Aidan is Back Home

So there is a happy end to this varicella epic. ... perhaps odyssey, considering all the travelling we have done and the culminating happy reunion of our family. We are SO happy. Tired, but happy.

The villainous micro-intruders are slain and Aidan is recovering, with a few battle scars in the form of IV bruises (he had seven total failures) and small pox (that looks strange, but you know what I mean) which are quickly crusting over. He only got about 30 lesions total, so I think the immunoglobulin shots probably did help, and the acyclovir did the rest.

He has to drink some bitter blue potion -- oral acyclovir in a compound, a substantial tablespoonful at a dose -- for another week. He has been soldierly about it.

Paddy got a heavier dose of the disease than the rest of the children, but is healing up though justifiably a bit cranky. Kieron is almost back to normal and is looking forward to (finally) seeing his friends at homeschool meeting this Friday. Sean is sore, but from Day 2 of football practice, not from disease.

Together again!

Sunday Psalm

These days, it seems I have to choose which of my blogs to update. For the progression of the chickenpox in our house, see here. The short version is that Aidan is presently at the hospital but today, doing pretty well. We don't know when he will be coming home, but are hopeful that the prayers and the medications are having their effect.

Yesterday, though, when I left him at the regional hospital with his Dad, an hour's drive away from home, he was running a temperature and not even interested in drinking Sprite, which is his all-time favorite indulgence.

Though I knew he was in the loving care of his father, it was so hard to leave him and so hard to drive the hour home in our little rental car (our Suburban has broken down in the midst of this varicella plague, poor trusty machine, having travelled over 180 thousand miles on our medical odysseys in the last 8 years). I was crying in the car and feeling angry at myself for crying. Somehow when I was growing up I acquired the idea that it was better to stuff emotions under the surface -- "I am a rock; I am an island/ And rocks feel no pain; and islands never cry" --- and weak and self-indulgent to express them. The result is that whenever a crisis hits, I go into affect-less mode. This is fine, my best friend, who has a master's degree in family therapy, tells me, IF you take pains to work through those emotion later when you have more time and space. Sometimes I forget to do that, though, or lose touch completely with how I feel, so I end up like one of TS Eliot's characters, wandering through life with a vague displaced melancholy.

I stopped at Mass on the way home (my older boys had walked to Mass at our local chapel, but that was already over, and my daughter had stayed home with the varicella-afflicted younger two).

At Mass, we sang a song based on Psalms 91. I don't particularly care for the melody or arrangement of this hymn in the Oregon Catholic Press hymnal.... if you are Catholic and don't go to a traditional mass, you probably know the one. But the lyrics themselves, taken almost verbatim from scripture, sounded like they were spoken just to me -- here is the psalm itself in part:

1 He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.

2 I will say of the LORD, "He is my refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust."

3 Surely he will save you from the fowler's snare
and from the deadly pestilence.

4 He will cover you with his feathers,
and under his wings you will find refuge;
his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.

5 You will not fear the terror of night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,

6 nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,
nor the plague that destroys at midday.

7 A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
but it will not come near you.

The illness of my child is one of the most difficult things I've ever had to endure. To start the IV yesterday, the nurses had to try five times. They were visibly shaken. This is only five more of an almost uncountable series of needles in his short eight years of life. It was so hard to listen to him say "I am going to be brave! See? I'm being brave!" with his big brown eyes filled with tears. It was harder for him, of course, and that is the worst part. I can't take that away from him. I would like to, but I can't.

Whenever I hold him and comfort Aidan through these things, I feel glad that three thousand years ago, that king and musician and poet, David, loved God enough even through his own flaws and sins, and had the gifts and heart, to write those Psalms.

Who would write about God covering him with feathers and sheltering him under wings, protecting him in a fortress, who had not felt the scalding vulnerability of having things happen which were not under human control?

Surely David had a true intuition that God's heart speaks a little like his did. That He mourns with us when we are mourning. That feathers and wings and fortresses and shields were in some way true types of what God's protection is about. That Our Lord would want to take our burdens upon our shoulders; that in truth, He would and did. That somehow, everything, though mysterious and painful, is all right; that those pestilences and plagues are not all-mighty.

I am glad that King David (and his Lord and His Mother, a thousand years later) showed me that tears and sorrowing are not weakness, but part of being stamped with God's image, and the reverse side of joy:

"Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted."

Varicella and Voldemort

Varicella Zoster sounds like the surname of some evil foreign count, doesn’t it?

Also known as chickenpox, the disease has worked its deliberate way through our younger set of children and on Saturday, Aidan came down with it. We were hoping he wouldn’t, since he had received a targeted immunoglobulin injection when we first found out Sean (at 14, the oldest of the “younger set”) had gotten the virus.

And, as we’ve experienced in the past, Saturday at 6 am is not the best time of the week to mobilize two specialty teams at two different hospitals and get them to work together to make a workable plan. Thus, we spent Saturday morning in suspended animation (suspended because we couldn’t make progress; animation because we stayed on the phone trying, and the off-phone times planning and packing and speculating).

Finally at about noon, the two teams (pediatric liver transplant team at the big-city medical center and GI team at the regional children’s hospital) communicated a plan to us, so Aidan ended up at the regional hospital — an hour’s drive away instead of four, so a better solution, from our point of view. He needs to be hospitalized to receive an intravenous antiviral drug, but when he is on the upward course of the virus, he can go home on an oral medication. That could be anywhere from 3 to 10 days.

I just looked back on the archives and realized that I haven’t even mentioned the evil count and his plague on this blog, yet. I wrote about it here, though.

Harry Potter has been an ongoing subtheme in our house’s activities. My daughter has been keeping a low profile on the internet, because she is afraid she will glimpse a spoiler by accident. Finally she ordered the book at Amazon because our library system had 562 requests already in place. Then she nobly let three of her brothers read it before she read it herself. The book came on Friday. First Brendan was the only clued-in one, then Sean joined the cognoscenti, and now Kieron has become one of the group.

Meanwhile, Clare had been reading a whole pile of analysis and speculation books on the HP series from the library. This is an easy, painless and lively way to get some basic literary analysis in. Discussions and sub-creations (where the kids make up their own versions of the endings, usually in parody) have provided further enrichment. Clare amused herself by narrating all the speculations from the “What will happen in HP7?” book from the library to Brendan, who could then laugh sardonically and mysteriously and not give any clues as to whether the guesses were on target or not.

Even Kevin is reading the first two books of the series while he is parked at the hospital with Aidan. He had not read them before but wants to see what all the fuss is about (he’s watched the movies with the kids though).

I will be SOO happy if Aidan continues to do as well as he’s doing (he’s drinking buckets of Sprite and watching Pokemon videos on his little hospital bed). Then we’ll be all done with this invasion of the evil VZ minions.

I notice every time Aidan comes down with something, Kevin and I both turn to major research mode and suddenly know everything there is to be found about the problem and all its possible treatments. This is why I don’t think it’s enough in education to give the children an informational overview. You want to have enough “cultural literacy” to know where to look for things and how to decide if what you’ve found is credible or not; you want to be able to dig up things that you need to know quickly and thoroughly because it has come up in your life; you want to have some areas where you’ve immersed yourself in knowledge just because you love it and it is delightful; and you want to have some areas where you’ve had to work through something carefully and analytically even if it gets difficult sometimes (which is my rationale for required Latin and math and a few other requirements through the years).

Whew, I got something about educational philosophy into this entry, even though I had to drag it in backwards.

Poetry Friday

And behold while I sang... but O Thou who didst grant me that day,
And before it not seldom hast granted thy help to essay,
Carry on and complete an adventure,---my shield and my sword
In that act where my soul was thy servant, thy word was my word,---
Still be with me, who then at the summit of human endeavour
And scaling the highest, man's thought could, gazed hopeless as ever
On the new stretch of heaven above me---till, mighty to save,
Just one lift of thy hand cleared that distance---God's throne from man's grave!
Let me tell out my tale to its ending---my voice to my heart
Which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last night I took part,
As this morning I gather the fragments, alone with my sheep,
And still fear lest the terrible glory evanish like sleep!
For I wake in the grey dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves
The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kidron retrieves
Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine.

Robert Browning, Saul

about mothers and geography and sacraments

I love this: Mother, you are a place.

It reminds me of Juli Loesch Wiley's beautiful article:
Milk and Honey

Old Photos

Speaking of old photos, since Love2LearnMom brought them up:

This is a great one of my husband's grandpa, I believe, and some friends, at Yosemite.

I don't think they let you do that anymore.

Pride and Dignity and the Chivalric Temper

Melissa at the Lilting House wrote a thought-provoking entry on Charlotte Mason, Discipline, the Deputy Headmistress and Running Wild in the Cereal Aisles. This post isn't meant to stand in any kind of opposition to the very good points that Melissa and the DHM made, but is my continuation of the conversation and some ongoing ponderings on what CM's thoughts on discipline have meant to me through the years.

There seems to be a lot of variety in discipline. Some of it is legitimate differences in style, temperament and needs of the family. It took me almost twenty years to internalize the truth that child-rearing is essentially a relationship, and relationships are guided by principles, yes, but are not set by detailed rules. Rules may provide a reality check and a guideline for the relationship, but are not the main thing. ("Only one thing is needful...")

Furthermore, child-training or discipline or whatever you want to call it -- even the words connote different things to different people -- seems to be an almost uniquely ambiguous topic. It's not just the "S" word that Melissa mentions, in remarking that her question on an egroup resulted through no intention of her own in a firestorm controversy. It's more than that. I think it's because we discuss these things out of context. We don't see how this actually looks in the other person's home. We hear the emphases that are most important to the other person -- what's effective for me, an introvert raising introverts, may be rather different than what is effective for a different mother or different children.

A bit after I started homeschooling, I started reading Charlotte Mason's Home Education, and this part rang like a deep cathedral bell for me:

"The apostolic counsel of ‘diligence’ in ruling throws light upon the nature and aim of authority; it is no longer a matter of personal honour and dignity; authority is for use and service, and the honour that goes with it is only for the better service of those under authority. The arbitrary parent, the exacting parent, who claims this and that of deference and duty because he is a parent, all for his own honour and glory, is more hopelessly in the wrong than the parent who practically abdicates; the majesty of parenthood is hedged round with observances only because it is good for the children to ‘faithfully serve, honour, and humbly obey’ their natural rulers. Only at home can children be trained in the chivalrous temper of ‘proud submission and dignified obedience’; and if the parents do not inspire and foster deference, reverence, and loyalty, how shall these crowning graces of character thrive in a hard and emulous world?"

Chivalry. That was exactly what I was looking for.... not cringing servility, not dissipated rebellion, not half-hearted compliance to avoid punishment. Charlotte Mason talked about how the child who is called "strongwilled" is usually actually WEAK willed, with appetites and emotions running rampant over intelligence and will, with no power to make himself do what is best. (I always think the little monsters in the grocery store, and I hasten to add that sometimes the monsters are us, are just wasting their energy and will on something inferior like candy or the delights of defiance,--- it really does strike me as a sad waste, as St Augustine says--)

"For I was far from thy face in the dark shadows of passion. For it is not by our feet, nor by change of place, that we either turn from thee or return to thee. That younger son did not charter horses or chariots, or ships, or fly away on visible wings, or journey by walking so that in the far country he might prodigally waste all that thou didst give him when he set out. A kind Father when thou gavest; and kinder still when he returned destitute! To be wanton, that is to say, to be darkened in heart--this is to be far from thy face..

"I fell away from thee, O my God, and in my youth I wandered too far from thee, my true support. And I became to myself a wasteland."

Chivalry. None of my kids have reached the ideal. Nor have I, after 44 years. I have to pick myself up every day and gallop at that windmill once more, hoping that this time I will really slay a dragon or at least give the beast a significant wounding. I think chivalry, with its connotation of horsemanship, implies a quest and even a defeat, as you see in the story of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, and in Chesterton's Everlasting Man:

"But Troy falling has been caught up in a flame and suspended in an immortal instant of annihilation; and because it was destroyed with fire the fire shall never be destroyed. And as with the city so with the hero; traced in archaic lines in that primeval twilight is found the first figure of the Knight."

Yet, chivalry is my aspiration, with all its pathos of defeat and limitations. Which is why, every time a disciplinary situation comes up in my house, I don't think simply, "How can I stop this behavior?" (usually not too difficult in itself -- after all, the children are smaller and simpler for a long long time) but "How can I help my child learn that this is not truly what he wants?" (usually HE, because I have a crew of lads and only one lassie, but she does not mind the generic "he" in certain circumstances).




I've quoted John Senior before:

"...the Camino Real of Christ is a chivalric way, romantic, full of fire and passion, riding on the pure, high-spirited horses of the self with their glad, high-stepping knees and flaring nostrils, and us with jingling spurs and the cry “Mon Joie!” –the battle cry of Roland..”

This seems to ring with the same language as Charlotte Mason above. She adds:

"By-and-by, when he is old enough, take the child into confidence; let him know what a noble thing it is to be able to make himself do, in a minute, and brightly, the very thing he would rather not do. To secure this habit of obedience, the mother must exercise great self-restraint; she must never give a command which she does not intend to see carried out to the full. And she must not lay upon her children burdens, grievous to be borne, of command heaped upon command."

There is a kind of freely chosen, noble servitude that brings with it great joy. I always picture that integrity of the heart and will and mind, like a high-stepping horse proudly and joyfully bearing the standard of the Good. This rings with my lads and lassie, and it is what I want for myself, to do what is right "because it is right", not because it is convenient --again, Charlotte Mason:

"It is only in proportion as the will of the child is in the act of obedience, and he obeys because his sense of right makes him desire to obey in spite of temptations to disobedience––not of constraint, but willingly––that the habit has been formed which will, hereafter, enable the child to use the strength of his will against his inclinations when these prompt him to lawless courses. It is said that the children of parents who are most strict in exacting obedience often turn out ill; and that orphans and other poor waifs brought up under strict discipline only wait their opportunity to break into license. Exactly so; because, in these cases, there is no gradual training of the child in the habit of obedience; no gradual enlisting of his will on the side of sweet service and a free will offering of submission to the highest law: the poor children are simply bullied into submission to the will, that is, the wilfulness, of another; not at all, ‘for it is right‘; only because it is convenient."

By the way, though this may be a side trail, I think when Charlotte Mason talks about "habits" she is using the word in a philosophical sense, as "habitus" -- "disposition". She is not talking primarily about a simple acquired reflex, though I do think she believes that these acquired reflexes help "lay the rails" for a smooth course of life. But I do not think she is confusing the simple mores of proper hygiene and manners for the "disposition" to listen and incline your ear and ponder:

Proverbs 5:1:

"My son, give attention to my wisdom, Incline your ear to my understanding;
that you may maintain discretion and your lips may preserve knowledge."

That is a habit, a disposition, something that is a precondition of a lot of what we hope for our children. A lot of my discipline, I realize, is directed towards teaching the children to listen, attend, incline, maintain, preserve. All the great behaviorial techniques in the world are like the blowing of the wind if the child is not listening, if his heart and ear are not inclined. With this basic attention to attentiveness, a mother can make some mistakes and fall short in some areas (believe ME) and still have cooperative children who really try to think "What would Mama and Daddy have me do?" and then ultimately "What would God have me do?" I think this was one reason why Charlotte Mason tended to be hesitant about recommending behavioral modifications, because so often these can be dead-ends if they are not accompanied by the kind of aspiration towards principles that she did emphasize so often.

Pretend Play

Once at Early Intervention, a mom brought in her 2 year old for evaluation while Aidan was doing occupational therapy in the same room. The little boy was doing imaginary play with dinosaurs while his mom and the evaluator watched, and the EI higher-up, whoever it was, said “well, that’s age appropriate”. Aidan was about the same age but firmly in the concrete-operational stage, with no interest in pretend play, and I remember wistfully pondering “age-appropriateness” and wondering what triggers a child’s mind to start attaching imaginary significance to play objects.

About two years later Aidan developed a deep bond with his stuffed Pikachu pillow. We had found it in a thrift store, almost new, and he said “Pika” for the first time when he saw it. Before age 3 he only had twenty word-approximations, so a new word had a lot of significance.

The Pika became a sort of symbol for his guardian angel, travelling with him to many hospitals during many different stays. At one point he sat in his hospital bed pondering and labelling the appropriate features on the Pikachu: “Pika’s eyes, Pika’s hands, Pika’s mouth, Pika’s tail.” This was how he taught himself all the body parts.

At some time later he started putting Pika to bed, giving him labs, testing Pika’s oxygen SATs on our monitor. When we were working on eating (he had a G-tube and didn’t eat by mouth) he would bring Pika over to “eat”, too. When he thought something was particularly wonderful, he would drag Pika over to be part of it. One time I found his Pika with its vestigial hands folded and Aidan told me, “Pika is praying.” At some point I realized that his love for the stuffed toy was propelling him to a Christopher-Robin level of imaginary play — treating a stuffed toy like a friend.

Meanwhile Paddy was born and progressed almost too quickly, without any difficulty, to the imaginary stage. He wasn’t more than two when he started telling me about his “maginawy fwends” and listing them by name and characteristics. Every time he found two sticks, or soldiers, or stuffed animals, they would start elaborate, battle-oriented dialogues complete with sound effects and staged actions. We would find play scenarios set up all over the house, formations arranged neatly. He also would draw things: “The Phantom fighting Raoul,” (we wouldn’t let him watch the whole Phantom of the Opera but he got to see the sword fights and listen to some of the songs, and that was enough to capture his imagination). “Sean playing baseball”.

Just recently, while I was up at grandma’s cabin by the lake with Aidan waiting out the chickenpox siege, I was sitting with him by the sandbox and listening. He was talking “I’m making a birthday cake for Declan (his cousin) and here’s one for Paddy and here’s one for Liam.”

Later, with his grandma’s Fisher Price airplane: “We’re going to Dublin! Declan is getting on, and Kelly, and …” (he goes on to list almost all the aunts and uncles and cousins that came with us to Ireland).

Then, just a couple of days ago, he staged a stylized battle with his brother’s Bionicles.

I realize he is doing imaginary play. He is using his imagination to recreate, to relate, to roleplay, to process events, to imitate, to participate in community life. Whatever it was that had not come together at age two is definitely in place now at age 8.

An article on The Power of Pretend Play says that pretend play helps a child:

* Come to terms with their feelings, thoughts, confusions, wishes, even fears.

* Change the power balance by “becoming” the adults in charge: Mommy, Daddy, policeman, teacher, doctor, carpenter, gardener, etc. Suspending the reality of their size, age, and relative powerlessness is very reassuring.

* Fulfill some unacceptable wishes: returning the baby sister to the hospital, for example.

* Make sense of their social environment. If you pretend to be someone else, you will get a sense of how it feels to be that other person.

* Develop feelings of mastery and control. In their role-playing, children are clearly in charge. And the play gives them opportunities to use many of their developing skills: eye-hand coordination, language proficiency, even large motor performance on tricycles or jungle gyms. It provides an opportunity to be inventive, to take risks (social, not physical risks).

* Learn concepts and symbols — far more meaningfully than in situations that call for mere memorization and rote behavior.

* Learn from their mistakes without mortification or any sense of failure.

Here’s a philosophical article on pretend play

Laura Berquist, talking about Aristotle’s De Anima (which Liam read last year in his sophomore year at TAC) and how people learn:

This text is about the soul, how it functions, what its operations are, and its objects. I learned a great deal theoretically about how learning takes place. I learned that the external sense receives the form of the object to be known. This form is transferred to the internal senses, notably the common sense (the faculty that puts together the information from the various external senses), and the form is then received into the imagination.

The form in the imagination is acted upon by the light of the agent intellect and is then impressed on the possible intellect. It is in this last activity that thinking takes place.

It is a good thing to see Aidan developing this capacity and it is something I will try to build on next year with good literature and music, access to art and building supplies, time outdoors, and lots of open-ended time as well as simple, enriching experiences.

A Middle Name Meme

Owl at Owl Flutter tagged me for a morphed version of the Eight Things meme. The new meme’s rules:

Rules:

1. You have to post these rules before you give the facts.
2. Players, you must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of their middle name. If you don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have had.
3. When you are tagged you need to write your own blog-post containing your own middle name game facts.
4. At the end of your blog-post, you need to choose one person for each letter of your middle name to tag.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

I have a sort of boring middle name, so I decided to try it in Latin.

J — In libris libertas - In books, freedom (had to cheat on that one since J’s are scarce in Latin).

E – Est queadam fiere voluptas - There is a certain pleasure in weeping. (Ovid)

A- Age quod agis -Do what you are doing. (This is my remedy for my ADD).

N — Non multa, sed multum - Not many, but much. (Pliny) (this is my other ADD remedy) (runner-up for N –Non scholae sed vitae discimus - We do not learn for school, but for life. (Seneca))

That actually turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. There are lots of Latin proverbs but not as many which are statements in the declarative rather than exhortations in the imperative mode.

NOTE: If you are inclined to ADD, don’t put cookies in the oven just before you start trying to do this.

I tag Faith at Dumb Ox Academy, Theresa at Lapaz Farm, Cindy at Learning As We Go, and Ladybug Mommy Maria.

Nota Bene: If you like Latin tags, this is a nice site

In Which I Rely on My Daughter

I haven't been around much recently on this blog and this explains why.

So for this entry I'm relying my daughter's artistry and hard work.

Here are some pictures my daughter took of our temporary isolation up in the mountains.(that's one of them, of Aidan, there on the side)


Also, if you check out my daughter's recent blog entries, there are some more pictures of our trip to Ireland:

Return from Ireland
More sights of Dublin
Our Cottage in Killarney
The Cottage Again

and a post about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

She also kept the kitchen running and Paddy happy while I was up at the cabin with Aidan over the weekend. She even made muffins. And we got to have some nice mother and daughter time on the last day, when she was up there with me and Aidan.

Having a bit of time to spend almost-alone with Liam, and then Clare, was a silver lining to this unexpected medical storm. We are in the eye of the storm right now -- the calm in the middle -- while waiting to see if and when Aidan and his other two siblings come down with the virus.

I don't know if you have ever heard Love is a Voyage by John McDermott, sung by Christy Moore and also the Irish Tenors. It is a sweet Irish song comparing married life to a voyage. Part of it goes:

Life is an ocean and love is a boat
In troubled water that keeps us afloat
When we started the voyage, there was just me and you
Now gathered round us, we have our own crew

We have thought of that song more than once during some of the crises of the past few years, and this time, once again, I was proud of our crew as we sailed through some slightly rough waters.

Almost Speechless Wednesday

These pictures show what happens when Mama is gone for a few days with one of the "big kids", the new washer and dryer come, and Dad is busy with business start-off -- and another of the "big kids" is down with chickenpox (Coming Down for the Landing)

(Maybe I'll post the corresponding AFTER pictures someday -- which will probably be August considering that the chickenpox siege isn't over yet -- just so you can see that we really don't live like this ALL the time)

New washer and dryer -- Hooraay!:

Kitchen
Living Room:
Dining Area
Loft upstairs
Another view of the upstairs
Kevin getting computer set up to give to his company's artist:

The nice thing about this is that there is no way to go but up. The other nice thing is that it's all on the surface. And that really is something.

Coming Down for the Landing

Shawna is so right....

It really, really, is a full time job just to "do what I do."

I am particularly noticing this after being away for almost a week. Sean, age 14, got chickenpox, and since Aidan is immunesuppressed, we decided that I should take an older kid (first Liam, then Clare) and spend some time with Aidan up at his grandma's cabin by the lake. So the house was being run mostly by kids -- teenagers, but still kids, and one of them down for the count.

What I noticed first is how incredibly easy it was to maintain tidiness, nice little meals and that kind of thing with only 2 kids with me and only one at the messmaker age. As Shawna would say, News Flash! I may still be a bit absent-minded but I'm actually quite naturally tidy. I even had extra time to play and talk. Life slowed down.

Now I'm back home. Not only was there a child with chickenpox here, but the new washer and dryer came when I was gone, which meant that Kevin and Brendan and others had to move all the bookcases and books out of the hall, and they are still not back. Then in addition, Kevin has been extremely busy setting up the paperwork for his new business.

Mess is not the word for the results. "Just moved into a fixer-upper" is more the decor description right now. I haven't taken pictures yet, but I may just do it now and edit this entry. Almost guaranteed to make your house look like Martha Stewart's. Even though I've been straightening as I go ever since I got back here yesterday.

Though I have a lot to do and life will continue to be crazy (3 other children still to go with the chickenpox and so another trip to grandma's cabin for Aidan is upcoming any day), plus Kevin has more business things to accomplish. --- it is just a teeny bit encouraging to see that on all those days when it appeared "nothing got done," I was actually doing quite a bit just by my presence. And for a couple of days at least, now Sean is over the infectious stage and the other kids haven't started, we are all together again.

Life is beautiful, even when the house definitely isn't!

Wednesday -- Works for Me

A game I like to play with the boys, called Robo Rally, has a restorative "power down" option. You can sit still and default from the game for a series of moves and restore whatever damage you've gotten during the game.

In real life, there are words like "sleep" and "retreat" and "sabbatical" to denote a movement away from the everyday for restorative purposes. Farmers, I understand, sometimes plow a season's crops under so that they can have a richer environment for future crops. "A seed must die in order to bear fruit."

There is also the tradition so many cultures have of a retreat time during menses and/or childbirth. (a blog post on Torah concept of tamei here -- I don't know enough about Judaism to know if this is way out in left field or not -- Faith, are you reading this? -- but I thought it was interesting)

Anyway, just recently I was thinking that periodic power-downs make a lot of sense for a lot of reasons. Since we are composites of body and soul, things that help the spirit also help the body, and vice versa.

Anyway, the reason that Robo Rally occured to me this time was that in this game, you have to announce your decision to power down a move ahead. This means that you spend your last active move preparing for the best power down, and you can't power down just on impulse.

This seems to make sense to me on human, not just game terms. I know that I often default into low-power mode because I've hit a wall and just can't go any faster. But with sleep, and retreat, and even (sorry) menstrual cycle, it seems to work better if I plan a power-down and embrace this time as being a fertile time in a different way.

Of GPAs, and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings

Sean, 14, saw me typing about college prep for my Catholic classical education e-group and asked “What’s a GPA?”

When I explained that it was a numerical average of one’s grades, he asked “What’s mine?” I told him that I didn’t really pay attention to marking grades until high school, so I didn’t really know. He said, “Well, what WOULD mine be?” I told him somewhere between 3 and 4 because that was how we operated in the homeschool. We just don’t move on until adequate mastery is reached. And when you are pursuing self-directed interests, you tend to get an A by the very nature of what self-directed interest is about.

I told him that I would start paying more attention to outside measurements for him this year partly because he’s entering those years and partly because if there’s any chance he was going to school, he’d need a transcript. I told him he was carrying an A — a 4– in the few classes that had objective grading, like math, and that it was harder to tell with the mostly reading-based classes, because I just didn’t set them up that way.

It turned out that he was asking because some of the kids at his quarterback camp had been comparing GPAs and he didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. At another time, when his coach found he was homeschooled, he roared “I bet your mom gives you all A’s!! ” This was basically Sean’s first exposure to academic competition standards, and he was interested.

It was ironic, what the coach said, because the point of the email I had been writing was that I actually undergraded Sean’s older brother. I found this out after Liam had been accepted and was comfortably carrying a college GPA that looked like it had been lovingly hand-crafted by Mom, but was actually based on his own hard work. I had been giving Liam college-difficulty courses in high school, and if he had been going to school he probably would have been taking AP and honors classes based on his inclinations, and possibly getting higher than a 4.0. That is apparently how high schools operate to show the difference between a “cream-puff” GPA and a “conference” level one (to use my sons’ football terminology for competition levels in different football schedules).

The conventional homeschool advice is to have the kids take some outside classes to “verify” the grades Mom gives, which are presumably supposed to be biased on the creampuff side. Liam did not take any outside classes. Nor have any of the other kids. There just aren’t that many tame affordable local classes running around in our neck of the Sierras. I have heard anecdotally that many homeschooled kids’ experience with the “real world” of high school or college classes tends to make them realize that it’s the schools who have made the creampuff accommodations. Of course, I’m sure there are exceptions, but the thing is: parents want their kids to succeed. They have expectations and aspirations. They are aware of their childrens’ potential. Schools more generally don’t and aren’t.

This seems like a bit of a side tack, but I dislike the idea of taking a class or doing something “just because” it might help their transcript. This is called making secondary ends into primary ones, and I may be too black and white about it, but it’s part of the reason my husband and I are homeschooling to start with.

I realize that this football/homeschool dilemma may be another expression of the same thing. And indeed, why measure GPAs at all, then? There are some distinctions to be made. I am still working it through, so I couldn’t tell you in so many words the parameters of the distinctions. I wouldn’t want to make distinctions that were too tight and therefore closed off possibilities for our kids. We follow our reason-based intuition or what we like to call our Poetic Knowledge here. Perhaps I’ll write more about this some other time, because I am trying to wrap this entry up, and it looks like I untied more ends than I tied together, here.

Bottom line, if we lived in an area where outside-verification, valuable learning opportunities grew like apples on trees, it would be nice. But we don’t live in such an area. And I have to think there are some advantages to the other kind of life too — “Less can be More, Small can be Beautiful” as the hobbits sang in 70’s style folk meter in the cartoon version of “Return of the King” (haven’t watched it? oh, my. You are missing….something).

Zone of Silence

From Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life, preface:

Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing, at least nothing worth while.

The book is based on Aquinas' Sixteen Precepts for Study

I think it was Michele who first mentioned the book. I've had it on my wish list a long time, and finally got it this summer. So glad I did, even just reading the preface.

Thoughts on Language and Competence

Paddy says, “I want to have TEN sausages.”
Aidan says, “I beat Michigan Viejo.”

I am struck by how at this pre-academic stage, the accuracy is not the important thing for the children. I explain to Paddy that if everyone got 10 sausages, we would have to make 90 sausages for breakfast. He looks at me with wide eyes and cheerfully accepts that he will get one at a time. He made his point, which was that he knows how to talk about quantity in context.

Aidan has combined two football terms. Michigan is a college team his older brothers talk about. Mission Viejo is where his older brother Sean went to quarterback camp. Making football conversation is a sign of being grown-up and knowledgeable to him (don’t argue! : )).

Yesterday I found this article Is Football Educational? A mom reflects on her childrens’ passion, which happens to be football, and itemizes all the educational qualities in a football hobby.

I always tend to hesitate before dissecting a natural learning event into its academic constituents, but possibly the exercise has value, particularly if you are worried that the “kids aren’t learning anything” or if you want to ponder the richness of life and experiential learning.

I read The Book of Learning and Forgetting back in the spring, and one of the things that struck me was the author’s concept that much of learning is about apprenticeship. He gives the analogy of a yachting club he belonged to. Some of the members loved to yacht, some were very good at it, others just liked talking about yachting and enjoying the trappings. By being part of the club, all could get these advantages from it, but they weren’t forced to do more than they wanted to.

When you are a willing participant in a community, you are continually open to learning new things about it. You partake of the knowledge and guidance available, in different ways according to your interests and abilities.

Small children are almost always willing participants in their community — that’s their very nature. They are open to everything in their world. If the “competent ones” are talking about football, they will take pride in talking about football. Charlotte Mason quotes Robert Burns:

If there’s a hole in a’ your coats,
I rede you tent it:
A chield’s amang you takin notes,
And, faith, he’ll prent it

Language is one of the key distinctions in any community. Listen to any adult group. If you listen to a classical homeschool group, you will hear one sort of vocabulary; in an unschooling community, the language and even the syntax, as well as the content, is distinctly different (though overlapping, of course).

If you listen to the children, you can tell a lot about the clubs they want to belong to. Paddy, from his many conversations during the day, wants to belong to the math club. Aidan sees that those he most admires talk about football and politics, so when he especially wants to sound grownup, he embarks on long monologues about football and politics. By speaking the language of those they want to be like, they approach closer actually becoming what they want to be like.

more fantasy books

We have been spending afternoons at our lake's beach recently, which gives me a couple of hours at a sitting to read, so here's another list of books I've read recently. This probably concludes my run of fantasy/sci-fi novels for now -- what is that, 14 in the last 3 weeks? My next list will probably be books I want to read for next years' homeschool...... but in the meantime....

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I finished the Dark Elf Trilogy -- well, actually, I read the first one and the third one in the book. Reading the first chapter almost made me put the book back straightaway in the library pile. It was quite grotesque, with a dark elf mother giving birth to a baby and a complicated assassination plot going on at the same time. There was nothing but evil and internecine contrivances(always wanted to use that word internecine, AH, and I just checked it, and it looks like I used it correctly, which brightens my day ).

But the point of the book turns out to be that Drizzt, the dark elf, is different from his kin and his kind. It's a contrast thing. Once you realize this, the moral tone is fairly substantial. I didn't say profound. But substantial is something. The rest of the book concerns how this dark elf manages to grow up in a thoroughly wicked society, devoted to worship of the spider goddess Lolth, without becoming corrupted himself.

It was another nine year old recommendation from the Waldorf page. I am starting to wonder if the Waldorf page means the same thing as I do by "nine year old". I would be OK with my middle to high teen reading this, if he was level-headed. PG-13 style violence. Comparable in tone and depth to the LOTR movies (not the books) and the second set of Star Wars movies.

The dark elf that is marked by his appearance, exiled from his own race by his desire to act rightly --- and outcast from the "good" races because of his looks and the reputation of his race -- the idea was moving. I guess this elf Drizzt is a sidekick in another series and I can see why people wanted to read more about his background. I was curious to read more about his adventures and really hoped that he would eventually find a place in the overlands. The books were very competently written; the third one about his forays into the Overland were less grotesque and dark than the first two, and I liked it better.
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Now -- the other fantasy book I read recently -- The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. What can I say.....on one hand, the writing style was very nice, at least at its best. It reminded me a bit of Mary Stewart or Madeleine L'Engle . ... intelligent and perceptive. On the other hand, the main character scored so high on the Mary Sue test that you would conclude that the author almost had to have planned it that way. This character had everything -- special powers, somewhat mysterious past, angst and unjustified self-doubt, strange (but beautiful) eyes and hair, everyone falls in love with her or is deeply affected in some way, special bond with animals (yes, horses and cats) -- it goes on and on.

The book itself was completely within the scope of a pre-teen or early teen unless the wish-fulfillment element was considered a debit -- stylized violence only, very mild romantic elements. You know throughout that the two main characters have a romantic interest in each other but there is no real progression of the romance until the very end, and it is as respectable as anything from Austen -- if Jane Austen would ever write anything about characters with golden eyes and special powers that enable them to change the world.

Drizzt, the elf, scored fairly high on the Mary Sue test too, by the way. I think this may be one of the job hazards of being a main character in a fantasy novel. You almost have to have some earth-changing powers, some dark secret in your past, some beyond-average fighting ability, etc. But there was a difference. To me the main sign of the true Mary Sue is that you get the feeling that the character is sort of a balm for the author's childhood issues. I think there is a certain type of serious, introverted, gifted child that is tempted to make childhood perceptions of his or her own abilities and trials into fodder for daydreams of grandeur, and if the child can write well enough, he or she might grow up to become a published writer. Well, perhaps you can't avoid this dream-fulfillment aspect entirely, but writers like Madeleine L'Engle seem to be more conscious of it, sublimate it and turn it into art a bit -- perhaps a lot -- more.
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Last of all, I forgot to mention the Celtic Crusade series by Stephen Lawhead. I thought I would like them -- Scottish Celtic, Crusades, and Christian author all in the same package -- but I found the one I read, the Black Rood, left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Was it the subtle anti-Catholic elements combined with a sort of gnostic Christian-pagan flavor? I gather that the series based on the story premise that there was some sort of medieval Celtic Christian "cult" that purported to follow Christ but didn't consider itself associated with the Roman Church. I just did not like that at all.

This book is about a search for the "Black Rood" which is a section of the True Cross that has been captured by Muslims. It's never really clear doctrinally or plot-wise in the book WHY the artifacts surrounding Christ's death are considered important..... the first book in the series, which I didn't read, was about the quest for the Iron Lance that pierced Jesus's side (here's a review). I know what the Catholic view on this would be but it was not clear why it was important in the Celtic Crusade worldview.

There's a scene where the protaganist encounters a secret veneration of a "Black Madonna" -- who turns out to be Mary Magdalene, who is holding a child who is reputed to be Christ's child. The author doesn't remark on the cult either way, but it seems like a hint of future developments. This sort of sums up the creepy, blind feeling I got about the book as a whole -- along with a scene where a pig is being tortured. No huge and unmistakable crimson flag, but tons of little flashes of red flags that whip out of sight when you turn around to look. PG-13 level violence again.

planning when the path isn't clear

Christine at Thinking Things Through has collected a bunch of planning posts in one place.

Also, Owl at Owl Flutter has a nice logbook for lollygaggers.

There is a possibility that Sean, may go to school not this year, but next year. At age 14, he is the oldest of my never-schooled kids. The older three went to Catholic school — Clare for only one year, the boys for a bit longer. But Sean has never entered a classroom except for sacramental preparation, and he is glad to have it that way. Around here, in California, you can’t play high school football unless you are enrolled. He is hoping to be able to work out something where he could do independent study, at least, so he could still be home-based.

If Sean did go to school, it would be a bit like him taking off for college four years early. We would not see much of him. It is not something I would jump at the chance to do, to say the least.

As to how this fits into a post about planning — when I’m planning for Sean this year, I have to keep in mind that this might be a transition year, and it might be my last year to have him at home. My two goals would flow from that. I would want to ensure that the academic switch isn’t too difficult. On the bright side, if there is one, he has always been a hard-working, efficient homeschooler. He doesn’t want to attend classes because he doesn’t want the waste of time and the detachment from home life, and the loss of his homeschooler identity. If the school did work out an independent study arrangement — a bunch of busywork from what I’ve gathered — he’s the most likely of my children to be able to charge through it and shake it off and do just fine.

Another possibility, of course, is for us to tell him that homeschool is more important than football. I could imagine a scenario where this would be the case. I could even imagine a scenario where he might decide this for himself. But a good part of our homeschooling has been about helping the kids develop their own gifts and giving them freedom and guidance to choose wisely and personally. A decision like that would have to be a worked-through one, not simply a close-the-door-and-bar-it reflex.

That’s where planning is right now.

Considerations

Consider the Child

• How old is he? What grade is he in?
• Where is he right now in his life (character, temperament, talents, challenges)?
• What are his interests? What does he do with his spare time?
• What is he serious about?
• What does he dislike or fear? Why?
• What is his learning style, judging by what seems to work for him? What did he do last year?

Consider Standards

• Now, look at his grade level and development stage.
• Turn to whatever standards you prefer to use. I like to browse through my favorite curriculums -- Kolbe, Mother of Divine Grace, Mater Amabilis, Ambleside. There are also learning standards published by each state. To me it seems to be an advantage to look at more than one, because you can see the variety.
• If the child is younger, sometimes developmental milestone lists are helpful.
• Where is the child on track or ahead? Are there areas where he could use some extra attention?
• Make a list -- brainstorming here -- nothing set in stone, but it's useful to have it thought out and/or written down to refer to later. The list can keep expanding during the year and goals can be noted as they are reached by date. Or you could make another list for goals met.

Consider the Whole Situation

• Take the notes from #1 and look at what the child did last year.
• Take the notes from #2 and look at what is suitable for him developmentally and temperamentally.
• Look at his future -- preparation/formation/options for his later years. It is wise not to decide too early what vocational field he is going into, but consider his formation as a unique human being and the balance between developing particular talents and keeping the options open.
• Pray; ask what God wants for the child.
• Consider your family's philosophy on education. Everyone has one.
• Now, more specifically -- consider methods, activities and opportunities that are available.
• --Keep a running list during the year.
• -- Look for things that seem to light a spark.
• --Also, for things that provide a balance in the child's life.

Start a Broad Outline

• Go subject by subject and list resources
• Try to think of several possible options for each subject area.
• Highlight or note preferences based on availability, method, and so on.
• Start listing books and activities for each area.
• This can also be a running list.
• Look at booklists.
• If you get overwhelmed with the choices, trying listing a few that you already know about or have around the house.

Consider Connections and Strategies

• This does not have to be done all at once. After you've considered each child, look at the intra-family and even inter-community connections.
• Are there some areas that could be combined or overlapped between children? Are there some subjects that could be integrated or otherwise connected? Can you "kill two birds with one stone?"
• Look at your list of activities and ideas.
• At this point you could start breaking down spine texts and booklists into specific goals. I often do this but rarely actually follow my lists. What it does for me is give me a framework, an approximation of how much to cover.
• Start thinking about a daily and weekly schedule that will cover what you want to cover. I usually sit down with calendars here. I choose a few basic subjects to be covered daily -- math, Latin and catechism -- and some that come once, twice or three times a week. There are a few that can be plugged in occasionally. Look at your running list of activities and ideas. There are days and weeks where you will want to "do something completely different".

Addenda

• How much to pre-plan?

I think that varies according to life circumstance and natural operating style. I like to have a simple sequence through a book for 3 or 4 "skill" subjects -- usually Math, Latin, and some Language subject. Others can be more open-ended.

When it looks overwhelming, it helps me to remember that if you just have a progression through the 3Rs -- in short daily lessons -- and live a rich life, you are already there. As for the rich life, these Priorities give me a head start.

For me, it's always more effective to remember what is unique about my own family: What is important to my husband and me? What is thrilling and absorbing? What areas are we growing in or learning about? How does our network or community look? These considerations keep me from stressing about what I can't do and concentrating on what I can or should be doing.

Breathing to Reading

For the past month or so Paddy has been telling me to trace the words with my finger as I read aloud to him. It’s funny because I clearly remember John Holt writing that he once thought to be helpful and educational by doing this while reading to a 3 year old girl, and the little girl moved his hand politely but firmly off the page. To her it was a “teacher moment” not a learning one.

Paddy is still in the picture book stage, though many of the books he listens to have quite a high text to picture ratio. I would have thought, in agreement with John Holt’s 3 year old friend, that my finger moving from line to line would be distracting, but apparently not. It was Paddy’s idea to start with, and almost every time I forget to do this, he reminds me — politely but firmly.

I always think of Scout Finch as Paddy breathes and watches quietly beside me — not that Paddy is reading yet, but that I always wonder whether this finger tracing can possibly be of any actual help to him, and then think of Atticus Finch’s method of getting to read the newspaper as a single father — told in Scout’s words here:

I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church–was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus’s moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evening in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills To Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow–anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Paddy is obviously separating some of the text into words, too. Since he knows how to spell “NO”, this seems to be a cornerstone of meaning for him. Whenever he hears me read “No” we have to go and find where the “No” is in the text. Once he told me as I was turning a page, “You forgot to say NO on that page.” He went on to show me a “now” on the previous page, and then I had to explain that a “no” with a W on the end was a different word. We have done this with “not” and “know” too. I am sure it’s a bit mysterious to him.

What goes on in the mind of a child who is learning to read is mysterious to me, in turn. I do not remember learning letter sounds or how to decode, though my mom tells me the first grade teacher I learned from used old-fashioned phonics and she attributed to that my almost immediate fluency. My first memory of reading is of sitting down with the Noddy books which my mom had often read to me, and finding that now I could read them myself. Reading the Noddy books to Paddy now brings back some of those delightful, vivid early memories. Though I think it’s painfully odd that all I consciously remember of first grade is not how I learned to read, but how the teacher used to scream at us, and sometimes make us all put our heads down on the desk. I don’t think she ever screamed directly at me, but I was always very afraid she would. That was obviously more significant to my 6 year old self than exploding the code was.

I’m writing this out because I’ve never up till now had a child who was interested in the symbols on the page along with the story. Clare could write stories before she could read. She knew the letter sounds and she must have grasped that combining them made words, so she would bring me stories about the “mnstr” that “jupt” at the “grl” — then she would help me read them. But when she was listening to a story, she was like the 3 year old in John Holt’s anecdote. It was the story and the imagination that she was interested in, not the meanings of the symbols on the page.

She doesn’t remember learning the letter sounds in preschool. But she does remember the librarian who snapped at her because she hadn’t returned her library book within a week.

Aidan loves how the letters look and has been able to name them and tell their sounds since he was five. He loves to spell words on his V Tech Phonics board. He loves to trace letters in his Handwriting without Tears book. But he is not as interested in stories as Paddy is and I think his process will be different yet again.

I love having the chance to revisit reading with my children and see the differences in each of them as they learn. I think it’s a bit sad that my childhood school-based reading instruction was apparently effective, but not memorable compared to the threat of facing a teacher’s temper tantrum. I’m glad my mother’s reading aloud to me provided the bridge to the moment that I really discovered reading — being able to decipher the words in my own book in my own home. I hope that Paddy and Aidan won’t need a bridge — that listening will transition seamlessly into reading, like taking the next breath.

Pondering about Planning

Slea Head. That was one of the most beautiful places we went to on our trip. If you ever go there, though, and you’re in a big van trying to back up on the one-lane cliff-side road lined with rocky outcroppings to make way for a huge tour bus, be sure to tuck in your left side window. Then maybe you won’t knock it completely off as we did. On the bright side, as my mother in law said, no PERSON in our family group of 27 got hurt, even with all that driving on the left hand side of the road, even in Dublin with the night-life going on right outside our hotel, even in Ennis where sadly, my teenage son and his 2 cousins came across the scene of a stabbing when they were returning from seeing Pirates of the Caribbean. A sheared off rear-view window — a small enough price to pay, though it looks like the rental company wants to make sure the price isn’t TOO small.

JoVE wrote a nice retrospective in response to mine yesterday — This Time Last Year. It made me wish that I had been a bit more philosophical in my entry, but my mind doesn’t seem to be working that way right now. Educationally, last year in July, it appears I was thinking about whether you could plan and still be an unschooler.

My friend and planning-guru Cindy wrote a series of posts describing how she does this. Over the past year, I have managed to learn that you can still plan and organize, even as an unschooler, if that’s how you operate in real life. The trick is to use the plans as a travel-guide not a sort of railroad track. And if you find yourself backing up on a rocky one-lane cliffside road, well, it’s worth it for the beauty of the scenery and the experience.

What I've Read Recently II

Faith at Dumb Ox Academy has posted her Summer Reading plans. If you look on my sidebar you will see my ongoing reading plans and here is my last Recent Reading post from May --but here are some more that I read too fast to want to go to the trouble of putting them up on my sidebar.

Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

He started writing these after reading Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Asimov obviously has a cynical view of the role of religion in society -- in these books a religion is invented in order to inspire and control the society so they carry out the ideas of the intelligentsia. He neither approves or disapproves this, just depicts it as part of the sociological landscape.

The premise is that the Empire is collapsing in slow motion and a mathematic-historian devises a Foundation in order to preserve and regenerate civilization -- there is a millenium-long "Dark Age" and the stories in the trilogy are to do with how historical events in actuality line up with the founder's mathematically based prediction.

As Asimov writes in the introduction, these stories are all about dialogue and the play of one intelligence against another and the sweep of history. There is hardly any romance and no graphic violence. Interesting to read. My teenage boys read it in their mid to late teens -- could be read by younger teens but probably better once they've reached a more analytical stage and can think through premises.

Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Children of the Mind. Someone in my local community must be a fan of Orson Scott Card since this is the second of his series I have found in part on our library remainder shelves. It looks like there are a total of 8 books in this series, but I only read the three above. There is plenty of violence and intensity in the first two listed above; much less in the third one. All were thought-provoking and dealt with Card's themes of guilt and family dysfunction and intellectual talent. Ender's Game, which is apparently a sci fi classic, is about an intellectual prodigy who is being trained to save Earth from aliens called the "buggers". The other two books are about Ender's attempts to redeem and regain control of his life after the events of the first book. Card is a serious writer (a practicing Mormon, incidentally) and according to the intros in the books, he was consciously writing in the tradition of the Foundation novels. My oldest son read the first two as well and we had some interesting discussions. I personally would not give the books to my kids until they were older teenagers.

Right now I am reading The Belgariad, which I found recommended on a Waldorf site for nine year olds along with some other fantasy books. I don't think I would give the book to my nine year olds, personally. The first book (it's another3-in-1 edition) is a relatively mild coming of age story that reminded me slightly of Lloyd Alexanders' books (not quite as sweet and formative but with the same idea of an ordinary boy who is involved in great events) but the second two have graphic violence (similar to Homer's epics) and some elements of moral cynicism. I think they would be better for a high schooler.

My library sale shelf also had some discards in the teen-sociology non-fiction genre. So when I got back from Ireland I read:

Eating Disorders by Diane Yancey

This is a clear and straightforward book about 3 kinds of teen eating disorders -- anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive eating. It approached the disorders through seven case studies, explaining some of the risk factors and the progression of the disorders, and gave summaries of the partial or complete recovery of the seven people described.

If you look on Amazon under "Eating Disorders" a LOT of books come up. When I was a teenager, anorexia nervosa was just coming onto the radar due to Karen Carpenter's sufferings from the disease. I mentioned once before that I suffered what appears to be a relatively mild bout of it brought on by depression and viral illness during my teenage years. Though my case has resolved, this book brought back some painful memories. This is the first book I've ever read about the condition -- instinctively knowing, I suppose, that it would have been harmful to gather information about it in the past, since one notable feature of the disorder is a competitive element.

A Tribe Apart.

This book is a keeper, though often painful to read -- about the lives and (mostly) school culture of eight "typical" teenagers in Virginia in the 1990's. It is a descriptive, anthropological account more than a problem-solving book. It would be interesting to read alongside Hold On To Your Kids (which I read last year and which seems to take note of some of the same problems and propose a more detailed solution) and in contrast to the more optimism-inspiring Real Lives by Grace Llewellyn -- accounts of eleven"unschooled" teenagers who have managed to escape the alienation and intense peer dependency of their "schooled" peers in A Tribe Apart.

Then I read two self-help books called:

Smart Love

(another library sale find) about alternatives to punitive discipline, using what the book calls "loving regulation" to bring up kids. It is subtitled: The Compassionate Alternative to Discipline That Will Make You a Better Parent and Your Child a Better Person. The authors, apparently a husband-wife team, have raised five children using their methods. They propose an alternative to the two extremes of permissiveness or punitive-type discipline. It deals with the concept of "inner happiness" somewhat similar to a book I read last year -- The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness. The idea is that in the first years of life, a child assumes that his parents are parenting ideally. This forms the foundation for later life -- for example, if the child is unhappy for his first years of life, he will try to seek out unhappiness in later life assuming that this is the ideal state. If a child is brought up to experience love and security as foundations, he will have an equilibrium based on a drive for happiness, not misery. This rang true with what I've noticed through the years -- that often, severely disciplined children seem to TRY to get themselves in trouble, which of course perpetuates the punitive discipline since the parents feel that the kid would be even more out of control if they "let up". A lot of the book's recommended practices made sense to the style of parenting I have intuitively gravitated towards. It reminded me a bit of St. John Bosco's Preventive Discipline and some of the teachings of other saints, like St Therese and St Francis de Sales, of winning hearts and souls through love and trust rather than fear.

John Bosco writes:

How then are we to set about breaking down this barrier (of mistrust and fear)? By a friendly informal relationship with the young, especially in recreation. You cannot have love without this familiarity, and where this is not evident there can be no confidence. If you want to be loved, you must make it clear that you love. Jesus Christ made himself little with the little ones and bore our weaknesses. He is our master in the matter of the friendly approach.

In general, the system we ought to adopt is called Preventive, which consists in so disposing the hearts of our students that they ought to be willing to do what we ask of them without need of external violence

Where Smart Love is at its best, it follows this prescription. I don't feel it would entirely work as a parenting system in itself -- it might be better as a counter-balance type book. I think the concept of children needing to acquire primary happiness is a useful one and explains things that would otherwise seem mysterious, but at some points in the book I think it goes over the line to the point where some parents reading it might be tempted to surrender authority in return for presumptive happiness for their children. The book does warn a bit against this, saying that some parents experience a need to inappropriately cushion their children from any type of obstacle to immediate gratification.

The last book on my list (whew!) is one that was recommended somewhere (can't remember where). So it cost more than a dime -- 40 cents plus shipping, to be precise.

When You Can You Will

This seemed a bit like a grown-up, self-help version of Smart Love. It discussed the underlying reasons why we can't make ourselves do what we want to. Like Smart Love, it did not explicitly discuss sin and fault, so I think some conservative Christians would call both of them "modernistic" and dismiss them as psychobabble. However, to me as a conservative Catholic who has been attracted to the (thoroughly orthodox) teachings of the saints mentioned above, I think that sometimes labelling some personal problem "sin" CAN become a dismissive label, and a shortcut..... just like "God's creation" CAN be used as a shortcircuit to avoid rather than pursue legitimate scientific research. I'm trying to finish off this summary in haste and hope not to be misunderstood. Sin has always been recognized -- descriptively, ontologically, poetically -- throughout history, but of course not always under that name and not always with the metaphysical specifics of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The way St Paul describes it rings very true to me

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

But not everything that goes wrong in human life is sin, and punitive, retributive methods are not always the most effective or the most appropriate even for moral issues. Jesus makes that clear in several of his dealings with the people around him. If you read St Paul's description above, you will see the mental turmoil of a child or adult who WANTS to do better but can't. Harshness is not the answer -- the answer is love, and grace and true guidance and support.

The idea of When You Can You Will is that sometimes the methods we use to try to change ourselves --- like self-criticism, behaviorial regimens, imitating what worked for others, and so on -- are methods that oftendo not address the REAL problems, or do not address them constructively, and thus fail. Say you are trying to be a better homeschooler, or make a career move, or change a destructive relationship -- WHATEVER. Berating yourself, or imposing some "failproof" system, or copying some perfect other person -- these things usually don't work anymore than scolding, comparing or complicated discipline systems usually work in raising children. The reason -- according to both these books -- is because the real situation is underneath -- and usually concerns something that is presently somehow "working" even though in a non-functional way.

This actually does accord with traditional Christian thought more than you would think at first sight. For example, St Augustine said that Sin and Evil are not positives, but negatives. Sin is a lack, a choice of the lesser good. No one chooses something except when he or she somehow thinks it is good. Even when St Augustine stole the peaches even though they were not good peaches, he knew he was operating under what his nature dictated as "good" -- self autonomy, and pride, perhaps.

I guess I could go on and on about this, but the post is long enough already.

Sense and Simplicity

This is an interesting Catholic, literary blog I just found --- And Sometimes Tea. It's going directly into my rather un-minimalistic -- possibly even cluttered? Google Reader subscription.

These two posts:

You Can't Take it With You
and
A Review of Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons
are both good reading, and only two of many.

They inspired me to hunt up this quote from GK Chesterton's Heretics, on Sandals and Simplicity -- one my teenagers and I have discussed in the past. It expresses some of my own reservations about Crunchy Cons when I read it a year or so ago:

A man approaches, wearing sandals and simple raiment, a raw tomato held firmly in his right hand, and says, "The affections of family and country alike are hindrances to the fuller development of human love;" but the plain thinker will only answer him, with a wonder not untinged with admiration, "What a great deal of trouble you must have taken in order to feel like that." High living will reject the tomato. Plain thinking will equally decisively reject the idea of the invariable sinfulness of war. High living will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to despise a pleasure as purely material. And plain thinking will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to reserve our horror chiefly for material wounds.

The only simplicity that matters is the simplicity of the heart. If that be gone, it can be brought back by no turnips or cellular clothing; but only by tears and terror and the fires that are not quenched. If that remain, it matters very little if a few Early Victorian armchairs remain along with it. Let us put a complex entree into a simple old gentleman; let us not put a simple entree into a complex old gentleman. So long as human society will leave my spiritual inside alone, I will allow it, with a comparative submission, to work its wild will with my physical interior. I will submit to cigars. I will meekly embrace a bottle of Burgundy. I will humble myself to a hansom cab. If only by this means I may preserve to myself the virginity of the spirit, which enjoys with astonishment and fear. I do not say that these are the only methods of preserving it. I incline to the belief that there are others. But I will have nothing to do with simplicity which lacks the fear, the astonishment, and the joy alike. I will have nothing to do with the devilish vision of a child who is too simple to like toys.