More on the Mundane

"Nirvana" by Charles Bukowski, read by Tom Waits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVVzCURucaA

http://talesfromshangri-la.blogspot.com/2014/09/pleading-case-for-mundane.html

Mrs. Pardiggle, Mr. Bumble, and the rest

Nothing subtle about Dickens.

Charles Dickens and the linguistic art of the minor character. 

Strengthening the Executive Function

Three publications look at how to develop your frontal lobe function

-- Psychology Today

-- Sharp Brain

-- Ideas from NaturalHealth365

"Examples of neurobic exercises are listed below:

Writing or using a utensil with your non-dominant hand.
Walking down your hallway with your eyes closed.
1-leg balancing exercises.
Spend time outside smelling all the plants and flowers.
Eat foods with lots of colors to stimulate your visual senses.
Feel the texture of different objects like rocks, shells, etc.

Additional neurobic activities include:

The use of essential oils – take a sniff to excite your brain.
Brushing the teeth with your non-dominant hand.
Listening to classical music or music that has different tones, melodies and instruments than you are used to listening too.
Surround yourself with lots of different colors.
Play a new instrument or try a new sporting activity.
Do a crossword puzzle.
Walk barefoot outside and pay attention to the unique feel of the rocks and ground with your feet.
Sit in a park and journal about all the unique sounds and smells you are experiencing.
Read a book or recite a speech out-loud while pacing with your eyes closed
Try a new, healthy dish with unique flavors you are not accustomed too."

Last Day

It's 10:30 pm on a Friday night and I'm about to clap shut my laptop. Today is my last day as a homeschooling mom.

I have taught anywhere from one to three of my kids at home for the past 12 years. (And none of them have ever been in five-day school.) All three are headed to a regular, brick-and-mortar, five-day-a-week school next year for 8th, 9th, and 12th grade. Radical.

Like all big endings, it has been a little anticlimactic: hassling one child to finish one final test, shuffling through files, last minute grading, an impromptu grocery store run, realizing transcripts will be polished up next week rather than today. Not with a bang but a whimper.

But it feels momentous to me.

Thank you, and goodnight, to homeschooling's curious, wild, busy, funny, angsty, peaceful, "lovely, dark, and deep" ride.

Our family has been viewed as kooky and offbeat.

We been viewed as conservative and authoritarian.

We've been viewed as rebels, madmen, and saints.

Of course we are none of these -- or perhaps all of these. Just like any family trying to creatively "do" life in the way that seems to fit with our lifestyle, resources, values, and needs.

I've been a terrible mom, I've been an amazing mom -- sometimes all in the same hour.

My children are quirky in some ways, brilliant in some ways, regular in most ways. Just like yours.

I have a shrewd, natural test-taker, and one who used to bomb standardized tests.

I have kids with different learning styles, different strengths, and different test scores. I have a math avoider and one who "hates" reading. (Though lately this kid has started talking animatedly about his reading.) One has been in learning therapy pretty regularly (and benefited greatly).

I have a philosopher, an engineer, and a pragmatic businesswoman. I have a child who carefully lines up pencils and ruler in the workspace and keeps a detailed calendar; I have one who can't find homework.

I've taught my kids in China and America, on the east coast and in the southwest. In the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the library, in the car.

I've used material from the internet, from neighbors, from friends, from books.

I've personally seen and experienced the kind of resources and co-ops that spring up in freedom-rich cultural and legal environments (Texas!) -- and the dearth of same in educationally narrow-minded and culturally parochial parts of the country.

Some of my best friends are other homeschooling moms. And some of my other best friends are not. I have gained wisdom from both about parenting.

The kids and I have worked so closely together, with all of our flaws and strengths. I have learned some basic things.

It's counter-intuitive, but start work each day with the youngest before you work with the older kids. Make sure everyone reads aloud each day. Let each do math at the time of day when they are mentally fresh. Take a short break every 30 minutes. Pick the curriculum that appeals to you as much as it appeals to them. Encourage each kid to study in his own way (eg, one kid may study by orally telling you all about what is going to be on the test, one kid may study by making flashcards. Both ways are fine and I only figured that out this year). Three words: Saturday morning chores. Have a short family devotion every morning -- ie, reflect on the forest before you head for the trees. Laughter really is the best medicine. Laugh easily, pray hard.

Most of these things I learned the hard way. And so many other things I still have not figured out. Homeschooling did not come naturally to me.

Somehow, the kids are alright. Not amazing. Not terrible. Like yours.

Gooodnight, homeschooling. I'm going to miss you.

And tomorrow I am finally going to catch up with the laundry.

"He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace at home." Goethe

What's Deuteronomy Got to Do With It?

One segment in Nancy Guthrie's series "Help Me Teach the Bible"

Scott Redd on Deuteronomy

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/help-me-teach-the-bible-scott-redd-on-deuteronomy

In this audio, Scott lays out ideas for how to teach and explain Deuteronomy to lay people. Included is the following: a discussion of the context for the book historically and a descriptive word picture of what is happening among the Israelites at the time, the covenantal framework of the book, the idea of using the Ten Commandments as an outline for the laws, a handling topics like slavery and punishment within the context of Scripture, and how we are to view sacrifice and purity laws, theocratic laws, and moral laws as believers today -- as not one jot or tittle of the law has passed away. Scott also discusses something he calls Mosaic Eschatology -- Moses looks ahead, and at the end of the discussion, grave errors he has encountered in approaching teaching OT Scripture.

"The Old Testament is not rejected, denied, or refuted by Christ and the apostles...They [the OT books] still make claims on us....How do they, in light of the work, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ."

"We are still called to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, and all of our selves, and all of our strength today."

The Nuances of Truth-telling

Teetering between Cyncism/Irony and Hyper-Sentimentality....

This author touches on a couple of topics -- some gems here for the social media age:

-- "To live ironically is to hide in public."

-- How we manufacture sentiment and nostalgia.

Both are deceptions.

[Less we react so much against irony that we blather our every heartfelt feeling, dark secret, and deepest motive, let us affirm this is not a call to publicly navel gaze or broadcast every feeling on social media. It is a call to authenticity instead of irony. A call to real-ness over cool-ness.]

How We Instagrammed Away Our Feelings

Stopping by Woods

...written and read by Robert Frost -- read when he was an older man.

Whose woods these are I think I know

Farm to Table

Check out Cartermere Farms here in North Texas, owned and operated by a creative, enterprising family who also attend my son's university model school.

"You can go online and order from the farm and pick up at the farm between 3:30-5:30 on Friday. Www.cartermerefarms.com. We have eggs, honey, freshly milled grains, jalapeno jellies, prickly pears and basil. More to come from our fall crops soon."

Stories Make You Smarter and More Empathetic

Reading fiction is good for you.

http://blog.theliteracysite.com/how-reading-fiction-improves-intelligence/?utm_source=twc-twcfan&utm_medium=social-fb&utm_term=090915&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=how-reading-fiction-improves-intelligence&origin=

Self Loathing at Evangelical Colleges

Succinct, honest, and thoughtful: from First Things:

Evangelical Colleges and Self Loathing

"You make eloquent the tongues of infants"

A home schooling friend sent me this prayer, cited at the Aquinas College website as one of Thomas Aquinas's prayers. It's a good one for those beginning their studies in a new school year or on a new school day. It's also a good one for those whose work is study.

Here is part of the prayer:

Ineffable Creator...

You are proclaimed
the true font of light and wisdom,
and the primal origin
raised high and beyond all things

Put forth a ray of your brightness
into the darkened places of my mind;
disperse from my soul
the twofold darkness
into which I was born;
sin and ignorance

You make eloquent the tongues of infants.
refine my speech
and pour forth upon my lips
the goodness of your blessing.

Grant to me
keenness of mind,
capacity to remember,
skill in learning
subtlety to interpret,
and eloquence in speech.

May you
guide the beginning of my work,
direct its progress,
and bring it to completion.

You who are true God and true man,
who live and reign, world without end.

Amen

College and the Honors League

Interesting article about the rise of honors colleges at public universities. We were impressed with the leadership path and other honors college offerings at Christopher Newport in Virginia.

A Prudent Path

The [Trollope] Diamonds

Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister.

Finally getting around to reading this book -- the 5th of the 6 Palliser novels (and one praised by Tolstoy) -- which parallels our hero, the now-older Duke of Omnium and his final political challenge as the liberal head of a coalition government, with the marital fate of an earnest girl of good family named Emily Wharton.

It is the middle-late 19th century in England.

Will England's greatness be advanced? Will the coalition government be a good suitor to Albion? Will the Duke's warm and ambitious wife's social excesses on his behalf help or hurt him? She is political and he is scrupulous.

And in the other story: Will young, noble Emily Wharton marry a stranger and foreigner who is involved in shady dealings, against the wishes of her father, who is wise and loving, but whose arguments against the man are marred by blind prejudice? Will she be led by her vulgar aunt or her beloved family friends?

All of this marked by Trollope's shrewd and sometimes-funny commentary on human public and private behavior in the House and in the house. Trollope was a dissector of human foibles and greatness, though with a light touch, and his characters can be more complex and less tragic than some Victorian writers'. His heroes have imperfections and his villains sometimes have something to admire, but it is always clear who and what is right.

[Addenda 9/14/15: Finished. Oh, the noble example of the tragic loyalty of Emily Wharton Lopez! The author lost control of his secondary story line and it becomes the meat of the book in theme and pathos if not word count.]

The question the book addresses is: What is a true gentleman and Englishman like?

Some quotes from the first quarter of the book:

"The man, certainly, was one strangely endowed with the power of creating a belief."'

"Though the thing had been long a-doing, still it had come suddenly."

"And it was not the way with her Grace to hide such sorrows in the depth of her bosom."

"I remember dear old Lord Brock telling me how much more difficult it was to find a good coachman than a good Secretary of State."

"It'll be best in the long run." "I'm sometimes happy when I think I shan't live to see the long run.'"

"She knew him to be full of scruples....unwilling to domineer when men might be brought to subjection only by domination."

On political alliances: "I don't want a man to stick to me. I want a man to stick to his country."

On young, rich men with political ambitions: "He had the great question of labor, and all that refers to unions, strikes, and lock-outs, quite at his fingers' ends. He knew how the Church of England should be disestablished and recomposed. He was quite clear on questions of finance, and saw to a 't' how progress should be made towards communism, so that no violence should disturb that progress, and that in due course of centuries all desire for personal property should be conquered and annihilated by a philanthropy so general as hardly to be accounted a virtue. In the meantime, he could never contrive to pay his tailor's bill regularly out of the allowance of 400 pounds a year which his father made him, and was always dreaming of the comforts of a handsome income."

"There is such a thing as a conscience with too fine an edge that it will allow a man to do nothing."

Who Cares about Homer and Shakespeare?

David sent this along to me today -- sensible reasons and practical ways for all students to read and study the classics -- even business majors. But I posted this mainly for the stories about Catholic school (which I attended in high school).


The Suicide of the Liberal Arts

"Behold, I make all things new."

"When we preach the gospel, we preach the promise of new life,
new mind,
new hope,
new purpose,
new union with Christ,
new company of the Holy Spirit,
new pardon of sin,
new affinity for repentance and closeness with God,
new love of the law,
new ability to obey,
new understanding of why God demands chastity outside of marriage and fidelity inside of marriage,
new patience with people who do not yet know Jesus,
new perspectives of suffering and affliction, addiction and change,
new hatred of our own sin and patience with the sin of others,
new responsibilities,
new heartaches,
new friendships,
a new family from within the body of Christ,
new allegiances,
new dangers, and
new grace.

I needed the expulsive love of my risen Savior to whisper in my ear that my burgeoning conviction of sin was truer than what my flesh craved."

-- Rosaria Butterfield in Openness Unhindered 

(with my formatting)

Lifestyle, DNA, and the Generations

DNA Carries Traces of Past Events

21

Sunergoi on "21 for 1"

"Centireading"

"After a hundred reads, familiarity with the text verges on memorisation – the sensation of the words passing over the eyes like cud through the fourth stomach of a cow. Centireading belongs to the extreme of reader experience, the ultramarathon of the bookish, but it’s not that uncommon. To a certain type of reader, exposure at the right moment to Anne of Green Gables or Pride and Prejudice or Sherlock Holmes or Dune can almost guarantee centireading. Christmas is devoted to reading books we all know perfectly well. The children want to hear the one story they have heard so many times they don’t need to hear it again."

On reading a book 100 times -- a good writer writes about reading Hamlet and Wodehouse,

Centireading Force:why reading a book 100 times is a great idea

As a Navy kid who attended 10 schools, I found reading and re-reading and re-reading certain books formed a groove in my mind of friendly kinship and "place" that eluded me in my constantly-changing school social circles. These books helped me translate my experiences from the vantage point of a wanderer in good company.

I saw myself as the adventuring outsider, watching mountains and plains and woods and cities roll by the car window on 80 or 95 or the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Though a skinny American girl living in the 1970s and 80s, I felt I related directly with the Pevensies and the Ingalls of Narnia, Cambridge, and the woods and prairies of 19th century America -- not the Middletons of Charleston or the Donovans of Maine or the Smiths of Virginia. I can quote the Narnia books and the Little House books like I can quote the Bible, yea, in time of need.

Later, as an adult living in Shanghai, when the strangeness of that glittering and odd city felt heavy and chemical, and like walking in a backwards world upside down, I turned frequently to Wodehouse to recall something warmly organic, a comfortable friendship, the mollifying lightness of old jokes shared again. And also therein recalled a world that presumes we are all, occidental and oriental, at least a little bit nuts.

In this except from the article, the author reflects on Jeeves and Hamlet (and why not?) as an expat Canadian boy in England: 

"Every Sunday, my family would load ourselves into a car – my father, my mother, my kid brother and I – and drive out more or less randomly to see what England had to offer. In western Canada where I grew up, it had been perfectly standard to cross three or four hours of prairie to visit a relative for lunch. From Cambridge, an hour in any direction would land us in a church from the reign of Queen Anne, unspeakably ancient to our new world eyes, or some grand estate, the luxury of the residence always offset by the cheapness of its gift shops, always reeking of scones and plastic guidebooks, or the ruin of some abbey, the stuff of mossy legends. During these trips, in the tiny English car, we would listen to cassettes of The Inimitable Jeeves, read by Jonathan Cecil.

The psychology of my love for The Inimitable Jeeves isn’t exactly hard to understand. As we rolled through that strange country, laughing at the English with the English, the family was both inside and outside. My associations with The Inimitable Jeeves are as powerful as they could possibly be, a fused sense of family unity and childhood adventure. The book is so much more than just a happy childhood memory. In such ways, books pick us, rather than the other way around.

The main effect of reading Hamlet a 100 times was, counter-intuitively, that it lost its sense of cliche. 'To be or not to be' is the Stairway to Heaven of theatre; it settles over the crowd like a slightly funky blanket knitted by a favorite aunt. Eventually, if you read Hamlet often enough, every soliloquy takes on that same familiarity. And so 'To be or not to be' resumes its natural place in the play, as just another speech. Which renders its power and its beauty of a piece with the rest of the work."

Old Quotes for a New Year

Stumbled across a few good quotes, the kind that help bring perspective in a sentence or two.

"In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him." Ralph Waldo Emerson

This pre-dates a piece of advice I've heard that Newt Gingrich gives about his approach to cocktail party conversation, and captures a notion that has gotten my introvert-ish self through 10 schools growing up, through 24 moves, and through numerous parties and meet-and-greets.

In social situations, you can retire from people and shrink away, you can buck up and suffer through, or you can enter conversation with a goal of figuring out what a person has to teach or share with you. People are brilliant--even (especially?) the boring- or different-seeming ones. Everyone has a speciality or experience to tell. Trying to figure it out acknowledges the image-bearer in each one of us and has a side benefit of making things more interesting for everyone. You can view casual conversation as a treasure hunt or a torture chamber. Humility helps you do the former.

"You want to know the difference between a master and a beginner? The master has failed more times that the beginner has even tried." Unknown [anyone?]

Echoes of T. Roosevelt's "person in the arena" quote. In our hyper-critical, hypocritical, knee jerk, tabloidesque, lack-of-context culture, you can plunge in a do-fail-learn-succeed approach -- and a try-sin-repent-grow spirituality -- or you can shrink back. Courage helps you do the former.

"What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God. We should accustom ourselves to think of our position and work as sacred and well-pleasing to God, not on account of the position and work, but on account of the word and faith from which the obedience and work flow." Martin Luther 

Good news for everyday people who are busy doing regular work for God and other people.

The guy administering vaccinations in Appalachia and the guy manufacturing the plastic for the syringes are both doing God's work, if they do it for him. Faithfulness in small, everyday things.

"In raising children, I have lost my mind but found my soul." Lisa Shepherd

The secular, and humorous, version of "Yet she will be saved through childbearing--if they continue in faith and love and holiness." (1 Timothy 2:15) Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

What Christians Can Learn from Veterans

Military people understand the intersection of Faith and Authority. The centurion understood Christ's sovereignty over nature, space, and time -- that all of nature was under the authority of it's Creator and would obey. He didn't need to see Jesus touch his servant to acknowledge Christ's Lordship over this illness. "All things were made through him" (John 1). 

Matthew 8: 5-13

5 When he [Jesus] had entered Capernaum, a centurion came forward to him, appealing to him,6 “Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.” 7 And he said to him, “I will come and heal him.” 8 But the centurion replied, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9 For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant,[c] ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”10 When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, “Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel[d] have I found such faith. 11 I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, 12 while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 13 And to the centurion Jesus said,“Go; let it be done for you as you have believed.” And the servant was healed at that very moment.

(Source: cut and pasted from Bible Gateway)