Archive | May 2004

Homeschooled or tutored?

May31

I found this quote in reference to something the author saw at a national park mentioning that Teddy Roosevelt was “homeschooled.”

People have been educating their children at home for centuries, but “home-schooling” has a contemporary political edge, and it doesn’t fit the Roosevelts.

Home-schooling is an act against “the establishment,” or at least apart from it. The Roosevelts couldn’t be against “the establishment”; they were the people who established the establishment.

So the term “homeschooled” has political connotations that “tutored” does not? Exactly what political connotations is the author, Ruth Walker, drawing? Could it be the “right-wing, fundamentalist, Republican” stereotype? And was TR himself really an establishment kind of guy? He was rather unorthodox and had a rather unorthodox childhoood as far as I remember. I think TR’s family would have fit in quite well with the homeschoolers I know–except that they (the Roosevelts) were rich and, unfortunately, most of us aren’t.

County Chronicle by Angela Thirkell

May31

I just finished reading County Chronicle by Angela Thirkell. The book begins with a proposal and then a marriage and ends with two proposals, marriages yet to come (in the next book?). So it’s a comedy, right? Angela Thirkell seems to have published about one book a year from 1930 until 1959–32 books in all by my count. This book, published in 1950, actually takes place two or three years after WW II. The problems in the novel, although distressing to the characters, involve nothing more serious than a lack of petrol, uncomfortable living arrangements, and unkind relatives. Still the story manages to hold my interest and keep me reading, and lately that’s an accomplishment. I’m supposing that these books are more or less like an English country soap opera and that the characters continue from one book to the next. Actually, the main complaint I have about the book is that there are so many characters, and they’re hard to keep sorted. Nevertheless, Ms. Thirkell has a gift for vivid description and interesting situations. And it’s all very clerical and gentle and pleasantly English. I already have another book by the same author, Private Enterprises that I plan to read next (even though it comes before the one I just read). Maybe someone should do a soap opera based on these books. Lifetime network? It would be a nice change from woman in danger and disease of the week.

G.K. Chesterton

May30

Whoa, go back three steps–actually one day. Yesterday was the birthday of G.K. Chesterton, and I can’t miss that one. He has so many great quotes. And Father Brown and The Man Who Was Thursday and Orthodoxy are such great books.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. To me, this means do it and enjoy it no matter what your level of competency. You don’t have to be a great singer to sing, and you don’t have to be a great writer to blog.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. Often quoted, but still true.

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense. Chesterton on homeschooling?

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. I get very impatient with children who are bored or who say they are bored.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare. I wish I could develop true contentment, but I greatly fear that I am unwilling to put in the work required to get there.

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink. Wow, talk about praying without ceasing. This habit, too, would be good to develop.

Significant events in US History

May27

I’ve been working for most of the day on a syllabus for the AP American History class that I’m teaching for a group of homeschooled high schoolers next year. I’m tired of working on it, so I have a question. What do you all think are the most significant events, people, or movements in U.S. history? I think I read in an interview once that Ken Burns thought the Civil War defined us as a people. He also made PBS series on jazz music and on baseball because he thought those were characteristically American inventions. If you were a film maker or an author, what or whom would you feature in your work as key to what makes us truly American? I have several thoughts. Immigration, perhaps? Our unique, sometimes rocky, relationship with Europe and Western culture? The whole Westward movement? Protestant individualistic Christianity?
As for people, who is the quintessential American? Benjamin Franklin? I think he was too fond of the French and spent too much time in France pretending to be an American. George Washington? Too remote and aristocratic. Abraham Lincoln? Maybe. The log cabin to president, rags to riches, theme is very American.
What do you think?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-

May25

For Second Daughter:All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

For Eldest Son: Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

For Eldest Daughter: No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

For Dear Husband: Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

For Everyone to Ponder: People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.

Arnold Lobel

May22

Today is the birthday of Arnold Lobel, author and illustrator of many, many children’s books including, Frog and Toad Are Friends and Owl at Home. In fact, one biographer noted that Mr. Lobel died in 1987 leaving a legacy of over 100 books that he either wrote or illustrated. What a legacy!
It’s an especially fine legacy since many of Lobel’s stories are memorable and thought provoking for adults as well as children. A long time ago a friend read me the story Cookies from the book Frog and Toad Together. In this tale, Toad bakes some cookies, and then Frog and Toad try, unsuccessfully, to keep themselves from eating all the cookies. In the midst of their fight against temptation, Frog says that they need will power which he defines as “trying hard not to do something that you really want to do.” At the end of the story, Toad is sad because the cookies are all gone. Frog says, “Yes, but we have lots and lots of will power.” Toad is not consoled. Neither am I when left with useless will power but no cookies. And isn’t it true that when I need will power to resist temptation it’s never enough, and I only have plenty of will power in the abstract when there’s no real place to exercise it.
Other unforgetable stories include:
A List in which Toad loses his list of things to do and is paralyzed and unable to do anything
A Lost Button in which Toad loses his button and shouts this immortal rant, “The whole world is covered with buttons and not one them is mine!”
A Swim in which Toad looks funny in his bathing suit.
Tear-Water Tea from the book Owl at Home in which Owl thinks of sad things to make himself cry so that he can make tea from his tears.
Mouse Soup in which a mouse tells stories a la Sheherazade in order to keep from beng cooked into a weasel’s soup.

Lobel was a great story-teller himself, and I am indebted to him for many smiles and pleasant read-aloud times.

Books by Arnold Lobel can be borrowed by member families from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

Catch-22

May19

Boston Globe, April 20, 2004:
The latest inside account of the Bush administration has provided fresh fodder for John F. Kerry’s campaign, with the presumptive Democratic nominee yesterday condemning the president for reportedly allowing the Saudis to maintain high gasoline prices until just before the fall election, when they would be cut to boost the US economy.
Washington Post, May 19, 2004:
Sen. John F. Kerry attacked President Bush on Tuesday for failing to take action to prevent a steep rise in gasoline prices, which hit an average of $2 a gallon this week, and for supporting policies that have enhanced corporations and wealthy Americans at the expense of middle-class families.

Let me see if I understand this. If gasoline prices go down before the election in November, it will be because Bush cut a deal with his Saudi friends in order to win the election. If prices remain high, it’s Bush’s fault because he wants to make his oil business friends even richer. So either way, Bush is the bad guy, and Kerry would propose, what?
Kerry outlined several steps that he said would help hold down gasoline prices, including diverting oil going into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and said the president has failed to do anything serious to stem the price rise.

Of course, we should deplete our emergency supplies of oil because the world is now a safe place, and we don’t need those old “strategic reserves” anyway–or rather, we need them now to bring down gasoline priices for the summer. And Kerry wants me to vote for him for president?

Omar Khayyam

May18

Today is also the birthday of Omar Khayyam. In addition to being a poet, Khayyam was also a mathemetician and an astronomer. My engineer husband would like this:
Khayyam measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days. Two comments on this result. Firstly it shows an incredible confidence to attempt to give the result to this degree of accuracy. We know now that the length of the year is changing in the sixth decimal place over a person’s lifetime. Secondly it is outstandingly accurate. For comparison the length of the year at the end of the 19th century was 365.242196 days, while today it is 365.242190 day
He was born in 1048 in Nishapur, Persia. Omar Khayyam’s full name was Ghiyath al-Din Abu’l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami. (That great long name reminds me of the picture book Tikki Tikki Tembo. Lots of things remind me of picture books.)

Unborn Tomorrow and dead Yesterday
Why fret about them if Today be sweet?

Perhaps we fret because if yesterday was disastrous and if tomorrow hath a foreboding look, today is unlikely to be very sweet.

Lillian Hoban

May18

Today is the birthday of Lillian Hoban, one of my favorite children’s authors and illustrators. She illustrated the Frances books which are favorites around here. We love Frances the badger who has trouble going to bed and is sometimes a very picky eater. I also really like another of Russell and Lillian Hoban’s books–Nothing To Do. As I remember it, this book is the story of a little badger boy who can’t find anything to do until his father gives him a very useful talisman. I haven’t seen this book in years and years; it’s out of print. I found several used copies at Amazon, and I think I’ll ask for one for my birthday.

Nehushtan

May16

2 Kings 18:4 He (Hezekiah) removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones, and cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it. (It was called Nehushtan.)

My pastor preached on this text this morning, and although I don’t think it was the pastor’s intention, God used his sermon to confirm to me that our family should leave the Southern Baptist denomination. His basic thesis was that good snakes (things, rituals, traditions, programs that focus and anchor our faith in God) sometimes become bad snakes (things that lead us into idolatry and cause us to be blind to the new thing that God is doing). As I said in an earlier post, I have been Southern Baptist all my life. I love Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong, Sunday School at 9:45, The Old Rugged Cross and Victory in Jesus, the Cooperative program, Glorieta, and Sunday School literature published by the Sunday School Board. I received my undergraduate degree from a Southern Baptist university, Hardin-Simmons in Abilene. I have been a member of six different Southern Baptist churches over the past 45 years. I believe what Southern Baptists believe.
However, I am seeing that God may want to do a new thing in my life and that of my family. In Experiencing God, Henry Blackaby says that we are supposed to see where God is at work and join him there. Well, I see God working in my children to cause them to grow in character and Christian maturity at the Evangelical Free church that we are visiting. I don’t see them growing or learning at our Southern Baptist church. Our SBC church seems to me to be stuck in the past in a bunch of church growth methodology and feel-good pop psychology religion. That is a harsh assessment, and I can’t guarantee that the church we go to (if we go) will be completely different. But it seems to me today that God is telling me that I’ve been holding on to an old dead snake, even burning incense to it. I need to let go and move on to the new thing.
(By the way, I realize that it’s an oversimplification and a distortion of God’s Word to say that The Story of the Snakes means that we should always give up the old ways in favor of whatever is new. Change is not always good. The Holy Spirit and Scripture must finally rule in all things.)

I found this excellent sermon on Nehushtan by Spurgeon.