Sorry, Jeeves

Rural Setting, forest and rocks, Jeeves and Wooster walking with Young Poet:

POET (explaining why he doesn't want to accept a stipend from a relative on condition that he go to New York and live the city life):

"I like to stay in my pajamas until 5 o'clock; then usually I just throw a sweater over them."

WOOSTER:

"Don't listen, Jeeves!"

JEEVES:

"uhhh .... (sinks down on rock and drops head in hands)..... I shall be better directly, sir."

A roundabout way of saying it's 10:30 and I haven't taken my bath yet. In fact, I haven't really gotten off the computer. I've been updating my Facebook and Twitter subscription, looking out at the rain, answering emails, updating blog structure and various other peaceful, rural things of the sort that don't involve getting out of my chair by the window.

Off to get the day started!

Thinking about Blogging

I am afraid to check my statcounter, just as I'm scared to step on my bathroom scale. (If they traded numbers, that would work for me....hmm, maybe then I'd be TOO thin). I haven't looked at either the scale or the statcounter for a long time, though I usually try to check once a week for both. I will wait until I am in the mood for challenge.

Reasons for my Statcounter Anxiety:

Firstly, people probably don't even really read blogs during Christmas season, except maybe to glance at other peoples' pretty holiday pictures and maybe get a sense of what others are resolving for 2009.

Secondly, even if they are reading during Christmas, the Catholic homeschool audience I imagine I get mostly probably aren't dying to find out more about Kant and Peirce and Descartes (or one person's perspective on them) when they are focused on trying to clean up their houses and recover from all the visitors and viruses and sugar.

Thirdly, my recent blogging volume has been at a steep clip, about 2 long posts a day on average, as I try to process mentally, which makes things even more off-putting.

A summary of my recent blogging history would go something like this (sung to the tune of "On the First Day of Christmas")

Five Newman Quotes!
Four posts on Kant,
Three retrospectives,
Two posts on fitness,
And the Dickens DVDs!

Yawn.... sorry folks. I can hardly think of another person in the universe who would have any interest in all this. Except for Dickens and retrospectives, none of it is terribly inherent to the Christmas season. A lot of it is rambly and a real drain on the busy person's attention span.

I have been trying to integrate my blogging and confine it mostly to this one place instead of scattering it over four or five blogs like I used to; the down side is that focus suffers as a result. You get a smorgasboard. Trivia about my fitness goals mingled with notes on family life and endlessly long quotes on how intellect and religion fit together.

On the "up side", though, is that I have been enjoying reading and rereading my blog. Seriously. It is just SO suited to ME right now : ). It is real. I actually did think things through while writing that I probably couldn't have thought out any other way. Blogging in its potential for an audience -- even if the potential is un-actuated -- challenges me to think things out in a way I wouldn't do otherwise. I have had more time to think -- our family tries to protect our holidays so besides some clan celebrating, we didn't have that many places to go -- and the transition to the new year has made me feel like reflecting and sorting through. Looking back at the last 1000 plus posts, I realize I have something like a scrapbook here, something like a journal, something like a commonplace or "copy book" but more of a treasure to me than any of these would be in itself.

I guess this post is becoming a way of thinking through why I blog, though I meant it to be short (all my recent posts have fallen into precisely that pattern).

Here are the two primary reasons I blog --

(1) to think things out and record life so I can go back and look at it later
(2) to communicate or network with others.

Both motivations are equally strong. Sometimes they work together in perfect harmony but more often they seem to tug at each other. Perhaps it's time just to figure out how to be comfortable with that recurrent tension. Perhaps it's healthy, like the seeming tug between the active and contemplative aspects of life.

I have been fortunate to have a few really thoughtful and consistent readers who comment occasionally and others who don't comment much or at all but have mentioned they follow my blog. I am very grateful for this, especially during the times when I feel I'm stretching the limits of their patience. Honestly I do very much value the occasional feedback and the sense of people listening and caring. That was one of the big things I have been pondering during this holiday season -- friendship and the ways it can come about that are different from traditional ways, but creative and real.

When I first started this blog, almost four years ago, I intentionally kept it very private because I was afraid I would hesitate to say things honestly if I knew anyone was listening. It was several months before I got my first comment. That was very rewarding -- to know someone was listening and responding. So then I actually mentioned my blog to people who already knew me online, and over time I got other readers from other venues as well. I found that some sort of readership did change my focus a bit, but it was very well worth it. Following the blogs of those who comment here has made me feel more part of a network than I would otherwise. I feel I have made some friends.

Long before I started blogging, I was a regular contributor to several email groups and loved the interaction of a written conversation. It gave this introvert, living in a rural community, a way to connect with people without going to great lengths to drive all over the face of California. When Aidan was born sick, this virtual community became a Real Life community as many people prayed Aidan through crisis after crisis. It became a paradigm for the Body of Christ.

Blogging seems more distant to me in some ways. You don't usually get the dialogues so much, though some of the people who read my blog do admirably in compensating for that. This is something very valuable to me. ... the interaction and feedback. I get less of it by blogging than I do by participating on boards and in virtual groups. And there is always the possibility of someone reading hostilely or coming here just to spam. So in that way sometimes I feel blogging is both less private and less instantly rewarding than group discussion.

On the other hand, blogging can reach a different type of person. For instance, I'm on a classical egroup and an unschooling egroup. Sometimes the conversations overlap but usually, they run on different tracks, and the focus is on the conversation, not on journalling moments of my life and thought. Blogging is a wider thing that way -- it can cover a wider part of one's life, and speak to people who wouldn't necessarily join either a classical or an unschooling group. The possibility of people reading who come from a very different background and worldview gives me reason to think things through in a different way than I would in a focused group where I am singing to the choir, as they say. And like I said, my commenters usually bring a lot to the combox -- they further my thinking, affirm my hope that I am not the only person in the world who thinks or feels or experiences whatever I have been blogging about. And they have widened my range of internet kindred spirits.

Just sort of thinking aloud, I guess; I can't think of a way to tie this up but there is a sort of theme running through it like a river : ).

That reminds me, and you'll see why it reminded me -- Lissla's post on Prequels No One Wants to See totally made me laugh out loud, especially.

The Ugly Kid with the Mask Who Likes Opera

A Stream Gradually Erodes It

I'll leave it there! If you are still reading and want to leave a comment, whether regular lurker or regular commenter, I'm welcoming you to take an opportunity to just say HI or Happy New Year or I'm Bored with Kant and Descartes, or whatever. If you want a topic, you could tell me why YOU blog if you do, or why you don't if you don't. If no one takes the opportunity, I'll try again some other time at the FRONT of a post instead of as an afterthought at the end of a longggg ramble.

a couple of notes on earlier posts

Martin Cothran made a comment on yesterday's post, pointing out very kindly that in Traditional Logic II, he didn't call Descartes' "cogito ergo sum" a fallacy, but an enthymeme. I made a edit to correct on the post itself, but I thought I should echo that in this post just in case anyone read my last one and walked away with the impression that Traditional Logic contained the statement that Cogito ergo Sum was a fallacy. It does not say that. It was my mistake.

Though I feel regretful that I wrote something inadvertently misleading, and resolve to be more careful in future (cast loose that blanket and brave the curriculum closet to check my facts), I am kind of glad it was a mistake because I had been afraid there was something I was missing about how syllogisms work.

(By the way I really like the Memoria Press Logic series -- they were remarkably successful with my second son in particular -- logic is still one of his favorite subjects).

Here is the relevant section in Traditional Logic 2, Chapter 6, p 54 of my edition on Cogito Ergo Sum:

"One of the most discussed issues in the history of thought is that concerning the foundation of knowledge. How do we know anything? To this question, Rene Descartes, a 17th century philosopher, answered, I know at least this: that I think. And if I think, then I must exist.

Descartes is considered to mark the transition from the Middle Ages to the "modern" world. Yet Descartes' ideas were founded on ideas much older than himself. In fact, the argument we study here, sometimes known simply as "the cogito"..... was thought of long before .... Aristotle, who wrote about 2,000 years before the birth of Descartes, is quoted by St Thomas Aquinas (a 13th century philospher) saying, "We sense that we sense, and we understand that we understand; and because we sense this, we understand that we exist."."

While I'm commenting on my earlier posts and the comments they received, I wanted to mention Sloth's gnawing little teeth. Stephanie commented:

What if we understand that to mean that enjoyment of things is the opposite of duty? That's wrong-headed, it seems to me. ..Instead, what if we enjoy things that are ours to do? What if we do them, not "because" we enjoy them, but because they are what we are good at?.....
Prioritizing by way of enjoyment only is not right, obviously. But prioritizing away from enjoyment? That seems just as wrong. Does that make sense?

This is very true. The Catechism says:

The virtuous person tends toward the good with all his sensory and spiritual powers; he pursues the good and chooses it in concrete actions. Human virtues are firm attitudes, stable dispositions, habitual perfections of intellect and will that govern our actions, order our passions, and guide our conduct according to reason and faith. They make possible ease, self-mastery, and joy in leading a morally good life. The virtuous man is he who freely practices the good.

The way I understand it, given that virtue is a good in itself, it ideally ought to be delightful. Because it sometimes isn't, given our fallen nature, because we are sometimes reluctant to do what is best, there are prescriptions like Msgr Knox's for discerning and remedying that reluctance. But it doesn't follow that choosing the most horrible option is a virtue in itself. It is a sort of discipline that may be necessary or advisable in certain circumstances, but it's a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Kant, from what I am straining to understand, thought that virtue is merely "duty",and correspondingly thought joy, Aristotle's eudaimonia which Aquinas took onto a Christian plane, was a sort of chimaera. This is different than the Catholic point of view, which says that joy and virtue are closely related in themselves, though in our fallen state, doing good things sometimes involves effort which is distasteful to our weakened human natures.

Clare just showed up dressed in a black coat and hat, brown skirt, paddock boots and with a basket of flowers in her hands, singing quietly

All I want is a room somewhere/ Far away from the cold night air..

From that perhaps you can guess that while Liam is here, we are going to do another play reading, continuing Pygmalion which we started last time.

gratuitous New Year's family photo -- the big boys are watching the sparkly ball come down in New York, while Paddy is watching Kevin open a bottle of champagne (it fizzled -- the cork disintegrated, so no POP).

Split Personality Blogging

No big surprise: this here blog came out as an INTP blog. Because that is what I personally profile as (look at my sidebar), it makes sense.

What personality type is your blog?

***(NOTE: if you look at this and take the test for your blog, I'd love to know what it comes out as and if you think it's valid!)***

HT: Clare

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Now for the "split" part:

Here is the profile for my other blog: Schola et Studium

Here's where the typealyzer caveat comes in:

Note: writing style on a blog may have little or nothing to do with a person´s self-perceived personality.

ESTP - The Doers

The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

Funny : ). I guess the TP part is consistent.

Invisible Balloons

Paddy at our homeschool Halloween party last week -- Clare took the picture.

Yesterday's JV football game went well. It was a fine warm autumn day and our team played decisively. They won by a margin.

On the stands, Paddy pointed and tugged my arm and said "Look.... it's an invisible balloon!"

I looked where he was looking. Over the field, caught and illuminated by the stadium lights, was a gossamer strand. I think it was one of those long single-threaded spider webs that drift around until they find a place to settle. Paddy saw the strand and deduced his own explanation.

I still call him a "baby" sometimes since he is our youngest and I'm still catching up in time -- my pace of assimilating changes seems to have a 3-year lag to it -- but looking at him last night, I realized I have a young person on my hands.... a curious, sometimes sarcastic or demanding, questioning, thinking philosopher. A real person, with eternity ahead of him.

I am an older mom, 40 years older than this little son of mine, so my prayer is that I never get socaught up in the "dailiness" and middle-aged complacence of life that I forget the invisible balloon behind the floating strand.

A Simple Gift

How to nap -- hey, I have a natural gift for this, but any ability that comes spontaneously can be improved by practice. HT: Mental Multi-Vitamin.

Can't get Kant

I am still killing my brain over Kant. What I am trying to find out is how Kant's epistemology compares to Aristotle's and Aquinas's. What I probably ought to be doing is actually reading Aristotle's De Anima, and Kant' s Critique of Pure Reason, but when I tried to do that I couldn't get my brain around the terminology and explanations, let alone synthesize, compare and contrast, etc.

So I went to the secondary-sources approach. Frederick Coppleston (a Jesuit scholar) has a whole history of philosophy series, and I have the first 2 of his books, so I knew he was good. The other book I got from the library is Descartes to Derrida by Peter Sedgwick. Quite readable considering the subject matter.

I found this blog post called Aristotlelian Epistemology and the Leo XIII's Thomist Revival. And here is an article called Aristotelian Epistemology.

Whenever Kevin hears Liam and I talking about Kant, he thinks of the lady in Singing in the Rain who says, "I KAAANT stand it!"

Mosaic -- Movies and Miscellany

I never would have known if my kids hadn't discovered the plot similarities that the Pokemon episode Showdown at Dark City is a version of the Akira Kurosawa movie Yojimbo.

Did you know that A Bug's Life is a version of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and that the Magnificent Seven is as well?

Speaking of Pokemon, the Sci-Fi Catholic says that Pokemon is banned in Saudi Arabia.

Aidan would not like that.

When I was looking up the Holy Grail a while ago, I found this blog called the Grail Code. It looks like a book blog, and I just liked it's "everything to do with the Holy Grail" theme.... from beer presented to Pope Benedict, to Arthurian-cycle art.

Finally, my inner English Lit major responded to the call of "It's Chaucer Week" at Red Sea Homeschool. Even though it's not the first week of April anymore, it seems that it would be really fun to go on a Chaucer study with my 12 year old since we are in the throes of medieval history right now.

Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr...

There is a Chaucer Storybook at Baldwin Project.

And Clare, if you are reading this, I found the Parson's Tale online.

Random Thoughts on Goals

That last post about resolutions was quite jumbled. Sorry, but I can't figure out how to improve it. The story I'm writing even though Nanowrimo is over is going quite nicely, and it must use a different part of my brain because I can't seem to write a blog post I'm happy with.

Liam and I agreed to wake up at 7 every morning to work on our stories, and that's made all the difference, so I'm going to use that as a paradigm for something I wanted to remember about methods in setting out resolutions.

Goal-setting ought to be a process, not just a onetime thing. I think that's important. Different things will work at different times. I used to think there was a problem with my follow-through if something that worked once didn't work twice, but now I think it's more along the lines of: You can't step in the exact same river twice. It may be the same river, but not the same water. Newman says that people, being finite, have to change in order to keep their ground.

Also, it has been helping me to remember that there is a flow between larger goals and smaller action steps. Maybe that's another way of talking about the river. If I can tie a simple action step to my big picture goal, the goal is much more likely to get carried through. I think that is the idea behind some of the traditional Catholic "mental prayer" guidelines. They are often set in terms of "Considerations; Affections; Resolutions." You think about something with your mind, then try to involve your heart, then your will.

So take my goal of story-writing. I want to keep writing my story, and eventually have a finished product. So I plan my plotline, ponder the happiness of having a story to work on -- but then a simple practical idea like "get up at 7 am and write for an hour" is what actually makes the difference in doing it.

I know there are people who find the practical ideas easier.

Blogging Lapses, and Lions and Reading Levels

I haven't written much on this blog for a long time, as you probably have noticed if you happen to visit here.

Part of it is that there are so many positively great blogs out there. Too many to read them all. There's not really a necessity for one more. Every time I load up the blank typing screen, that's what I start thinking, and it freezes up my writing.

Of course, there's another way to think about it. A blog is like a personal journal or book or essay depository accessible to others. The number of blogs out there doesn't matter so much, in that perspective.

That's how I've been trying to think of it recently. I would really like to start writing here again.

By the way......

It occurred to me just now that my last post with the readability test might look like bragging. And ever since then I've been squirming, wondering whether to delete it altogether. But really, it is not. It's not bragging, and I will prove it. I thought it was amusing that Love2Learn Mom's daughter's blog scored at a higher level than hers, and then when my daughter and I came through with the same disparity, I thought it was even more amusing for the same reason.

But now look at this blog, The Window in the Garden Wall, which is daily quotes from CS Lewis's writing. When I put that link into the readability test, it came up as Elementary level. You see, while there's a place for Genius blogs like my daughter's (BWG) that doesn't mean that "Elementariness" isn't a definite virtue, either.

Flannery O'Connor's blog If Flannery HAd a BLog also has an elementary readability level. Lewis and O'Connor are two of the best modern stylists I can think of.

The daily GK Chesterton blog has a high school reading level. Chesterton's style is unique and can hardly be categorized, but is marvelously vivid and effective.

This blog, John Henry Newman, which is about Newman, with plenty of quotes from his work, gets a college/postgraduate readability. I thought it might. Newman is a first rate stylist, too, but much more in the Ciceronian than the plain style.

And so on.

By the way, if you go to the CS Lewis blog I linked to above, you will find on the sidebar what Aidan describes as "A Lion Toilet!!" (imagine a tone of delight).

I think that's the right note upon which to end this post. Aidan always has the best turn of phrase. If he wrote a blog, I cannot even propose what level of readability he would land at.

I think it's the poems and the GKC quotes

Like Love2Learn MOm, I checked my blog for readability:



then checked my 12th grade daughter's:



HT: The Bookworm

Still Around...

....still spending most of my time at my Schola et Studium blog.

I wish I could think of something to say that would fit on this blog, but so far, still thinking.

I can't seem to do detail and big-picture at the same time. It's either one or the other.

Maybe when things slow down (life has been busy around here!) I'll be able to think more than one thought in sequence.

Until then!

Thinking about Blogging

I have four, FOUR blogs, not even mentioning the ones where I'm a co-contributor.

I am not sure how that happened. I love them all. But I think something has to give. Butter stretched over too much bread seems to describe how it's going (if you remember Bilbo at the beginning of Lord of the Rings) .

OR:

"Eia, totus tenuis sentio, aliquantus distentus, si quod significo intellegis: sicut butyrum quod in permulto pane litum est. Non recte esse potest."

I don't quite have the nerve to close this one down. It's one of my oldest. But I'm thinking of letting it stand deserted for a while and do most of my posting on my other ones.

Heart of Home is for house and health type things.
Schola et Studium is my Learning Notes blog.

Every Waking Hour is my other general homeschooling blog, and the closest to this one. I have been trying to choose between doing most of my regular blogging on that one, or this one. A vexed question; I have reasons for loving them both.

Anyway, I'll be heading out of town for a few days (Alaska! see other blog) and maybe that will give me time to think it through. Any thoughts? I have thought about it all summer and I still can't decide! You can imagine how it is when I'm trying to sort through the kids' artwork! I guess it's not really a life or death question, but it is bothering me~ !

At any rate, I think that I'm going to give this one a month or two off and see if I can do without it (like putting the old favorite toys in the garage for a month or two before I actually donate them to the thrift store)

Before Dawn....

.... we we awakened by the hugest clap of thunder I ever heard, then a rainstorm, and then a confused bat flying around the house. The next few minutes were spent scurrying around turning off the computers and opening window screens and doors to try to encourage the bat to roost outside, not on our rafters. All the younger kids are up and wondering why they are up when it's still dark. I wonder what the day will be like once it actually is day?

Only a couple of days ago, a wild-fire blocked the highway up to our house, so we had to return by the old switchback up the other side of the mountain. The fire was still smoldering last night, according to my husband who brought the teenager down to football practice.

We have been feeling like we are in.....dee DEE dee dee... the Twilight Zone (Kevin and the older kids have been watching some of the old b&w episodes in the evening).

Well, at least the rainstorm may have helped put out the last embers of the fire.

Adding Meaning To....

Kim at Starry Sky Ranch had these beautiful words in her post Back to School:

Lest this all sound a bit too rosy let me assure you, our life has a multitude of challenges. A MULTITUDE. This year in particular. There is no easy button. Why then add more to the plate by way of time-consuming arts? As Sandra says, it isn't about "adding on, but about adding meaning to - to anything and everything you do". We can take moments to make something meaningful or find our lives full of meaningless activity. When moments are hard to come by it is even more important to make each of them count.

I'm adding them to my collection of ideas to remember for this year.

I am grateful to those of you who commented so sympathetically on my two "blue" posts and for the wise women who spoke up on the Real Learning thread where my friend Chari spoke for both of us : ).

And a couple of friends who called me up to commiserate and offer counsel.

Thank you, thank you!

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.

Classical Quantities and Qualities

This, from Drew Campbell's blog, reminded me of what Melanie at Wine Dark Sea said when commenting on John Holt's book. I'm quoting some of Melanie's post:

Part of the problem seems to be in Holt's definition of curriculum; indeed, in his definition of knowledge. He seems to be thinking of a series of facts crammed into a child's head. But a curriculum, properly speaking, means a course of study (it comes from the Latin word for race course). A curriculum isn't, or shouldn't be, so much a set of facts to be learned as a series of disciplines to be explored.

I do like John Holt's books very much, but Melanie puts into words one of my main complaints with his point of view.

Similarly, Drew Campbell, quoting Neil Postman's Technopoly:

In consideration of the disintegrative power of Technopoly, perhaps the most important contribution schools can make to the education of our youth is to give them a sense of coherence in their studies, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn. Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn't teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer, and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social, or intellectual center. There is no set of ideas or attitudes that permeates all parts of the curriculum. The curriculum is not, in fact, a "course of study" at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses "skills." In other words, a technocrat's ideal - a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills.

Speaking of classical education -- not that I was, at least not explicitly : ) --- Mary Daly wrote a post on the Love2Learn blog "What is a Classical Education?"

Quiddity encapsulates the answer to a similar question into a nutshell:

The fundamental shift from classical Christian thought to conventional thought is that from the qualitative to the quantitative.

Fr Stanley Jaki comments on the pursuit of quantification in The Biblical Basis of Western Science:

Nothing which is non-quantitative is the business of science. But everything which is quantitative is its business. Non-quantitative aspects of existence, such as purpose, freedom, design, honesty, cannot he handle by science because they are not quantitative propositions. But every bit of matter is quantitative and therefore the business of science. Does not the Bible say that God “disposed everything according to measure and number and weight”?

Please note that the Bible does not say that measure, number and weight, or quantities in short, are everything. But the Bible says that every thing has measure, number, and weight or quantitative properties. Wherever there is matter, quantities are present. This is what gives science its unlimited competence in everything material, whether living or dead. But this is also the reason for the radical limitation of science to what is material insofar as it can be measured.

Still talking about class ed: Classical School blog run by the owners of Eide Neurolearning has a post on Classical Education for Visual Learners.

One question raised by parents about a classical education is whether it is too "verbal" for some of their children, and the verbal demands of reading classical history or texts can't be underestimated.

But like great thinkers in all historical times, they come in many different sizes, shapes and varieties.

( I sometimes wonder if Socrates wasn't a visual/spatial thinker).

I also liked Eide Neurolearning's recent post on The Art of Exploratory Thinking, with this quote attributed to TS Eliot):

"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go."

They go on to say:

It's interesting to think about exploratory decision-making as a necessary step for successful decision-making in real-life. In traditional education, discovery-based learning, when it happens, is rarely strategic - or at least the teaching of strategic approaches to discovery is rarely practiced or modeled...but isn't that too bad?

For some reason that reminds me of John Keats' On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer-- doesn't Keats seem a bit like a visual/spatial thinker?:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Love2Learn also discussed Catholic homeschooling yahoo groups recently, which might be the reason why several new people recently joined the Catholic Classical Education group I've been moderating for the last nine years. It is very nice to have some newcomers as well as the tried and true members who have been on there for years and watched each others' kids grow up. When I first started moderating the list, my oldest was twelve. How strange. Now my fifth child is eleven!

OK, I guess this turned into my Sunday Six : ). Or maybe it's turned into Seven, or even eight. Quantifications and qualifications before coffee; perhaps not a good idea.

Rambling towards Mooreeffoc

For some reason I have been so tempted to rename my blog Exceptio Probat Regulam. Don't ask me why -- it doesn't even seem to fit, really. I found it in Newman's Apologia Pro Sua Vita -- it is Latin for "the exception proves the rule". I just like the way it sounds! I am a bit like my 7 year old -- I pick up on some new word or phrase and then it runs through my head for days. At least, Exceptio Probat Regulam is better than "Many Cheerful Facts about the Square of the Hypotenuse" which is the other phrase that has been accompanying me everywhere these days.

I renamed my blog In a Spacious Place back in December and then recently found there is already a blog named A Spacious Place -- sigh. It refers to a different Psalm, since mine is based on Psalm 30 and hers is based on Psalm 18, and the title is a bit different -- but still. I feel a bit like a name thief.

Back to "exceptio probat regulam" --maybe it does fit a bit. We do seem to live a bit that way. We have a log home... and eight computers hooked to each other through a local area network. We are remote from civilization in miles but can access the World through the web at the click of a mouse. We have drying clothes strung on our loft railing because our dryer hasn't functioned for almost a year, yet we have books -- and computer games -- everywhere. We have a gas-guzzling Suburban but our family fills every seat and it's our one car. Both of the parents freelance at home. Our income varies wildly from year to year, and it does not seem to really matter to anything that counts. We do classical unschooling. WE live in a part of California where you can drive an hour and move from sequoias and cedars and snow down to dust and heat and farmland.

I think this is why we are all Chesterton fans around here. Chesterton spent his life looking for the strange place called "Mooreeffoc."..... in other words, the paradoxical, the mystery in the prosaic everyday, the thrill of discovery in the banal and everyday places of life. As Tolkien writes:

Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

My daughter uses this Chesterton quote as the tagline for her blog:

"When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale."

So true, and this is another one
(and look -- I think it's a chiastic structure! how cool!):

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered;
an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered."

Ask Bilbo Baggins! That could sum up what The Hobbit is about in one line!

I strive for a "Regula" but I cherish the "Exceptions". Every natural object has a certain identifiable order but all have some unique feature which separates them from the others of their kind. All my friends and family -- I cherish the common ground I have with them but delight in their differences, that amuse and interest and enlighten me. Often it is not the order in my day that makes it memorable, but the deviations -- the extra inconveniences and adventures. I think all this is a reflection of our Lord, who made us all so diverse within a given order, and surely intended it that way.

Mooreeffoc would make a good blog name, too, I'm thinking. Probably has been done already. Yep, I knew it.

Learning Curve

See the Books I'm Reading sidebar? It took almost an hour to enter those five books yesterday -- the book covers that link straight to the information page, and the hyperlinks as well. But now I know how to do it.

I think it will take less time when I next do it, because that is the typical pattern. You spend big time on your learning curve uphill slope and then you get to rely on what you already know.

My 11 year old, Kieron, is learning to do gif animation. He wanted to learn how, so with a bit of supervision he looked it up himself, downloaded a tool and some information, and set to work. He spent over an hour getting two characters towards each other on a page. But the same thing will happen to him, too. He will get to the mastery point and then he can focus on what he is doing, not how he is doing it.

This is similar to how Charlotte Mason's notion of Habits work. You do things that make virtue easier, and you do them again and again until you don't even have to think about them. If you are in a habit of telling the truth it becomes very difficult to lie. This guards us from moral dilemma in daily life, so we can save our pondering and willpower for the "big things".

Thomas Aquinas refers to a virtue as "a good habit bearing on activity," or a good faculty-habit (habitus operativus bonus). (from article by Father Hardon)

In the early habit-forming stages, it is helpful to have strong motivation. I wanted to know how to get those books over there on that sidebar. I knew if I could get past the learning part, I would have a useful tool at my disposal (and I could find out if there was an easier way to do it!!)

It is also good to have a general sense of competence. Thankfully, Kieron has acquired a "can do" attitude as a fifth sibling, homeschooled. I somehow acquired one as a firstborn, public schooled. I just read recently in a waiting room magazine that kids learn confidence from testing themselves against appropriate level challenges and learning to cope with failure. Resilience is the key to self-esteem, according to this, not compliments and protection from all adversity. More on this at Eide Neurolearning. This too fits in with some of Charlotte Mason's ideas.

I talked on my other blog about how motivation and focusing on how I COULD do it helped me organize my hours in a day. (It is an ongoing process though, and that's the other aspect of habits I don't have time to write about today! certainly learning from failure has come into it!).

This started off as a simple asking-for-commiseration for my sidebar challenges, and turned into a reflection. LOL. Off to T-ball with my little ones.

Planning and Purpose

This is really cute -- sums up some of my days too! HT Cindy at It's About the Journey.

Also, a great post by Cindy: Trusting Myself (and God and the DC)

I like this piece of advice from the post:

"Plan on messing up 5 times a week. Then when you mess up 4 times, you will have had a great week!" :-)