Archive | January 2008

On Monday This Space Is Reserved for Huckabee

Jan14

Dave Barry asks: And is there any TV show that Mike Huckabee will NOT appear on? Are we going to see him one of these nights on Deal or No Deal? Why does anybody, aside from Howie Mandel’s immediate family, watch that show?

And I say to Mr. Barry, why not? If Howie Mandel, whoever he is, and his family, are willing to listen to what Mr. Huckabee has to say, why shouldn’t he appear on their show? I wish Mr. Huckabee would make an appearance on my blog. I’d love to interview him and ask him a few questions.

Such as:

What do you really think about education and homeschooling? I’m seeing lots of prominent homeschoolers who support Huckabee and others who adamantly oppose your candidacy. What can you, Mr. Huckabee, say that will reassure the opposition that you will support parents’ rights to direct the education of their own children?

I’ve heard allegations that while you were governor of Arkansas you and your wife were the recipients of many, many gifts, “more than $112,000 in one year alone.” Are these allegations true? If so, was your governorship compromised by the gifts you received from businesses and individuals?

How would your “fair tax” proposal actually help me, the mother of eight children in a one-salary household in which that salary is solidly middle-class, but still hard to stretch to meet the needs of ten people?

Mr. Huckabee, you have said that the first step towards immigration reform is securing our borders. How would you secure our borders? (Please don’t tell me you’re going to build a fence!)

O.K., that’s four fair questions. I could probably look around and do some research and get at least partial answers to those questions. But if Mr. Huckabee wants to leave a comment . . .

As of now, I’m supporting Mike Huckabee for president because I like his principled stand on issues such as the right to life, tax reform, traditional marriage, and national security. Unlike some of the other candidates, he comes across as honest and straightforward. If you’re not Mike Huckabee, but you have the answers to any or all of my questions, feel free to leave a comment, too.

As for Dave Barry, I’d be happy to interview him, too. I could change the name and a few of the details, use the same questions, and probably get a laugh at the very least.

Sunday Invitation to Joy

Jan13

Randy Alcorn, Joel Stein, Starbucks, and Heaven: “As much as I disagree with his worldview, I found Joel to be sharp, engaging and witty; the kind of person I’d enjoy having lunch with. (I might enjoy it more than he would.) I was friendly and unapologetic about my beliefs, and he was professional and considerate.”

Risking Can be Fun from Amy Letinsky: “Honestly, I don’t know what God was up to with this one. Sometimes, he reveals his purposes pretty clearly; other times, it’s anybody’s guess. If I had to pin down his motives behind this one, I’d say that God was just showing me how much fun I could have if I was willing to trust him more, to take risks, even if I don’t know the outcome, even if my pride might get wounded or my self esteem might go a little lower.”

Ten Ideas for Living Intentionally in the Suburbs

I live in Major Suburbia. I absolutely believe that it is possible (and desirable) to live an intentionally Christian life in suburbia. Wherever you live, I pray that this day and this week is for you a week of risk-taking, unapologetic faith, and authentic Christianity. And I ask you to please pray the same for me.

Weekly Homeschool Report: January 11, 2008

Jan11

We started back to school this week, what Melissa would call “high-tide homeschooling.” At least we tried. I had to be gone a lot taking my parents to doctor’s appointments, visiting the hospital, and running errands. So the urchins were on their own some of the time. They did quite well, considering.

History:

The Story of the World, Vol. 1 by Susan Wise Bauer: The Library of Nineveh, Nebuchadnezzar’s Madness, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon read to Betsy-bee and Z-baby.

Karate Kid and I read about Pericles, Phidias the Sculptor, Herodotus, the Father of History, and Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesion War. Then we began reading about Alcibiades, the archetype of a teenaged rebel, except that I don’t think he was nearly that young. (We’re reading Greenleaf’s Famous Men of Ancient Greece.)

Brown Bear Daughter is working in the history/literature curriculum, Ancient History: A Literature Approach by Rea Berg (Beautiful Feet). She’s studying the Greeks right now just as Karate Kid is. We also used Michael Macrone’s book, It’s Greek to Me! as a reference, and I read Goddess of Yesterday by Caroline B. Cooney, the story of a girl living during the time leading up to the Trojan War, review pending.

Language:

First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise. With Betsy-Bee, age 8, and Z-baby, age 6, I reviewed the five poems we learned last semester, started learning a new poem, Dancing by Eleanor Farjeon, and discussed nouns, pronouns, and initials.

Betsy-Bee and Karate Kid did Dailygrams each day.

Math:
The older students use Saxon math, and the younger two use Miquon. We follow the philosophy of “slow and steady” in math, just making sure we do a lesson or a page or two each day, rain or shine.

Books read to and with Z-baby, age 6, this week:

The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss.

Several Berenstain Bear books.

Science:

Brown Bear Daughter is working in Apologia General Science, and the rest of us are reading about the human body. This week we talked about eating and digestion. Z-baby is taking a class at our homeschool co-op called The Human Body, and the others are just reading and discussing. We’ll start reading from our book I Am Joe’s Body again if we ever figure out where we put it before Christmas. The book, based on a Reader’s Digest series, has a bit of evolutionary nonsense in it, but I just skip those parts.

The bane of my life: misplaced books and lost learning tools (pencils, pens, scissors, tape, stapler, hole punch, etc.)

The joy of my homeschool life: children who come together and do school and learn whether I can be here or not.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born January 11th

Jan11

Alan Paton is a South African author, famous for his book Cry, the Beloved Country about the system of racial apartheid that kept South Africa in turmoil for so many years. Alan Paton is a writer you should read. There are passages in Cry, the Beloved Country that bring tears to my eyes whenever I read them. And here’s a brief discussion of a couple of Mr. Paton’s other books.

A writer who can evoke emotion that well and who writes hope in the midst of tragedy is not to be missed.

Information on teaching Cry, the Beloved Country.

Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction

Jan11

Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis (Scholastic Press) is the winner of the 2008 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction.

I read someone’s review of the book comparing it to The Great Brain series (sorry, I don’t remember who), and the book does begin with that flavor. Elijah is an eleven year old boy living in a settlement for free (escaped or bought out of slavery) Negroes in Canada just across the border from Detroit, Michigan. The year is 1860, and the name of the settlement is Buxton.”

Go here to read the rest of the Semicolon review of Elijah of Buxton.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born January 10th

Jan10

Today, according to my handy, dandy Booklover’s Day Book, is Lord Acton’s birthday, b. 1834. I had heard of him, but couldn’t place him. It turns out that he’s the one said this:

“Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end…liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition…The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to to govern. Every class is unfit to govern…Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

I had never heard the part about “every class is unfit to govern.” I like that. We are unfit to rule over others for an indefinite period of time. After a while, we do get power-mad. We enjoy playing God. According to Wikipedia, “Most people who quote Lord Acton’s Dictum are unaware that it refers to Papal power and was made by a Catholic, albeit not an unquestioning one.”

Acton was a historian and also a book-lover. I read somewhere that he owned over 60.000 books when he died, and many of them had passages marked that he thought were significant. I thought I had a lot of books!

Have Books, Need Bookshelves #2

Jan9

Closet door bookshelves. I SO want these all over my house. If you saw all the bookshelves that are already in my house, you would say, “Enough, already!” But I’m a biblioaddict; I can’t help myself.

Here are some pictures of absolutely beautiful libraries. I don’t think mine will ever be up to these standards.

Ladder bookshelves from Mother Earth Living via The Common Room. Or else the ladder actually becomes a hanging bookshelf.

Here’s the first in this what-I-hope-will-be an ongoing series of posts about cool bookshelves.

New in 2008

Jan8

Two of my favorite mystery writers, P.D. James and Elizabeth George, each have a new book being published in 2008. George’s is titled Careless in Red.

Hilary McKay’s last book in the Casson family series that began with Saffy’s Angel will be available on this side of the water in March or April. It’s called Forever Rose.

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall, a sequel to The Penderwicks, is coming out in April.

Mitali Perkins’ new Sameera Righton book, First Daughter: White House Rules (Dutton), will be available January 24, 2008, just in time for all those primaries and caucuses. (Some of those political caucuses and conventions are pretty boring, perfect time to get in some good reading. I know; I’ve been there.)

Athol Dickson’s new novel, Winter Haven, comes out this spring. Teaser from Mr. Dickson’s website: “Boys who never age, giants lost in time, mist that never rises, questions never asked…on the most remote of islands off the coast of Maine, history haunts the present and Vera Gamble wrestles with a past that will not yield. Will she find refuge there, or will her ghosts prevail on…Winter Haven?

Lief Enger has a new novel also, due out in May, called So Brave, Young, and Handsome. I’m going to reserve this one at Amazon.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s new novel, according to BuzzGirl: “Unlike anything Le Guin has done before, this is an imagining of Lavinia, the king’s daughter in Vergil’s Aeneid, with whom Aeneas was destined to found an empire.”

Coming in February 2008: Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear, the fifth Maisie Dobbs mystery. I still haven’t read the first one yet, but I hear from many reliable sources that it’s a great series if you like historical mystery fiction.

Out of the Wild is the sequel to Into the Wild by Sarah Beth Durst, coming out in June 2008. Here’s a summary, with spoilers if you haven’t read Into the Wild yet, of Ms. Durst’s second book.

Then, there’s the Class of 2K8, 28 Middle Grade and Young Adult novels by 28 debut authors. Check out their website.

These are a few of the pleasures I’m looking forward to in 2008. How about you?

The Gender Gap in Middle Grade Fiction Nominees for the Cybil Award

Jan7

Books whose main character is a boy: 22

Books whose main character is a girl: 43

Books with both a boy and a girl as main characters: 6 Isle of Swords by Thomas Wayne Batson, The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, The Lemonade War by Jacqueline Davies, If a Tree Falls at Lunch Period by Gennifer Choldenko, Ms. Zephyr’s Notebook by K.C. Dyer, Regarding the Bees by Kate Klise.

Unclassified: 3 The Cat on the Mat Is Flat, Annie: The Mysterious Morgan Horse, Cork and Fuzz.

One interesting thing is that several of the books attempt middle school romance, usually disastrous, while others go for BFF relationships between a fifth or sixth grade boy and a girl. No Talking by Andrew Clements is more realistic about this age group, I think, as the boys and the girls compete in a no talking contest, and Clements still portrays the underlying interest in the opposite sex without pretending that boys and girls as best buddies is typical in elementary school. Even in seventh or eighth grade, the girls are much more interested than the guys usually are.

In an earlier post, I listed all the Cybils nominees in which there was what I called “an ambiguously platonic friendship” between a middle school aged boy and girl: The Social Experiments of Dorie Dilts: Dumped by Popular Demand by P.G. Kain, The Queen of 33rd Street and the Broken Bike Boy by Sharon Flake, Perch, Mrs. Sackets, and Crow’s Nest by Karen Pavlicin, The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy, Reaching for Sun by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer, Ms. Zephyr’s Notebook by K.C. Dyer, Leap of Faith by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate, Lucy Rose: Working Myself to Bits and Pieces by Katy Kelley, Qwikpick Adventure Society by Sam Riddleburger, The Middle of Somewhere by J.B. Cheaney, Way Down Deep by Ruth White, A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban, Celeste’s Harlem Renaissance by Eleanora Tate, Isle of Swords by Wayne Thomas Batson.

Of course, some of the friendships were more ambiguous than others. In some of the books with seventh and eighth grade protagonists, it was obvious that the boy and the girl were more than “just friends” or wanted to be more than just friends. In books with younger characters, the girl and the boy were often portrayed as simply friends with no complications stemming from gender or romance. Two of the more realistic situations were:

The Middle of Somewhere in which twelve year old Ronnie meets thirteen (?) year old Howard, the two become friends and work together to find Ronnie’s lost little brother. It’s obvious in the book that Ronnie and Howard are interested in one another romantically, but taking it slow as behooves young teenagers.

Lucy Rose: Working Myself to Bits and Pieces by Katy Kelley, in which Lucy Rose is teased unmercifully by the class bully about her friendship with Melonhead and a central element in the book is Lucy Rose’s attempt to keep her friendship with Melonhead intact while avoiding the stigma of “being in love”.

And in all of this “gender gap” stuff, it’s the boys who lose out. More books are written for girls, fewer for boys. The ratio is 22:43, girls win. And I think it gets worse as we move into young adult fiction. See this post at Chasing Ray for a much more articulate discussion of this phenomenon.

What I’m trying to say, poorly but trying, is that just sticking a guy in the book as the girl protagonist’s “best friend” or “latent romantic interest” won’t work to make boys want to read the books. Karate Kid, my ten year old boy, reads books with both male and female main characters, but the books have to have something else, usually action and lots of it, to hold his interest. He’s not much interested in fictional romance, and I really doubt he will be anytime soon, maybe never. Brown Bear Daughter, age 13, reads mostly books about girls, but one of her favorites from the Cybils list was The Mysterious Benedict Society, a book with a group of children at the center, two boys and two girls. She likes mystery, spies, and a touch of romance.

Girls and boys both read Harry Potter and love it. So, what does it take to get the typical middle grade or high school boy interested in reading a book? And whatever it takes, should publishers and authors be producing more of it?