Afterthoughts

Stupendous Selections on Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Sun, 19 May 2013 23:31:00 +0000

How Government Wrecked the Gas Can | Laissez-Faire Bookstore

So true, so true.
- I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.
- Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress?
- The whole trend began in (wait for it) California.
- The government never said “no vents.” It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly.
- t’s as if some bureaucrat were sitting around thinking of ways to make life worse for everyone
- Just what I wanted to do with my Saturday afternoon, hacking the gas can to make it work exactly as well as it did three years ago, before government wrecked it.
Court upholds Obama Admin denial of asylum for German homeschool family

This is Not Good.
- Uwe Romeike, a piano teacher, said that if the courts turned down their asylum completely, “it would mean they would send us back to Germany where we would face the same persecution as when we left.”
- Although the court acknowledged that the U.S. Constitution recognizes the rights of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children, it refused to concede that the harsh treatment of religiously and philosophically motivated homeschoolers in Germany amounts to persecution within our laws on asylum.
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT MANDATES UNCONSTITUTIONAL SPEECH CODES AT COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES NATIONWIDE - The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education - FIRE

Raise your hand if you think there are officially too many government agencies? We are living Hobbes' big dream, it seems.
- In a shocking affront to the United States Constitution, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education have joined together to mandate that virtually every college and university in the United States establish unconstitutional speech codes that violate the First Amendment and decades of legal precedent.
- There is likely no student on any campus anywhere who is not guilty of at least one of these "offenses."
IRS Asks for Reading List, Tea Party Group Sends Constitution - ABC News

I love that they did this.
- They wanted to know what materials we had discussed at any of our book studies.
- In 2012, the IRS says that it flagged groups with the words “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names for additional scrutiny.
- They wanted copies of our blog. They said they had already taken copies of our website.
Biometric Database of All Adult Americans Hidden in Immigration Reform | Threat Level | Wired.com

Okay: you tell me what this has to do with immigration. This is another reason to suspect bills longer than five paragraphs.
- Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.
Republicans slam IRS targeting of Tea Party as 'chilling,' a form of intimidation | Fox News

This is ironic. When Tea Party members accused the IRS of doing this--of singling out certain groups--they were called paranoid {and worse!}.
- Washington Republicans on Sunday characterized the IRS targeting Tea Party groups and other conservative political organizations as “chilling” and intimidating acts that heighten Americans' mistrust in government.
- the IRS acknowledgment Friday that the agency targeted such groups during the 2012 election cycle
- the draft report seemingly contradicts public statements by Shulman and shows senior IRS officials knew agents were targeting Tea Party groups as early as 2011.

More Library Additions

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:10:00 +0000

As they say, when it rains, it pours! That has definitely happened to our home library lately. Some children were given gift cards for birthdays and special occasions, which they finally put to use {having an inability to decide what titles they wanted with any expediency}. Some mommies found things on PaperBackSwap. And some books were found at the best used bookstore ever.

Our New Favorites

These titles are very big hits!

*

Everything Else

These are good stuff, also.

One of my girls still will not pick up many "real" books on her own, so I find I have need of more easy readers than I used to own. Arnold Lobel is, of course, a good author for that level of reading. The sure test of this is that I would never mind reading his works aloud over and over, if my four-year-old demanded that of me. The Frances books are also big helps. I saw a huge stack of them at the store for about fifty cents each. Now that I know the girls like them, I think I'll take a few dollars down there and buy the whole stack!

Any new books in your library?

*Note: In Comus, the water nymphs are somewhat scantily clad. This does not bother me, but if it bothers you, then consider this note fair warning. Personally, I am thrilled that someone bothered to make a children's version of Milton's famous play. It is excellent.

Making Progress

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Wed, 15 May 2013 22:47:00 +0000

Do you remember that song from I think it was Sesame Street? "One of these things is not like the others!" I remember singing this as a child. And then jokingly about my fourth-born child. And then? Well, I suppose I sang it not-so-jokingly. He is his own person, that is for sure!

He and my wild, almost-untameable goat, Charlotte, have had a lot in common. Of course, Charlotte has an excuse. There was a hole in her cage when she was a kid. She ran wild all over the mountains near the microscopic town of Weldon, California, where I purchased her. But my child? He's lived in a controlled environment--indoor plumbing, even!--for the entirety of his life.

Our other children have their issues, of course, being that they're born sinners like the rest of us. But this last child of mine is the one who will do me in. He is, for starters, our only true extrovert, and if that were not enough he also thinks he is very funny.

If we were giving out awards, he would be voted Most Likely to Say Something Embarrassing. This means he asks big biker guys why they have girl hair or big {no--he would definitely say huuuuuuuge} tummies, or that poor homeless man where his teeth went. Sometimes I think he knows what he is doing and is doing it on purpose. As I often tell my friends, if I die of a stroke, you will know why.

Ahem.

Poor Charlotte, trying to sleep
after O-Age-Four "crowned" her with his toy

I remember when I realized I had to train Charlotte the goat. This was back in the winter and she was a month or two out from kidding. I had tried over and over with her, only to quit because no progress was ever made. So what if her hooves didn't get trimmed? Serves her right for throwing such fits and being so difficult! So there!

But when I knew she was having a baby and I was going to have to milk her I was filled with fear. And it was, admittedly, horrible. This is the dark side of keeping livestock, at least it is if you think you are getting a good deal when someone charges you very little for a goat that has spent her infancy pretending to be feral, and getting pretty good at it.

So I determined to win. I went out there every single day, twice a day, in the cold, in the rain, and dragged that horrible goat to the table and made her get on it, though at times it took me and two other children to get her there. I locked her in. I fed her grain and tried to use my Nice Voice and pretend that I liked her.

Weeks passed, and she had a baby, and still we were dragging her to the table, using all our muscles to get her stubborn self up, and then pretending {sometimes with no success} to be Nice and Adoring.

To give you something to compare this to, my sweet little goat Reece came to us from a farm where she had been put up on a ramp for hoof trimming every six weeks with great regularity. She hadn't seen a milking table before, but she figured everything out within 48 hours.

Charlotte tries a different position...
she was thrilled when one of the other children
finally rescued her

But with Charlotte, many more weeks had to pass before she started to behave. I think it was about twelve weeks before she suddenly, one day, walked up to the shed, waited patiently for me to open the door, jumped up on the table all by herself, and even held still while I milked her.

Praise the Lord!

Not to compare my child with a goat, but there is a bit of an analogy here for me. With this child, though, it's been four years, and I don't have the right to give up and let his hooves rot {metaphorically speaking}. But often times it feels like no progress is made.

Now don't get me wrong. He is very charming. He is much more pleasant to be around than Charlotte the Terrible. But I have, in the past, had that same feeling, like I was hitting my head up against the wall. All the other children were trained by now. What in the world is taking so long?

But today? Today I felt the same way I felt when Charlotte jumped up on the table by herself. It was a miraculous breakthrough for my adorable, impulsive child.

It was 5:45 am and he was already riding his scooter on the patio {much to the neighborhood's chagrin}. He was in his pajamas and a jacket he had drug of storage somewhere. He grabbed his sand pail and walked up to the faucet. Now, he knows I have a No Water Rule, especially before breakfast. I do not believe in 30 changes of clothing before chores, so the general idea is do your chores, do your lessons, and then we'll chat about water wars.

So I was watching him, prepared to {once again} send him inside because he didn't behave.

He hates being sent inside.

He walked up to the faucet. He grabbed the knob. And then he paused. He looked up at me and gave his big, ornery smile.

He spoke loudly. I am sure the neighbors hated it.

"You know why I don't turn the water on?" he asks at the top of his lungs.

"Why?" I ask. I am so relieved we don't have to start the morning out with A Consequence.

"Because I don't want to go inside."

And he rides off on his scooter.

Oh, I know I'll probably have to send him in tomorrow. But still. I'm encouraged. We're making progress. We're strengthening the will. He just made himself do something--and he said no to his impulses and temptations.

That's good enough for me.

My Teacher, My Logos?

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:05:00 +0000

I was rereading the Definitions of Terms over at the CiRCE Institute recently. I find that knowing definitions really grounds me--it not only tells me what something is; it tells me what something is not. Whenever I start to feel that wandering, slipping feeling in regard to lessons, I start to review my basic principles, and one of the ways I review is to read the aforementioned definitions page.

I was reading through the sections on the four sciences, because I've had cause to think long and hard about science lately. I came across the reminder that a logos is a central organizing principle. I've written about the idea of logos here and also here, to name two, so I won't go into the idea very much.

CiRCE tells us that each science and subscience has a logos {think -ology to see that it is even in the English word}. For example, in regard to the natural sciences:

Biology is ordered by the attempt to know the causes of being and change within and among living things. Physics is ordered by the inquiry into the forces that bring about change in the physical realm. Chemistry is ordered by the inquiry into the elements of which physical things consist.

Or in regard to the human sciences:

Ethics asks the question, how does a human being fulfill its potential {i.e. how does it attain excellence or its own flourishing}. In a word, how does a human become virtuous...Politics asks the question, how can a human community enable its members and itself to fulfill its potential, to attain excellence, to flourish? How can a human community cultivate the virtue of its members?

My point here is not to get into science, but rather to think a little bit about the idea of logos. The sciences increase in importance as they climb the ladder to theology, which is the Queen of the Sciences. This is why Charlotte Mason tells us that education is the "handmaid of religion"--because theology is the Queen. CiRCE reminds us:

The goal of theology is to order all knowledge to that first cause.

"First cause" meaning God Himself, of course.

So the ultimate logos brings us full circle to John chapter 1, which tells us that Jesus is the Logos--He is the central organizing principle.

Even when we're not teaching theology, we have to keep this in mind.

Here's where it gets interesting.

We've all had that teacher that seemed impossible. Our goal as students of said teacher became to "give her what she wants" {mine was female, but it's not beyond a male to be this sort of teacher, of course}. We students know that this teacher doesn't care about our thoughts and opinions, or even about appeals to absolute truth in the form of the divine revelation found in Scripture--even though this may be a teacher from a Christian school!

No!

What the teacher wants is for you to give her exactly what she's looking for. Regurgitate, people! She told you stuff in class and your job is to cough all of that back up in the form of essays and test answers!

Right?

Now let me ask a question: When this happens, what is the central organizing principle of that classroom? What is its logos?

The teacher, right? The teacher has set herself up as the organizing principle of the class. These sorts of teachers can occur in any type of study, so whether she's teaching fourth grade or college-level chemistry, the fact remains the same, and normal learning and inquiry is derailed. Once the student realizes that they have to perform for the teacher, the teacher is the logos. Nothing else matters.

Of course, there are always those poor, dear souls who don't get it. They are naive enough to think that they are allowed to think, or at least let a book think for them. These students give answers they found outside of the teacher, and so they get marked down for that. All that thinking might contradict the teacher!

It is so very easy to condemn this teacher.

But then I look in the mirror.

Sometimes, like today, I am tired. And when I'm tired I become hard to please. And when I'm hard to please I bet my children start organizing themselves--their learning and behavior--around me.

It is so easy to set ourselves up as logos, isn't it?

The problem is it's also wrong and sinful. Desperately wicked and all that.

So today is a new day--though it's feeling rather old since I've been up since 5:15 {darn goat}. I resolve to keep Self out of it. I'd rather organize around a better cause--a First Cause.

Stupendous Selections on Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Sun, 12 May 2013 23:31:00 +0000

Boy genius diagnosed with autism has IQ higher than Einstein - NY Daily News

Surprise, surprise....the experts were wrong...
- doctors told Jacob Barnett’s parents that their autistic son would probably never know how to tie his shoes.
- Jacob spent years in the clutches of a special education system that didn’t understand what he needed.
- His mom realized that Jacob might need something that the standard special education curriculum just wasn’t giving him.
  
  So Kristine decided to take on the job herself.
- I operate under a concept called ‘muchness,’” Kristine said.
Panel Seeks to Resolve ‘Son of God’ Translation Controversy – The Gospel Coalition Blog

Maybe I'm overly simplistic, but it seems like this would all be cleared up by explaining the the virgin birth. Doesn't the word "son" imply the same thing in English? I don't see why it's a big deal to clear this up theologically rather than through translation.
- These controversies stem from the fact that Muslims often misunderstand the divine familial language found in the New Testament, believing that it implies that God had sexual relations in order to beget Jesus. This misunderstanding is found in the Qur'an (5:116; 17:111; 19:88-92) and leads Muslims to abhor the idea that Jesus is the Son of God. Therefore, in an attempt to avoid miscommunication some translations have avoided using the divine familial terms of "Father" and "Son."
The Duchy of Burgundy Carrots: Stress and Motherhood

Love.
- Also, once you have four you have hit critical mass for playmates--chances are anybody can find somebody to play with at any given time.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/07/.UYo8O8W0CEQ.facebook

This thing makes me shudder. Watch out, Texas!
- The snails, researchers warn, are potentially dangerous to touch, in part because they can carry meningitis.
Going To Hell with Ted Haggard | Leadership Journal

Something to think about.
- See, that guy said sorry a long time ago. Even his wife and kids stayed and forgave him, but all you Christians still seem to hate him. You guys can't forgive him and let him back into your good graces. Every time you talk to me about God, you explain that he will take me as I am. You say he forgives all my failures and will restore my hope, and as long as I stay outside the church, you say God wants to forgive me. But that guy failed while he was one of you, and most of you are still vicious to him." Then he uttered words that left me reeling: "You Christians eat your own. Always have. Always will."
Marc Thiessen: A Benghazi bombshell - The Washington Post

FYI: Benghazi was not, as the White House would like you to believe, a "long time ago." Don't let this go down the Memory Hole, folks!
- this week three State Department officials will tell Congress that the Obama administration’s version of history is false — and that the falsehoods it told the American people were willful and deliberate.
- I never reported a demonstration; I reported an attack on the consulate.
- Hicks has not even been allowed to see the classified Accountability Review Board report. Perhaps the Obama administration is afraid to let him review its “findings” for fear he will uncover more falsehoods.
- the whistleblowers have been threatened with career-ending reprisals if they furnish new information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress

Latin for Moms: A Preposition Inside the Dative Case

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Wed, 08 May 2013 19:32:00 +0000

In our last lesson, we discussed the genitive case. We learned that there is a preposition inside the genitive case. It isn't completely evident, but it's implied, and it comes out during translation into English. The dative case also has this going on! Though Latin has a lot of prepositions, some of the ones we use most often in English are right there inside the cases.

The Flexible Indirect Object

In English, we have two ways of denoting that something receives the direct object, but in Latin they are the same thing:

Both of these would be translated into Latin the same way. {No I do not know the word for prize, or if there even is a word for prize. This is a grammar lesson, not a vocabulary lesson!} But out of Latin, there are two options for translating it into English, which is what you see above.

More than an Indirect Object

In English, there is an idea implied in the indirect object that also comes across in Latin and will be something you have to watch for when you are practicing translation. There is a sense in which the prize is for John. John did something awesome--let's say he saved a child from drowning. Mrs. Smith gives him a prize. John is, to some extent, the purpose of the prize. There would be no prize-giving were it not for John's valiant actions.

Latin takes this one step further than English. On occasion, the dative case can also be translated as a "for" prepositional phrase. If I was translating the sentence "The prize was for John" into Latin, "for John" would be in the dative case.

In addition to this {yes, it's a little complicated, but stay with me} sometimes there are English prepositional phrases which function as an indirect object, but we would only translate them into prepositional phrases. Here is an example:

The reason for this is that, in this case, there is a nuance in what I mean by "indirect object." Typically, we think of an indirect object as the object receiving the direct object. In this case, the phrase "to the passengers" receives the verb. The direct object is "flight." The indirect object is "passengers." This is similar to the idea the prize was for John. Here, the announcement benefits the passengers.

Notice that the "to" here does not convey motion. If you see a "to" prepositional phrase and are asked to translate it into Latin, one way you can test whether you'll put it in the dative or not is to ask yourself whether or not it conveys motion. If it does, it isn't in the dative case. The "to" prepositions you find in the dative will all convey purpose or benefit--they'll be more abstract rather than concrete.

Let's Update the Chart

In our very first lesson, there was a simple chart to explain the cases to us. I've updated the chart to show what we've learned lately about the genitive and dative cases.

See all the prepositions in the ablative case down there at the bottom? We'll talk about that...someday.

Read More in this Series:

Lesson 1: Understanding the Five Basic Cases

Lesson 2: What Does Declining Mean?
Lesson 3: A Preposition Inside the Genitive Case
Lesson 4: A Preposition Inside the Dative Case ←you are here

Kim and the River of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:31:00 +0000

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life,
clear as crystal,
proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.

--Revelation 22:1

Like most other Year Five AO families, we are reading Kim for this term's literature selection. Like many of the literature selections, it's a tough read. The language is complex. The culture is foreign. Et cetera. Because of this, even though I would classify this particular student as "independent"--Plutarch is about the only thing I regularly read aloud to him for lessons--we read the book together at first. I told him to let me know when his mind had adjusted to the style; when he felt capable of reading the book alone.

So I read it aloud for about a week and a half, and then I passed it on. The chapters are packed with details, so I've divided them into two, or even three, separate readings, spread over the week.

At this point, I still pre-read all of this child's books. My goal is to keep up all the way through and hope that my study at this stage is retained enough that I do not need to pre-read for my younger children unless new books are added. So I'm still reading the book, but I'm reading the whole week's worth of readings in a single Sunday afternoon.

All of this is background. I have fallen in love with this book. Of course, I am a Kipling fan, and this is just about the only Kipling novel I haven't read, and I haven't read it because I was saving it for when I ahem when my son was in Year Five.

There was a point recently where I really wanted to throw the book across the room. I haven't finished the book yet, though, because I'm reading at the term's pace, so I'll share why I was frustrated as long as you agree not to spoil the ending! Deal?

What is the River?

Kim's tale really begins with a lama. Kim meets the lama while he is on a sort of spiritual journey. He is attempting to "acquire merit," that he might get off the Wheel. If you're familiar with Buddhism, you recognize that the lama wants to be released from suffering and reach Nirvana. The lama believes that he knows the pure form of Buddhism, the real Truth, and that many of the other Buddhists in India have been deceived by inferior silly stories.

To earn merit he is traveling by foot {all the way from Tibet!} to visit the holy places of his faith that are scattered throughout India, and seeking the River. He explains the River's origins to a curator thus:

"When our gracious Lord, being as yet a youth, sought a mate, men said, in his father's court, that he was over tender for marriage. Thou knowest?"

The curator nodded; wondering what would come next.

"So they made the triple trial of strength against all comers. And at the test of the Bow, our Lord first breaking that which they gave him, called for such a bow as none might bend. Thou knowest?"

"It is written. I have read."

"And, overshooting all other marks, the arrow passed far and far beyond sight. At the last it fell; and, where it touched earth, there broke out a stream which presently became a river, whose nature, by our Lord's beneficence, and that merit He acquired ere He freed himself, is that whoso bathes in it washes away all taint and speckle of sin."

"So it is written," said the curator sadly. The lama drew a long breath. "Where is that river, Fountain of Wisdom, where fell the arrow?

"Alas, my brother, I do not know." said the curator.

"Nay, if it please thee to forget--the one thing only that thou hast not told me. Surely thou must know? See, I am an old man! I ask with my head between thy feet, O Fountain of Wisdom. We know He drew the bow! We know the arrow fell! We know the stream gushed! Where then is the river? My dream told me to find it. So I came. I am here. But where is the river?"

"If I knew, think you I would not cry it aloud?"

Kim joins the lama as his personal servant, and together they search for that for which they are looking: Kim, his own mysterious red bull, and the lama his River.

Meeting the Fathers

It was later in the book that I wanted to throw or break something. You see, one of the reasons why I love Kipling is his symbolism. Just as I'm convinced that the incident of the rich boy falling off of the yacht in Captains Courageous is a baptism {and the boy's subsequent indenture upon a fishing boat sanctification--the whole thing being redemption}, so am I sure that the lama's River of Life is meant to remind us--Kipling's Christian readers--of the River of Life.

Spring up, oh well and all that.

Ahem.

So to say that I was upset at the Catholic and Anglican priests is an understatement! {For context: Mr. Bennett is the Anglican priest; Father Victor the Catholic.} Here's what happens:

"What is it then?" said Father Victor, not without sympathy, as he watched the lama's face.

"There is a river in this country which he wishes to find so verree much. It was put out by an arrow which--" Kim tapped his foot impatiently as he translated in his own mind from the vernacular to his clumsy English. "Oah, it was made by our Lord God Buddha you know, and if you wash there you are washed away from all your sins and made as white as cotton-wool." {Kim had heard mission talk in his time.} "I am his disciple and we must find that river. It is verree valuable to us."

"Say that again," said Bennett. Kim obeyed, with amplifications.

"But this is mere blasphemy," said the Church of England chaplain.

"Tck! Tck!" said Father Victor sympathetically. "I'd give a good deal to be able to talk the vernacular. A river that washes away sin! And how long have you two been looking for it?"

"Oh, many days. Now we wish to go away and look for it again. It is not here, you see."

"I see," said Father Victor gravely. "But he can't go on in that old man's company. It would be different, Kim, if you were not a soldier's son. Tell him that the regiment will take care of you and make you as good a man as your--as good a man as can be.

[snip]

"I do not understand the customs of white men. The Priest of the Images in the Wonder House in Lahore was more courteous than the thin one here. This boy will be taken from me. They will make a Sahib of my disciple? Woe to me, how shall I find my river? Have they no disciples? Ask."

"He says he is very sorry that he cannot find the river now any more. He says, Why have you no disciples and stop bothering him? He wants to be washed of his sins."

Neither Bennett nor Father Victor found an answer ready.

The Ready Answer

I am no expert in cross-cultural ministry. I live a small life with my husband and my children and my books and my dairy herd. I don't even travel. But even I can see that these two men, chaplains of the King's army, were without. Here is a man, looking for the River, asking to be washed of his sins, and what? They have no answer?

...be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you...

--I Peter 3:15b

It's not every day that one is asked about the River.

In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse...

--Revelation 22:2-3a

Stupendous Selections on Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Sun, 05 May 2013 23:31:00 +0000

Grown And Flown: 17 Parenting Lessons From 'Downton Abbey'

It's no secret I'm a Downton fan...
- Grandparents have a crucial role to play in any family as dispensers of wisdom and healers of souls. No one can put a situation into perspective better than someone who has seen seven decades pass. In times of pain and panic, it is the Dowager who is needed most.
- The loyalty and love of our children is one of life's greatest blessings, never to be taken lightly. Mary's loyalty to her father, when he is right and even when he is wrong, is a source of comfort and strength.
Internet Sales Tax Is a Tariff Not a Tax | John C. Dvorak | PCMag.com

Shock: another idea pushed by politicians is actually unconstitutional.
- This debate actually goes back to the roots of the mail order business which was not taxed except in the state in which it exists. So this is not a new debate or a new idea.
- The big difference is that Amazon came around and Jeff Bezos is an obvious retailing genius. So because of his success, everything is different? No, it's not different; we just have interesting new players.
- Taxes are not just collected to steal money.
- This is not a tax it is a penalty fine or a tariff for competing with local businesses. To be honest about it, they should call it a tariff, not a tax. Be honest about it. Oh wait; a tariff would be illegal
Homeschooler uprising in America? :: Accuracy In Academia

I liked the title.
- the achievement gaps, long plaguing school systems around the country, aren’t present in homeschooling environment.”
  
  “There’s no difference in achievement between sexes, income levels or race/ethnicity.
How to Matter | Circe Institute

Oh my. Mr. Kern completely hit this one out of the ballpark.
- Instead of resting in a transcendent wisdom that comes from walking with God, we follow the fads in the schools (usually a few years after the schools have all the proof they need that the the fads didn't deliver) on curriculum, teaching, assessment, and even governance.
- They have a fragmented curriculum because they have no thread to tie it together (re - ligio is Latin for "I tie together").
- Here are the facts: Christian classical school students typically score around the 90th percentile on the SAT. They typically get into the better colleges with lots of scholarship money.
  
  But when Christian classical schools sell their souls to score well on the SAT or to get into college, they not only lose their souls, experience the bitterness that arises from false advertising and mixed messages, and often close their doors, but they don't do well on the SAT or get into the better colleges either.
Advice for Raising Godly Children

So some of these made me feel like a failure. Something to work at, I suppose!
- 1. The best exercise in the world for children is to let them romp and jump about, as soon as they are able, according to their own fancy.
Fool's Gold; A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood | Alliance for Childhood

The full text. FREE.
- The full text of Fool's Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood is available in Adobe Acrobat pdf format for downloading and off-line viewing.
I'm Sick of Hearing About Your Smoking Hot Wife | Her.meneutics | Christianitytoday.com

Don't you think that when a man talks about his wife this way, especially in front of a crowd, he's encouraging the men around him to view his wife as an object instead of a person?
- When a man brags about his wife's looks, body, or smoking hot prowess, we may consider his remarks loving compliments from a husband to his better half, but when I hear a man say those things, I bristle.
- This line of thinking tells wives that if they struggle in the sexual area and their husbands look elsewhere, it's partly their fault. They've violated that scriptural call to be a smoking hot, sexually satisfying wife.
- The culture is oversexed, immersed in pornography, sex trafficking, and prostitution. It's a cheap, horny view of sex that insults the beauty God intended. If we try to emulate what our culture applauds, the result will be a shallow sex life. A broken one, too.
The Weekend Interview with Donald Kagan: 'Democracy May Have Had Its Day' - WSJ.com

Fascinating!
- These kinds of citizens aren't born—they need to be educated. "The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make," Mr. Kagan says. "At the university, there must be intellectual variety. If you don't have [that], it's not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It's that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial."
- Taking a grim view of the Periclean era in Athens, Plato and Aristotle believed that democracy inevitably led to tyranny.
SpunkyHomeSchool: Work-force Science

Amen.
- The bible instructs parents to train up a child in the way he should go for eternity NOT to train a worker for the global economy in the 21st Century.
Australia to Abandon the U.S. Dollar - theTrumpet.com

Gulp.
- Australia’s announcement that it is abandoning the U.S. dollar for trade with China is the latest broadside in the global currency war.
Immigration Bill Doesn't Secure the Border

I just don't trust bills that run into hundreds of pages. Besides, Congress has legislated "securing the border" twice in my lifetime alone; but they do not follow, fund, nor enforce their own laws.
- While supporters of the bill trumpet its “border security” features, in reality, the law delivers nothing new—other than the promise of spending a lot more money and running up our debt.
- Washington is willing to draft a bounced check to justify an amnesty bill.
- Supporters of the bill trumpet requirements to “certify” border security, yet its standards are in some ways weaker than existing law.
‘We Could Be In For A Cooling Period That Lasts 200-250 Years’ Russian Scientists Claim | The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)

Shock: the earth's heat...comes from the sun.
- solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well.
- Solar activity follows different cycles, including an 11-year cycle, a 90-year cycle and a 200-year cycle. Yuri Nagovitsyn comments.
- Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%.

Library Candy

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Thu, 02 May 2013 16:29:00 +0000

Oh, my. We have a new used bookstore in town. I could just as well say there is a used bookstore in town period because I don't know of another one. But this bookstore? It is amazing. I think the owner said she has over 40,000 volumes in the store. The prices are wonderful. I drop by on my way to other places, like the park or the feed store. I tell the children if they can find a good book, I will buy it for them, because many of them cost less than a dollar--or even less than half a dollar.

It dawned on me that this is my new candy store and from here on out I'm going to have to be careful not to fritter my money away.

Each time I go, I come away with a little stack of books we will need in our coming school years. At this point, I have the time to be picky and only buy copies that are hardbound and pretty. When we get closer to school's start, I'll have to buy what I can find. I do detest a paperback when a hardback is available!

Here's what I've gathered in my three {so far} trips to the bookstore:

In case you think I am over-spending, allow me to ~~brag~~ explain that I have spent just over $30 so far. I feel like I hit the proverbial jackpot!

After, Or: I Done Did It

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:30:00 +0000

It dawned on me that I never posted an after photo from my furniture project over Easter Break. {I could never be a design blogger, that is for sure!} So today is my big unveiling. Our nightstands have been in use for about a month now, and we're still loving them. Just having them be the right size--finally, after all these years--is joy enough. But I'm pleased with how they turned out, just the same.

If you recall, these are my before photos:

I spent $90 total on these mismatched but just-right-for-our-space nightstands

And here's the after photos:

I spent too much time trying to "decide on hardware" only to conclude that my budget was better spent on one can of spray paint {used on the old hardware} instead. You can barely see my lamps in the after photos, but do you see that they are still that rubbed brass finish in the photos? Well, once I took these, I thought they looked terrible, so I used the rest of my spray paint to paint the lamp bases, too.

By the way: Rusteoleum Hammered Black Metal Finish Spray Paint? Awesome! Even I can make it look okay with that stuff.

I really wanted to do Annie Sloan Chalk Paint, but...can you say pricey? The chalk paint would have doubled the cost of the furniture! But it looks like chalk paint, because I used Chalkboard Paint {a fraction of the cost} and waxed it with Miniwax Matte Paste Finishing Wax {also cheap}. I stuck the paper to the drawer front with good, old fashioned Mod Podge! Plus I have leftovers from all of this for future projects.

In all, it was a fun project. I would definitely do it again. I had always wanted to try decoupaging furniture, and I figured this was my big chance. I can paint over it in a few years if I tire of it, right?

This post is linked to the Hidden Art book club.

Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Greetings! I am excited {and nervous} to be hosting this edition of the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival. I have never hosted a carnival of any kind before, so I hope I do it right. This is a wonderful collection of links so, needless to say, I am excited about it.

Charlotte Mason Education: Simplicity and Life

This post from Jen contains good reminders for all of us.

I almost burned myself out trying to do this when doing preschool-at-home with Michelle the year she was 4. I was spending more time researching ideas of cute projects and fun things that we could do to learn the alphabet than we actually spent together doing them. (And as cute and fun as those projects were, did they really help her learn the alphabet any better or faster than she would have had I employed simpler methods? No, probably not.) We were not going to last in this homeschooling thing for the long haul unless I did something differently.

Get some grit {Parents' Review Volume 2}

Mama Squirrel points out the wisdom in the Parents' Review articles. The article from PR Volume 2 that she's discussing says this:

A certain amount of hardness and sternness is inculcated as necessary to the production of energy, self-reliance, self-control, endurance, and dignity--of everything, in fact, that is commonly summed up under the phrase 'strength of character,' or in the Scotch term 'grit.'

The question becomes: Where does "grit" come from, and how do we cultivate it?

Children of a Greater God

Silvia tells us about a lesser-known, but must-read book:

Dedicated to the Andreola couple, mentioning among others Francis Shaeffer, Dorothy Sayers, the word utilitarism, and quoting C.S. Lewis, Chesterton, George McDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aristotle, and the Fruits of the Spirit, it was destined to be a book that leaves an impression, a companion that reassures us and defines with detail our vision for our children and ourselves, and how to accomplish this forge of character that a christian education is.

If you want to know the title, I guess you'll have to click over to find out!

Ahem.

Letting Go

Nebby reminds us that we don't really have control after all:

We want to be able to control what our children learn and who they become. But we can’t. They are not blank slates, they are persons. All we can do is to provide the best materials, ideas, Charlotte would say, to feed their hopefully eager minds. But we cannot force them to take them in.

Simple Lessons Work

Lanaya tells us that most learning can take place with far less preparation!

Do you like to put together little lessons where everything matches a theme and then use them to teach your kids? As pinterest and copious blogs can attest, many moms and teachers do enjoy this, including myself. At least I enjoyed it at first.

Thoughts and quotes on the use of the mind

Amy collected some quotes for us to enjoy! {The thoughts are fabulous, too, of course...}

Charlotte quotes Paterson as he talks about the fact that in Elementary schools time is WASTED on such like as tiresome unit studies or spending too many years teaching the basic R's of education, instead of providing that feast of knowledge on which a mind must inevitably grow.

Young Students and "the Fairyland in Geography"

Celeste tells us that geography is more than capital cities and river names:

The next element of geography lessons is pictorial geography, which she describes simply as "pleasant talk about places." Sounds doable, no? It basically consists of furnishing the child's mind with beautiful images and feeding his imagination through stories of places with which the mother/teacher is familiar.

Summer Plans

Angela shares with us her summer plans!

I hope there will be lots of beach days, ice cream, books read in the shade, and long naps in the breeze. Summer should have all of that and more!

Unsung Heroes: The Bielski brothers, Bushcraft and World War II

This fascinating post from Carol explains a little bit of her family's Year 11 studies:

There must be so many untold stories of heroism from World War II. The movie Schindler's List, based on a book written in 1982, brought attention to the story of one man who was responsible for saving the lives of more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust. More recently the story of the Bielski Brothers - Tuvia, Asael and Zus, has been uncovered and told in book and film.

Fitting in the nice bits

Are you tempted to drop all of the little things that round out a Charlotte Mason education? Jeanne encourages us to keep them in, and explains how:

By the extra bits, they mean the nice stuff - folk songs, composer study, Shakespeare, Plutarch, picture study, art, map work, handwork, a nature walk. I scratch my head a little because without these things you're left with reading, writing and arithmetic - hardly a liberal education at all, really, is it?

Marginalia

Jeanne only wanted to link one post, but I requested we add in this one, too, because I loved it. I love to mark up my books, and my hope is that, in the upper years, I can afford individual copies for my children, that they may be allowed to freely mark up their books as well.

Miss Mason suggests that our students be able to write in the margins of their books, but I'm afraid that's going to take a little while for Jemimah. It has taken me 50 years to come to this decision. That means she still has another 39 years to go.

The next Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival will be hosted at Dewey's Treehouse. The theme is The Way of the Will and the reading assignment is Chapter 8 of Volume 6.

Stupendous Selections on Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 23:31:00 +0000

St. Raphael Orthodox Online Homeschool - Welcome

Hello! I am not Orthodox, but...How exciting is this? James Taylor founding his own online school??
- We offer a la carte classes and a program of studies for Elementary, Middle, and High school students based primarily on the classic Good and Great Books from Western and Eastern European culture. All classes take place in the collegial spirit of the Orthodox Church where education is seen as a friend to theosis, our journey of transformation into the life of Christ.
SpunkyHomeSchool: What is a democratic republic?

The new Common Core Standards reallyare* new. Even the definition of the type of government we have is new. Someone call the Founders. They don't know about this yet.
- Democratic republic? The term confused me.
- I googled democratic republic, truly expecting to find a long list of places where I could find a definition.
$2 Trillion Underground Economy May Be Recovery's Savior

I have an idea. Let's stop over-regulating and over-taxing so that the *real* economy can save the "recovery."
- The shadow economy is a system composed of those who can't find a full-time or regular job.
- You normally see underground economies in places like Brazil or in southern Europe
- But in the long run, an underground economy is telling us that things have to change.
George W. Bush is smarter than you | Keith Hennessey

Didn't love him, but I believe it!
- He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting.
Is the Common Core Standards initiative in trouble?

Don't throw confetti yet, but if you've been making noise about this, keep it up!
- Duncan made the appeal, which was reported by Education Week, because the initiative — a set of common standards adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia designed to raise student achievement — has come under such withering attack in recent months that what once seemed like a major policy success for the Obama administration now looks troubled.
- The Republican National Committee just passed an anti-Common Core resolution, saying that the initiative is a federal intrusion on states’ rights
Complete Charlotte Mason Reading Lessons - Google Drive

Jen's super awesome, really helpful details on what Miss Mason really said about learning to read.
- Complete Charlotte Mason Reading Lessons
Think Fat-Free Milk is Healthy? 6 Secrets You Don’t Know About Skim | Butter Believer

Skim is a waste product, and other thoughts on milk.
- Dairy had always been consumed in its whole, full-fat form before the industrialization of foods began. And no one had heart disease.
Learning to Love What Must Be Done | Circe Institute

As usual, it's a heart problem. Sigh.
- The etymology of procrastination is worth examining: the word comes from the Latin pro ( forward, on behalf of) and cras (tomorrow).
- we find encouragement of a different sort from the German poet Goethe: Cease endlessly striving for what you would like to do and learn to love what must be done.
Home Library Key to Academic Success

Another excuse to buy books. {Like you needed one!}
- After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home — and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect — gives children an enormous advantage in school.
- Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics
BBC News - Hadrian's Wall: Aerial photographs 'could change history'

Fascinating! I love learning about this period in history.
- Experts say he had potentially discovered the camp of the men who actually built the wall that runs across the country from Tyneside to Cumbria.
- "Then suddenly, when we started to fly, a whole new world emerged. Huge numbers - tens of thousands - of isolated farms, completely undefended.
  
  "You can only have a landscape like that when people are so used to peace that they take it for granted.
  
  "And that utterly changes the story of how we see the Romans."
- Ancient camps, ovens, rubbish pits and ditches show up from the air as crop marks, where plants grow differently - often invisible from the ground.
Toddlers becoming so addicted to iPads they require therapy - Telegraph

Just don't.
- Dr Graham said that young technology addicts experienced the same withdrawal symptoms as alcoholics or heroin addicts, when the devices were taken away.
- He warned that the condition prevented young people from forming normal social relationships, leaving them drained by the constant interaction.

Latin for Moms: A Preposition Inside the Genitive Case

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:14:00 +0000

I know I said that next we'd talk about declensions, but it came up in the comments, this point about Latin not having all of the prepositions English has, and I decided the commenter was on to something and we should get this conversation out of the way first.

Today, we'll discuss the preposition of and how it's connected to the genitive case.

Does Latin Have Prepositions?

Well, yes, actually. Yes it does. Remember, prepositions help define relationships between one thing and another. They explain the location of something in time or in space. So I am standing beside the table or on the table or next to the table or none of these because I've crouched down and now I'm under the table. I did all of this before breakfast.

Latin contains many of the same prepositions as we use in English. If you are inside, you are intra. If you are outside, you are extra. If you are under, you are sub. If you are before, you are ante. If you are with, you are cum, but if you're without, you're sine.

But these spatial and temporal prepositions are not the prepositions we use most often. The ones we are most likely to use are: of, for, to, by, with, and from. These special prepositions explain different relationships than most prepositions--they explain ownership, origination, means, or purpose {among other things}.

This short list--of, for, to, by, with, and from--contains prepositions that are implied in the cases.

If you don't recall what cases are, you need to review Lesson 1.

A Preposition Inside the Genitive Case

Thinking about this in English can help us.

Iin English, we can show possession in two ways:

Both of these are correct, and they are basically the same thing to us: the gate belongs to the house. In Latin, we would simply say porta casae {porta means "gate" and casae is the possessive--genitive--form of "house"}. Do you see what I mean when I say that a preposition can be wrapped up inside of a case? The preposition of is in the genitive case. In Latin, we don't need a separate preposition because that is what the case means. When we are translating from Latin to English, we will use the apostrophe-s or the preposition of depending on how it sounds best in the English.

There are two more cases that contain implied prepositions. We'll talk about them sometime soon.

Read More in this Series:

Lesson 1: Understanding the Five Basic Cases

Lesson 2: What Does Declining Mean?
Lesson 3: A Preposition Inside the Genitive Case ←you are here
Lesson 4: A Preposition Inside the Dative Case

Writing Readiness Or: Something Else We Did Late {and it Worked Out Okay}

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:38:00 +0000

There is a lot of pressure to start writing in first grade, or even in kindergarten. Around here, "kindergarten" is generally code for "15-minutes-of-phonics-plus-a-read-aloud." Or, at least, that has been the trend. So writing didn't really come up, unless someone, using their extensive amount of free time, decided to copy something.

In first grade, we start Ambleside Online Year One, and then there is the dreaded copywork listed right there under Daily. Obviously, "copywork" must begin with proper letter formation. My second child simply was. not. ready.

But, oh, how we tried.

We drew in the air and we drew in the dirt. We talked through the strokes.

See this? This is "A." To make an A--watch my arm!--you do one line down, second line down, one line across.

And then she would try to do it herself and it was the sorriest looking A you ever saw. Charlotte Mason wrote, in regard to copywork:

No work should be given to a child that he cannot execute perfectly, and then perfection should be required of him as a matter of course.

Hmmm...perfectly?

I did the standard of perfection thing with my oldest, and it worked out great, but what to do when a child's ability to "execute perfectly" is clearly at zip, zero, zilch?

I pushed on through the weeks for a while, and then...I dropped handwriting. But I didn't drop it in a thinking, deliberate sort of way. I dropped it in an I-don't-know-what-to-do-about-this-child sort of way.

Which I wouldn't suggest.

Then I thought I'd go and buy a cursive curriculum, even though I've taught handwriting in the past without curricula of any kind. {How human it is to think money spent will solve our troubles!} I read all that "cursive first" stuff, and thought we'd try that, since printing didn't take.

But that proved equally frustrating. We were working daily and getting nowhere.

Finally, I asked myself: What would happen if this was math?

Well, I believe that the ability to do math is, first, a neurological one. Normal, healthy children can do math when their brains are ready. Asking them to do it earlier than that is {1} extremely frustrating and {2} asking for math trouble later on in childhood.

What if, I asked myself, she just isn't ready?

You'd think I'd be used to this sort of question, but the truth is it shocks me every time, and I think that is because there is such an extreme push for early academics these days. Now, it's not just kindergarten. Kids around here have to go to preschool, or something called TK {transitional kindergarten}, and the parents are so proud of how academic their kids are.

I'm a pretty academic person, but I still would rather my kindergartener know the trees and birds by name and wait on the math thing.

But I digress.

My point here is that I skipped writing after that.

Until after her eighth birthday.

I'll wait while you freak out.

Done?

She had always copied things from books, and she continued doing so in her writing that, until recently, still looked like a five-year-old's. It was clunky and mostly capitals. When I noticed, around her eighth birthday, that her letters had begun to look quite nice, all on their own {with no instruction from me}, I started teaching her proper letter formation and pencil grip.

It took about a week to teach her the entire alphabet.

And that standard of perfection? She reaches it, yes she does.

So we're done with letter formation and we're commencing real, live copywork, still asking for perfection. We'll start with words--her name, for example. Then we'll do simple sentences from her books.

And we'll go from there.

I'm not saying here that all children should wait until eight. My current kindergartener is probably ready right now, but our house policy is that I'm not obligated to teach handwriting until first grade, and so I don't.

It takes wisdom to figure out whether a child needs to push through, or take time off. Some children don't want to work hard, and taking time off won't teach them perseverance. But a child working hard and struggling? I am increasingly convinced that this is a sign that they are being asked to do something which is neurologically inappropriate.

I never mentioned this around here because I wasn't sure I had done the right thing. At least, not until recently. I see her perfect little copy pages, and I'm so glad we took time off. There was no frustration, there were no tears. She didn't start to think she was "dumb," or couldn't cut it. I'm not sure she even noticed it disappeared from the schedule for over a year!

And now, she's learning to write.

Painlessly.

Waiting has its charms.

Stupendous Selections on Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:31:00 +0000

Debate Over Delaying of Miranda Warning - NYTimes.com

The idea of "debate" over Miranda rights disturbs me. Whether we like it or not, these men were US citizens!
- But the administration’s effort to stretch a gap in the Miranda rule for questioning about immediate threats to public safety in this and other terrorism cases has alarmed advocates of individual rights.
- “The public safety exception to Miranda should be a narrow and limited one, and it would be wholly inappropriate and unconstitutional to use it to create the case against the suspect,” Mr. Romero said. “The public safety exception would be meaningless if interrogations are given an open-ended time horizon.”
Uncle: Mentors 'radicalized' older Boston bombing suspect - TODAY.com

Interesting.
- Tsarni said a family acquaintance told him there was an outside influence on Tamerlan.
- “He said there is someone who brainwashed him, some new convert to Islam,’’ Tsarni said.
- The suspects’ uncle believes the radicalization occurred in the United States, not overseas.
- “It has nothing to do with Russia, (or) with Chechnya, which he had nothing to do with,’’ Tsarni said. “It started here.”
From Latin Dropout to Latin Lover | Garner Goings On

This was a great series. Charlotte Mason said that mothers can do wonders once they are convinced that wonders are required of them.
- Do you have to learn Latin in order to homeschool Latin? In my experience – yes. Some parents will tell you “No.” Some curricula will tell you “No.” But what I hope you’ve gleaned from my transition from Homeschool Latin Dropout to Homeschool Latin Lover, is that learning Latin alongside your child is not only do-able, it’s eye-opening, it’s enjoyable, it’s horizon-expanding! It is everything that I love about homeschooling!
Rome wasn’t built in a day… | Garner Goings On

I wish it weren't so, but I'm pretty sure it's so.
- “It’s great! You don’t need to know Latin! We just pop in the videos and…”
  
  How do you say “Red Flag” in Latin?
- I had already learned a lot during our two years of homeschooling. Why not Latin?
We Were Homeschool Latin Dropouts | Garner Goings On

Oh, this was so familiar I had to laugh!
- We got to a point where she wasn’t getting something. She had, God help me, a question. This began happening more and more often
- Later I discovered that the more highbrow Classical communities have a name for people like us: Homeschool Latin Dropouts.
Man's home searched during manhunt

So...we must forfeit our rights--and protection from illegal search and seizure--when there is a manhunt going on? I wonder if they had a warrant for this? They certainly entered his home without permission!
US missionary pilot missing off West Africa coast
- "After much research and digging, there is a 50 percent chance that Jerry's plane crashed,"
- "That other 50 percent is the probability that he was captured and forced to fly for some drug lords or guerrilla members. There is evidence now to support both scenarios."
Article Spotlight~ Homeschooling “Internationally Benchmarked” | The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine

Spunky's excellent, excellent article on Common Core.
- Is it possible that homeschooling here in the United States could be affected by what the rest of the world thinks? International benchmarking is the buzzword to watch and listen for.
Report: Saudi National Ruled Out as ‘Suspect’ in Boston Marathon Bombings to Be Deported on National Security Grounds Next Week | Video | TheBlaze.com

It seems awfully fast--to deport someone who was of suspected involvement, before the investigation is even over...or has even really begun.
- the Saudi national who was briefly named a “person of interest” in the Boston Marathon bombings, is being deported on Tuesday.
- he is now going to be deported on national security grounds
- One source at the FBI and another at the Saudi Embassy referred to the student as connected to an important Saudi family.
Unexpected Good Results Make Me Look Smart | The Contrary Farmer

I always love reading Gene Logsdon.
- So when nature allows me to look smart, I play the part with gusto while I can. Tomorrow it might all blow up in my face.
- I think the foxes are feeding their young because the rest of the year they don’t bother us. So I have to keep the hens penned up. I do not want to keep the hens penned up. My business plan states very clearly that my hens will graze the meadow and woods around them without benefit of purchased feeds
Report: Two Explosions at Boston Marathon | The Weekly Standard

Pay attention, folks.
Canadian news anchor warns: Gun registration brings confiscation - Washington Times

It already happened in Canada. Second note: since when does The Washington Time quote The Blaze? My, my, how things are changing!
- “If you don’t believe me,” he said, in a report from The Blaze, “just look at what’s happened here.”

Latin for Moms: What Does Declining Mean?

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:27:00 +0000

These initial terminology lessons {cases, declining, etc.} may seem simple enough. But, as someone who has been trying to teach herself Latin for a number of years, I can say that they trip people up. At least, they tripped me up. It was all Greek to me, you know? Only it was Latin, which was even more confusing.

Ahem.

So today we're going to talk about the word declining. Sometimes, in Latin textbooks, you'll be given the assignment to "decline the Latin words such-and-such" and so it helps to know what a declension is and what is means to decline.

In short, if you have ever learned a foreign language, or even studied one in school, you are going to have the advantage here. Essentially, declining is a lot like conjugating, only declining is done with nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, while conjugating is for verbs.

So do we decline our nouns in English? Well, a tiny bit.

Declensions fit with the idea of cases. We already talked about cases, but if you didn't read it, you need to go back and do so to understand this lesson.

As a brief review, the five main cases are: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative. These correspond to the different functions nouns can serve within a sentence, even an English sentence: subject, possessive, indirect object, direct object, and within by/with/from prepositional phrases.

So, in English, we can "decline" a singular noun, but the word won't change much at all:

What you see above is the declension of boy. It gives the form of the word for each of the major cases. Obviously, English isn't a highly inflected language and doesn't really have cases, but I think seeing it in English sometimes helps, so stay with me here.

When you decline a Latin noun, you find the stem of the word and then list all the case forms for it. This is the one thing that is hard to show in English because other than adding apostrophe and s in the possessive, our words remain the same. But still, this is why I said it is something like conjugating verbs, if you ever did that for Spanish of French in high school.

Don't worry. We'll come back to declensions in the future, but this is a good place to stop for today.

Read More in this Series:

Lesson 1: Understanding the Five Basic Cases

Lesson 2: What Does Declining Mean? ←you are here

Lesson 3: A Preposition Inside the Genitive Case
Lesson 4: A Preposition Inside the Dative Case

Living California History: The Wild Muir

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:30:00 +0000

Because, as I said before, I accidentally got behind on California history, I am not actually scheduling this book. I'm just giving it to my son as a free read. And, by the way, if you're looking for an interesting, masculine, nonfiction, lively, and unconventional free read for around ages 10 or 12, this book is in order.

John Muir lived from 1838 to 1914, so I think a collection of his most famous of adventures is a great way to finish up Year 5. I'm scheduling it for Term 3 with all of my future students, and I'll be pasting the schedule below.

But before I do, I simply must tell you how I discovered this book. On our tenth anniversary, Si and I went away for a night to a bed and breakfast right outside Sequoia National Park. The owners of the place had an extensive collection of books about California. It was truly a treasure trove! We were sitting in the parlor with the windows open that night, chatting and listening to the water in the river. I picked up a copy of a book and started reading.

I had never even heard of John Muir before, at least not in a way that I remembered him.

But I read and I read and I kept thinking that my son would love this book.

I don't know if the book is really for kids or for adults. As an adult, I truly enjoyed it. Muir was lovable and the stories were engaging. As my child's teacher, I can only say that this is a fun introduction to John Muir, whose naturalist writings he'll read when he is older.

Now, in case some of you are beginning Year 5 Term 3 and would like a fitting selection, I give you my weekly schedule for the book. I'm assigning two chapters a week on average. Please note that my students will not be reading those chapters on the same day--I would have them read one on, say, Monday, and then a second chapter later in the week.

The Wild Muir: Twenty-Two of John Muir's Greatest Adventures
by Lee Stetson

{fits with AmblesideOnline, Year 5, Term 3}

Week 1: Good Scootchers and Near Drowning
Week 2: At the Bottom of the Well and Blind!
Week 3: Fever! and The Brink of the Yosemite Fall
Week 4: An Interview with a Bear and In the Midst of the Yosemite Fall
Week 5: Climbing the Ice Cone and The Snow Avalanche Ride
Week 6: Rattlesnakes and The Earthquake
Week 7: The Ascent of Mount Ritter and A Geologist's Winter Walk
Week 8: The Tree Ride and A Perilous Night on Mount Shasta
Week 9: Mono Lake Windstorm and Thirst
Week 10: The Rescue on Glenora Peark and Stickeen
Week 11: A Sled Trip on the Muir Glacier
Week 12: Nearly Crushed by an Iceberg

Latin for Moms: Understanding the Five Basic Cases

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:44:00 +0000

So I've decided to stop playing around and really learn Latin. 90% of the time, Visual Latin is enough for my child. But that other 10% of the time? He doesn't get it, watching the video over doesn't help, and trouble starts if I haven't studied up enough to help him. No matter how helpful videos can be {and I love them, and they are helpful}, nothing can replace the mother who can answer questions, who can say it in another way.

I hate admitting this because it means I can't stay as I am and teach well. My children can learn a lot of stuff from books, of course, but sometimes they need me.

This is the good thing about homeschooling, right? It makes us grow and change and learn in all these ways we never would have on our own.

What is your child asking you questions about? Mine is asking about Latin. And subsequently, I have studied up...and fallen in love with Latin. Latin is like math: it makes perfect sense. I feel more sensible for being around my Latin books!

Latin study tripped me up from the very beginning: the terminology. Why can't we say "possessive" if that is what we mean? Why do we have to get all philologist about it?

I can't answer those questions, but I can try and explain what the "cases" are, which is basically what this new, unscheduled and therefore unruly, series will be about. It'll attempt to explain some of the basic nuts and bolts about Latin so that you can answer questions when your children ask.

Or maybe you'll even study on your own!

So today we'll talk about the cases using a basic English sentence:

I used red to do to the sentence what we are asked to do in our exercises from KISS Grammar. We underline the subject, put "IO" over indirect objects, "DO" over direct objects, and parentheses around prepositional phrases. Then I noted the possessive just because. They haven't asked us to do that in grammar {yet}.

Each of these five different uses of nouns {subject, indirect and direct objects, prepositional phrase, and possessive} has a "case" which corresponds to it in Latin.

I'm not going to decline any Latin words, so don't freak out. I'm just going to define relative terms, as I already did in the picture above, in blue. The nominative case corresponds to the subject of the sentence. The genitive case is possessive. The dative case is where you file all your indirect objects {as well as prepositional phrases beginning with "to"--either way, the dative noun is receiving the direct object}, while direct objects are in the accusative case. Finally, there is the ablative case, which is sometimes called the "by/with/for" case--it's used with lots of prepositions.

When we decline Latin words, we do it in this order:

Nominative
Genitive
Dative
Accusative
Ablative

Memorize It!

binder ring clips
are your friend

I quickly learned that there is nothing I can do to ease my way in Latin like memory work. Memorizing this stuff speeds the process up rapidly. I study Latin the exact same way I studied necessary facts in college: flash cards. I write what I want to memorize on one side of a 3x5 card, and some sort of prompt on the other. I punch a hole in a corner of the card, and I put the card onto my binder ring clips.

These clips let me flip through cards easily. I quiz myself before I start each new study session, then clip them back to the inside of my Latin binder.

I wanted to remember the cases, in declension order. So, my prompt was, "Name and define the five main cases." On the back it says:

Nominative: subject
Genetive: possessive
Dative: indirect object
Accusative: direct object
Ablative: used with by/with/for prepositional phrases

Technically, there are two other cases. It's true. But when you study declensions, you'll see that these are the five you usually work with. So here we shall begin our Latin study.

Suggested Study Helps

If you want to teach yourself Latin, might I suggest these helpers? These are what I use myself.

Wheelock's is what I started with, ages ago, so it will always have a special place in my heart. But to be honest, the combination of Henle and Visual Latin is exactly what I needed. I still use Wheelock's as an occasional reference.

Read More in this Series:
Lesson 1: Understanding the Five Basic Cases ←you are here
Lesson 2: What Does Declining Mean?
Lesson 3: A Preposition Inside the Genitive Case
Lesson 4: A Preposition Inside the Dative Case

Stupendous Selections on Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 23:31:00 +0000

Ants can sense earthquakes a day in advance - The Times of India

I'm going to ask the ants in my backyard if the Big One is coming.
- But before an earthquake, the ants did not retreat into their mound in the night and bustled around outside it.
How to Remove Bees From a Tree | Root Simple

And also, what NOT to do if there are bees in your tree.
- A large cavity filled with bees is generally a sign of a diseased or damaged tree. The bees may be the least of your concerns.
- Hire a beekeeper to do a “trap-out.”
The Upward Call - The Upward Call - The tyranny of the recovered

Interesting!
- My mother used to say that there was nothing worse than a "recovered smoker."
- "Do you know how many calories are in those chips?"
  
  Yes, I know, and I'm not eating them for health benefits; I'm eating them because they taste good.
On School Shooters – The Huffington Post Doesn’t Want You To Read This | Peter Brown Hoffmeister

Blame the video games?
- It’s scary now to think that I ever had anything in common with school shooters. I don’t enjoy admitting that. But I did have a lot in common with them. I was angry, had access to guns, felt ostracized, and didn’t make friends easily. I engaged in violence and wrote about killing people in my notes to peers.
- But there is one significant difference between me at 16 and 17 years of age and most high school shooters: I didn’t play violent video games.
- In essence, Lanza – and all of these shooters – practiced on-screen to prepare for shooting in real-life.
- The military uses video games to train soldiers to kill, yet we don’t consider “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3″ training for addicted teenage players? A high school boy who plays that game 30 hours per week isn’t training to kill somebody?
- Kids need the outdoors.
A peaceful day: Charlotte Mason and Walter Scott

In other words, sometimes we simply have to do hard things.
- Every year Ambleside Online lists one of these hard books - Parables of Nature, Robin Hood, Pilgrim's Progress, Unknown to History, Kidnapped, A Book of Golden Deeds, Kim. They're all hard. And every time, on the forum and lists, people complain about them. Their kids don't like them. The mums can't read them. They don't understand them. And they leave them out, or substitute them for something easier. And the next year they can't understand the 'hard book' from that year either.
Teacher: One (maddening) day working with the Common Core - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post

Common Core: about as opposite from CM as we can get!
- I was struck by how out of sync the Common Core is with what I consider to be good teaching.
- That teaching is simply the transference of information from one person to another;
  
  * That students should not be trusted to direct any of their own learning;
- The exemplar, in fact, forbids teachers from asking students if they have ever been to a funeral because such questions rely “on individual experience and opinion,” and answering them “will not move students closer to understanding the Gettysburg Address.”
- The exemplar instructs teachers to “avoid giving any background context” because the Common Core’s close reading strategy “forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all.”

The 20 Principles Study: You're Invited

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 23:50:00 +0000

Because I needed something else to do </sarcasm>, I'm putting together a study of Charlotte Mason's 20 principles of education, to be hosted on the Ambleside Online Forum. Actually, this is my way of making my work do double-time. I've been designing this study over the past year for an in-real-life reading group, so this is the online equivalent, but gussied up by time and experience.

Most of you are aware that Charlotte Mason developed a list of 20 guiding principles for education. If you've never read through the list, you can do so easily on the AO website.

We are going to slowly read and chat our way through these principles, one {or two, when applicable} at a time. We'll start on April 29, 2013 and go all the way until December.

If you would like to read and think more in depth about Miss Mason's principles, and chat about it with other women doing the same thing, the first thing you'll need to do is join the Forum {if you haven't already}. From there, you'll find the right section of the forum by going to

CM Study Hall → Charlotte Mason Series → General CM Series Discussion

My plan right now is to post "Assigned Reading" and "Suggested Reading." The "assigned" selections will be things that we should all read, so that we are all {literally} on the same page in our discussion. The "suggested" selections may be quite numerous at times, and are completely optional. This gives all of us enough to have a good discussion, but those of us with time or desire a lot to chew on.

I'll post the principle and readings, and then we will discuss for a couple of weeks before moving on to the next principle. This is not a race to the end.

By the way, most of the selections will be available free online, but I do suggest one book that is not public domain: For the Children's Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macauley. I won't call it "assigned" but it is highly, highly recommended.

Hope you can join us. Remember: the study is not happening here on Afterthoughts, but over at the AO Forum.

Time Out-of-Doors

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 23:45:00 +0000

There are two nature-y aspects of a Charlotte Mason education. One is formal nature study, which should take place weekly {at least}. The other is simply Time In Nature. Historically, my track record is quite poor at both. Last year, I had a bit of a health crisis that kept me from having many adventures, and one of the things I felt guilty about while I was languishing upon my couch was that my children were cooped up inside more than I would have liked.

The Mountain View Trail

What is a hike without lupine?

Yes, they went outside daily. We purposely bought a house with a larger backyard, and filled it with interesting animals and dirt to dig in. But it wasn't the same as going on adventures.

One of my mental goals for the year was to Get Out More. I {mostly} have my stamina back, and I want to make hay while the sun shines, as they say.

halfway there

So this past weekend we made the trek over to Wind Wolves.

And it was beautiful, the perfect morning for hiking, really. We knew it might turn off warm in the afternoon, so we left right after breakfast and milking.

the view from the top

Of course, then we had to stop at the grocery store.

And then the gas station.

And the coffee place.

Ahem.

But still we were there early; we even wore jackets until the hike warmed us up.

the trek back down

I couldn't help but wonder why we don't do this more often.

Promote Your Stuff?

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 22:26:00 +0000

So let's say you started a little side business. Nothing huge, really. Maybe you wrote an ebook {or a physical book}, or you craft cool jewelry, or you create beautiful paintings, or...something. As long as it is something portable {electronically or physically}, we can discuss a little marketing opportunity I have for you.

The 2013 Bakersfield Home Education Conference is a local conference in Bakersfield, CA that my husband and I started with our good friends in 2011. This is our third year, and, personally, I think it keeps getting better.

{Perhaps I'm biased.}

Every year, we offer a prize drawing to our pre-registrants. Everyone who pre-registers by the deadline has their names put into a hat for great prizes.

We've had everything: gift certificates for ice cream sundaes, books, ebooks...last year, Tim Hawkins donated tickets to one of his shows! {That was exciting to announce!} Not only is it a way to motivate people to sign up early, but passing out prizes the day of the conference has consistently been great fun.

So where does the opportunity come in? Well, if you have a product that you think appeals to our attendees, you can contact me to donate one as a prize.

How would this benefit you? In addition to having the satisfaction of knowing that you supported an annual conference still very much in its infancy, you really will get some publicity. The prizes are announced on our website, as well as our Facebook page. This means that even some people who aren't attending the conference will hear about your product. When I announce a prize on our website, I always include a description, a logo or photo, and a link to where people can purchase the item if they like.

If you would like to donate your product, please contact me to get started.

Stupendous Selections on Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 23:31:00 +0000

Afterthoughts: Memory Work Index

I realized that there are certain blogs with memory selections posted, and I visit these blogs whenever I am stumped for memory work ideas. So, I finally put up an index page of our own memory work selections in order to return the courtesy.
Suzy Lee Weiss: To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me - WSJ.com

Ah, the college rat race.
- Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms.
- I also probably should have started a fake charity.
- Because everyone knows that if you don't have anything difficult going on in your own life, you should just hop on a plane so you're able to talk about what other people have to deal with.
Hogwash Alert: “National Review” on Common Core | COMMON CORE

Shock: people paid to praise Common Core...praise Common Core.
- The ironically titled The Truth About Common Core article cannot be taken seriously. It’s written without any links or references for its Common Core-promoting claims, and it’s written by two authors whose employers are largely funded by the main funder of all things Common Core.
- The standards are written behind closed doors in D.C. The standards are copyrighted and are unamendable by locals. There is a 15% cap on adding to them, written into the ESEA Flexibility Waiver Request. And there is no amendment process; thus, no local control.
- If it seems like practically everyone supports Common Core, Gates’ money is why. Bill Gates has said he’s spent $5 BILLION pushing (his version of) education reform.
- Republican Jeb Bush is behind the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a nongovernmental group which pushes Common Core and is, of course, funded by Gates. Republican Rupert Murdoch owns not only Fox News, but also the common core implementation company Wireless Generation that’s creating common core testing technology. Democrat Bob Corcoran, President of GE Foundation (author of cap and trade and carbon footprint taxes to profit GE on green tech) and 49% owner of NBC also bribed the PTA to promote Common Core, and gave an additional $18 million to the states to push common core implementation.
- Pearson’s latest textbooks show extreme environmentalism and a global citizen creating agenda that marginalizes national constitutions and individual rights in favor of global collectivism.
- Classic literature is sacred. Its removal from American schools is an affront to our humanity.
All Hail Maggie Smith | Her.meneutics | Christianitytoday.com

Maggie Smith is amazing!
- Of course, there's a distinction between Maggie Smith the actress, and Lady Grantham the character, but in the public mind, the two have largely become inseparable—all the more so because Smith, herself a British dame, has made a habit of playing such "biddies," as she calls them.
- With her portrayal of the Dowager, she makes old age look classy.
Collection of Sourdough Muffin Recipes

I've been looking for sourdough "quick bread" type recipes. I'm so excited to try these!
- Sourdough muffins, like any quick bread, are reliant not on yeasts for their rise, but on a chemical reaction between alkaline and acidic ingredients.
Health-Food Heresy: When Eating Healthy Becomes Your God by Lindsey Carlson – Health & Beauty

How many times have you seen healthy eating destroy--or at least disrupt--Christian fellowship?
- But if you are living a life consumed by crazed calorie counting, mealtime manipulation, and weigh-in worries, you are most likely staring into the face of your idol.
- Jesus didn’t die for you to be a size two or have low cholesterol, but to forgive your wicked lusting after things of this world.
Bakersfield Home Education Conference: Free Download: 2012 Workshop Session

This post contains a link to my talk from last year's conference. You can download it for free.
- To whet your appetites for this year's conference on July 13, 2013, we'd like to share one of the talks from the 2012 conference.
SpunkyHomeSchool: Meet David Coleman

The more I read about Common Core, the more disturbing I find it. Is Coleman the next John Dewey, in terms of influence? And I mean that in the worst way possible. Dewey was destructive enough.
- David Coleman’s ideas are not just another wonkish trend. They have been adopted by almost every state, and over the next few years, they will substantively change what goes on in many American classrooms. Soon, as Coleman steps into his new position as the head of the College Board, they may also affect who applies to college and how applicants are evaluated. David Coleman’s ideas, for better or worse, are transforming American education as we know it.
- What is tested is what is taught. What is taught, is what is thought. Why parents and publishers are blindly giving up so much to one man's philosophy of education is mind boggling.
Kansas Homeschool Suspends Student over Mohawk | HEDUA BlogHEDUA Blog

Bwaahahahahaha!
- “She went all ‘mother’ on me, and then sent me to the principal’s office.”
Weird Food Allergy Stresses Moms, Baffles Doctors - ABC News

I recently heard about this from someone whose child has something similar. But I don't think it is exactly the same thing. In the coming years I expect doctors and researchers to "discover" many of the allergies we've dealt with that don't fall into neat little diagnostic categories.
- Since he was 18 months old he has to be hospitalized before he can try a new food.
- A non-IgE mediated food allergy like FPIES is especially difficult to diagnose because standard skin and blood testing for specific IgE are routinely negative.
- Her son Landon, now 4, can eat only seven foods, along with elemental formula.

Charlotte Mason and Suggestion

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:01:00 +0000

There are a few words that Miss Mason uses in her volumes that, when I read them, my instincts tell me are not being used in the same way we use them now. Among the words that have puzzled me has been "suggestion." In her fourth principle of education, she writes:

These principles are limited by the respect due to the personality of children, which must not be encroached upon whether by the direct use of fear or love, suggestion or influence, or by undue play upon any one natural desire.

Both suggestion as well as influence have I considered over these years of reading. Influence became more clear when I considered the writing of books like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, which first appeared in 1937, not even 15 years after the publication of Miss Mason's final volume {in which this principle appeared}. Moreover, I read that there was a belief around this time that people had the responsibility to influence those around them.

In spite of this, my understanding remains rather limited and vague.

And so it has been with suggestion. My thought upon my first reading was to question why it would be wrong to suggest something to someone, even to a child?

Well, because perhaps it doesn't mean what I think it means.

I was proofreading the Parent's Review article Morals in the Home, when this jumped out at me:

The analogy between suggestion and instinct he was probably the first to point out. Suggestion resembles instinct because it induces a consciousness of obligation, the feeling in the mind of the patient that he is compelled to do the act suggested. Suggestion in the hypnotic sleep is powerful because the mind is in a state of disaggregation. Education is powerful in the case of the young because the mind is rudimentary."Suggestion is the transformation by which an organism more passive tends to bring itself into harmony with an organism more active; the latter dominates the former and eventually controls its external movements, its volitions, and its internal convictions." It is the application of this notion to morality that makes this volume of unusual professional interest.

Suggestion is an instrument by which the educator will be able to modify instinct of inherited habits.

So first we see that suggestion here means--and very likely means in Miss Mason's principle above--something like hypnotic suggestion rather than that noncommittal sort of suggestion we talk about today. And, like hypnotic suggestion, this sort of suggestion has a force of power far superior to our plain old suggestion in modern culture.

It is interesting to me that the article here, which Miss Mason included in the Parent's Review, seems to be in favor of suggestion, while we know from her principles that she rejected suggestion as an educational tool, way back in her very first volume. The prohibition against suggestion wasn't something she added into her later volumes.

Why would this sort of dissenting opinion be included? Well, I can only say that Miss Mason really did seem to learn from everyone and everything around her. While many would expect a magazine edited by Mason to be guided strictly by her philosophy, I have only read a small portion of the Parents Review article thus far, and yet have seen a much broader variety than I expected--articles in favor of classical schools teaching almost only Greek or Latin, or written by a disciple of Froebel, to name a couple.

But I digress.

In short, I think that we can consider Charlotte Mason's prohibition of suggestion to be a prohibition of a subtle sort of manipulation.

'Suggestion' goes to work more subtly. The teacher has mastered the gamut of motives which play upon human nature and every suggestion is aimed at one or other of these. He may not use the nursery suggestions of lollipops or bogies but he does in reality employ these if expressed in more spiritual values, suggestions subtly applied to the idiosyncrasies of a given child. 'Suggestion' is too subtle to be illustrated with advantage: Dr. Stephen Paget holds that it should be used only as a surgeon uses an anesthetic; but it is an instrument easy to handle, and unconsidered suggestion plays on a child's mind as the winds on a weathercock. {Vol. 6, Chapter 5}

History Through Different Lenses: Comparing Bauer with Foster

noreply@blogger.com (Brandy Vencel) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 22:38:00 +0000

This book didn't honor Commodore Perry at all," he said. If his face was any indication, he was disgusted with what he had just read. "Why not? What's wrong with it?" he asked me. I was trying not to laugh at him because he had almost completely botched the question on Perry in his exams a couple weeks ago, and at the time my suspicion was that it had more to do with attitude than lack of knowledge {suspicion confirmed}, especially as he went through and compared and contrasted, without prompting, Susan Wise Bauer's take with that of Genevieve Foster.

I had noticed this when I did my pre-reading, but I didn't say anything to my student because I'm not one to bias a reading. I disapproved, but Story of the World isn't my favorite anyhow.

"Which one is true?" he prodded me. I had wandered off in thought, and he was bringing me back.

"We-ell," I hesitated. A lot goes into the writing of history. How much should we really get into here? In the end we discussed bias and perspective.

"But which is true?" he asked again, after all of that. He reminded me of what he perceived to be factual contradictions, to say nothing of the tone of Bauer's work, which portrayed Perry in a sort of snide knowing way. In a he-thought-he-was-so-smart-but-the-Japanese-knew-better way. In a looking-down sort of way.

Or, at least, that was the way I took it. Apparently, my student took it in much the same way.

So I told him I'd check up on the factual contradictions--as well as the parts that were obviously left out by Bauer when compared to Foster--and see what I could come up with. I'm no expert. What if Foster embellished? What if what happened really was what Bauer said, in spite of that Bauer tone which irks me every. single. time?

And so I searched the internet, looking for reliable sources.

It helps immensely that Francis Hawk's book is now available on Google Books. Francis Hawk claims in his preparatory notes that all he really did is "compile" information sourced from journals written not just by Commodore Perry, but the other men with him.

Was Commodore Perry an Ignorant Fool?

If I had only read Story of the World, I might have thought him silly, at the very least. For example:

[T]he Americans told the Japanese who tried to board, "We bring a letter from the president of the United States to the Emperor of Japan. But we can only give it to a high official of the Emperor."

The Japanese went back to the shore to talk this over. They could see that the Americans did not understand how Japan was governed. Japan did have an emperor, but although the Japanese believed that the emperor was almost divine, he didn't actually rule in Japan.

Now, nothing said here is untrue, but knowing only this, it gives the impression Perry is going into this situation blind. The beginning of the section discusses why and how the Japanese cut themselves off from the world, but nothing of substance about Perry.

Genevieve Foster, however, tells us:

Long before he started Perry had tried to learn all he could about the mysterious island. He sent to Holland for all available books, pictures and maps of Japan. These he spread out and studied over all of one summer in the library of his country home...

And then later Foster explains why Perry used this tactic:

Perry saw the reason for [why the Dutch had to make their deliveries to the "back door" of Japan]. Japan was a nation with a proud caste system. Tradespeople were considered low class, and foreigners were "scum."...

If, on the contrary, someone of apparently high caste approached Japan with the proud but courteous formality which Japanese could understand, would he not at least receive consideration?

Whether or not Perry understood the relationship between the emperor and the shogun, Perry definitely had more knowledge--as much as could be gained considering Japan was all but closed off from the world--than Bauer gives him credit for.

All of this intrigued me, so I did a little digging. It is obvious from Hawk's Narrative of the Expedition to the China Seas and Japan that Perry had extensive knowledge of the works of Philipp Franz von Siebold, one of the leading Dutch experts on Japan of his time. I read much on this subject that validated Foster's claim that, before undertaking his expedition, Perry spent much time {reports seem to vary from a handful of months to two full years} studying Japan and preparing himself to engage the Japanese culture.

This is why, during Year 5, Term 2, my student and I spent a bit of time comparing Commodore Perry to Lilias Trotter--specifically, how they came to understand the foreign culture they were engaging in order to be more effective in accomplishing their aims.

This sort of cultural understanding is evident in the fact that Perry didn't require the Japanese to sign the English translation version of the treaty:

Perry's letter to the Navy Secretary, also in the holdings of the Archives, offers an explanation: "It will be observed that the practice usually pursued in affixing signatures to treaties was departed from on this occasion, and for reason assigned by the Japanese, that their laws forbade the subjects of the Empire from putting their names to any document written in a foreign language." The missing signature demonstrates that Perry's determination to achieve mission objectives was tempered by a willingness to compromise on issues of custom.

Who Was Toda?

According to Bauer {who refuses to refer to Perry as Commodore}:

[T]he Japanese decided to write a letter assuring Matthew Perry that the governor of a nearby town, a man named Toda, was the emperor's high official. They signed the letter in the emperor's name, and gave it to the Americans. When the Americans saw this forged paper, they agreed to come ashore and give the president's letter to Toda.

So Matthew Perry came ashore with his officers and a military band. The Japanese escorted him into a room hung with purple cloth and gauze curtains, where Toda sat, looking very serious.

[snip]

Toda thought the whole scene was very funny.

Foster, on the other hand, writes:

The Governor would like to see the letter. At sight of the beautiful rosewood box inlaid in gold, his manner changed at once. He could take the matter up with a high Councilor at Yedo, he said...

Three days later he returned and...he said that a meeting had been arranged to take place two days later near Yokohama.

[snip]

Perry walked the length of red carpet and presented to the First Councilor of the Empire the President's letter. With the announcement that he would return in the spring for the answer, the ceremony ended.

I searched and searched. Every original and secondary source I could find--meaning journals from those who were on the expedition, records at the National Archives, books written in the 1800s and early 1900s compiled almost exclusively from journals and records and containing little commentary, agree that Prince Toda of Izu and Prince Ido of Iwami, who received the letter from Commodore Perry, were in high positions of authority. Some sources I read said they were representatives of the Emperor, but most seemed to agree that they represented the Shogun himself.

The only "evidence" I found supporting Bauer's claims was a slew of sarcastic blog posts on websites designating themselves as "anti-imperialist." I'm not saying there isn't any evidence out there, but only that I was unable to find any.

Who Signed the Treaty?

Bauer ends her retelling of events by saying:

When Matthew Perry came back to Japan in 1854, the Japanese agreed to sign a trade treaty with them.

But Foster says:

That year 1858, Ii Naosuke had been appointed Prime Minister of Japan, or Tairo, the highest office under the Shogun and one filled only in a time of national emergency such as this caused by the knocking of the Americans on their door.

Japan was torn into two factions, bitterly opposed. Many government officials wished to continue their old policy of isolation and drive off all foreigners by force. Ii Naosuke, and a smaller group of his countrymen, realizing how strong the foreigners were and how impossible resistance would be, favored signing the treaty of commerce, if necessary.

[snip]

Ii Naosuke, however, felt that it could not be avoided. Therefore, in the face of tremendous opposition, he courageously signed the treaty on July 29, 1858, and so unbolted Japan's door from within.

For that he was called a traitor and a rebel.

Obviously, these things, again, are not directly in conflict {except for the dates, and in this case, Bauer is correct and Foster is incorrect}.

For Bauer, the signing of the treaty is something of an afterthought, whereas with Foster, it is an important part of the story. To some extent, I'd say that, if Foster is correct {and it is important to note that the Encyclopaedia Britannica agrees with her}, it is difficult to justify stating that the "Japanese agreed" to sign the treaty. The Japanese did not agree, which is partly why Naosuke was assassinated just a couple years later.

History Through Different Lenses

This case of contradiction was a wonderful experience for my student. It raised questions that he needed to answer, it gave him a chance to learn that history is written by persons with bias--that all history is written in this way. I'm going to offer him a Kindle copy of Hawk's book, if he wishes to read more about Commodore Perry's adventures...from Commodore Perry himself.

It does concern me, though, that many homeschoolers I have met read one version of history throughout the elementary years. It might be one author or another. Yes, Bauer is very popular, but so are other series. The problem is that they all tend to have a modern slant {harder to identify because it is our own slant, whether we like it or not}, and they all tend to have the same author's slant.

One of the things that I like about Ambleside is that we get a bit of a variety, even though we of course limit ourselves to the "best" available books. But H.E. Marshall, James Marshall, M.B. Synge, Virgil Hillyer, Richard Hannula, Diane Stanley, James Daugherty, Feenie Ziner, Genevieve Foster, Hendrick Van Loon, Natalie Bober, Susan Wise Bauer, George Grant, and H.A. Guerber are some of the authors featured for the first history rotation. Some stories will be read twice, from two different authors, allowing for the sort of "rounding out" you see here in this post.

Reading broadly will protect us from being gullible when it comes our history reading--both in regard to "facts" as well as in regard to bias. Just because Bauer {or Foster!} wrote it in her book, doesn't make it true, and doesn't make it the whole story.

The one who states his case first seems right,
until the other comes and examines him.

--Proverbs 18:17