a stone, a leaf, an unfound door

(from Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel, which I haven’t read, but I liked the sound of the phrase)

What to write, what to write?

We walked — not just me and Aidan, but almost the whole crew were outside together. Aidan was pushing his purple wheelchair — good therapy, it is up and down hills and that thing weighs about 50 pounds. Kieron had the scooter. And Paddy was running after us in his little rain white boots with spots and dog faces on the front. And plaid shorts. He looked a bit like Christopher Robin. It was breezy and cold. There are still patches of snow hidden among the shady parts of the woods.

We had to go into town to supposedly get Clare’s baby teeth extracted, but instead she came out looking bewildered and said she had only gotten a checkup. I found that they needed a referral from the orthodontist. I wish they had let me know that BEFORE we made the 120 mile round trip at $4.15 per gallon gas. Ouch. We went to Costco and spent quite a bit more but we can probably last for several weeks now as far as the freezer and pantry stocks go.

While the kids unloaded the groceries from the car I made phone calls. … insurance related. Five separate bills were refused by our insurance company for 2 separate reasons (both due to billing errors). I am tentatively hoping that the calls — these are by no means the FIRST of the phone conversations about these bills — resolved the issue. But I have hoped before, and in vain. We shall see. I find I have to talk billing-insurance-speak, and this is something I was never taught in school. Could it be that it’s better to teach children HOW to keep learning throughout life, and to develop capacities for adaptation and patience, rather than put too much trust in a given set of skills and scope of content?

Then we were off again, Aidan and I, to more testing at the school. It still may not be the last test. But when we come to the last tests, they are going to be the LAST tests, indeed.

I baked — pizza, “cookie bread” (our family name for Toll House Cookie dough baked in a pan — makes it sound nutritious or something, doesn’t it?), then I made fudge. I guess the cold air outside revived the baking instinct.

The quote for today comes from The Learning Umbrella: Do Your Kids Get Enough Danger? — quoting Swallows and Amazons.

“Better drowned than duffers - if not duffers won’t drown.”

Maybe I’ll read that book to my kids this summer. I know so many people who love that series, and I’ve never managed to read it, even though we’ve had it around the house for quite a long time.

Clare has been reading Hardy Boys now, of all things. Kieron just read “The Forgotten Door” one of my favorite books in childhood. Alexander Key’s books are great for introverted kids. I must have read this one a score of times in elementary school.

total effect and literature

A bit more on a similar topic from Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: --- Total Effect and the Eighth Grade). She is writing about a couple of cases where books, specifically Steinbeck's East of Eden and Hersey's A Bell for Adono, were assigned in 8th and 9th grade, and parents objected, and a teacher was subsequently dismissed, and Hersey wrote to the state school superintendent to protest. (This was in 1963, by the way). The issue of whether it is to be parents or teachers who decide what schoolchildren should read is not her main concern, though. The whole article is at the second link above.

This is the part that reminded me a bit of what I was writing about yesterday:

The total effect of a novel depends not only on its innate impact, but upon the experience, literary and otherwise, with which it is approached..... the fact that these works (she is talking about the English novels of the 18th and 19th centuries) do not present him (the student) with the realities of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time, and he has no perspective whatever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday; their studies began with the present and dipped backward occasionally when it seemed necessary or unavoidable.

She defines the term "total effect" as:

that principle followed in legal cases by which a book is judged not for isolated parts but by the final effect of the whole book upon the general reader.

I think the term "total effect" is still used today. First, here is an English lesson plan version which seems a bit reductionistic and overly subjective to me. Don't you think?

Firstly, we are affected by literature -- we love it, hate it, or
are indifferent. This is the total effect.

"Meaning" is the total effect -- the sum of all of the parts is
what it "means" to you. A work may have made a didactic point or
not but you responded to it.

Here is one I like somewhat better --from Writing an Analysis of Literature

Assume everything is significant. In good literature, nothing should be an accident. Each word, each character, each thought, each incident should make a contribution to the total effect the author is trying for. The contribution is sometimes obvious and direct: the author casually mentions that a car is nine years old because later on the car will break down. At other times, the contribution is indirect: the author spends a paragraph describing a glowing fireplace in order to establish a homey mood that fits in with the story's central idea -- the joys of family life. As you think about the material you are going to analyze, as you brood about what you are going to say and how you are going to say it, keep in mind that nothing is beneath your notice. Assume that everything serves a purpose and that you have not reached a full understanding of the story, poem, or play until you clearly see the purpose that everything serves.

Finally, an essay on Literature and Science by Matthew Arnold. He starts with Plato and proceeds to a defense of the value of Greek literature with very brief and respectful excursions into the territory of Darwin, Faraday, and Ruskin. What could be better! But here is what he says about "total effect":

Fit details strictly combined, in view of a large general result nobly conceived; that is just the beautiful symmetria prisca of the Greeks, and it is just where we English fail, where all our art fails. Striking ideas we have, and well-executed details we have; but that high symmetry which, with satisfying and delightful effect, combines them, we seldom or never have. The glorious beauty of the Acropolis at Athens did not come from single fine things stuck about on that hill, a statue here, a gateway there;—no, it arose from all things being perfectly combined for a supreme total effect.

I think I've diverged a bit from the original point, with these various definitions of "total effect". But Flannery O'Connor's point was that the principle of total effect could and ought to be conceived more broadly than when talking about the education of a child. Part of the total effect of a book is going to be what the student (of any age) brings to it. So I am staying to my point after all -- that it is the context and backdrop of the child's reading that affects his perspective on the new ones that come his way.

Wandering, Reading, Writing

Title from an article about walking and poetry, called Walking with His Muse. I looked up walking because today Aidan and I went for our first spring walk. The older children have been roaming around the outdoors ever since the majority of the snow melted but this is the first time for me.

I wanted to write something every day in here but alas, I haven’t been consistent. I think part of the problem is that most of what has been happening recently has been nice, but small scale. Even writing it out casts a bigger shadow than the thing itself.

Like:

–Aidan vacuuming the whole downstairs yesterday. He was so proud that he got on the phone to talk to his brother at college to tell him his achievement.
–Games of UNO, War, Poker and Hit the Deck. It’s a fun way for me to spend time with my middle boys and not have to use my brain too much. And the little ones can phase in and out without much disruption in the game, though it does nicely build the patience muscles in the teens.
– Noticing the way one of my teens approaches conversation with me… by observing some meticulously noted detail usually to do with the natural world. Yesterday he told me he heard and saw the bats coming to get the moths at his window at night. Today he pointed out our most majestic sugar pine and compared its height to the height of the new Dallas football stadium going up.

Aidan had one more series of tests today at the school. This one held his interest much better because it was geometric shaped pieces and you had to follow the pattern the tester made. He was very absorbed and did better in this than he has in the more abstract areas. But he lost ground when he had to repeat shapes that were only pictured on a paper.

We went to the lake. It was actually warm enough for the courageous souls to swim (mostly Aidan) though we had to do some climbing to get to a good beach place. You could actually see snow in the hills right above the lake, so you can imagine it was no sauna. When we were discussing whether they would be allowed to go into the water, I said something about being a Spartan mother and Kieron said, “Well, as long as you don’t make us eat raw meat.” I thought that was funny — a 12 year old boy version of “connections” in learning!

Kieron spent almost the whole time rescuing ladybugs. A whole bunch of them had made their way into the water — maybe they hatched nearby and got blown in? This isn’t a very good picture since I couldn’t see my viewfinder in the sun, but here is a small sample:

As for academics? Yes, a bit. We have packed up Jacob’s and are reviewing for Sean’s math. Basically, Sean’s academic year is dwindling to a close. This must be a first, when he is finishing all his books and I actually don’t have enough left for him to do. I guess it must be because we’ve had no major life events this year. I am thinking — a unit? a writing intensive? Surely there must be some areas left to shore up?

The boys were looking for something to do, and found this –

War!– Age of Imperialism

The younger ones kept playing even when Sean and his dad went off to work out at the high school football field. Aidan was delighted — a train!! Wheels! (on a cannon). All sorts of little pieces to play with. I have warned them most solemnly to keep them on the table and not scatter them around the house. We have had similar conversations in the past and they work — for a while —

Clare and I talked about Descartes’s proof for the existence of God. What does it mean, “existence is more perfect than non-existence?” That was yesterday. And today we talked about Perry Mason. We are nothing if not eclectic here.

I dug out a box of Paddy’s old books. I hid them in my closet a few months ago because I was so tired of reading them — bad mom. But I wanted to fan the fire of interest-in-something-besides-Tintin, and now the trodden grass has sprung up enough so that I can bear them again. So we have been reading Arnold Lobel and Else Holmelund Minarik. Perfect for instant serenity and staying-in-the-moment. I think you can learn a lot of philosophy from reading Frog and Toad.

JoVE gives me a new way to think of the transition — “gearing up” rather than “winding down”. Really, our days have been quite full, and are likely to become even fuller when Liam comes home and our summer plans take effect.

All Literature is Dangerous

This is what Martin Cothran writes in The Classical Teacher sent out from Memoria Press. He quotes Chesterton, who says in "On Reading":

To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one's last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns.
Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone.

Cothran writes about young college students who read some of Ayn Rand's work and were "swept away", not having read enough or thought enough to realize that books like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were not great literature or thought. You could probably substitute whatever book or idea you could imagine. The best insurance against a disproportionate influence of one book or idea is a broad, deep environment of them.

Of course, CS Lewis says something very similar in his famous Introduction to Athanasius:

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook - even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny.

Cothran goes on (he is talking about the Harry Potter series):

"To a child who is not well-read, Harry Potter is dangerous -- and so is any other book he or she may read. But the best defense against one idea is not fewer ideas but more of them....being widely read, in other words, is the best inoculation against the dangers of literature. Being widely read enables a person to not only see an idea, but, as Chesterton put it, to see through it."

"Literature is dangerous-- except when taken in large doses"

I read Ayn Rand in my freshman year of university, so that is why the example particularly rang with me. The friend who gave me her books was an enthusiast who took her philosophy as truth. As for me, I admired Rand's vigor and a sort of cool sweeping bleakness in her tales of striving, dispassionate men and women. But I knew it was not great writing and I knew it wasn't great thinking. When I reflect on how I knew, I think it was because of my mother reading Winnie the Pooh to me, among much else, and I knew that Rand had left a whole lot out that needed to be accounted for at least implicitly.

John Senior writes:

"The seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, only properly grow in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, romances, adventures-the thousand good books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and the rest."

I think that if children have explored the territory of these "thousand good books" (you could probably add others to the list) then they will have some means by which to measure the books and ideas that will inevitably come their way. The virtues and the limitations of the Hogwarts world will be clearer against a context of Middle Earth, Narnia, Sherwood Forest, and Ravenhurst, to mention only a few.

I like what Theresa at La Paz Learning wrote some time ago about Living Dangerously. She writes:

Far better to teach your child how to appropriately handle the dangerous things he may come into contact with, like power tools, knives, or fire. It is actually safer than trying to keep your child in a sterile, “safe” environment in hopes of keeping him from harm. Rather than forbidding a child to touch these things, teach him (age appropriately, of course) to use “dangerous” things safely, and you no longer need fear him coming across them (because he inevitably will) and then hurting himself. I contend (though I admit I have not done the research to back it up) that most accidents happen due to lack of knowledge, not because of the possession of too much of it.

I think this mastery of danger has ramifications in the literary sphere too. A lot of the most worthwhile things have an element of risk. We don't read them or do them BECAUSE they are risky; but because of their very value or power, there is some danger in their handling. This would include our faith, of course. A constant theme in CS Lewis's Narnia Chronicles is that "he (Aslan) is not a TAME lion". Our faith is not tame, or at least should not be; our lives are not tame, unless we have insulated them to the point of vacuum-sealing; nor is tameness all we should expect of our literature, even for our children.

Of course, this is not about letting kids have free rein with the matches or knives or guns or books with adult themes, either. I think our society tends towards a dichotomy -- XTreme precautions, to the point that you can't buy a real chemistry set anymore and laws are being proposed to restrict fast food; and on the other hand, simple neglect or indifference to a toxic environment. Everyone has to find their own balance for their own family and children. But there is a golden mean between any two extremes, and it seems to me that children learn more about risk by learning to handle it to some extent according to their maturity than by being kept from it altogether.

out of half a dream

NEAR the end of April,
On the verge of May –
And O my heart, the woods were dusk
At the close of day.
Half a word was spoken
Out of half a dream,
And God looked in my soul and saw
A dawn rise and gleam.

This is the first stanza of a poem called Near the End of April by someone called William Stanley Braithwaite who turns out to be an interesting person. I googled and found this bio

Poet, literary critic, editor, and anthologist, William Stanley Braithwaite was a distinguished fellow of American letters. Braithwaite was born in Boston and largely educated at home. His father was a native of British Guiana and his light-skinned mother was the daughter of a mulatto ex-slave. His passion for literature was fostered in the years he spent as an apprentice for the publisher, Ginn & Company. Braithwaite published his first volume of poetry, Lyrics of Life and Love, in 1904, followed four years later by The House of Falling Leaves…

and his list of honors and achievements go on and on. So he was “homeschooled” if you can use that term, and quite an autodidact too, it appears.

I am really enjoying this way of getting in touch with some poets I hadn’t heard of before by way of taking lines from their work for titles. Sometimes I feel a qualm about this. Sometimes the titles look a little strange when I see them perched on top of a quite prosaic and largely unrelated blog entry but on the other hand, they give me a thrill every time I see them and with poems, I find, more than almost anything else except life with toddlers, I have to become acquainted with them gently. I am a fast reader but you can’t read a poem fast. You have to slow down, just like you do with a small child, and meet them on their own terms and expect to be surprised somehow.

Today was largely taken up with watching the football draft. I’m not sure how I found myself sitting down with my teenagers to watch this event, because usually I don’t even like watching movies, let alone commentators with bad hair taking their painfully slow time to announce picks for teams I barely know of players I haven’t heard of at all. And interspersed with offensive commercials, yet. But I did sit down with them, and it was fun.

I think I’ve linked to Sandra Dodd’s Parallel Play — Leaning on a Truck before. But every once in a while it comes to my mind again. We are a family of introverts and most of us are masculine; the ratio is 7:2. Furthermore we live in a mountain community where even the extroverts are a bit taciturn and have pretty wide personal space zones.

Watching a football draft leads to all kinds of conversation that simply wouldn’t happen if you said something like “so how was your day?” (”Okay” is the obvious ending point to that conversation) or “What do you think about such and such?” (the answer is “I don’t know.”) In my family the laconic answers aren’t a resistant type of behavior; they stem from the mental-retrieval issue that comes up in my own life very often.

There are all kinds of ways to lean on a truck and I am trying to spend more effort simply being around the children, being part of what is going on. When you hang out beside a truck that the owner is proud of he will tell you a lot about it and you will learn more about him in the process, too, and there will be a new strand in your relationship. Sandra says:

Women talk face to face, they say, but men lean side by side on a truck. Another version of leaning on a truck is fishing: facing the same way, doing the same thing. Traditionally these days parents and children move in different spheres and do different things, but unschooling families mix ages and activities.

What can be the model of parent/child interaction? Well there’s the time-honored “riding in the car,” a great time and place for humor, news, and deep conversation. With a tape player, you get music, stories, and grand lyrics about the history of the world and faraway places. But people can’t live in the car. Washing dishes is a great time to sing or tell stories, but even after the biggest holiday dinner, the dishwashing ends. Raking leaves is a great project to lend itself to talking while doing.

Football drafts work too.

I wanted to put that down to remember it.

Out of the Depths

Another quote from Oscar Wilde's De Profundis. This seems to me to be a remarkable description of suffering and depression, especially the wheel image. By the way, you will note that De Profundis is the Latin for Psalm 130, which begins "Out of the depths I cry to You/O Lord, hear my voice!"

. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.

He talks about his temptation to, first, commit suicide, and then to wear his gloom like a purple robe swept around him. Finally he resolved that it was better to keep a cheerful countenance when his friends came to visit him, and try to communicate his real joy in their presence. But the difficulty of the task, moment by moment, is immense.

Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.

And, though at present my friends may find it a hard thing to believe, it is true none the less, that for them living in freedom and idleness and comfort it is more easy to learn the lessons of humility than it is for me, who begin the day by going down on my knees and washing the floor of my cell. For prison life with its endless privations and restrictions makes one rebellious. The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart - hearts are made to be broken - but that it turns one's heart to stone. One sometimes feels that it is only with a front of brass and a lip of scorn that one can get through the day at all. And he who is in a state of rebellion cannot receive grace, to use the phrase of which the Church is so fond - so rightly fond, I dare say - for in life as in art the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, and shuts out the airs of heaven.

What he says there about the heart of stone and the broken heart is echoed in The Ballad of Reading Gaol:

And thus we rust Life's iron chain
Degraded and alone:
And some men curse, and some men weep,
And some men make no moan:
But God's eternal Laws are kind
And break the heart of stone.

And every human heart that breaks,
In prison-cell or yard,
Is as that broken box that gave
Its treasure to the Lord,
And filled the unclean leper's house
With the scent of costliest nard.

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?

And he of the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes,
Waits for the holy hands that took
The Thief to Paradise;
And a broken and a contrite heart
The Lord will not despise.

Pain of Learning?

I wrote this in an earlier blog a very long time ago. It was about Mortimer Adler's Invitation to the Pain of Learning, which he wrote in 1941. It is interesting that later, in 1974, he wrote another article called The Joy of Learning. (Edited: I originally wrote in this space that Adler had become less atheistic and more Catholic as his life progressed and that his change in thinking reflected that, but that was a careless shorthand. I think he became more philosophical. Possibly this led to his conversion in the long run, but that's beside the point here and is for another conversation. I must not have many atheist readers, or any that I have don't take offense easily, because no one seemed to object.)

--------------------------

I think that there's some pain in all worthy endeavours, but emphasizing the pain too much leads to a false, not fully Catholic view of existence. We are taught that our goal is happiness, joy, true peace -- those things aren't synonymous with ease & comfort but transcend them. Joy etc even transcends suffering by FAR. The point is that some pain etc is acceptable in pursuit of a worthwhile endeavour, like learning.

We don't do hard, worthwhile things BECAUSE they are painful but because some things are more good than pain is bad. Pain is certainly not the worst thing in our existence. Sin is.

I think it is good to teach this to our kids through life but also to acknowledge that pain IS painful. Sometimes we all don't want to get out of bed, scrub the toilet, be patient with a toddler, etc. It's just that we shouldn't let the pain stop us or turn us aside.

David Isaacs in his book Character Formation says that the best age to start really working on fortitude and courage, which is what I'm talking about above, is about ages 8 to 12. You don't do this solely or even mostly through schoolwork but by chores, sports, hiking, etc. I think the younger set needs to focus more on loving obedience.

I think some people like Adler who discuss the pain in learning are trying to counter the view that all learning should be immediately and at all times pleasant, comfortable etc. CS Lewis said that some learning is painful in the beginner stages because it's hard to see where it's going. The learning itself isn't immediately rewarding, but when you HAVE learned it, you are rewarded in the long term because you can understand something you couldn't before you got to that stage. The example he is is of the early stages of Greek grammar, leading to an appreciation of Greek poetry in the original. You wouldn't even be able to see WHY reading Greek poetry is so great UNTIL you are to the point where you can start actually reading it a little (not that I know this from experience). So when I'm talking to my (older) kids I try to emphasize these two points -- (1) that most worthwhile things are hard sometimes and we don't HAVE to be daunted by hardship and (2) that sometimes you can't realize the rewards until you are at a stage where you have learned enough to appreciate them. With a little kid, I try more to SHOW this by rewarding and approving good efforts, etc.

I imagine this is the sort of thing Adler and others of the "no pain, no gain" school are emphasizing. But if it becomes a sort of pleasure in inflicting pain -- a sort of "I had to face bullies in the schoolyard and boring, meaningless classes, so why shouldn't you?" then it's gone too far. That's where John Holt is absolutely right in resisting a kind of academic tyranny imposed on the child from outside.

Non sum dignus

To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.
Is that time dead?lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?

Helas, Oscar Wilde

An article on The Long Conversion of Oscar Wilde begins with this:

"I am not a Catholic; I am simply a violent Papist."

This article, The Vatican Goes Wilde, tells more about the context for this aphorism.

A few months before his death Wilde had travelled to Rome. On Holy Saturday he went to tea at the Hotel de l'Europe and there a man he did not know suddenly came up to him and asked if he would like to see Pope Leo XIII the next day. Wilde, ever the joker, bowed his head and, borrowing a phrase from the Mass, said "Non sum dignus [I am not worthy]". But the man produced a ticket. On Easter Day, Wilde appeared in the front row among the pilgrims at the Vatican and received a blessing from the Pope.

For five months the Irishman had been suffering from a terrible rash - perhaps, biographers have speculated, the late effects of syphilis, eating bad mussels, an allergic reaction to his hair dye or vitamin deficiency dermatitis from overuse of alcohol (he was on a litre of brandy a day, plus copious amounts of absinthe). Whatever, the rash vanished.

Wilde later wrote: "When I saw the old white Pontiff, successor of the Apostles and Father of Christendom pass, carried high above the throng, and in passing turn and bless me where I knelt, I felt my sickness of body and soul fall from me like a worn garment, and I was made whole." But still he hesitated. "My position is curious," he epigrammatised, "I am not a Catholic: I am simply a violent Papist."

Like everyone, I had known that Oscar Wilde was convicted in a public trial and went to gaol, but I had not known that it was the Marquess of Queensberry who actually had brought him to court after Wilde sued him unsuccessfully for libel. Queensberry was the one who codified the rules for boxing.

Whatever his prowess in the boxing ring, the athletic Marquess was clearly no match for Wilde in a war of words, so Wilde (against good advice) decided to bring an action for libel against him. Wilde had at the time two hit plays running in London. He had everything to lose — and he lost it. Why, then, did he take the Marquess to court?

Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol after seeing a man hung for murdering his wife:

The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

Chesterton once wrote:

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

Of course, he was referring to the "Oscar Wilde" with the +TM mark, the flamboyantly amoral aesthete, not the interior individual. And he was making a point about gratitude and what true appreciation for beauty requires of the person, not proposing a pay-for-goods transaction. On another occasion, GKC made a distinction between the public figure of Wilde and the real thinker and man and artist behind the persona.

About Oscar Wilde, as about other wits, Disraeli or Bernard Shaw, men wage a war of words, some calling him a great artist and others a mere charlatan. But this controversy misses the really extraordinary thing about Wilde: the thing that appears rather in the plays than the poems. He was a great artist. He also was really a charlatan. I mean by a charlatan one sufficiently dignified to despise the tricks that he employs.

and later:

One might go through his swift and sparkling plays with a red and blue pencil marking two kinds of epigrams; the real epigram which he wrote to please his own wild intellect, and the sham epigram which he wrote to thrill the very tamest part of our tame civilization. This is what I mean by saying that he was strictly a charlatan - among other things. He descended below himself to be on top of others. He became purposely stupider than Oscar Wilde that he might seem cleverer than the nearest curate.

Last summer, Clare and Liam and I did an impromptu reading of a scene in Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest. We had so much fun reading the parts together. I was Jack, if you want to know. But I did notice the red-pencil versus blue-pencil sorts of clevernesses. As a family, we seem to find ourselves amused even by his merely facile turns of phrase, which seem to me to be a restless impatience with conventionality, like a boy who has to ask the teacher difficult questions just to annoy her and cause a stir. You can sympathize a bit even while you get irritated by the wasted time and effort. You can sense the desire to turn things over and pull them apart in order to get at the real things behind them.

I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.

I think one of the best things about Wilde as a person and probably as an artist is that he probably knew as well as anyone the difference between his charlatan side and his truthful side. That's probably one of the best things that could be said of anyone, actually.

From his De Profundis:

It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

He also wrote:

Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which one alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say in their Gnomic aphorisms, 'Even the Gods cannot alter the past.' Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing he could do.

Odds and Ends

I liked this gestalt homeschooling post that Patience at Knitting the Wind shared from her old blog. Especially this part:

Rose has in her mind all the bits of information, but in a way that makes one great story. She is also being trained at a very gentle, almost unconscious, level to see everything as connected. I believe the potential of this is huge. When faced with a problem in the future, she will naturally be able to call open-mindedly upon resources from vastly different spheres because she believes everything is pertinent to everything else.

I’ve been following JoVE’s thoughts on Math. I keep thinking about this, from her post on Jacob’s Algebra:

Those of you who know that I hang out (in cyberspace at least) with the creative learner types will immediately see what the problem with the text might be. It is very sequential. And breaks things down in small steps.

I have been trying to figure out the solution to this. Math is truly my last bastion for “just do it” thinking. I rather enjoyed math myself in school, even though I was a right-brained visual/spatial type. I think the reason was that unlike so many things in school, it did not seem arbitrary to me, and it was not stressful. Math does not lie — I can see for myself that 7 + 8 = 15, or that Y = 2x +5 gives you a value for Y if you know the value for X. This was very peaceful for me, and accorded with my instincts rather than worked against them.

But I see it is not the same for my children.. They are not normally stressed, so sequential math programs are not a refuge for them, but feels like a box.

I can see the value of trying to figure out a less programmed approach but am a bit vexed at trying to discern how. I am not really a hands-on type teacher. We get by in the other subjects by reading and talking. Anyway, over the summer I am going to try to brainstorm a bit how to work on math with Kieron. Aidan and Paddy are easy because we do very little formal math anyway before age 8 (and Aidan is developmentally about age 6 while Paddy is 5).

The gentler breathings of April

Title courtesy of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brronte.

A few bits and pieces about our life up here in the Sierras, since I probably won’t have time to blog regularly today:

Aidan had a clinic appointment yesterday at the therapy unit in town and then we went shopping, stocking up on groceries to the tune of a few hundred dollars. But our pantry and freezer aren’t bare anymore and we can probably last out the month!

Today Aidan has testing at the school. He had a meltdown this morning about something seemingly unrelated, but I could tell that he had been stressed all morning. We talked, and he confided that he hated the testing. I tried to reassure him that the end was in sight, that I knew it was hard, that he should just do the best he could etc. This is a bit of a milestone, that he was able to talk about his feelings. One habit of his is to put his feelings on a sibling, “Paddy cried…. Kieron is in BIG trouble….” and he did this a bit but was also willing to discuss his own feelings and I saw a lot of tension go out of his behavior after that. I hate the testing too.

Very cold this week. We’ve had the fire going daily.

Clare and I made peanut butter oatmeal cookies with butterscotch and milk chocolate chips (the BEST!) and are going to have a girl time this afternoon and watch Becoming Jane together.

Sean is almost finished with the chapter on Quadratic Equations. This is one of the few things in the Algebra book I don’t remember how to do, but reading through the chapter in order to “teach” it gave me some insight into how Sean feels whenever a new concept comes up. Then yesterday, Clare needed help with her Geometry, and she was trying to explain to me the AA congruency principal, and once again I realized how difficult it must be to sit and listen to what seems completely outside of one’s own experience and almost completely arbitrary. Good reminder for me!

I really really need to sit down and plan a bit for next year and also for the last few weeks of this year, especially for Kieron and Aidan. Sean’s classes are just about in line for the rest of the year; he’s been able to keep going on his own momentum even this week when I haven’t been around much.

There is an April Page here with lots of poems, quotes, farmers lore etc. Of course, April is almost over, but still….!

Paddy goes down with Kevin and Sean this evening to play with his little cousin.

Aidan playing in the long jump pit at the High School on Sunday.

Aidan “reading” to Paddy on Monday.

City Kid

I finished reading City Kid. It was mostly an account of how Mary MacCracken, who wrote the book, went back to school to get a degree in order to continue working with troubled children in the city. The pointlessness and bureaucratic tyranny of her college experience was described in juxtaposition with the helplessness of the school system to deal directly with children at risk who didn’t fit in a certain category. Troublemaking kids and kids who were slipping quietly through the cracks in the school-day were often put on waiting lists and then nothing happened as a result. The program she was involved in was an attempt to cut through the delays and work directly as a sort of friend/therapist/counsellor with specific kids. The one she mostly worked with during the course of the book was Lucas Brauer, a seven year old who had been in trouble with the law many times for stealing and setting fires. She describes how she worked with him, trying to get to know his family circumstances, trying to deal with college life and her own personal life (her mother died during this time) while still maintaining a relationship with the boy.

It was interesting — he got retained in 2nd grade for another year shortly after he starting working with her, which was devastating to him emotionally since now his former peers looked down on him, his younger brother was in the same grade as he was, and his stepfather thought he was dumb and treated him accordingly. But his work with MacCracken helped him fight back up to his grade level. She would see him for about an hour three times a week — she made him a box which contained (1) a sheet where they had a star system for marking his progress in academic work and in keeping out of the principal’s office (2) a book with “language experience” stories — he would draw a picture and she would write down what he explained about the picture (3) a word box where she cut out words from old readers and he drew them out and tried to read them. He invented his own game show type play with these where he got points for number of words read correctly. She wrote that she realized she didn’t have to figure out how to teach him — if she paid attention, Luke himself would teach her how to teach him.

She also writes that she didn’t like behavioristic systems like charts with stars but that for this child, who was used to failure, it was important to have tangible successes that he could count and measure. For the same reason she learned to rely on his strengths while gently shoring up his weaknesses — his visual memory was way better than his auditory memory, so he had difficulties with phonics, for instance.

In some ways the book reminded me of Marva Collins’ Way — a positive story about how not giving up on a child, and being willing to develop a relationship of trust, can make up for some of the disadvantages of a precarious home life and an underfunded and institutional school setting.

The sparkle and coolness of snow was blown from the mountain beds

The poem is Azure and Gold by Amy Lowell. Since the poem deals with April, I thought it was suitable for my April habit of trying to find poetry lines to head up my blog entries. As for our snow, it is lingering in patches in the shadow of our house and in ridges where the snowplow left its berme, which is apparently a Dutch word meaning a level shelf or raised barrier. The word apparently was convenient to the modern settlers in the Sierras in describing the huge walls of snow you get from snowfall after snowfall piled up on the sides of roads and driveways and walls.

Today went a bit differently than the normal course of things. In the morning, I went to a therapy class held by Aidan’s occupational therapy. It was at another mom’s house down in the foothills, and it was for moms only, so Aidan and Paddy stayed home with the others. Basically I was gone from 8:30 to 1:30 — I don’t remember the last time I’ve been somewhere without even one kid. Almost disorienting! I had a good time. It was interesting to meet several other moms with special needs children who I hadn’t met before.

When I got home I found that Paddy and Aidan had been playing together most of the morning. They had built things with Duplos, played with Aidan’s hot wheels, and then they played a game where they lay down on the bed and Aidan “read” to Paddy, then they both pretended to go to sleep. I got to see them do it. Aidan has pretty much memorized the Bible story book and when he skipped a page he didn’t remember very well, Paddy turned it back and prompted him. It was rather cute.

I had told the older boys to do what homeschool they could without me. So that is what they did, plus their twice-weekly household chores.

I took Kieron, Brendan and Clare to the library and the market as we customarily do on Monday, and we got pizza for dinner since the freezer is basically empty. That hardly ever happens but for some reason we’ve had few opportunities to shop recently.

I am reading a 10 cent library sale book called “City Kid“. I am pretty sure I must have read another book by the same author when I was in middle school. I used to babysit the three adopted sons of a couple who were both psychologists, and they had a bookshelf with a variety of this kind of personal case history/narrative. It’s interesting to read about how she says she lets Luke, the troubled boy the story is about, teach her how to teach him.

Paddy and I have been doing a lot of reading together. I find that if I sit down on the bed, he will soon appear with a book. This is inconvenient if I am planning to read or take a nap, but now that I am intentionally trying to spend more time with him reading, it works just great. We read Lyle the Crocodile, Strega Nona, The House at Pooh Corner, a Noddy, Pickles the Fire Cat and something else besides the ubiquitous Tintin.

Kieron has been reading a Lloyd Alexander book we checked out from the library, The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio.

Kieron found a pumpkin book for Aidan at the library. Pumpkins by Ken Robbins. Aidan has been carrying it everywhere saying, “a truck of pumpkins!” It has inspired many jokes on his part about how the truck is going to dump a cord of pumpkins so that Brendan can stack them on the porch. We think GK Chesterton, who according to his housekeeper would laugh, and write, and then laugh some more at what he wrote, would have much enjoyed Aidan’s sense of humor.

At Thinking Things Through, Christine asks some interesting questions about unschooling and there are some interesting comments in the comment box.

This passage, towards the end of the short story Revelation, has been on my mind recently since I wrote about Flannery O'Connor a few days ago.

There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk ..A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extended upward through the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling towards heaven.... And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. Flannery O'Connor, Revelation

Sunday Miscellany

Julia at Musings of a Prairie Girl has a series of posts where she is pondering about Classical Education. I am linking to the one on Classical Reading because there were a couple of books on the list that I haven’t read that might be interesting for summer.

Unplug your Kids has lots of good ideas for alternatives to the screen. I wanted to note these two posts:
Practical TV-Free Ideas.
Unplugging Yourself

Some of what this “unplugging” is about is mindfulness, as the blogger at Unplug Your Kids points out. Cindy at Applestars brought that idea into my mind (and comment-box) when she mentioned that she liked to have alternatives on hand to the screen to ensure that turning on the box wasn’t just a default or a patch over a blank or troubled spot in our lives.

Sandra Dodd has collected a lot of ideas about the value of video games and TV/Videos. This is something I’ve been thinking over for a long time, and haven’t come to any tidy conclusions, yet. I am not a video game player or movie-watcher myself by natural temperament. I prefer to have my nose in a book, my pen in a notebook, or a computer on my lap ;-). But when I started thinking about it more, I realized that I had set up a false dichotomy in my mind. VGs — frivolous, Books–serious. TV –mindless, other things — mindful. Screens — addictive, typed words — educational. But it’s not as easy as that. Heavens, I just wanted to make a link list, and here I am getting into another giant subject! I’m not going to try to think this through today, but just say that when I started mentally legitimizing my children’s interest in screen activities, it opened up a whole new field for communication and sharing learning.

Yet, it is easy for me to plug myself into my own internal world and basically leave a vacuum in the house. Not the red Elite Hoover that Aidan is fascinated by, but an empty void where my connecting to the children and to life ought to be. It takes some strength and attention to wrestle Things into their places. It starts with me, which is the hard part, and the reason why artificial limits can be attractive — they are easier than mindfulness. But I’ve noticed that what I admire most is balance, strength in dealing with all the media opportunities in modern life; not fearful, reflexive avoidance. So that is what I’m trying to turn over in my mind.

This is my blog for half-formed thoughts so there you go, a whole collection of them!

Checkpoint!

Paddy wanted me to play Battleships and Othello with him last night. He calls Othello “Checkpoint”. I have no idea why, but he is confident about it, and I like it so much I haven’t corrected him.

He has figured out a way to “cheat” at Battleships. He gives himself the role of Lazlo Carreidas in Tintin “Flight 714″, and I get to play Captain Haddock. Carreidas is a millionaire who uses closed circuit TV to see his opponent’s board, so this gives Paddy a chance to come over and look at my board before he plans his attack. This is sort of a “cheat” in the same way that video games have cheat codes — it gives him an edge that he may well need. At five he is not capable of the strategy of scatter-shot that comes naturally to older people when they play this game.

I told him that there was not a brother in the house or another person in the world besides his mom who would let him have such a handicap. But for his Mom, who would feel guilty beating him anyway, this turns out to be a plus. We got to play Carreidas/Haddock scripts for the duration, and I get to see that he knows how to find points on a graph without a problem. In Othello he had a little trouble seeing how to make his chip placement count.

Later on I found Paddy in his Dad’s office “helping” him design robots for Kevin’s new computer game. Later on Paddy and Kevin played NCAA Football together. The teens looked for funny videos on You Tube.

Earlier, at Mass, Paddy decided to ponder theologically and said “Jesus and God are the most powerful guys in the world” and then later started asking me something about Jonah and the whale. Then he fell asleep, which is what he usually does since our Mass is at 4 pm Saturday afternoon. When we were leaving Mass he shouted “HI!” to one of the churchgoers, a gentleman whose grown children are just a bit younger than we are. “I saw you at the store!” Paddy continued with great friendliness. This is SO not like our family, we agreed with amusement in the car. At his age no one would open a conversation with a mere acquaintance. I think this has to be the difference between an extrovert and an introvert; we haven’t raised him any differently.

A few other notes on life:

It got COLD here again. Clare has been doing yard work to earn money for a swim suit. She raked the front and swept the driveway and garage yesterday.
Brendan finished stacking the two cords of firewood we got a couple of weeks ago. The chill in the air gives us a chance to use the firewood. Brendan also swept the deck.
Kieron got some water-balloon grenades and he and Sean were having a battle out in the front. I made them vow to pick up every scrap of balloon.
Kieron also bought some jacks (he had a couple of extra dollars he had earned after he bought Sonic Heroes) and gave some to Aidan, who is using them as tops. Everything that comes into his hands, Aidan tries to spin.

Labels

Theresa at La Paz Home Learning has a series of posts on unschooling that I wanted to preserve since they have to do with the ongoing unschooling conversation:

• A Voice from the Past
• Unschooling revisited
• Unschooling Inspiration
• On the Need to Label Ourselves

Kim at Starry Sky Ranch wrote about right brain, left brain, also discussing the usefulness of labelling. And Leonie wrote about unschooling recently, too, learning with no strings attached.

One question that seems to be coming out of this discussion (though I am listing it as two!) is:

When do labels help? When do they constrict?

My last post quoted a neuroscientist who was talking about the reductionism in some modern approaches to literary analysis. Laura rightly pointed out that the quote itself was just a bit jargony (and notice that this paragraph I am writing is getting a bit that way too). I think the author of the article, as an actual neuroscientist, was using the specialized terminology to deconstruct the deconstructionism of the neuroaestheticists. The concept I was trying to highlight in the quote was the concept of "overstanding", which to me implies making something smaller in order to stand over it and critique it in an over-simplified way.

I think human language, reflecting our own humanity, has a tendency to label in order to box something in, OR to box other things OUT. I have often noticed it. I think labels are useful to identify and as JoVE pointed out in Theresa's comment box, to "gather in" and provide a sort of fold of shelter. For example, the concept of unschooling gives a sort of positive force field around a concept that needs to be protected -- the primacy of the learner in the learning process, and the essentially active role of the child in his or her own learning. I have seen the Attachment Parenting label used the same way. It provides parameters, a shorthand icon for a certain type of practice, a readymade community to whom you don't have to explain your whole philosophical thought processes, and a sort of beacon in the distance to aspire to.

But labels can be mis-used, as in this example by Cindy at Dominion Family, who unfortunately isn't blogging anymore. She wrote two thought-provoking posts, not about unschooling in particular, but about boxing in general -- not the sport, but the equally aggressive tendency to impose one's own preferred non-essentials upon everyone else, or to exclude the vast majority who doesn't measure up to the preferred standards. This tendency is at least 2000 years old and is a major theme in the Gospels, where it comes up as one of Jesus's particular aversions. The fact that it has survived in so many people, some of whom profess to follow in His footsteps, implies to me that the tendency is almost as deep-rooted as pride. And I am not immune, mea culpa!

Here is Cindy's example, telling a story told to her by someone else:

He was with a group of people from church at a restaurant. He was waiting for his wife outside the bathrooms and his baby started to scream. He frantically looked for a pacifier which his wife rarely used. Coming out of the restrooms was a little homeschooled girl from his church. She saw the pacifier and kinda huffed and turned around looking for her mom. Her mom came out of the bathroom took one look at the baby with pacifier and said something to her daughter like, “It’s Ok, honey, some people just don’t know any better.”

Here are the links to her posts:

• Gestapo Homeschooling Moms
• Gestapo Homeschooling Moms part 2

She points out that the tendency to impose is often a flip side of a virtue -- strength of will and purpose. I think that is very perceptive. It certainly is a balancing act, especially on the internet. Part of the balance is that the reader, too, has a responsibility not to be imposed upon by what he or she reads. I wrote about how mentoring is not the same as imposing, and how the mentored person has a responsibility not to be imposed upon. I am certainly not going to point out any specific examples, but I personally tend to avoid receiving wisdom that has a "fear" or "anger" mentality: "Do it my way, or some horrible thing will happen to you" or "don't be like THOSE people, or you will no longer be in OUR club". Those types of sources give me a jolt that sometimes feels like energy, but it's really not. It's a substitute for good energy, like the way a simple carb acts on my blood chemistry, and it doesn't last, and it leaves me feeling less energetic than before.

Even some good sources have that jolt to them, not because the sources are gestapo types but because I personally react fearfully to parts of them -- Charlotte Mason's writings might be an example, for me. I try to isolate and get rid of the fearful elements and just focus on what might work for our family or what I see is positive and helpful in the advice. As Cindy also points out, being a GHM isn't the same as being opinionated. Don't many of us get truly energized by someone honestly sharing their convictions in a real, personal way? This is more like a protein or a complex carb.

It isn’t just a matter of being opinionated. Blogging is opinionated but to tell the truth the best blogs are the most opinionated ones. I enjoy reading people’s opinions on their blogs, but the gestapo mom seeks not only to give her opinion but force her ideas on those around her.

So once again, I would say that the problem is not the labels themselves, but the way they are used. Maybe it has a bit to do with this fallacy mentioned by Drew at Running River Latin School.

It goes like this: ab esse ad oportere non valet consequentia, or as Marcello Pera puts it, "there are no formal [logical] implications between 'is' and 'ought'.

In other words, just because some homeschool mom does something and talks about how wonderful it is and even (gasp!) has principled reasons for doing it this way and even puts a name on it -- that does NOT mean that it would be wonderful for everyone's family or that the principles would apply the same way in a different situation. (ETA: Wendy at Zoom Times makes a similar point coming from a different starting place -- these connections are really interesting!)

Now to finally close this long post ---I have been trying to adopt Melissa's practice of turning away from the computer screen to give my attention to whoever is asking it. That has been enriching for me because I have heard my husband read aloud to me about China from a National Geographic magazine; I have shared Aidan's excitement about his car puzzle and the way he can make jacks spin like tops; I have listened to Sean narrate and comment upon a football story he has been reading; and I have been trying to keep some mental awareness of the time passing that Kieron and Paddy are playing Sonic the Hedgehog upstairs. It is definitely a painstaking discipline for me, and I am not very skilled at it, so this is probably a very disconnected blog entry! But I did want to get those links down. If anyone else has blogged or read a blog that is part of this recent unschooling conversation, please let me know. I am trying to keep track of it.

The children mostly played

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. Heraclitus.

There are more quotes about play here.

Yesterday was another day of basic 3Rs for Sean and mostly playing for Kieron and the younger ones. Kieron did do a math sheet. The bulk of their time though was spent on their bionicle game on the table, running in and outside to enjoy the newly emerging spring, and then in the afternoon, we drove down into the spring zone for our homeschool Stations of the Cross. We spend the first half hour gathering, the second half hour meditating on the Stations. Then we bring out the snacks and the kids just play while the adults just talk. It has been a good thing for the children: just playing.

I noticed how the snacks were at least half or two-thirds the “healthy” type of snacks. We had Oreos there but also nuts, carrots, and popcorn. The Oreos didn’t even get finished. I remember how when we first started the group each family would bring at least one, sometimes two types of sweet dessert. As the kids grew more comfortable with each other and started wanting to come to see their friends rather than for the snacks, the snack table became less of a draw and more of a resource for refueling and regathering.

Similarly, the Stations themselves at first were mostly a matter of the mothers saying them. As time went by the children have taken more of a role. Recently even Aidan has wanted to “take a Station” and he astonished me by having some of them memorized so he did not need my prompting to say them. Paddy gets in moods where he asks me about every detail….. what happens in this one? Other times Aidan pushes his stroller around and Paddy is more intrigued by the other children than by the pictures or the devotions.

There was a stage when the children tended to group in age groups when they played, and sometimes they still do, but often now you see all the ages (Paddy at five is usually the youngest and Kieron at 12 and a half is by a couple of months the oldest) grouping together — hunting for lizards, playing robbers or dinosaurs, moving from one activity to another just as I remember doing as a child. This weekly gathering has been a nice element of our lives. All the children feel comfortable with each other; they have all given Aidan and his quirks a nice foundation of acceptance. They admire his stroller as he pushes it around; he told one of the older girls, Rachel, that he had lost a tooth, and she praised him and looked inside his mouth where he pointed.

One of the moms and I were talking about how much everything in our society has to have a goal or product, often an economic one. Things that don’t “pay” in some concrete way are less valued than things that have a measurable quantitative benefit. We were talking about my oldest’s college experience (he is going to a college where he gets a “liberal arts” degree, a fine and rigorous one but one that does not pay itself off in terms of usefulness, and will leave him with some debts) but then we realized that some of what we were saying also applied to the life of a SAHM. I don’t get much pressure to make myself useful in economic terms but I know my friend does, and so do some of my other friends. That seems a bit reductionist; of course I want to make my life worthwhile, as does everybody, but that doesn’t always have to mean employment.

Later I thought that the free play the kids were doing fell into the same kind of category. We see benefits coming from it — the companionship, the enrichment of personal interests by sharing with friends, the skills developed in sorting out problems. But we aren’t just “doing socialization” or “learning life skills”. We’re letting them play, which makes for a larger thing, even if it is more difficult to weigh and measure precisely because it is larger.

The true object of all human life is play. G. K. Chesterton

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.Erik H. Erikson

live frugally on surprise

The title is from Alice Walker. I’ve never read anything of hers, but I like that phrase. The whole poem is Expect Nothing.

Yesterday I got Kieron’s help to move the dining room table so I could straighten the big carpet underneath.

Then of course I had to vacuum it, REALLY vacuum it, even underneath, not just around the corners of the table and under the edges like I usually do.

Then I went upstairs because Kieron or Aidan wanted me to see something. Sean and Paddy had gone down to town with Kevin — Sean for his weekly strength and conditioning workout with his uncle, and Paddy to play with his little cousin whose mom was running on the track.

After a while, still upstairs, I heard a cry of delight, “Oh, Maddelyn would LOVE this!” It was my daughter, and I had no clue what she was talking about except that Maddelyn is her young friend. When I went to look, Clare was dancing a sweeping waltz on the open carpet.

A few minutes later I glanced downstairs again. Brendan had come out of his room and was doing mock football drop-back-passes on the empty field of carpet.

Today all the boys played an extended game with their Bionicles on the carpet. Sean is making cardboard goals now. One of them (or perhaps their Dad) said, “You should leave it like that!” Of course, over time the surprise of it which was part of the delight will fade.

The unlimited potential of the open carpet (and Brendan still waking up in the morning).

We didn’t do a whole lot of formal academics this morning, though Sean by habit made it through all his work. Kieron played, and Clare talked to me for a long time, subjects including: college and adult life plans, planned book-writing project, role of women and how it relates to further education (she visits a Catholic board where the arguments range all across the board, which gives us all kinds of discussion material on all sorts of subjects), Pope Benedict’s possible reaction to Haugen and Haas music at Mass in the US this morning. I think it was a bit of kairos. JoVE mentioned three concepts of time — historical time, generational time, and developmental time — in her comment to my post yesterday. I will have to go back and read the article she mentioned, but I have noticed before that conversations are so often links to past and future, to tradition and to potential, in a way nothing else is, except perhaps things like books and movies and books and pictures. Oh well, perhaps lots of things then, but certainly conversations seem to have a unique quality — an ability to travel instantaneously and to transmit messages and to strengthen vision. A bit like angels, perhaps.

An angel can illuminate the thought and mind of man by strengthening the power of vision. — St. Thomas Aquinas

Kieron has taken the little ones on a walk. I don’t know what you will think if I say I am paying him good money to do this. The thing is — he wants to earn money to buy a Sonic video game, and the most valuable thing I can think of for him to do is to take the little ones outside. I like them being outside and I like him being outside taking care of them. And I like getting a bit of time by myself while knowing they are doing something good. I guess it is what is called a Mother’s Helper job.

Brendan put up his windchimes yesterday that he got for Christmas. The process had almost a ceremonial air to it, like a rite of the new season. The little boys were thrilled and spent the next hour running around with miniature wind chimes we had around the house. I tried to get pictures but they were too busy and lively to slow down for natural light exposure photos.

Two pictures of Brendan in one post! That is a rarity.

I have been spending about an hour a day cleaning up and organizing the house. And I’ve lost six pounds. I always gain 20 during the winter and I have decided that I’m okay with the range. Other years I put the weight loss on “project status” and kept charts and food journals and the like. That does work, but this year I’m experimenting with something in a book that went “the process is the goal”. So rather than worrying about arriving at a certain target, I’m just focusing on doing things in a healthy good way. I think both ways can work, but I’m hoping that “the process is the project” will be more in line with what I’m trying to do with the unschooling thought process right now.

True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness. Albert Einstein

I doubt if many actually live in that sense, though. Certainly I’m not there yet.

avoiding the difficulty of understanding

Right after I wrote about Immanuel Kant and my difficulties in understanding his book on my homeschool journal, I found this mystery book Critique of Criminal Reason. And my library has it ;-). Leonie calls this serendipity.

I found it on the blog The Grail Code -- John Donne and the Case of the Missing Toilet Paper -- and it links to a very interesting article on reductionist literary criticism -- The Neuroscience Delusion. From the article, which is by Raymond Tallis, a professor of geriatric medicine:

The key point is this. The range of “mental objects” Changeux’s theory encompasses is hardly unique to mentally demanding and enriching experiences such as those associated with reading poetry. The processes leading up to mental objects – if they really do correspond to distinctive realities and are anything other than artefactual dissections of consciousness – are ubiquitous. Bellowing in a rage when one discovers that the toilet paper has run out, and someone has neglected to replace it, would involve the very same processes Byatt invokes to explain the particular impact of the poems of a genius, if such processes do occur. The mental objects constructed under such irritating circumstances also involve percepts, memory images, abstract concepts, and an extraordinary confection-by-association of them, as one justifies one’s rage and allocates blame, and deploys sophisticated neural algebras that simultaneously locate oneself in an unsatisfactory toilet and a careless world populated with thoughtless people.

That is, by adopting a neurophysiological approach, Byatt loses a rather large number of important distinctions: between reading one poem by John Donne and another; between successive readings of a particular poem; between reading Donne and other Metaphysical poets; between reading the Metaphysicals and reading William Carlos Williams; between reading great literature and trash; between reading and a vast number of other activities – such as getting cross over missing toilet paper. That is an impressive number of distinctions for a literary critic to lose. But that is the price of overstanding.

Overstanding -- as opposed to understanding -- is a nice word. I like it for lots of reasons.

the one present moment goes by so quickly

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” Albert Einstein

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. Emily Dickinson

I noticed yesterday while I was digging under the bed for lost dusty items, vacuum hose conveniently at hand, the difference between my pace and Aidan’s. He was discovering the treasures I was pitching into the corner to weed through — an old glow in the dark star, a small ball, a piece of paper with a drawing on it, a pen with its lid off. He picked them up and looked at them, spun the star, studied the paper. For me it was activity and for him it was contemplation.

One of my own earliest memories was a day I stayed home from school because I was sick. I was resting in the living room, and my mother had been vacuuming nearby. But she had stopped, and the silence was like a deep breath. Everyone else was at school. There was golden light in blocks on the floor from the late morning sunlight streaming into the window. I could see the dust motes sparkling in the gold. That moment still seems to be going on somewhere, though I moved on past it.

I don’t know what this has to do with homeschooling, really, except that when I pause to watch my kids I see that the day appears different to them than it does to me. I wondered who was closer to “reality” — me or Aidan. I was getting things done and he wasn’t. But then, I was doing secondary things, in order for something else to occur, while he was already there at “something else”.

It made me wonder again about the balance between pulling the kids into my orbit, and observing theirs.

Liam has been “narrating” Kant to me on Sunday afternoons. They are studying it in seminar at his college. The Critique of Pure Reason is one of the few books in English I’ve ever picked up and been able to make no heads or tails of. I feel like my head is being tossed around by someone else, and I do not like it. But anyway, Kant seems to say that time does not exist in itself but is a form our mind projects upon experience in order to make sense of it. That raises more questions than it answers.

The Greeks had two words for time, Chronos and Kairos.

Chronos is the way a school is usually run. The clock is in charge. Every moment has the same value, and they all add up to the same amount.
Kairos is the “in between time” or sometimes the opportune moment, or the quality of time. Everyone could probably think of a handful of moments that were turning-points, where the quality of the time was out of all proportion to the sequence of time passing.

This is all one reason why I have trouble with “living in the present moment” and with mindfulness, two unschooly concepts that I have been thinking about recently. I THINK that it means not missing the Kairos. You don’t want Chronos to trudge like a treadmill over everything, trampling it into the ground.

But Kairos can extend outward and outward. I found a quote yesterday, which I can’t find today, to the effect that “the present moment is actually the one that just slid past.” It seemed so true. Kairos is something else than “the present moment” because it is a combination, a synergy, a colliding of more than one thing. By definition you can’t plan for it. I suppose you can keep a peacefulness while you wait for it, and perhaps this is the essence of contemplation.

Oh, maybe this was the quote I couldn’t find:

“Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going”. Tennessee Williams.

not quite the first spring day

The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month. ~Henry Van Dyke

Sean and Kevin just got back from the football playing field down at the high school. Paddy and Kieron are outside. Aidan is eating chili at the counter behind me. Clare was out earlier on the deck playing her guitar. I start noticing all the things that need to be fixed or cleaned up around the house and yard. Kevin is finishing up the taxes and getting a new prototype ready for the new game he has been working on. All this tells me that spring is perhaps very close now, with the snow melting in patches that seem out of date, like when you have lost some weight and are wearing your old clothes with the creases and stretches that don’t match the way the clothes hang anymore.

Our days have definitely gotten looser in structure, too. Partly because I have a rotten spring cold, and partly because I feel like if I spend the time it takes to plan and carry out regular lessons, I will miss the changes that after all often come very subtly.

Like the boys spending all kinds of time playing plastic ball-and-bat baseball upstairs — all four boys, ages 5 to 15.
Or Brendan heading outside almost every day to reconnect with the forest.

Yesterday evening Kevin took the older three and Aidan to a hockey game. Our niece is dating a hockey forward and he got some free tickets, so several of the uncles and aunts and cousins went, along with Grandma and Grandpa, to a pub and then to the game. I didn’t go, because I was so sick last night. Paddy and Kieron stayed home with me and sort of regretted it, when they heard the stories when the others got home. And I was mean and didn’t let them watch a movie — I wanted them to feel the unaccustomed silence in the house, because it is so rare. We played SET and I read a lot to Paddy, and Kieron hung around and talked to me about Sonic the Hedgehog, mostly. When Kevin got home he showed them a couple of clips from Kolchak the Nightstalker. That spooked Kieron enough so that he didn’t sleep well last night.

I had taken night time cold medicine and didn’t even stir till 9 am. I can’t remember the last time I haven’t been awake several times during the night and wide awake by 7 am. The reason for this was that Aidan was still asleep, too. He has been a restless night person recently but not last night. I guess the hockey and pub grub were just the thing for him.

This morning we got into a discussion of how “Signs” (the Shyamalan movie) was more enjoyable but not as good as “The Sixth Sense”.

Then Sean did his regular habitual school stuff. Then I did Algebra with him.

I read a little bit of our read aloud to Kieron and that was about it for anything formal with him.

The kids started playing SET and then played their baseball game, and Sean went out to lift weights, and I got busy taking apart the master bedroom and putting it back together again.

After that I read to Paddy for a long time. He is expanding out of Tintin again so maybe it was that I wasn’t doing enough lying around so he wasn’t getting enough chances to come up to me with a book.

Aidan made up a sort of learning game for himself. He had one of the altar server calendars telling the schedule for Sean and Kieron. He asked me to cut up the hundreds chart I printed out for him some time ago. Then he started doing this:

He matched every single one and was very happy about it.

The other day he asked me to write the days of the week on cards. Then he spent a long time laying them out and talking about them.

One must learn a different… sense of time, one that depends more on small amounts than big ones.

Nothing to do with anything else, except that it’s Poetry Month, but here are 30 Ways to Celebrate Poems.

Unschooling as Fact or Fancy

Shaun at Red Sea Homeschool's post How is Unschooling Like Santa Claus? is a continuation of the conversation started by Melissa, which I have been following. It is interesting reading, and Mrs T at Fine Old Family follows it up with a post on Utopia and Unschooling. Oh, I like reading posts by other English lit majors -- I still have that old Edward Bellamy Looking Backward book around somewhere, with the paper clothing proposal. My husband and I -- we were not yet married at the time --took the class and read that book together and laughed at some of its naive absurdities. It made me smile to see that name again after so many years.

Now, my quick answer to the question of how unschooling is like Santa Claus would be that perhaps it is more like Santa Claus than like the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy exists in fancy and in the cultural life of families. Santa Claus, on the other hand, seems in addition to these qualities to have a legitimate peg in history as St Nicholas. We don't know many facts about his life anymore, and there are many accretions and cultural ringings-of-changes, but he represents something that has endured and that is real and still resonant. I would say the same is true of unschooling as a phenomenon.

Now the long-drawn-out response to the question:

When I started considering homeschooling because my husband wanted to try it, I went to the library to research it into the ground, thereby continuing an honorable family tradition that I hope and trust will carry on to the next generation or two at least. (That is, researching new and interesting things into the ground, though I have some hopes they will homeschool as well). I was fortunate that my local library at the time basically carried a history of homeschooling on its shelves, as follows:

• Growing without Schooling newsletter -- wonderful little snippets from the lives of the first homeschooling pioneers, something like the blogs and message boards of today.
• John Holt's books, including Teach Your Own and Why Children Fail (a classic critique of institutional schooling systems of the time).
• Raymond and Dorothy Moore's books, including Better Late Than Early. Raymond Moore was a Christian researcher who believed that many children, particularly boys, are better off learning at home from helping around the house, conversation and informal lessons rather than going to school at ages 4, 5, or 6.
• Nancy Wallace's Better than School -- about her musically gifted children and her struggles with a tyrannic school system.
• Richard Mitchell's Graves of Academe. Another stinging critique of the institutional school system. It is available online.
  

All of these in their way subversive and yet constructive at the same time, and therefore suiting what I was newly understanding, as a recent convert to Catholicism, in regard to my responsibilities to my children. That is, that I would have to convert and reconvert every day if I were to make progress, and there comes the subversion and the construction. I had been scared to homeschool -- I hated school so much as a child and the worst nightmare I could imagine was an eternity actually BEING a teacher and foisting this teachery stuff off on my children.

On the other hand, I loved learning. I loved being with my children, I loved seeing them learn. I did not exactly know how, but I wanted to be a guide and mentor for them. Reading these books, I could see how home education could be something completely different than sitting my kids at desks from 8 to 3 doing textbook math, English, social studies, snooooze, hold your breath while watching the clock to see if you could beat your last time, long for the bell, watch the dust devils on the playground, put the library book you were reading on your lap so you could read while the teacher was droning on about something you already knew..... (I am describing how I got through the first 13 years of my schooling -- the next five were a bit more interesting).

Rather than perpetuating what I had been sick of even the first time around, we could keep doing something like we'd always done... checking books out of the library, going for walks, talking, playing games, living together.

And these classic unschooling books also gave me new possibilities that hadn't ever occurred to dreamy me, waiting for the time when my kids were all at school so I could get an advanced degree/become a librarian/sit around reading British mysteries all day. I could really be an influence in my childrens' lives, not just mark time as a guard and diaper changer until I handed them over to the school system. There were so many possibilities. Learning could take all sorts of forms, just as Shaun describes:

Homeschooling for us has been about drawing comic books and writing songs as history “narrations”; sitting down at the piano before breakfast, and then again before lunch, and then again after dinner; dropping English as a subject and picking up Chinese instead (and soon, German too!); dumping long division for a while and playing with protractors and compasses. And of course it has been chin puppets and orchestra concerts and sisters playing Harry Potter for an entire afternoon. It’s full of surprising connections, giving Victoria opportunity to say “just like Mozart!” or for Violet to draw stories weaving together the fiction and history she’s reading with her love of manga.

So this is why I think that unschooling IS rather like Santa Claus. I have an affection for the old fellow, though some of his modern manifestations don't appeal to me in every respect, and I think every family is free to celebrate him as they wish or indeed not at all... and with unschooling, I don't always agree with the ways other people use the term, and I think they are free not to use the term at all, but I do like and celebrate the basic historical substance and think the term continues to have validity and meaning.

Those original parents back in the 70's were admirable folk, sometimes risking their very freedom by keeping their kids out of a system that they thought had taken a wrong turning. Perhaps a bit comparable to good Bishop Nicholas dropping the coins down the chimney to free the girls from slavery.... but you get the point.

Here is a short summary of the history of American homeschooling. It seems to hit the main points.

I think I should add that I realize that I'm not addressing Shaun's main point, which was more to do with the inadequacy of labels -- Charlotte Mason, unschooling, classical --- in describing a rich, home-based adaptive learning environment that is broader and deeper than the labels. I think this as her main point holds very true indeed, and I found it personally convicting because I have a tendency to dwell on labels and terminology to the point where I lose track, as Mrs T said in her post, of:

whatever it is, whatever you call it, seems to happen in the uncharted spaces between the ideological islands. I can't even call it "the way children learn," because there are no "children." There's this child, and this child, and this child, and this child. And this mother, and this mother, and this mother

Yep, especially on this blog I like to sling around terms and quotations and distinctions that are meaningful to me in a sort of INTP theoretical way, but probably don't have much practically to do with how people live their lives and teach their kids. It helps ME -- perhaps a bit like Utopia-books seemed to serve a sort of social-commentary function -- but it can easily get abstract and artificial, I am sure. John Holt wrote a book called What Do I Do Monday? and I ask myself that almost every Sunday -- whatever I have been pondering all week, what does it come down to in terms of how our home actually looks as a learning environment? Tomorrow, to be precise? What will I be doing with my kids? After all, education is first of all a practical art, not a science. Labels can classify, but they don't do much to describe. And I can forget that if I'm not careful.

My purpose here is simply to point out the actual real fact of unschooling behind the accretions and recastings. Unschooling, as it occurred in the 70's, was one of the more successful grassroots movements of the century, I think; and I think it is still ramifying. It was a matter of individual parents taking back the parenting and education of their own children, and networking with each other to provide support and strength and encouragement. This seems to be paying off yet in all sorts of ways, some not even connected directly with homeschooling. At its beginnings, unschooling united all different types -- from California homesteaders like the Colfaxes, whose sons went to Harvard, to New Yorkers like the Wallaces whose children grew up to be concert musicians.

John Holt wrote in the second issue of GWS:

Those who read GWS , and want to take or keep their children out of schools, may have very different, in some cases opposed reasons for doing this.

Some may feel that the schools are too strict; others that they are not strict enough.
Some may feel that the schools spend too much time on what they call the Basics; others that they don't spend enough.

Some may feel that the schools teach a dog-eat-dog competitiveness; others that they teach a mealy-mouth Socialism.

Some may feel that the schools teach too much religion; others that they don't teach enough, but teach instead a shallow atheistic humanism. I think the schools degrade both science and religion, and do not encourage either strong faith or strong critical thought.

Some feel that the school curriculum is dull, fragmented, devoid of context, in George Dennison's words, that it destroys "the continuum of experience." Others may feel that the school curriculum is fine, but that they don't do a very good job of teaching it.

What is important is not that all readers of GWS should agree on these questions, but that we should respect our differences while we work for what we agree on, our right and the right of all people to take their children out of schools, and help, plan, or direct their learning in the ways they think best.

This is the original unschooling premise that cornerstoned the homeschooling movement as a whole, and I think it is still a good one now. It was about the right of parents to take back the children and their learning into their own hands, and the possibilities for new ways of life that ensued from that. Unschooling may not be exactly the term we use to sum this up nowadays. It has become a term used to describe a specific kind of child-centered learning, and in that regard, as Shaun says, it gets blurred in with many other forms of homeschooling that also respect the personality of a child. Or it gets set apart as something like "non-directive" or "hands-off" which for many people makes little sense in terms of how they actually live with their children. But in many ways it is just as apropos as the term "homeschooling" -- for how many of us actually "do school" purely "at home"? But all homeschoolers have presumably taken their kids out of school, and so in that respect can be called "unschoolers".