Dinner: Prebirth

(what you get when you combine an egg dinner for five with three flashlights and a photographer. The setup:)

The Lunch Game

I think this game posted at the Beehive may be the funniest thing I've ever seen - you simply must play!

Peculiar Aristocratic Title

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Most Noble and Honourable Tim the Rustic of Fritterton on the Marshes Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

(from The Common Room)

What I'm thinking about today

"In great states, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents wanting to make men and women of them. In vile states, the children are always wanting to be men and women, and the parents to keep them children."

- John Ruskin, Mornings in Florence

What Non-Homeschoolers May Not Know About Homeschoolers

This post from another blog was posted to one of the Ambleside Online email lists. It's nice to remember these things when I feel bad about not meeting all my own expectations about doing it all.

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.

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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.