Last Child in the Woods Summary

I finished Last Child in the Woods, and, to keep notes, started a summary -- one or two sentences to sum up each chapter. And these are the sentences.

1 Most adults have fond memories of being outside climbing trees but today, kids don't go outside much anymore. Why?

2 Kids used to build forts and tree houses but today's kids don't even have grandparents who live in rural farms where they can play and see where food comes from.

3 Parks and open places are no longer places for kids to free-play--too much liability if kids fall out of a tree, and too many flowers they might trample.

4 Vacant lots left untouched can be wild natural areas. Nature relaxes us and can help with mental health.

5 Spending two weeks in the desert helped at-risk inner city teens. Most people today only experience nature as store theme-displays or in sensationalized nature documentaries.

6 Howard Gardner added a 'nature smarts' category to his theory of multiple intelligences. But it can only be developed by being in nature. Building forts teaches lots of other skills, including use of all the senses.

7 Lots of creative people--writers, musicians, etc.--list nature as an early inspiring influence in their creative life.

8 Being outside in greenery seems to calm and ground kids with ADD. Perhaps nature is as necessary for kids' growth as food and air.

9 Organized sports and busy lives can squeeze out time for free play outside. We think of free play as a luxury, but it's necessary for physical and mental health.

10 Emphasis in the news of crime makes parents afraid to let their kids play outside, but the risk is exaggerated, especially considering how much we sacrifice by letting fear confine our kids indoors.

11 Even families who do get out miss the beauty as they tear up the landscape in their ATV's. College science majors no longer know basic life forms in nature because they didn't learn that as children.

12 If kids view nature as far removed and all about abstract global warming and rainforests, how will they ever be passionate about protecting the environment? They need to love the nature near their homes first by playing in it.

13 Adults need to take kids out and share their own awe at nature. As an antidote to too much falsely stimulating entertainment, take them hiking or camping or even just for a walk. Watch bugs, grow vegetables.

14 Teach kids to be alert under your watchful eye to keep them safer in general; nature is great for teaching alertness.

15 Saving stranded turtles, keeping nature notebooks, gathering plants for food or medicine, even hunting and fishing can create a connection with nature.

16 Finland: 'The core of learning is not in the information . . . being predigested from the outside, but in the interaction between a child and the environment.'

Ho hum; I got bored with the book and started speed-skimming. So, I have nothing to say about chapters 17 and 18. I cracked down on myself the day before the book was due back at the library to make myself finish.

19 Nature and animals can coexist with people through innovative plans in urban areas: cities can plan wild, overgrown patches of land or rough, green 'pocket parks' and encourage wildlife to live there by planting native plants they like. ('Pocket parks.' I love the term. I like how it sounds when I say it out loud: 'pocket parks.' And the concept sounds good, too!)

20 Imagine an idyllic world where kids grow up in a natural green environment and a world where buffalo roam once more on the prairie. Can we do it? Yes we can! (MBTI: I sense some INFP here...)

21 For Christians, caring for the environment isn't earth-worship; it's good stewardship.

The End

How to Make a Pizza (or Two)

As Brother J and I were coming home yesterday around dinner time, we had one of those rare moments of creative genius that only happens when brilliant, hungry minds meet.

      "You know what sounds good right now?" I said, thinking aloud as I drove. "Homemade pizza."
     "You mean like the Jones's homemade pizza?"
     "No, like our homemade pizza. The way we used to make it, only better."
     "That does sound good. We could do that."
     "We could."
     "We should."
     "Let's do it!"

We phoned home to change dinner plans, stopped at the store to purchase some necessary supplies... and this is what ensued.

Step 1: Gather a selection of fine ingredients. We used freshly made dough, red bell peppers, feta cheese, tomato sauce, shredded Italian cheeses, and pepperoni.

Step 2: Stretch out your dough. You can use the tossing method...

...or the rolling method.

Step 3: Spoon on sauce. Not too much; remember, it's just for flavor.

Step 4: Add pepperoni. You can do this before adding cheese...

...or after.

Step 5: Cover liberally with cheese--whatever cheese you like best. Ours was a combination of mozzarella, provolone, parmesan, asiago, fontina, and romano. Vive le fromage!

Step 6: Add whatever other toppings your heart desires.

Now they're ready to be baked!

Step 7: Put your pizza in the oven and bake. 400 degrees, 8 minutes in our oven. Take it out just as the crust begins to brown.

Step 8: Let your pizza cool for a few minutes.

You can use this time to admire your handiwork.

Step 9: Cut into four parts and repeat for eight slices.

Step 10: Eat and enjoy.

Bon appetite!

Last Child in the Woods

I'm halfway through this book (by Richard Louv), and this quote struck me:

"If such joy [in nature] is dormant, we must reawaken it. This is not an easy task for parents who previously missed the chance to connect with the outdoors. But that opportunity is still available, and I believe most parents will do this -- when they fully understand that nature is not just 'nice to have' but a must for healthy childhood development."

It struck me because it's almost exactly what Charlotte Mason said about finding a way to get kids out in nature:

"Impossible! Says an overwrought mother who sees her way to no more for her children than a daily hour or so on the pavements of the neighbouring London squares. Let me repeat, that I venture to suggest, not what is practicable in any household, but what seems to me absolutely best for the children; and that, in the faith that mothers work wonders once they are convinced that wonders are demanded of them."

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And there's this from teacher John Rick, envisioning a change in schools that would bring kids and nature back together:

"The society we are molding these kids toward is one that values consumer viability. The works of John Muir, Rachel Carson, or Aldo Leopold are seldom if ever taught to children in the public schools. Even in the sciences, where nature could play such an important role, the students study nature in a dry, mechanized way. How does the bat sonar work, how does a tree grow, how do soil amenities help crops grow? Kids see nature as a lab experiment.
The alternative? I imagine a classroom that turns outward, both figuratively and literally. The grounds would become a classroom, buildings would look outward, and gardens would cover the campus. The works of naturalists would be the vehicle by which we would teach reading and writing. Math and science would be taught as a way to understand the intricacies of nature, the potential to meet human needs, and how all things are interlaced. A well-rounded education would mean learning the basics, to become part of a society that cherished nature while at the same time contributing to the well-being of mankind. Progress does not have to be patented to be worthwhile. Progress can also be measured by our interactions with nature and its preservation. Can we teach children to look at a flower and see all the things it represents: beauty, the health of an ecosystem, and the potential for healing?"

I like it, but I'm reminded of how people tend to see all of education through the lens of their own interest. For example, the guy who did the Robinson Curriculum happens to be a mathmetician and feels that every child should be required to spend three hours a day on math. "The works of naturalists would be the vehicle by which we would teach reading and writing." I wonder if this means he would replace classic literature for nature books?With some balance, I think his suggestions are good.

Another take on public school

According to this article, Finnish students have the highest test scores in the world while spending fewer hours in school than the students of any other nation. Children learn by playing until age 7; their parents read to them at home; education does not center on competition, either between students or between schools; and primary and secondary schools are combined, so one teacher stays with her students all the way through. Sounds like some Charlotte Mason principles in action, to me...

BBC News - Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

Words to think with

(Cross-posted at In Search of the Perilous Realm)

The semester has dwindled to a sliver of its former self, the way an ice cube shrinks when you pour water over it in the sink, and I am just watching and waiting now for the last few weeks to melt away. And I'm studying, of course. And rehearsing. And writing papers. And memorizing lines. And planning summer projects. And summer trips. And summer work. And next semester's classes. And vacillating, all the while, between bleary-eyed complaints about the workload and moments of utter wonder that I am allowed to eat and drink and breathe history, literature, philosophy, music; that I have lived through the hardest winter in living memory to see a spring which is the loveliest in history, as every spring is; that I love and am loved by a woman who is fair and seemly and wise beyond my highest hopes; that I continue to wake up every morning to find that someone else has been up before me scrubbing the sky and pulling up the sun and pouring dew on the grass—in short, that I keep on living in God's good earth under God's bright heaven. This must be the way a sprout feels when it wakes up from hibernation in its seedpod to find itself planted in rich soil with clean air swirling around it and the sun beaming down overhead.

Meanwhile, time slips away from me and it's early morning and I should try going to bed. I oughtn't to be blogging at all, except that I was studying late and broke policy and bought a coke and now I'm awake on caffeine. I'll rue it tomorrow.

I heard a lecture this morning about modern women who are writing—Annie Dillard and Toni Morrison and people like that. It was a good lecture from start to finish, but this simple quote stood out to me. It comes from Toni Morrison, whom I've not read. It returns to the question of ownership, which I've pondered before, but Morrison makes it more personal that Steinbeck did:

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Words to think with, words to live by...

Ownership

From The Grapes of Wrath, which I'm reading for school:

...It's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, and died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

What do we mean when we say we own something? The word has different shades of meaning. We say we "own" our clothes, by which we mean they are our property. But we also say we "own" someone as a friend, by which we mean we acknowledge the relationship, not that we possess them. What makes something our property? A book may sit on your shelf, but can you really say it's yours until you've read it and slipped bookmarks in the folds or dog-eared the pages or stuck sticky notes to favorite paragraphs or added notes in the margins or whatever you do with books—in other words, until you've made it yours by spending time with it and letting part of yourself become involved in it? The relationship makes it yours, not the purchase.

About the Teaching of Art

(Cross-posted at In Search of the Perilous Realm)

Should art be taught for enjoyment or understanding? Or can it be taught for both? I've been wondering about that for a few months. Last fall I had some talks with my mom about the place art should have in a curriculum based on relational principles (i.e. Charlotte Mason). Now my college semester has begun, and with it my fourth and final semester of humanities. We've been studying history chronologically, so this semester is about the 20th century. We've already studied plenty of modern art.

I've noticed, however, that all we study are the avant-garde, envelope-pushing works. We've looked at Matisse and Picasso and Munch, watched Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, listened to atonal music and talked about Schoenberg's twelve-tone system. Our discussions of "what's happening in art" during the 20th century have focused on modernism and post-modernism: the rejection of traditional Western aesthetics, experiments with other styles, and the serious, searching art that was produced as a result.

[Admittedly, the literature we've studied—World War I poets, W. B. Yeats, Pygmalion—has been more traditional. (In other words: no Joyce!) We haven't studied the literature as art, however, but as illustrations of contemporary ideas. The WWI poets demonstrate the two ways people looked at the war (romantic, patriotic sentiment versus shocked, disillusioned realism). Pygmalion expresses and criticizes the behaviorist principles of B. F. Skinner. And so on.]

I understand to a point why we ought to study the latest developments in art. The state of the arts can tell us much about the state of a culture. But my question is this: why do we privilege progressive art over works created in older styles, works which may do nothing to advance the art of art, but which are still profound and moving and beautiful? Why the bias towards the new?

I asked two of my professors this question, separately, and got several answers. One professor replied that, in a survey course such as humanities, we have limited time, and have to focus on the tip of the spear, so to speak, as art moves forward. He explained that, once you hit the 18th and 19th centuries, old styles no longer die out as new ones are born; thus by the 20th century you end up having neoclassical, romantic, realist, and a whole list of other styles all being used simultaneously with the developing modernism. That modernism is the new element, so that's what needs our attention. But just because we're not studying the other art of the 20th century doesn't mean it's not important.

The other professor replied that the humanities course is focused on understanding art rather than enjoying it. (This professor, by the way, enjoys art as much as anyone I know.) I may be misinterpreting him, but I think his point was this. When we look at the diverse collection of 20th century styles, most of them are ones we have studied before. Romanticism we met in the 1800s; neoclassicism in the 1700s. So, while artists may still be using those styles, they offer no new perspective on the human condition. The new styles, those that offer a different approach: those are the ones we can learn from. Those are the ones that add something substantial to our understanding of the world.

I think I understand their arguments, but they don't satisfy me. If students are taught to understand art—that is, to analyze it—without being taught to enjoy it, then education has missed the point of art. If we approach a work only to extract its philosophical underpinnings, then we have forgotten how to listen, and if we do not listen, we cannot learn. Art must be experienced, not merely studied. We learn from art only when we respect it enough to build a relationship with it. That means entering without an agenda and without trying to analyze. It means entering with attention, even with humility, to ask the art what it means.

Any good art will be rewarding if we take the time to build that relationship with it. In saying this, I disagree with the bias towards new art. I don't mind learning about the new as well as the old; we have to know the whole history in order to understand where we are now. What bothers me is the tendency to say that an artist must say something new in order for his work to have significance; to say that the only legitimate, honest art is that which speaks in the most current dialect; to say that today's questions can only be answered with today's artistic styles.

If art were like science, always gaining more knowledge, always correcting old theories, then the bias towards new art would be necessary. But art is not progressive like science. An old work of art, or an old style of art, has as much to say to us now as the art that is current. Plenty of music composed in the 20th century was sophisticated and significant without abandoning tonality or aesthetic standards. Vaughan Williams comes to mind, as does some Prokofiev, or later works by Stravinsky. Plenty of literature written in the 20th century was beautiful and meaningful without abandoning traditional narrative structures or poetic forms. I'm thinking of The Lord of the Rings, or the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, or Yeats's lyrical works.

We can gain as much by getting to know these traditional works as we can by studying new styles. Atonal music, abstract art, stream-of-consciousness literature, and the like may be more "advanced" (that is to say, newer). But that does not make them more valid or more valuable than art which says well what needs to be said, whether it has been said once or a thousand times.

Charles Edward Perugini

This is one of my very favorite paintings, so I decided to look up the artist.

His name is Charles Edward Perugini. He lived from 1839 to 1918, was born in Italy, but spent much of his life in England. He trained under Lord Leighton and married one of Charles Dickens' daughters, Kate, who was also a painter.

"The themes of his pictures are mainly nice girls doing peaceful things like reading, or just dressed in rich costume and looking contemplatively, often with a romantic tone." Girl Reading (also called In the Orangery)is probably his best-known work; it was painted in 1878.







Here's a picture he did of his wife, Kate:

Batman Begins: the Untold Story

I just finished watching Batman Begins for the first time with my brothers. They had both seen it before, which put us in the interesting situation of them showing me a movie for once. (An unusual occasion, that.) I enjoyed the movie a lot, but at the same time it left me with an unsettling feeling. In this movie, more than in any of the other Batmans or superhero movies I've seen, you see the vulnerability of good guys. It wasn't simply that the hero had weaknesses, or that he could be injured; that's a given in any good superhero story. This movie made you doubt Batman's ability to save Gotham, or stay a step ahead of the bad guys, or protect the ones he loved. It made you doubt his ability to defeat evil at all.

Batman Begins made me feel how precarious our victories are in this life. The world is balanced on a razor's edge. No matter how many times we save the world, all we're doing is keeping it from slipping. It remains hanging on the edge of destruction. The next battle could very well be the last.

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Read more.

Cook From the Pantry Challenge

I saw this challenge at Dewey's Treehouse . . . and ignored it because most home skills are beyond me. But we haven't really done a real grocery shopping trip since before Christmas and probably won't until this weekend. Tim felt like it would be interesting to see if we could do without having to get anything from the store, just use what we have, until the weekend. So, we aren't doing the challenge for the whole month. It's just for a week. And we'll still be getting lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers so I can have daily smoothies and they can have salads.

We have one frozen chicken breast, three boxes of taco shells, an envelope of taco seasoning, lots of canned beans, a little rice, pasta, lots of gluten-free Thai rice noodles, a jar of peanut butter, some oranges, a couple of onions, parmesan cheese and a jar of pasta sauce.

Here is our week's menu:

Monday - Thai noodles with peanut sauce
Tuesday - orange hummus (no lemon!) with taco-shell chips
Wednesday - pasta with tomato sauce
Thursday - pasta with butter and parmesan cheese
Friday - chicken tacos
Saturday - sauteed onions and kidney beans over rice

We also have our stand-by (apple cinnamon muffins and baked beans) if we need another meal. I've been dropping the muffin batter onto cookie sheets in order to save money on foil muffin liners. It makes them look like monstrous blobs, but they taste the same (one child says they taste better this way).

We'll make bread (we do have a bread machine), and Miranda has a box of frozen gluten-free waffles in the freezer (that's her bread). I think we have some rice cakes, too.

Part of the official challenge was to donate all the money you save to charity. We won't be doing that. We have a car that needs repair because a deer jumped out at us a few weeks ago, and a washing machine that needed repair last week, and we have other bills. So any money we save will be absorbed into the family budget.

Happy New Year!

In my reading this morning I came across this passage from Psalm 4 which seems befitting for the start of the new year.

Many people say, "Who will show us better times?"
     Let the smile of your face shine on us, Lord.
You have given me greater joy
     than those who have abundant harvests of grain and wine.

I will lie down in peace and sleep,
     for you alone, O Lord, will keep me safe.

I love this. It is at once a prayer for blessing, a song of thanksgiving, and an expression of trust. As the year begins we are all hoping for better days, days of peace and plenty. The psalmist directs us to God, who is the foundation of all our hopes. He gives thanks for last year's blessings, and reminds us that we are blessed whether or not we've had an abundant harvest, because we have been given life and love by our God. Finally, he reaffirms our trust in God by reminding us to rest, to keep Sabbath with God, because it is he who keeps us safe, whether we wake or sleep.

Have a blessed new year, everyone!