Caterpillars, Science, Food

I'm actually previewing two books for Year 11. The other one is The Life of the caterpillar by Jean Henri Fabre. He's observing some pine processionary caterpillars and wants to experiment to see if they'll eat other species of pine, or just their native pine. But, however much all pine trees smell alike, the caterpillars only eat a couple species. Fabre makes this comment about science fabricating food on the assumption that one kind is pretty much the same as another:

"We must mistrust the chemist's retort when it pokes its nose into the kitchen. It may succeed in making butter out of tallow-candles and brandy out of potatoes; but, when it tells us that the products are identical, we shall do well to refuse these abominations. Science, astonishingly rich as it is in poison, will never provide us with anything fit to eat, because, though the raw substance falls to a large extent within its domain, that same substance escapes its methods the moment that it is wanted organized, divided and subdivided indefinitely by the process of life, as needed by the stomach, whose requirements are not be met by measured doses of our reagents. The raw material of cell and fibre may perhaps be artificially obtained, some day; cell and fibre themselves, never. There's the rub with your chemical feeding."

There's more. Muir observed that insects tend to be cooperative and communal when they eat plants, but insects that prey on other insects are too competitive for food/survival to work together - there's not enough food to go around for them to live together. They'd kill each other fighting over the food. And - communal insects only have one mother in any community: the queen. Maternal instinct makes mothers too fiercely protective to cooperate in a communal society. They'd never sacrifice their own eggs for the good of the hive or nest.

Here's his quote about what insects can teach us about forcing equality in order to have a communal society like the pine processionary caterpillars, who are as alike in appearance, ability and ambition as every other pine processionary caterpillar:

"If it suited us to go to school to the [caterpillars], we should soon see the inanity of our levelling and communistic theories. Equality is a magnificent political catchword, but little more. Where is it, this equality of ours? In our social groups, could we find as many as two persons exactly equal in strength, health, intelligence, capacity for work, foresight and all the other gifts which are the great factors of prosperity? Where should we find anything analogous to the exact parity prevailing among caterpillars? Nowhere. Inequality is our law. And a good thing, too.
A sound which is invariably the same, however often multiplied, does not constitute a harmony. We need dissimilarities, sounds loud and soft, deep and shrill; we need even discords which, by their harshness, throw into relief the sweetness of the chords. In the same way, human societies are harmonious only with the aid of contraries. If the dreams of our levellers could be realized, we should sink to the monotony of the caterpillar societies; art, science, progress and the lofty flights of the imagination would slumber indefinitely in the dead calm of mediocrity."

John Muir

I'm previewing an AO book for Year 11, Our National Parks, written by John Muir in 1901 as magazine articles to stir an interest in visiting the country's national parks. The book is online here.

His love for nature and desire to prevent human progress from ruining the land is very evident in his book. Here are a few quotes from the first two chapters; the first chapter is general comments about our national parks and the second chapter is about Yellowstone and the geysers.

"Give a month at least to this precious reserve. The time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal. Nevermore will time seem short or long, and cares will never again fall heavily on you, but gently and kindly as gifts from heaven."

"As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature's sources never fail. Like a generous host, she offers here brimming cups in endless variety, served in a grand hall, the sky its ceiling, the mountains its walls, decorated with glorious paintings and enlivened with bands of music ever playing."

"Again and again, in season and out of season, the question comes up, 'What are rattlesnakes good for?' As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God's ways."

"How still the woods seem from here, yet how lively a stir the hidden animals are making; digging, gnawing, biting, eyes shining, at work and play, getting food, rearing young, roving through the underbrush, climbing the rocks, wading solitary marshes, tracing the banks of the lakes and streams! Insect swarms are dancing in the sunbeams, burrowing in the ground, diving, swimming,--a cloud of witnesses telling Nature's joy. The plants are as busy as the animals, every cell in a swirl of enjoyment, humming like a hive, singing the old new song of creation."

"The shocks and out-bursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, storms, the pounding of waves, the uprush of sap in plants, each and all tell the orderly love-beats of Nature's heart."

All Schedules Done!

I spend a few days before each school year preparing complete 180 day schedules for each child. The first one is done. This is J's ninth grade schedule; he's doing Ambleside Online's lightened version of Year 8.

L's Year 5 Schedule is done. I discovered last year that he does better if I break up his readings into small portions and have him reading more books each day, but less of each individual book. I also made a few changes from AO's Year 5 because he's already read King Arthur a couple of times with us, and I don't think Kipling's Kim would suit him. So I found a few etexts at the Baldwin Books project that I think he'll enjoy more: The Aeneid for Boys and Girls by Alfred Church, The Story of Siegfried by James Baldwin, and The Story of Roland by James Baldwin. We do Devotion/Plutarch/Shakespeare together as a family, and Picture Study/Composer/Folksongs/Nature Study together once a week - all of those are on their schedules first each day, since we do those first.

Tim's Year 12 plan is posted, and his daily schedules are here.

J's Ninth Grade Plan

J is going to be doing a slightly adapted version of AO's lightened Year 8. I switched the geography book and devotional, and he'll be reading all of Saints and Heroes instead of just the second volume.

Evidence That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell
The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer
Saints and Heroes by George Hodges Volumes 1 and 2
The New World by Winston Churchill (volume 2 of his History of the English Speaking Peoples)
Martin Luther's defense before the Diet of Worms
Queen Elizabeth's speech to the Spanish Armada, July 29, 1588
A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt (watch movie)
A Coffin for King Charles by C. V. Wedgwood
Johannes Kepler chapter from The Great Astronomers by R.S. Ball
In Search of England by H.V. Morton (geography)
Whatever Happened to Justice by Richard Maybury
I, Pencil a short essay by Leonard Read
Ourselves by Charlotte Mason
Utopia by Sir Thomas More
Francis Bacon selected essays
The History of English Literature for Girls and Boys by H.E. Marshall ch 32-59
Everyman, a Morality Play
Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley
Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves (Spenser's Fairie Queene Book I)
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Poetry of John Donne and George Herbert
Grammar: Our Mother Tongue
VideoText Algebra
Chemistry
Nature Reading: Rural Hours by Susan Fenimore Cooper
William Harvey and the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood by Thomas Henry Huxley
How To Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (part of the book)
The Story of Painting by H. W. Janson - chapters 4, 5

Senior Year Plan

For Tim's last year, I'm letting him mostly plan his own school. We're following Ambleside Online's history line-up; ancient history is planned, but Year 12 isn't done. So we looked at what people are recommending, especially on the AO lists, and here's what we're looking at:

Term 1
The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton
The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton
Histories by Herodotus (Books 6, 7, 8 that tell of the Battles of Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis)
Code of Hammurabi
Chemistry
Latin
The Christian Imagination by Leland Ryken (collection of essays)
Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis
The Gift of Fire Richard Mitchell
Short Stories (4 per term)
Oedipus Rex, Antigone by Sophocles
Medea, Hippolyta by Euripides
2 or 3 Greek Lives by Plutarch
Italian Journey by Goethe (for geography)

Term 2
The Roman Way Edith Hamilton
History of Rome by Livy (Books i, II and III)
Chemistry
Latin
From Socrates to Sartre by T.Z. Lavine (part 1)
Orthodoxy by Chesterton
The Aeneid by Virgil (Books I-VI)
Short Stories
2 or 3 Roman Lives by Plutarch

Term 3
De Conquestu Britanniae (Gildas's Conquest of Britain) I and II (will also count as Latin practice)
How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill
Chemistry
Latin
From Socrates to Sartre by T.Z. Lavine (part 2)
Pensees (Thoughts) by Blaise Pascal
The Man Who Was Thursday by Chesterton?
Literature: Beowulf, Gawain, Mabinogion, Sir Orfeo, Pearl, Y Gododdin, Asser's Life of Alfred
Short Stories

I've posted a webpage with his booklist here.

I'll be reading along with him as best I can - which means I'll be using easier versions. And for that, I have my own booklist and schedule.

More on Baby Einstein

"Early screen-viewing has a negative effect on [the brain's] soft-wiring even when the content is baby-safe . . . The question to ask isn’t, ‘What is she watching,’ but, ‘What else isn’t she doing?’"

‘We have succeeded in convincing people that the first years are critical to brain development,’’ said Meltzoff, who is co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. ‘‘The unfortunate consequence is that it has spun off to build a brainier baby enterprise, where people think they have to use technology to take advantage of this critical window.’’

Read more here.

Baby Einstein Doesn't Work

"The claim always seemed too good to be true: park your infant in front of a video and, in no time, he or she will be talking and getting smarter than the neighbor's kid. In the latest study on the effects of popular videos such as the 'Baby Einstein' and 'Brainy Baby' series, researchers find that these products may be doing more harm than good. And they may actually delay language development in toddlers.
Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. 'The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew,' says Christakis."

". . . the only thing that baby videos are doing is producing a generation of overstimulated kids."

Read the full article here.

I'm not the least bit surprised. Endangered Minds by Jane Healy (read my review of the book) says that children have a window of opportunity for learning language, and they can't learn language passively. They learn language from back-and-forth dialog - the kind that mothers do naturally with their kids. God knew what He was doing when he placed children in homes. Science is just catching up and discovering that that's where they learn best, at least at very young ages.

Fanfiction and Originality

Merry K's great post on fanfiction over at Beth Spera in Domino got me to thinking about the modern view of fanfiction as opposed to original, published fiction. I've always seen fanfiction as inferior to "original" fiction, on principle, but the more I read the less I am inclined to think so. I confess, most of the fanfiction I find is of poor quality (am I just looking in the wrong places?), but I think this is due more to our culture's perception of fanfiction than something inherent in the genre. Nowadays we esteem originality so much that anything derivative is automatically considered poorer work: our copyright laws even prohibit the publishing of most derivative work. But this hasn't always been the case. In the Middle Ages, "originality" as we think of it was unheard of: the structure of their mythical universe was already in place, and all the great works--the Canterbury Tales, the Inferno, Paradise Lost, even Shakespeare's plays--were stories told within that universe. Classics such as the Iliad and the Aeneid were part of the accepted history of the universe, and historians like Geoffrey of Monmouth made it a point to show how their histories were connected with these earlier stories--to prove, in other words, that they were writing a sequel and not merely making up something new. The very fact that their work was "fanfiction", something derived from a great work rather than the invention of a single mind, gave it a higher status in the eyes of both author and reader. Of course it was still possible to write an awful book, but then the quality of a book doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether it's original or derivative.

And just to prove that I'm working from authority and not making up something original, I'll end with two quotes. First from Ezra Pound (whom I don't care for generally): "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."--But no poet makes something completely new. And then from C.S. Lewis, from his book The Discarded Image, which is all about the Medieval worldview. I've just read it, can you tell?

"I doubt if [the Medieval authors] would have understood our demand for originality or valued those works in their own age which were original any more on that account. If you had asked Layamon or Chaucer 'Why do you not make up a brand-new story of your own?' I think they might have replied (in effect) 'Surely we are not yet reduced to that?' Spin something out of one's own head when the world teems with so many noble deeds, wholesome examples, pitiful tragedies, strange adventures, and merry jests which have never yet been set forth quite so well as they deserve? The originality which we regard as a sign of wealth might have seemed to them a confession of poverty."

Book 7 (minor spoilers)

I've been thinking about the book for a few days now. Frankly, I miss Hogwarts; the seventh book spends very little time at the school and it has a different feel because of it. But it was a satisfying ending to the series; often unexpected (for me, at least), but very satisfying. All the subplots, even some themes and characters that had been dropped--and left, I thought--in previous books were picked up and concluded in this one. The main characters have matured a lot; I love how Neville in particular has grown. (His character arc reminds me of Eustace Scrubb's, but that's another story...) We do lose some characters, too; I won't say which; but between that and the many other manifestations of the love the characters have for one other, this a moving story to read. I have only ever cried once while reading a book, but this one had me watery-eyed in a couple spots. The climax was all that could be wished for, and yet (as in Lord of the Rings) the fate of the world hangs not on might nor power, but on the little things too small for the Dark Lord to notice. (MAJOR SPOILER WARNING: Highlight to read, but only if you've read the book!) Or rather on the one great thing, Love. Harry sacrifices himself, not for the cause, but for the sake of his friends; Hogwarts and the Order risk open war, not in an attempt to defeat Voldemort themselves, but simply because Harry needs their help; Snape, we finally learn, was redeemed because of his love for one person (or perhaps two, as I think we may include Dumbledore); Narcissa deceives her master and saves Harry at the crucial point because of her love for her son; Neville kills Nagini, not because he knows why it must be done, but because he trusts Harry; Dobby gives his life, not because he hates the Dark Lord's rule, but because he loves Harry.
(You can read now.)

So there are my thoughts upon first reading. It's not my favorite book in the series, but I think it was as near a perfect ending as could be. I still have some questions and some things I want to give more attention to, but that can only mean one thing.

Reread!

Book 7 (no spoilers)

Okay, so I haven't even read any of the HP books, and I'm catching some of the hype/excitement. It's contageous!

I did watch the first two movies this week. I hadn't let the kids read the series for a long time, but now that Tim is going to be a high school senior, I thought it would be okay. So he read all six books in four months and has started catching up on the movie versions. We found a HP party at our local library, a gathering for fans to speculate before they rush to Barnes and Noble at midnight to buy their copy. Tim won't be buying a copy; he'll be on a waiting list to read a library copy. He's afraid of spoilers, especially since he probably won't be reading it for weeks after everybody else.

Meanwhile, the younger siblings are going to be watching a video at home with me while their big brother is at the library talking about a book series they're not allowed to read yet . . . Their day will come.

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Update - Tim went to the party, which went on until midnight, when the library unveiled their three copies for patrons to check out. They did a drawing of those who were there to see who'd get the first three copies, and he won the drawing - and came home with a copy of the book!

We promise - no spoilers. :)