thought about. Meanwhile, I also read the seed catalog -- which I'm going to say doesn't count as a book, so that I'm still only talking about one book -- from which I learned, among other things, that one should cure newly-harvested sweet potatoes in a ventilated crate or basket for 8 to 10 days:  "so that their innate sweetness and moist, creamy texture may develop."

ADDENDUM:  Meanwhile, fresh off his Tournament of Novels, Joe Carter at First Things asks, "Why is Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio on everybody's 'Top 100 Novels' list?"

He also asks, "What's so great about the Great Books?" How would all you classical homeschoolers and other lovers of Aristotle answer him? The comments on Joe's post are largely excellent, by the way, and point towards a refutation of the oft-made claim that reading the Dead White Men insulates students from different value systems and points of view, a claim which rests on the erroneous assumption that Plato and Kant, being both Dead White Guys, believe all the same things. One particularly good comment reads:

Another blog, discussing “What’s so Great About Great Books,” posits the problem that these so-called great books are not repositories of Truth as many would claim, but instead confuse the reader with conflicting and conflicted perspectives. I say, yes! That is the point! Out of the chaos, is there not some connective tissue, some pattern that students should learn to identify. A comment on the article states that the best students in freshman writing have often been exposed to Great Books. Well, of course they are. They have been forced to confront different and challenging perspectives, ideas, narratives, emotions, reactions, solutions. And they will either change their own narratives or reinforce them. Either way, the student has looked at patterns within the literature and come up with a way to make sense of them. (read more)

Anyway, back to what we learned this week . . . 

So, you? What did you read this week? What did you take away from it? Leave a link in the widget below or, alternatively, feel free to leave a comment. The list will be open all weekend, so have at it.

Bread and Milk and Motherhood

Bread and milk are plain fare, peasant food, but anybody who has ever baked bread also knows that the humble loaf of bread is a beautiful symbol of hearth and home, a work of patience and attention, a hands on process requiring some attention and feel for when the dough is 'just right.'

Milk, too, is both an ordinary food, and one of two foods God used to describe the promised land, one flowing with milk and honey. The Proverbs 31 woman is to have the law of kindness on her tongue, and we speak metaphorically of a kind and generous soul as one flowing with the milk of human kindness. Bread is a metaphor, too. It's a metaphor for our Lord, who is the Bread of Life. He gives us life, and we give it back to Him.

Read the rest.

Friday Poetry: Macronic Fun

Epiphany brought the following home from Latin class some weeks back. It wasn't very Lenten, so I didn't post it then, but here it is now, in all its gloria:

Carmen Possum

THE NOX was lit by lux of Luna,
And ’twas a nox most opportuna
To catch a possum or a coona;
For nix was scattered o’er this mundus,
A shallow nix, et non profundus.
On sic a nox with canis unus,
Two boys went out to hunt for coonus.
The corpus of this bonus canis
Was full as long as octo span is,
But brevior legs had canis never
Quam had hic dog; et bonus clever.
Some used to say, in stultum jocum
Quod a field was too small locum
For sic a dog to make a turnus
Circum self from stem to sternus.
Unis canis, duo puer,
Nunquam braver, nunquam truer,
Quam hoc trio nunquam fuit,
f there was I never knew it.
This bonus dog had one bad habit,
Amabat much to tree a rabbit,
Amabat plus to chase a rattus,
Amabat bene tree a cattus.
But on this nixy moonlight night
This old canis did just right.
Nunquam treed a starving rattus,
Nunquam chased a starving cattus,
But sucurrit on, intentus
On the track and on the scentus,
Till he trees a possum strongum,
In a hollow trunkum longum.
Loud he barked in horrid bellum,
Seemed on terra vehit pellum.
Quickly ran the duo puer
Mors of possum to secure.
Quam venerit, one began
To chop away like quisque man.
Soon the axe went through the truncum
Soon he hit it all kerchunkum;
Combat deepens, on ye braves!
Canis, pueri et staves
As his powers non longius carry,
Possum potest non pugnare.
On the nix his corpus lieth.
Down to Hades spirit flieth,
Joyful pueri, canis bonus,
Think him dead as any stonus.
Now they seek their pater’s domo,
Feeling proud as any homo,
Knowing, certe, they will blossom
Into heroes, when with possum
They arrive, narrabunt story,
Plenus blood et plenior glory.
Pompey, David, Samson, Caesar,
Cyrus, Black Hawk, Shalmanezer!
Tell me where est now the gloria,
Where the honors of victoria?
Nunc a domum narrent story,
Plenus sanguine, tragic, gory.
Pater praiseth, likewise mater,
Wonders greatly younger frater.
Possum leave they on the mundus,
Go themselves to sleep profundus,
Somniunt possums slain in battle,
Strong as ursae, large as cattle.
When nox gives way to lux of morning,
Albam terram much adorning,
Up they jump to see the varmin,
Of the which this is the carmen.
Lo! possum est resurrectum!
Ecce pueri dejectum,
Ne relinquit back behind him,
Et the pueri never find him.
Cruel possum! bestia vilest,
How the pueros thou beguilest!
Pueri think non plus of Caesar,
Go ad Orcum, Shalmanezer,
Take your laurels, cum the honor,
Since ista possum is a goner!

H/T

 This is not a possum. Nor is it the canis of the poem. I don't think. But if you were to ask a certain member of this household how she feels about, oh, I don't know, photo-I.D. cards and standardized college-entrance exams, this is the kind of response you might expect right now.

Get Back, Jack!

What I Learned This Week By Opening One Book returns tomorrow. Oh, what shall I write about? What will it be?

The Sagas of the Icelanders? 

The John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds catalog? (Thank you, Susan, thank you thank you!)

The Miquon Math Lab Sheet Annotations? 

The Catholic Choirbook I? 

Around and around and around she goes . . . and where she stops, only they who tune in tomorrow will know (and I hope you've got some links simmering at the ready, too).

Once a Methodist, Always

. . .  a  person  who appreciates  "O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing." 

Here's what John Wesley had to say about ye congregational hymn-singing:

I. Learn these tunes before you learn any others; afterwards learn as many as you please.

II. Sing them exactly as they are printed here, without altering or mending them at all; and if you have learned to sing them otherwise, unlearn it as soon as you can.

III. Sing all. See that you join with the congregation as frequently as you can. Let not a single degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up, and you will find it a blessing.

IV. Sing lustily and with good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep; but lift up your voice with strength. Be no more afraid of your voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard, than when you sung the songs of Satan.

V. Sing modestly. Do not bawl, so as to be heard above or distinct from the rest of the congregation, that you may not destroy the harmony; but strive to unite your voices together, so as to make one clear melodious sound.

VI. Sing in time. Whatever time is sung be sure to keep with it. Do not run before nor stay behind it; but attend close to the leading voices, and move therewith as exactly as you can; and take care not to sing to slow. This drawling way naturally steals on all who are lazy; and it is high time to drive it out from us, and sing all our tunes just as quick as we did at first.

VII. Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing him more than yourself, or any other creature. In order to do this attend strictly to the sense of what you sing, and see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually; so shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve here, and reward you when he cometh in the clouds of heaven.

And on the hymns themselves:

May I be permitted to add a few words with regard to the poetry? Then I will speak to those who are judges thereof, with all freedom and unreserve.

To these I may say, without offence, 1. In these hymns there is no doggerel; no botches; nothing put in to patch up the rhyme; no feeble expletives. 2. Here is nothing turgid or bombast, on the one hand, or low and creeping, on the other. 3. Here are no cant expressions; no words without meaning. Those who impute this to us know not what they say. We talk common sense, both in prose and verse, and use no word but in a fixed and determinate sense. 4. Here are, allow me to say, both the purity, the strength, and the elegance of the English language; and, at the same time, the utmost simplicity and plainness, suited to every capacity. Lastly, I desire men of taste to judge, (these are the only competent judges) whether there be not in some of the following hymns the true spirit of poetry, such as cannot be acquired by art and labour, but must be the gift of nature. By labour a man may become a tolerable imitator of Spencer, Shakespeare, or Milton; and may heap together pretty compound epithets, as “pale-eyed,” “meek-eyed,” and the like; but unless he be born a poet, he will never attain the genuine spirit of poetry.

. . .  That which is of infinitely more moment than the spirit of poetry, is the spirit of piety. And I trust, all persons of real judgment will find this breathing through the whole Collection. It is in this view chiefly, that I would recommend it to every truly pious reader, as a means of raising or quickening the spirit of devotion; of confirming his faith; of enlivening his hope; and of kindling and increasing his love to God and man. When Poetry thus keeps its place, as the handmaid of Piety, it shall attain, not a poor perishable wreath, but a crown that fadeth not away.

Just thought that was all like interesting and stuff.

H/T

Homeschool Notes

Much is happening in the wide world, and there are darknesses which cast shadows in my heart. Still, the duty which every day presents is to get up and live it, and so we've been doing here.

Our school day included, in roughly this order:

*a decade of the rosary (the First Glorious Mystery, the Resurrection)

*a brief reading from Marigold Hunt's Saint Patrick's Summer

*short piano lessons, aimed at helping us to train all our fingers to do what we want them to. I had Crispina, for example, first wiggle all five fingers of her right hand as I called out their numbers, one (thumb) through five (pinky). Then I had her drum those fingers on the desk as I called their numbers. Then we played up and down from Middle C to G, using all the fingers. Finally, we started work on a tiny piece which uses the first three fingers. When she got restless, we called it quits. What I've noticed, in the few weeks we've had the piano, is that the little bits I dole out in these very short lessons get practiced:  I'm bad about remembering to tell people to practice, but everyone likes to play on the piano, and after a while, playing tunes, though initially more difficult,  becomes more interesting than simply banging.

*math review:  addition with sums to 11 for Crispina;  subtraction with regrouping for Helier;  divisibility for Amicus.

*reading practice for Crispina;  independent reading for Helier and Amicus

*making dandelion wine. I began a batch the other day, using a recipe from The Backyard Homestead. Epiphany, Amicus and I spent an hour or so laboriously separating the petals from their stems and sepals (apparently the green parts impede the fermentation process). We then poured boiling water over the petals and let them steep for three days. Today being the third day, we brought the flower-water mixture to a boil again, stirred in sugar, cooled it down, and added yeast. We read a bit about yeast and its activities and byproducts in Janice van Cleave's Biology for Every Kid (the experiment on page 82, if you're interested), then began watching the yeast. Currently it's forming big boily carbon-dioxide bubbles over the top of the future wine, and all the children have remarked that the kitchen smells like bread. We're to leave it alone for two days to a week, whenever the bubbles stop forming, then strain it and decant it into bottles, which we then top with deflated balloons to watch for further fermentation. Once the ballons stay deflated for twenty-four hours, we can cork the bottles and store them in the basement.

We also went out and picked the latest crop of dandelion flowers for another round of wine-making. This time, on a whim, I added clover blossoms and a few violets. Of course, it'll be six months before we discover how any of this turns out, but it's all an interesting experiment, and the yeast action is pretty darn dramatic. Besides, it's something to do, not only with the dandelions, but also with all the glass bottles which seem to pile up around here.

*Epiphany's at the college today for Latin and dance, but I also know that she's reading Edgar Lee Masters for English and prepping for the ACT.

*At this writing, the boys are finishing  an afternoon of room-cleaning (ay ay ay), and Crispina is doing a bit of the same. I'm being asked to go and inspect.

P.S. Forgot to mention that our current read-aloud is Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family, the first in a sweet series about a Jewish family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1900's.