The Elephant's Child

Shorts for Thursday.

After overhearing many twenty-something women and men talking out in the wide, wide world, it seems to me that women, far from being empowered, are being infantilized. They're cutesy and ditsy, slow on the uptake, and obsessed with petty, inconsequential things.  And to me, it seems there is a proportion of men that are being feminized.  Many a "man" at age 24 doesn't seem all that grown up.  More often than not, he's got a light-weight boyish voice, he's wearing skinny girl-jeans, and he's irresponsible and childish in his relationships.  Ewwww. Grow a spine, boy.

Fallen leaves can be a great thing for kids to play in.  They can also hide dog poop.

Our cat has picked up fleas because Sparkle was petting a loose neighborhood cat out on the front porch.

Flea bites itch an awful lot, worse than mosquito bites, and they last longer, too.  Now that I know what they're like, I can state with certainty that the bites I got while staying in a hotel because of a car breakdown last spring were most definitely fleas.  Gross.

A friend is giving me a Lutheran Study Bible. She bought a few extras by mistake, and she's blessing me with one of the extras. God is good!

While I'm fine these days with Sparkle Kitty dressing up as Word Girl or a tiger and going Trick or Treating, I'm still not wild about all the cheap garbage-y carp that people pollute the neighborhood with and call "decorations."  And I really don't want to hear "Halloween" music piped into the stores I'm shopping in.  Fail, people.  Fail. 

Sparkle used "difficult" as a verb today.  She was doing math problems in the car, a increasingly common occurence, and I asked her what 3 x 4 was.  She said, "Wait, Mommy.  I'm going to have to difficult this out."  (She got the answer right, by the way.) On Monday afternoon, she brought up nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs with me.  I had explained them to her two weeks ago, verbally, during a car drive, and we haven't talked about parts of speech since.  After some general discussion, she proceeded to verbally diagram a few simple sentences.  On her own.  Without me asking her to.  She's seven. She's never been to "school"  and she's not reading outloud yet, either. (Although it's becoming more and more clear that she is in fact reading to herself.) Our experience kind of puts the kibosh on talk about how learning has to be linear, presented in appropriate, manageable chunks, and include lots of review and testing.

Another whirlwind weekend coming up, although less so than last weekend, and then Mad Musician's off to Pennsylvania for the week for an organ installation. Sparkle and I will head out to visit a friend while he's gone.

Homeschooling: The Gift of Time.

After a chapter of A Child's History of the World and a an Arnold Lobel book, Sparkle decided we were done with reading out loud for the moment.  I sent her outside to sweep the porch.  After a few dead ladybugs were swept into oblivion, she headed out into the yard.  I parked the cars so they made a little protected area for her to play in.  Then, she asked for breakfast.   In between sorting the winter coats and tidying up (again! Didn't I do that last night before bed?) the downstairs, I ferried raisins, peanut butter, apples and biscuits out to Sparkle Kitty. She sat out there for the longest time, watching the squirrels, talking to our cars, James (on the right) and Saabie (on the left).  Doing nothing, really.

In the madness of getting myself through each day mentally intact with a talkative, creative, irrepressible gradeschooler, I often can't see what a blessing these days are.  I often feel guilty we don't do more.  When family and friends speak of all the activities their children are involved in -- soccer, swimming, theater, art classes, Awana, Scouts, music lessons, and dance to name but a few -- I often feel terribly guilty that I can't also give all these opportunities to Sparkle Kitty.

But every so often I'm called up short, like I was this morning by my friend Jane's post, and I come face to face with the fact that I'm giving Sparkle Kitty a wonderful gift, a gift that I grew up with and took for granted.

I was not homeschooled; I grew up overseas on the mission field.  The scores of after-school activities so common in the United States were unheard of there.   "Soccer mom" type ex-pat moms in West Africa were more likely to shoo the kids outside to play so they could have a cup of coffee in peace with a friend than to be toting children from activity to activity.  I, my sister, and my brothers had what seemed like hours of free time every day, even on school days, and we certainly had that time all summer long as well.  I've come to appreciate it all as a precious gift.

I can't give Sparkle Kitty my African childhood, but I can give her time.  Open ended, glorious, unstructured time.  Time to imagine, time to play, time to think deep thoughts and shallow ones. Time to explore and time to process what she's explored. Time to watch the clouds, build forts, create worlds with stuffed animals and rubber mice, and read books without interruption. 

I'm giving her time enough to be a child, and time enough to grow up.

I only hope I remember this the next time I feel like we're "not doing enough."

An Old Fart At 35.

Victor Davis Hanson's article today on dropping out of the mainstream culture really resonated with me.  It's very much where I am, partly by choice and partly by circumstance. 

Four years ago we moved to a town 30 miles away from a very tiny TV market and made the budgetary decision not to install cable or satellite TV.  For a long time, all we could get was the Public Broadcasting Station.  After Feburary of this year, that station went digital and left us in the dark.  We held off on a digital converter box for quite awhile, but then gave one a try.  It wouldn't work, despite several set-up attempts. So, we remain without any broadcast TV at all.  So be it.  Any Big Story That Everyone Is Talking About will be up on YouTube anyway.   Sparkle Kitty has benefited in any number of ways by growing up in very much isolated from aggressive advertising. 

Like Victor Davis Hanson, we stopped following bands and current music a long time ago. Nowadays, we don't have the disposable income to be spending much at iTunes or on CDs.  I'm only dimly aware of current actors. The last time I saw a movie in the theater was oh, about three years ago.  Mad Musician and I never were into sports of any kind, other than me occasionally watching of a Nascar race or two. 

I do occasionally feel "out of it."  I occasionally toss a blank look when people expect me to know to whom they're referring.   But rarely do I care enough to seriously consider paying for cable TV or subscribing to a major newspaper.

I'm not Amish, however.  I read dead-tree books, an awful lot of them, and nearly all of them non-fiction. I read pixellated opinions and essays.  I blog.  I hang out with friends on Facebook.  I participate in two email lists, one of which is extremly active.   While our life is still full of much more stress and travail than I care for (or feel that I can bear, at times) it's pretty simple compared to the American average. 

In a way, I'm grateful that circumstances have made our life this way; I'm not sure I'd have had the discipline to dump pop culture and the incredible onslaught of always-terribly-urgent media of all types otherwise.

It does make me an old fart at the tender age of 35, but I rather like my rock.  It's nice under here.

Teachers.

The best teachers end up being the ones that are the least "teacher-ish."  I think I would have loved being in Bethany's class when I was in grade school Sunday School (Although I wasn't all that interested in shoes at the time, I've grown up since then and acquired a commensurate shoe collection --several pair of which I cannot wear because my feet have matured faster than my fashion sense.)

Maybe being a great teacher has more to do with a relationship between teacher and student than it does with the transfer of information from adult to child.  Maybe a healthy dose of plain old love and affection tips the balance from misery for both parties to a mutual journey enjoyed by all.

If that's the case, doesn't it follow that parents might be the best "teachers" out there?

One Day Out.

We had such a great day today, Sparkle and I.  We headed off to a nearby college town to their little on-campus Museum.  We had the museum completely to ourselves, except for a volunteer at the information desk who was very helpful and sweet.  We wandered as we wanted to, as stayed as long or as briefly as we wanted to at each display. We saw in real life quite a few of the things we read about this past week in A Child's History of the World: The Rosetta Stone (a very good reproduction of it), hieroglyphics on a sarcophagus, a real mummy, and papyrus fragments showing demotic script.  Since we had learned from our reading that names of important people were circled to "capitalize" them, it was exciting to be able to pick out the proper names on the Rosetta Stone. We also looked carefully at the Greek writing and noticed how many of the letters look like our letters today, and we wondered whether or not Uncle Evan would be able to read the Greek.

As we read off the displays about how hieroglyphics changed from a picture language alphabet to a phonetic one, Sparkle got down on the floor with a piece of paper and pencil and demonstrated the word "Cat" by replacing the "C" with a neatly drawn cat.  She figured it out herself from the explanation that I read off the card; I doubt she'll ever forget it because of the way she learned it. She owns that knowledge in a way she would not if she'd been handed it on a worksheet.

Although we've not read very much about Ancient Greek yet and have only touched on Greek Mythology, we enjoyed walking through the many plaster casts of pieces of frieze off of the Parthenon, and pouring over a scale model in plaster of the Acropolis.  In the European room, I very much enjoyed seeing a Saxon short sword, very rusty and aged, true, but with the pattern-welding still very much visible after 800 years. Sparkle stared and stared at an incredibly detailed 15th century merchant ship.  So incredibly complex, it's amazing that ships like that didn't every one of them disintegrate in even minor storms.

Our time at the museum was absolutely fantastic, and nothing like the "field trips" I remember as a kid - noisy, pushy, rushed, and "educationalized" to death.  With my deafness in one ear, I often had a hard time hearing the docent over the rustling papers and shifting feet of my fellow students.  And, of course, nobody got to sit in front of an exhibit for as long as they wanted! Gotta keep on schedule!

Sometimes, I think the quickest way to destroy the love of a something in a child is to "teach" it to them.  It's so much more fun to be learning along with Sparkle rather than teaching her, and how much better Sparkle remembers the things she connects together herself! She's happier, too, and so am I am.  Not "teaching" everything to her leaves me free to learn too.

I don't know what to call what we do anymore, since "homeschooling" doesn't seem to come close to this amazing journey that we're on.

Freedom Of Literature Manifesto For Homeschooling Moms.

(...or A Plan for Living With A Voracious Reader.)

1. I will not pre-read each book, nor will I make my child clear every book with me. There's no way an adult can keep up with an avid young reader anyway. 
2. I will scan covers and read dust jackets, but I will not micro-manage my kid's reading.
3. I will encourage the advisability of choosing from the adult library, rather than the "teen fiction" sections;  I will not, however, completely forbid teen fiction entirely.  I reserve the right to set a limit - say, 1 book per week of that genre - if I see that my child is abusing the freedom I've granted.
4. We will continue to read outloud as a family and use audiobooks for car trips so that all of us, adults included, are exposed to good, quality writing and stories.
5. I will set an example by occasionally reading books that are challenging, long, or difficult to read myself. 
6. I will talk with my child about what he is reading.  Reading carpy fiction gives Mom an opportunities to discuss WHY it's carpy.
7. I will be available for questions, and I will not "freak out" when he asks about some of the Big Stuff. I will practice saying, "Get Mommy a glass of wine, and let's sit down to talk about that."
8. I will trust that because I am raising my child in a Christian home and taking him to hear the Word preached each Sunday, he will gradually self-exclude himself from icky books.  It may take a while. It may require some low-key encouragement from mom and dad, as I set out in #2.  It may require Mom or Dad putting their foot down on a few seriously over the top books. But I will reserve the heavy guns for extremely severe examples of explicit literature.
9. I will understand that one half- read disgusting scene can horrify a kid in a very useful way.  I have yet to hear of a child from a functioning Christian home who immediately went out and started experimenting with pot and group sex because she read about it once in one retarded, badly written  novel.
10. I will remember, as best as I am able, that my child is a baptized child of God with her own brain and with a heart that has to learn to sort the wheat from the chaff. 
11. I will assist the development of her discernment, and not atrophy her discernment by doing all her discerning for her.

 

One Day At Home.

Wednesday was a good day.

We worked outside for a few hours in the morning.  Before we went out, though, Sparkle Kitty spent some time playing with the little jewelry pouches I've made, which I graciously allowed her to borrow she swiped off of my desk.  Much fun was had, especially by the long-suffering little rubber Bunnies ($2.00 per set of 5, seasonally available at Walmart.)  The last set of rubber Bunnies met a rather gruesome end: they were decapitated one by one so that they could share their heads.  The Replacements have survived un-mutilated since Easter last; let us give thanks and praise.

Sparkle determined that there were thirteen of the little pouches, which she told me was "two fives and three more."  If the good Lord did not desire small children to puzzle out their maths with their fingers, why on earth did he create their sweet little hands in base ten? 

Once we got outside, I set Sparkle on a hunt for the watermelons, while I triaged the wreckage of the remainder of the vegetable garden.  Who knew a half-grown six-pound, basketball-sized watermelon could camouflage itself so well?  They were located, and ooo-ed and ahh-ed over.  I wonder if we'll have enough warm weather yet so that we can eat the larger one? I hold out no hope for the smaller one.

We carefully, carefully picked the rest of the ripe tomatoes, moving ever so gently so as not to disturb the freakishly large Argiope spider and her zig-zag decorated web. (According the article, when a male approaches a female's web to mate, he drops a saftey line so he can escape if she attacks him. Female argiope spiders apparently have permanent PMS.)

Sparkle discovered a bird hawk, and saved it to later stick in Daddy's hair. Fortunately, the bird hawk got lost somewhere outside before we went in for the day, and Sparkle's nefarious plans have come to naught.  I'm glad for that.  I was concerned that it would end up in the laundry and thus in someone's underwear next week.  'Vantage number three! to sewing pants for your kids without any pockets: no bird hawks in the laundry.

The birch tree was climbed, several times.  My box of granola now has teeth marks on the top edge from being ferried up to the heights via mouth.  Discussions on the construction of an obstacle course were begun, but then tabled for another day.

I'm always amazed at the variety of critters we've got just here on our city lot.   I haven't seen a praying mantis recently, but we do usually see a few over the course of the summer.  Since our neighbor put in a little pond, I've even seen a few damselflies.  We nabbed the biggest meadow grasshopper I've ever seen.  He was resting comfortably on the carrots when from above descended the giant white net of the butterfly house. Caught!  He spent two days in the butterfly house in our kitchen before we let him go.  Our cat was quite enthralled, and knocked the butterfly house over and rolled it across the floor several times.  I'm sure the poor grasshopper was traumatized. I feel a little bad about that. Sparkle named him "Loki" since at first I referred to him as a locust. (Some varieties of grasshoppers are only locusts when they turn into plague style swarms.)

Sparkle "painted" the garage with grass-head paintbrushes and water from the rain barrel. The Replacement Bunnies were hauled outside; they played in rain barrel and in piles of dry leaves.  A broken clay pot was used to create a little house for them as well.  And the watermelons were watered by hand-carried buckets of water from the rain barrel.

And thus endeth this week's hands-on science field day.  On our way rejoicing...

Not A Bad Place To Start.

We keep looking for small ways to start learning German with Sparkle.  Why German?  We, her parents, have taken a good, hard look at our family's study habits and determined that our family will never get around to learning any language we don't love, so Spanish was out, despite its usefulness.  It would make some sense to study a language with Sparkle Kitty that I've studied before, and I've had two years of French ::spit:: I also spent two years in an African-French speaking country.  But I rather hate French ::spit:: and Mad Musician has never studied it. So French is out. 

Neither I nor Mad Musician could get very excited about something as difficult as Japanese or Mandarin. We're just not that adventurous. Arabic is probably also out of our league, even though I absolutely love the sound of it.  We came back around to German, since Mad Musician and I have both studied it previously.  Although neither of us retain very much of what we learned, the grownups in this family wouldn't be starting from zero.  I heard a fair amount growing up (thanks to commenter Chris and his family) so the sound of it is familiar to my ear.  It also just happens to be my father in law's first language. My younger  brother has pooh-poohed my theory that there could be some sort of genetic predisposition to language preference; he's probably right, although it would make sense.  My DNA has rich deserts, fine beers and sauerkraut embedded into it.

"But Spanish is so much more useful!" I hear someone saying.  Let's just not have that discussion, ok?  We'll pretend that all of Europe won't be speaking Arabic and African French by the time Sparkle Kitty is old enough to travel abroad, and we'll say that we're all learning German as a family so that she may more easily study organ someday in Germany or Austria and will be able to read obscure theological and academic works in her spare time. Let's go with that. Alrighty then!

Since Sparkle can already rattle off the English version of this prayer, I think we'll learn the German version next. 

Ich danke dir, mein himmlischer Vater, durch Jesus Christus, deinen lieben Sohn, dass du mich diesen Tag gnädig behütet hast; und bitte dich, du wollest mir vergeben alle meine Sünden, wo ich unrecht getan habe, und mich diese Nacht gnädig behüten. Denn ich befehle mich, meinen Leib und Seele und alles in deine Hände; dein heiliger Engel sei mit mir, dass der böse Feind keine Macht an mir finde. Amen.

Some Classical Caution From a Lutheran Educational Perspective.

I'm simply not convinced about Classical education.  In fact, I have some concerns about some of it.  I see a tiny red thread of Reformed theology wending through the Christianized Classical educational approach. Of course, if you are Reformed, that's perfectly fine.   I'm also struck by the way Classical Ed is talked about as something that is uniquely Christian.  In fact, all methodologies of eduction, including Classical, have roots in in pagan societies.  If you'd like to talk to me about constructing a Christian version of the yeshiva, then I'll buy the "this is our heritage" line of thinking.

It is certainly laudable to teach our youth about logical fallacies and formal rhetoric.  It is beneficial for high school students  to learn about the great conversations of Western Civilization, and they should do more than read a dumbed-down version of The Odyssey.  There is much to be gained by children studying at least a bit of Latin. (It improves a child's English grammar and vocabulary, for starters.)  I do not, however, think (as many of the Classical ed fans do) that there is anything inherently superior or uniquely Christian about the Classical approach to education, and it is disingenuous for proponents to pretend that there is.   The old-school Liberal Arts, which were born out of the methods used in pagan Athens to educate the social elite, are based on the idea that the training and crafting of the human intellect makes an individual the most useful to the greatest number of people.  It's a very small step from that to full-out Humanism.  In my mind, that has the potential to be as dangerous as the Progressive model of education, which seeks to turn out people who fit appropriately into their assigned places in a consumerist society.  Different issues, both models, but both still lacking the unique Christian view of broken, imperfect sinners acting in service to their neighbors as masks of God. (Never heard of the "masks of God" concept? Read this.)

It's also easy to see that someone who is classically trained may eventually turn their rhetorical skills and "Aristotelian dialectic" onto Scripture.  Once you start applying human reason (however well-trained) to Scripture, well, you end up Reformed.  Once you take every verse to its "logical conclusion," you end up with things like double predestination and the idea that Christ cannot possibly be in the Sacrament of Holy Communion, since he's already ascended to the Father.   

Of course, just because there's a danger in the misapplication of a skill set doesn't mean we shouldn't study them.  Studying rhetoric is a fantastic thing. Classical content (as opposed to methodology) is also wonderful.  I just can't embrace Classical Ed as the Best Thing For Raising Little Lutherans since Luther penned, "Was ist das?"  And Classical Ed is certainly being presented that very way in some quarters.

There are definitely good benefits due to the resurgence of interest in classical literature, but I do not see that copying the way that Athens trained their elite citizens is some wonderful new magic bullet that will restore the church to a position of influence in this country. (Which I have my own doubts about the wisdom of anyway; that's another post, I think.)

The Educational Industrial Complex

Is this education?

"It’s safe to say that improving the workforce is one of two ultimate educational goals; the other being to prepare children to become participating, law-abiding citizens. If NCLB  [No Child Left Behind -ed.] — or any other program — can produce good workers who can stay out of prison, then we should be happy." (Source.)

Sure, I want my kid to be able to show up for work on time and to stay out of prison, as much as any parent does.  Is that to be the sole measure of the success of our educational system? I've said in the past that I've got low standards for Sparkle Kitty, but even my "low standards" assume a more fleshed-out education than the one described above.

I'm sure that the person who wrote the essay excerpted below is a good worker and can stay out of prison:

"When comparing and contrasting socialism with capitalism one can find good in both ideas of systems, it just depends on a person’s opinion. Also, I think morals also play a large role in which system a person would choose to follow. Socialism would be the system a moralist would more likely follow than capitalism. It appears that capitalists are greedier and care about what is better for himself or herself than everybody as a whole. Where as highly moral people tend to help others and care less about being wealthy and more how they are treated, along with their fellow workers. They like the government because they, and I also feel that the government does provide good programs for those in need." (Source.)

If you're going to go online looking for an essay to plagiarize for your writing assignment comparing and contrasting capitalism and socialism, you might want to pick a well-written one. 

Of course, you've got to be a minimally educated person to be able to spot bad writing.  I'm going out on a limb here, but I suspect you've got to be able to manage a bit more than being a good worker and staying out of prison.

Rather a Catch 22, I'd say.