Miss M'isms

Miss M is almost four, but there are still some reminders that she's got a ways to grow. These are things she still says pretty regularly.

"passidy" (instead of pacifier)
"pampanks" (pancakes)
"buckle me out" when she wants out of her car seat

And these are typical--

"Turn it on wild!" (turn the water on harder.)
"When I grow up, I want to be a motorcycle lady. And I'll marry a motorcycle man and have children and their names will be Tally, etc."
"Mommy, why didn't you name me Harry when I was born? My real name's Harry." I'm not sure why she's stuck on the name Harry. Maybe she's thinking of "hairy"? She also likes to be "Lisa," but I can trace that one to Corduroy.
And she's proposed to her Daddy, all of her brothers, and her best friend, C.

Goethe on Imagination, Plants, and Work

Quotes from tonight's reading of Italian Journey.

"A thousand times I have heard people complain that some object they had known only from a description was disappointing when seen in reality, and the reason was always the same. Imagination is to reality what poetry is to prose: the former will always think of objects as massive and vertical, the latter will always try to extend them horizontally."

I'm not sure I understand what he's talking about, but it certainly is food for thought.



"Let me say briefly what I think about the ancient writers and us moderns. They represented things and persons as they are in themselves, we usually represent only their substantive effect: they depicted the horror, we depict horribly; they depicted the pleasing, we pleasantly, and so on. Hence all the exaggeration, the mannerisms, the false elegance and the bombast of our age. Since, if one aims at producing effects and only effects, one thinks that one cannot make them violent enough."



Look, look! I just posted about Goethe's unifying/Primal Plant theory, and it showed up in what I read this evening!

"I must tell you confidentially that I am very close to the secret of the reproduction and organization of plants, and that it is the simplest thing imaginable. This climate offers the best possible conditions for making observations. To the main question - where the germ is hidden - I am quite certain I have found the answer; to the others I already see a general solution, and only a few points have still to be formulated more precisely. The Primal Plant is going to be the strangest creature in the world, which Nature herself shall envy me. With this model and the key to it, it will be possible to go on for ever inventing plants and know that their existence is logical; that is to say, if they do not actually exist, they could, for they are not the shadowy phantoms of a vain imagination, but possess an inner necessity and truth. The same law will be applicable to all other living organisms."



And here's an interesting defense of Naples workers, who were accused across the board of being lazy:

"...all of them work not merely to live, but to enjoy themselves: they wish even their work to be a recreation."

It sounds like us today - it's hard to imagine that such an attitude about enjoying one's work could have seemed novel at one time.

Goethe: Well, What Do You Know!

In Italian Journey, Goethe mentions his quest to find evidence that all plants came from a single plant - a unifying theory. I even quoted a comment he made where he got off on a rabbit trail in Italy when he found the native plant species to be abundant and got excited about his unification theory and wasted a day when he could have been sight-seeing because he was preoccupied chasing an unsolvable problem.

Well, here's a quote from Charlotte Mason in volume 5, [page 357] indicating that he found some measure of success in that quest:

"His scientific interests remained with him to the end. He is allowed to have been in some respects a precursor of Darwin: he it was who discovered that all plant forms are modifications of the leaf, and arrived at the certainty that there must have been an original plant from which all plants were developed."

As I understand, scientists still hope to find a single substance that everything else comes from - whether it's energy, or matter or whatever. They think that everything originally came from one thing. It's kind of an elaboration of Goethe's original idea.


Here are the two relevant quotes from Goethe's Italian Journey that I blogged a few days ago:

"To wander about among a vegetation which is new to one is pleasant and instructive. It is the same with familiar plants as with other familiar objects: in the end we cease to think about them at all. But what is seeing without thinking? Here, when I am confronted with a great variety of plants, my hypothesis that it might be possible to derive all plant forms from one original plant becomes clearer to me and more exciting. Only when we have accepted this idea will it be possible to determine genera and species exactly. So far this has, I believe, been done in a very arbitrary way. At this stage in my botanical philosophy, I have reached an impasse, and I do not yet see how to get out of it. The whole subject seems to me to be profound and of far-reaching consequence."

Berating himself for allowing himself to get side-tracked from a scenic walk in order to solve the puzzle of finding the 'promal plant' from which all other plants came:
"Why are we moderns so distracted, why do we let ourselves be challenged by problems which we can neither face nor solve?"

UK: Bullies driving thousands of pupils to study at home

If you ask Americans why they homeschool, you'll get reasons like religious training, higher standard of academics, better student-teacher ratio, more positive role modeling of socialization.

In the UK, a common reason is bullying. Bullying is a problem in the US, but often considered a strengthening experience for kids to work through; it seems to be looked on as a good way for kids to "learn to get along in the world" and stand on their own two feet, and is therefore a positive reason for choosing public school. I mean, you hear of a child being homeschooled because of a bully every once in a while, but it's the least common factor, at least from what I hear of the homeschoolers I know of. For bullying to be the most oft-cited motivating factor for pulling kids out of school, it must be pretty bad in the UK.

Read more here. I found this article at HomeschoolBuzz.

Nursing Blankets

I'm not quite sure how to post this, so I'll post a link to the picture directly from its location on somebody's blog.

Goethe in Sicily

More quotes from Italian Journey.

"Today we were shown Prince Torremuzza's collection of coins. I went there almost reluctantly. I understand too little about this field, and a merely inquisitive tourist is the bane of the true connoisseur. But, after all, one has to begin somewhere . . ."

This relates to a Prince collecting money for a charity:
"'If, I said, 'instead of spending vast sums on follies for his villa, he had used them for this cause, no prince in the world would have accomplished more.' My shopkeeper disagreed: 'Aren't we all like that? We pay gladly for our follies but we expect others to pay for our virtues.'"

Berating himself for allowing himself to get side-tracked from a scenic walk in order to solve the puzzle of finding the 'promal plant' from which all other plants came:
"Why are we moderns so distracted, why do we let ourselves be challenged by problems which we can neither face nor solve?"

"Under the shelter of an airy pergola attached to a miserable inn, we took a light midday meal. Dogs greedily gobbled up the discarded skins of our sausages; a beggar boy chased them away and hungrily consumed our apple pairings until he, in his turn, was chased away by an old beggar. Professional jealousy is to be found everywhere."

"On the higher slopes of the mountains we still found olive, carob and mountain ash. Here cultivation follows a three-year cycle - beans, corn and rest. Manure, the peasants say, works greater miracles than the saints."

And there's that word again:

"In the detritus of the river, more quartz, some plain, like breccia."

The Temple of Concord in Sicily, where Goethe raved about a sarcophagus.

Caring for Your Introvert

I found this article while looking for tips on writing college entrance essays. I looked for one thing and found another.

"Remember, someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts. It pays to learn the warning signs."

Goethe Visits the Hamiltons

An interesting rabbit trail in Goethe's Italian Journey--

"Sir William Hamilton, who is still living here [in Naples] as English ambassador, has now, after many years of devotion to the arts and the study of nature, found the acme of these delights in the person of an English girl of twenty with a beautiful face and a perfect figure. He has had a Greek costume made for her which becomes her extremely. Dressed in this, she lets down her hair and, with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations - standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose following another without a break. She knows how to arrange the folds of her veil to match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a headdress. The old knight idolizes her and is enthusiastic about everything she does."

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I was intrigued, so I looked up Sir William Hamilton to see if he'd ever been painted with his young wife, and discovered that she was famous in her own right. She was later the famed long-time mistress of Lord Horatio Nelson, had a daughter with him, and was devoted to Nelson until he died. But she squandered everything he left her and died in poverty in her fifties. She and Nelson had always pretended that the daughter was adopted (because they weren't married) and, even years and years later, the daughter herself refused to ever admit that Emma had been her mother. Emma is the subject of the Vivien Leigh/Laurence Olivier movie, That Hamilton Woman. When she so impressed Goethe, she probably presented an image similar to this painting of her:

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And here's another interesting quote from the same book, Italian Journey, by Goethe.

"The storms of the last days have presented us with the picture of a magnificent sea and allowed me to study the motions and the forms of the waves. Nature is, indeed, the only book whose every page is filled with important content.
"The theatre, on the other hand, no longer gives me any pleasure . . . To me the theatre is merely a peepshow on a larger scale. I seem to have lost my taste for such things."

Spanish Living/Classic Books?

I'm going to start trying to collecting some classic and living Spanish booklists for a friend. who has a really cute picture of Miss M playing with her little girl on her blog.

This is only the start (I hope - not only are these not so easy to find, but I'm less familiar with Spanish books to know whether a booklist is worthy or not!)

UPDATE: Javamom has posted some Spanish language helps, including Spanish songs, poems and etexts, on her blog here and here. You can view all of her posts on Spanish Lessons here.

http://educandoenfamilia.com/ General homeschool site
They also have a message board (although it's not very active)
and an active blog Educando en Familia

When I do a search for great Spanish writers, these are some names that come up. I have no idea whether their works are worthy of a CM education.
Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Pio Baroja.

Wikipedia has an entry on Spanish literature. "In the Romanticism (principle of the 19th century) important topics are: the poetry of José de Espronceda and other poets; the prose, that can have several forms (the historical novel, the scientific prose, the description of regional customs, the journalism —where Mariano José de Larra can be mentioned—); the theater, with Ángel de Saavedra (Duke of Rivas), José Zorrilla, and other authors. In the latter romanticism (post-romanticism) some appear: Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro. " Some names offered:
18th century:
Benito Jeronimo Feijoo, Jose Cadalso, Juan Meléndez Valdés, Félix María de Samaniego, Leandro Fernández de Moratín.
19th century:
Duque de Rivas, Mariano José de Larra, Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (Rhymes, Legends), José de Espronceda (El estudiante de Salamanca, La canción del pirata), José Zorrilla (Don Juan Tenorio)

They have a more extensive list of writers from the realist and modern periods, but I don't know how those would be at instilling the kind of character Charlotte Mason had in mind - so much of modern literature has a different goal, and hispanic literature might even have its own focus altogether.

Wikipedia has a list of Spanish authors divided by country. But, again, I don't know what the quality of their works is, and how usable they'd be in a Christian-based education. I'm suspecting that a person looking for a classic books education would have to rely heavily on world classics translated into Spanish. I know they're widely available. For starters, I'm sure Aesop's fables, Fairy Tales are available in Spanish translations - even the English versions are translated from a language other than English. The standard literary classics that seem to make it on everybody's booklists (Swiss Family Robinson, Jungle Book, Little Women) must surely be available in Spanish.

I guess one solution for coming up with a Spanish version of a great books list would be for someone who knows both English and Spanish to convert a list of standard great books (perhaps starting with Ambleside Online's list) into Spanish by finding the titles in Spanish.

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I found this at the Online Books Page - book sites in foreign languages. These are Spanish etext sites:

• Biblioteca Electronica Cristiana (Christian electronic texts in Spanish)
• Biblioteca Virtual de CLACSO (social science books in Spanish)
• Biblioteca Virtual Miguel De Cervantes (Spanish texts; JavaScript-dependent)
• Comedia Library (Hispanic classical theater texts)
• Elaleph (Spanish-language PDF texts)
• Memoria Chilena (Chilean historical books and other materials in Spanish)
• Textos Lemir (medieval Spanish texts)

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Here's a beginning list, thanks to Mama Squirrel's comments.

Imitacion de Cristo por Tomás Hermerken de Kempis

Poesia por Fray Luis de Léon (not sure of the quality, but the text is listed on a Christian site)

Mujercitas por LouisaMay Alcott

Desiring God by John Piper pdf file

El Progreso del Peregrino por Juan Bunyan pdf

Vintage Books online in various translations at The Rosetta Project, including Aladdin, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Bears, (click on the "Spanish" button for the translated text)
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A Goethe Quote About Drawing

This is another quote from Italian Journey.

"The artists like giving me lessons because I am quick to understand. But understanding is not the same as doing. Quickness of understanding is a mental faculty, but right doing requires the practice of a lifetime. However, feeble as his efforts may be, the amateur should not despair. The few lines I draw on the paper, often too hasty and seldom exact, help me to a better comprehension of physical objects. The more closely and precisely one observes particulars, the sooner one arrives at a perception of the whole. One must not, however, compare oneself with the artist, but proceed in one's own manner. Nature has provided for all her children: even the least of them is not hindered in his existence by the existence of the greatest. 'A little man is still a man.' Let's leave it at that."

I like how this parallels with Charlotte Mason's method of reproducing natural objects in drybrush as part of nature study: "The few lines I draw on the paper, often too hasty and seldom exact, help me to a better comprehension of physical objects. The more closely and precisely one observes particulars, the sooner one arrives at a perception of the whole."

The purpose of a nature notebook isn't to become a skilled artist, but in order to observe, comprehend and perceive.