Fabre's Life of the Caterpillar

I finished this etext this afternoon. Who would ever have believed that a book about caterpillars could have you on the edge of your seat?

Fabre stops at nothing to learn the private habits of his subjects. What do they like to eat? Will they eat anything else? What if they're really hungry and deprived of their preferred food? How do they mate? Will the males find the female if she's inside the house? How about if she's locked in sealed glass where they can see her but can't smell her? Where do they get their silk from? What is it about caterpillars that irritates your skin if you handle them? Can you find out by concentrating a lot of caterpillars into a mash and wearing the mixture against your arm for a few days?

I wish I had discovered his books a long time ago - this is the kind of thing I craved as a child. I remember loving books about spiders and insects, but none of them really explored their daily habits and how they survived and raised their young, which is what I really wanted to know. Fabre's books are what I really wanted to read, but I didn't know they existed.

Here's one of the detours he sometimes takes; here he discusses man's attempts at controlling garden pests by introducing foes who eat those pests:

"The cherry of our orchards is excellent eating: a maggot contends with us for its possession. In vain do we weigh suns and planets: our supremacy, which fathoms the universe, cannot prevent a wretched worm from levying its toll on the delicious fruit. We make ourselves at home in a cabbage-bed: the sons of the Pieris make themselves at home there too. Preferring broccoli to wild radish, they profit where we have profited; and we have no remedy against their competition save caterpillar-raids and egg-crushing, a thankless, tedious and none too efficacious work.
Every creature has its claims on life. The Cabbage-caterpillar eagerly puts forth his own, so much so that the cultivation of the precious plant would be endangered if others concerned did not take part in its defence. These others are the auxiliaries, our helpers from necessity and not from sympathy. The words friend and foe, auxiliaries and ravagers are here the mere conventions of a language not always adapted to render the exact truth. He is our foe who eats or attacks our crops; our friend is he who feeds upon our foes. Everything is reduced to a frenzied contest of appetites."

Wait, one more quote, this is related to intelligent design.

"But let me tell you: we are called old-fashioned, you and I; with our conception of a world ruled by an Intelligence, we are quite out of the swim. Order, balance, harmony: that is all silly nonsense. The universe is a fortuitous arrangement in the chaos of the possible. What is white might as easily be black, what is round might be angular, what is regular might be shapeless and harmony might just as well be discord. Chance has decided all things.
Yes, we are a pair of prejudiced old fogeys when we linger with a certain fondness over the marvels of perfection. Who troubles about these futilities nowadays? So-called serious science, the science which spells honour, profit and renown, consists in slicing your animal with very costly instruments into tiny circular sections. My housekeeper does as much with a bunch of carrots, with no higher pretention than to concoct a modest dish, which is not an invariable success. In the problem of life are we more successful when we have split a fibre into four and cut a cell into shavings? It hardly seems so. The riddle is as dark as ever. Ah, how much better is your method, my dear master; above all, how much loftier your philosophy, how much more wholesome and invigorating!"

Miss M Has Opinions About Names

We have a friend who recently had a baby boy. In the van today Miss M informed us that his name (a very nice, Biblical, not unusual name) is 'not a pleasant name, it's too contrated.' She thinks that Sleeping Beauty would be a much nicer name for the baby.

I told her that I'd inform his parents and let them decide if a name change is in order.

My Own Schedule

Why should the kids have all the fun? I've had a list of children's books from www.mainlesson.com that I've been wanting to preview for AO for awhile, so I made myself a reading schedule of my own.

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.