Monthly Archives: March 2006

Science

Diseased Rabbit Trail

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Jane has a request. She read an article about the British doctor who tracked down the source of a cholera infection in London in 1840. This has sparked her interest in (and I quote) “germs, bacteria, diseases, microbes, and things I can watch wiggle under a microscope.” We have a couple of books on Louis Pasteur somewhere around the house, but before I launch a library and Google search I thought I’d ask the question here. Got any favorite bacteria-themed resources?

A kind neighbor surprised us with dinner the other day and mentioned that she’d been running flu tests at the pediatric clinic where she works. Jane’s eyes bugged out with awe and longing. Some people, you could see her thinking, have all the luck.

Ah, disease…exactly the sort of soft and snuggly unit study a nesting mama yearns to arrange in the final days before the baby arrives.

Books

Books to Read (Again?) Before You Die

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British librarians recently named a list of thirty books all adults should read before they die.

Here’s the list. I’ve read the titles in bold.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D’urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

Like Ms. Mental Multivitamin, to whom I tip my hat for the link, I find several of the choices to be puzzling. I loved The Time-Traveler’s Wife but I don’t think I’d put it in the “read before you die” category. Same for Life of Pi. I’d have picked A Tale of Two Cities over Great Expectations. And where is Toni Morrison on the list? Or Faulkner and Wharton? Or Fred Chappell? Well, it is a British librarians’ list, I suppose.

This list also put me in mind of a post I read a while back: How long does a book stay read? After perusing a different list of books, the author reflected:

Looking down the list, mentally adding up the number I’ve read, I came to several, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, to name but three, that I know I read as a teenager. I remember the experience of reading the book, the fact of reading the book, and in the case of A Tale of Two Cities I still have the exact copy of the book I read, but although I remember all that, I don’t know that I really retain much of the book itself twenty odd years later. I know the story lines and names of some of the characters in each of the three I’ve named because they are themselves well known, and have passed into the wider common culture outside the novel itself. But I’m reasonably confident that if I went back and re-read them I would find the books themselves almost unrecognisable.

I would have to say the same for several of the titles on the list above. As a matter of fact, I too reread Gatsby not long ago, for the first time in almost twenty years. I might as well have been reading for the first time a book I’d only heard vague hints about. The language, the richness of it, was wholly new. I had no memory of tasting those phrases and images before. It was like trying some kind of food, like chocolate or lobster, for the first time. No matter what one has heard other people say about it, the exact flavor is indescribable because it is unique. It, in fact, forms a basis of comparison for other foods. I could say that some other book has a Gatsby-like quality, but I can’t say Gatsby tastes like anything else I’ve ever tasted before.

I once ate a meal in an Afghan restaurant on the Upper East Side, a rice dish flavored with lemon, saffron, other spices unrecognizable to my suburban-America-trained palate, and, most shocking to my taste buds, rose petals. I can’t say I liked it exactly, but I was compelled to keep tasting, turning small bites over in my mouth in an attempt to understand and savor the strange flavors.

Last week I reread a Faulkner novel I hadn’t picked up since high school. Reading As I Lay Dying was like tasting that rose-petal and saffron dish, each word a grain of rice, complex and savory with an uncomfortable assault of flavors. I didn’t enjoy the meal—it was too rich, too much, too suffused with sorrow and pain—but I could not stop eating until I was done, and I felt awed and nourished by it afterward. I could feel the novel becoming a part of me, altering me, just as if one could actually feel food being broken down into its elements and absorbed into one’s body at a cellular level.

I know this was not the experience I had reading it in high school. This was a book that did not “stay read” for me. Nor was Gatsby. There are many others. It’s been over twenty years since I read Tess in 11th grade, though I did go on a Hardy jag shortly after college. I skipped Tess in that spree because I’d already read it. Now I remember the bones of the plot and a pervasive sadness. That’s all. I couldn’t speak about it with any astuteness nowadays; I’d have to reread it. And if I hadn’t read Winnie the Pooh as an adult, I’d have missed out on half its charm.

I’ll have to think about what I read in high school that stayed read. Some Flannery O’Connor short stories come to mind. Pygmalion. Midsummer Night’s Dream. I do think The Grapes of Wrath has stayed read for me, but not Great Expectations (which I yawned through in 10th grade, and am currently reading to Jane and delighting in every word) or (shudder) Billy Budd.

Clippings

He Keeps Waking Up Early

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Wonderboy, that is. He has ‘surped my morning blog time, but that’s quite all right, because he only has a week or two left to be the baby of this family, and the extra cuddle time is a treat for both of us.

Commencing the cuddles at 5 a.m. is perhaps the teeniest bit excessive…(yawn)…

Anyway, he’s been in my lap for over an hour, and the other kids will be down any minute. I’ll post later, but for now, here are some links that caught my eye—

Anastasia Suen reports on trends in children’s books.

Astronomy picture of the day. (HT: Daryl.)

Florida is considering a move to require high-school freshman to declare a major, a notion that many of us find ludicrous.

Chicken Spaghetti profiles dragon books.

Book Moot has some thoughts about a San Antonio school superintendent’s decision to disallow a school-wide reading of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Becky features books about grammar. (UPDATE: broken link fixed!) Karen Edmisten has thoughts of her own about the benefits of modeling proper grammar. (Love that Ramona!)

While you’re at Karen’s site, don’t miss her posts on how you are what you read.

Current Affairs

More on that Banned Books Issue

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Remember that board of trustees that scratched a bunch of books from a to-purchase list drawn up by a team of parents and teachers?

Turns out the trustees hadn’t read the books they axed.

“When it came time to say which were acceptable and which ones weren’t, they picked a bloc of books that had Clifford and Disney, that they really had no problem with, but they were in the same group that they did have concerns about,” trustee Maurice Kunkel said.

Now that is something that really, really gets my goat: people who make judgments about books without having read them—that is, judgments that affect whether other people can or will read the books in question. Obviously, we all make private judgments every time we decide whether to read or not to read a particular book. But those who make public judgments, those affecting policy decisions or reader opinion, have a responsibility to make informed decisions.

Camille has more. So does Becky.

(I do still see a difference between not buying and banning. But this board of trustees had no business overriding parent/teacher choices without even troubling themselves to read the books in question.)

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Methods of Home Education

Home Education: Delicious and Nutritious

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Homeschoolers talk a lot about the reactions and comments they get (so often negative) from people who don’t know much about homeschooling. Nearly everyone has encountered a critic in the extended family, a naysayer in the neighborhood, a cross-examiner in the grocery store. Then there are the articles and editorials, a handful every week, in which some “expert” wags a warning finger about the disadvantages of home education.

This fascinates me. Ten years ago, when we decided to tread this path, people’s negative reactions often upset me. Now I am simply amused and somewhat perplexed. It puts me in mind of the stern admonishments I used to get from the little old ladies in my Queens neighborhood who were appalled that I wore baby Jane in a sling. “It’s not good for her to be squished up like that!” they would scold. “She can’t be comfortable!” And I’d look down at my contentedly snoozing child and have to stifle a laugh. Babies are really, really good at letting you know when they’re uncomfortable. Discomfort generally evokes a different reaction than the blissful slumber Jane slipped into when I walked around the neighborhood wearing her in that sling.

At first the old ladies’ disapproval bothered me, but eventually I decided it was an interference borne of good intentions. They genuinely cared about the well-being of every random baby on the street, including mine.

And over the years I’ve decided that it’s that same genuine concern that prompts a lot of the negative responses people have about homeschooling. I just wish these folks would stop and think about what is REALLY bothering them, what their concerns really are. Usually, their objections are based on assumptions they have never seriously analyzed.

Like this one. If I had a nickel for every time someone has said to me, “But you’re not a scientist. How are you going to teach them biology, chemistry, trigonometry?” I could pay my mortgage and have change left over. I always answer, quite seriously, “Well, I took those classes in high school. Didn’t you?”

“Of course,” the skeptic will say, “but it’s not like I REMEMBER any of it.”

This cracks me up. Sometimes I’ll say, if I’m feeling snarky, “Then surely I can do a better job than your teacher did!”

But I’m not really slamming the teachers. I’m slamming the skeptic’s ill-considered argument. You can have the best teacher in the world, but if you don’t have a reason to use the knowledge, ten or twenty years later you’re probably going to have forgotten it. Since none of us can predict exactly WHAT knowledge our children will need in their lives to come, many homeschoolers approach education not from the perspective of “What do our children need to know?” but rather “How can we help our children retain the love of learning they were born
with?” There’s a reason that Yeats quote about education being “not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire” is so popular with the homeschool crowd.

The skeptic’s question presumes I’m going to be teaching in the textbook-and-test style that has been deemed most efficient for classrooms full of many students at various ability levels. I think most people who come at homeschoolers with the “are you qualified” argument are imagining a scenario in which Person With Knowledge imparts said knowledge to Student Without Knowledge (Yet). And that’s just so different from how home education really seems to work—no matter what method, philosophy, or curriculum is applied. We’re working one-on-one—an unbeatable student/teacher ratio—with a teacher who knows the student intimately, knows his interests, abilities, moods, sense of humor, learning style, sleep patterns, and diet, a teacher who has the strongest possible attachment to the student. This creates a whole different kind of learning environment. School vs. homeschool becomes apples vs. oranges. They are such very different experiences that it becomes nearly impossible to compare them. But I think that when the skeptic says, “Are you qualified to teach subject x,” he’s looking at my orange and thinking what a misshapen apple it is.

Rarely in these encounters is there an opportunity to explain in glorious depth what home education is REALLY like: the freedom to explore, the excitement of following rabbit trails, the lack of testing or administrative pressure, the absence of certain social pressures, the luxury of time in which to immerse in a subject, the spontaneity, the opportunities for hands-on learning, the lightheartedness. It’s a really delicious orange, see. But if you’re expecting it to taste like apple, then of course you’re going to look askance at it.

Other critics will allow for the academic advantages of a low student/teacher ratio. After all, there are all those statistics about high test scores among homeschooled students, all those geography and spelling bee winners, all those dazzling science fair projects. “But,” comes the objection—that persistent, prevalent, popular “disadvantage” you see in almost every single editorial about home education—”what about socialization?”

Honestly, I’m amazed that people are still beating this particular dead horse. Homeschoolers packed it off to the glue factory a long time ago. (That’s how we stick together all those sugar cubes for our model Egyptian pyramids.)

When I hear this question, I always want to ask right back, “What exactly do you MEAN by socialization?” Because I don’t think most people who toss the word around are really thinking about what they do mean by it.

Do they mean, “How will your kids learn to get along with other people if they’re holed up in your house with only YOU all the time?” Because if that’s their question, they’re leaping to the assumption that most homeschooled children ARE “holed up at home” all the time. I have yet to meet one family for whom this is the case—and between real life and online, I’ve met thousands of homeschooling families. The person who harbors this concern could lay his fears to rest by doing a quick bit of investigation. Homeschooling blogs, websites, books, and magazines are jam-packed with examples of kids getting out in the world and encountering other people in all sorts of situations: co-ops, clubs, sports teams, orchestras, drama groups, church groups, animal shelters, internships, apprenticeships, gym classes, volunteer groups, museums, nursing homes, playgroups, and on and on and on. We can hardly walk for tripping over opportunities for social interaction, both in peer groups and mixed-age groups. Two minutes of conversation with my kids, and the person who was worried they were stuck with just MY company all day, poor things, can breathe a sigh of relief. Good luck catching my kids to ask them the question, though, because they’re out playing with the neighborhood schoolchildren who flock to our yard every afternoon. (The neighbor kids must not realize how unsocialized my children are.)

But maybe the Socialization Worrier meant something else. Maybe she meant, “See, I know this family who homeschools, and their kids are just plain weird/socially awkward/obnoxious/wild/[insert unpleasant adjective of choice].”

To which I must respond: And you’re saying that there are no weird/socially awkward/obnoxious/wild/etc. kids in schools? Because, um, I beg to differ. They were there when I was in school, and I know they’re there now because I hear about them (or read about them in the news) all the time. Some of the weird ones—the nerdy guys in the computer club—grew up to become multimillionaires (and usually really nice people—but then, they were nice all along, just weird). Some of the obnoxious ones now draw huge crowds at the comedy club. Others are in jail.

Maybe, dear critic, that family you know does have some really weird kids, total Napoleon Dynamite types. Are you saying those kids would be better off in a school situation, where their awkwardness will be rubbed in their faces all day long? As for the obnoxious/wild/rowdy/ hooligan kids—are you saying you’d PREFER to have them in your kid’s classroom, causing disruptions? Do you really think they’d be less obnoxious in a school setting?

That’s what I’d like to ask the “I know a homeschooling family and I don’t like them” skeptics. Because I don’t believe that if they really thought the matter through, they would believe that the problem with those kids would have been avoided by “socialization” in a school setting. The obnoxious kids would almost certainly be just as obnoxious (what our skeptic is really objecting to is probably a parenting issue, not an educational one), and the weird kids would be just as weird and probably a whole lot more miserable. After all, “weird” in this context just means “different,” doesn’t it? Kids who just don’t fit in? How many times have we seen the school misfit blossom and thrive as soon as he finishes school or college and is finally freed of the pressure to squeeze into a mold that doesn’t fit him? Heck, how many of us experienced this ourselves?

Sometimes people say, “Look, everyone has to learn to deal with unpleasant people sometime. One of the things you learn in school is how to put up with difficult personalities.” To which I am tempted to respond, “And you think my kids aren’t learning that at home? Have you met my husband?”

KIDDING, honey! But really. Does anyone truly believe that home educated children are growing up completely free from exposure to “unpleasant people”? Because if there are kids like this, I’d love to know where they live so I can move there too.

The “you might as well get used to putting up with bad stuff now” argument is perhaps the weakest homeschooling criticism there is. I don’t think anyone who utters it really means it, not REALLY, not for their own kids. No one wants his child bullied. No mother tucks a lunch in her son’s backpack, zips up his windbreaker, and thinks, “I hope he gets picked on today because that’ll make it easier for him to put up with jerks in the office he’ll work in someday.” No father watches his daughter climb on the bus and hopes she’ll be called names all the way to school in order to accustom her to receiving verbal abuse so that it won’t come as such a shock when her future husband inflicts it upon her later in life.

Mind you, I’m not saying that every kid who goes to school will be bullied or abused (or that no homeschooler ever will). I’m not saying anything about school at all—I’m just saying that the “learning to deal with unpleasant people” argument against homeschooling doesn’t hold water.

As for “learning to deal with unpleasant experiences“—surely life outside school affords plenty of practice at that, whether we want it or not? The dentist’s office, the doctor’s office, the death of a pet, the stomach flu…Again, I don’t believe any parent sends a child off to school actually hoping he’ll have an unpleasant experience that day in order to toughen him up for future adversity. And I don’t think the people who offer this glib statement as a criticism of home education are really thinking about what they’re saying.

What else do people mean by socialization? I’ve actually heard some people say, “How will homeschooled kids learn how to stand in line and take turns?” That one is my absolute favorite. Um, ever been to the post office? The grocery store? Or, gee, how about the line we stand in for Holy Communion every Sunday at Mass? I have to say, despite the lack of institutional training, my kids have picked up that skill just fine. As for taking turns, well: one mom, four kids—yup, plenty of turn-taking opportunities here. Then there’s the These comments are (extreme) examples of the unexamined prejudices I’m talking about. Caveat: I do believe Michelle Malkin’s remarks about liberals in this post and others are every bit as uncharitable as the comments to which she is objecting.

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Fun Learning Stuff

By the Way

The other day, Angela (Mother Crone) asked for books and resources about Scotland to go along with my Martha books. I’m working on that post, Angela, and will put it up as soon as I get all the links ready. Didn’t want you to think I’d missed the request! I have a long list of titles and I’m delighted to share it. Thanks for your interest!