Oh dear...

While reading Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman) today I came across this quote that I liked, so I paused to put it in my quote book.

"To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community."

Returning to the book, I read this in the very next paragraph:

"...A good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph."



[Edit - Moody Broadcasting is doing an online Book Club feature of this book, the link is here.]

Miss M

This morning she came rushing out of the bedroom, excitedly yelling, "Swan Lake! Mommy, it's Swan Lake!" I went back to the bedroom, and, sure enough, Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake was playing on the radio. I'm amazed - she's seen the Nutcracker live a couple of times, seen the ballet on TV a lot and heard the CD all Christmas, so it doesn't nsurprise me when she recognizes it (lately she can correctly pick out Snow, Hot Chocolate and the Arabian dance), and we did a whole term of Mozart so I'm not surprised when she recognizes him, but she hasn't heard Swan Lake more than a few times.

Oh, and this morning she proudly showed me how she figured out how to work the child-proof cabinet latches. It may be time to install double latches on a few of the cabinets. I'm not ready for her to be able to get into any of the cabinets she feels like playing in.

test

Stacks Book Challenge Completed!

I almost forgot - I finished The Iliad for Boys and Girls a week ago. It took a bit longer because I read it aloud to my 10-year-old son. I enjoyed it. I was never able to make it through the whole Iliad, not even in audiobook form. I could never keep all the people straight. This was much easier to follow, and now I feel more prepared to tackle the original.

I posted about Linnets and Valerians here.
Roller Skates
All-of-a-Kind Family and Just David
The Mouse and His Child
and my original post where I listed the books I'd read here.

Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer
Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge
The Iliad for Boys and Girls by Alfred Church
All of a Kind Family by Sydney Taylor (and I read two sequels)
Just David by Eleanor Porter
The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban

Article on Liberal Education

The Common Room posted an article about standards in liberal education. The author laments the lack of any common core of knowledge to teach in colleges. Instead, students can take a couple of courses of their choice in science, math, humanities, and get a degree - but two students with identical degrees from the same college might not have ever read the same book! (Tim says this won't be a problem for long, once the UN's world curriculum is adopted by more schools . . .)

Charlotte Mason had a lot to say about what should be learned in schools, and she was very much against vocational education that's narrowly focused on training students in job skills in lieu of a standard liberal education that passed on a body of knowledge and developed character. A quote two-thirds down in the article did a great job explaining that concept very concisely. Peter Berkowitz commenting on John Stuart Mills:

"Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians." In other words, the cultivation that they bring to professional schools from their liberal education goes a long way to determining whether professionals practice their trade sensibly and decently.

Listen to Poetry

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/

I found this other site http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/poets/toc.html which includes a reading of Wordsworth's Intimation of Immortality, but the reader doesn't have a British accent.

What European City Do You Belong In?

You Belong in Dublin

Friendly and down to earth, you want to enjoy Europe without snobbery or pretensions. You're the perfect person to go wild on a pub crawl... or enjoy a quiet bike ride through the old part of town.

What European City Do You Belong In?

What's Your Personality Type?

We've been having fun with this online personality test. I scored INTJ, Mr. B scored ISTJ, and Tim scored INTP (gee, we're all a bunch of introverts here!) J just took it and scored ESFJ, but I think it's still too early to tell - so much of what he does is by default because of his family. I'd love for some of my friends to take it - Miss Roxie, Ginger, Sis and her mom, my Bioluminescent Twin, my AO friends.

One thing I found about the test - if you truly don't understand a question or strongly feel like you could go either way (they ask "yes" or "no" and don't give an "I could go either way" option), you can leave it blank so than an erroneous answer doesn't throw off your results.

This is my first time posting to our updated blog.

Edit: Here's a second variation of the test - you can take both to see if your results jive.

Calligraphy in the Sky

(the above is dramatized; below is closer to how it actually looked)

(taken November of last year)

But a week since...