50th Week

My parents are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary this week (and my mom's birthday is today - apparently she shares this special day with a few others, as a matter of fact my dad was baptized the day my mom was born), and as we all prepare to make our way to their home to celebrate, I thought I'd share a little here.



This is what my dad wrote about the occasion...

Yeah, I was the young, brash, scoundrel who lucked out with the right girl!

Of course over time, I gradually came to realize that this was all really much more blessing than dumb luck, that I "clicked" with this super special girl who became my wife and mother of our 7 beautiful children. Maryanne's deep Catholic faith and love and dedication to our family made all this possible in the eyes of God. And I now more than ever, appreciate the reality of the numerous blessings that our Heavenly Father continues to shower upon our loving and growing family. He has guided us through the trials and tribulations of these past 50 years and has blessed us with twenty six grandchildren (+ 2 more coming) who enjoy the true love and security of their own very special parents.

And so I pray, that I will always appreciate what I have been given with this beautiful wife and beautiful family on this great occasion.

Back to Normal Blogging Next Week (I think)

Right now we're dealing with family photos, chicken pox and lots of expected visitors in preparation for my parents' 50th anniversary on Friday. After that I'll be getting back to more normal blogging and especially curriculum plans.

Our big news this summer is that Ria is jumping from 7th grade to 9th grade. This came about since Ria's friend Gilbertgirl (who's a year older) has a lot of common educational interests with her (like G.K. Chesterton) and her mom and I (very much wanting to foster those interests as well as provide a solid high school education) decided to do some of our lesson planning together. The girls are ecstatic. It turns out that others in our co-op (which includes a whole bunch of going-into-9th grade girls) are also interested and so we came up with the idea of using co-op, in addition to our long-running Latin classes, to provide enrichment learning to support the classes being studied individually by each family - particularly in the areas of science, history, literature and religion. That was difficult to express, so probably even more difficult to understand, so I'll give some examples.

Two of the Moms are going to put some real effort into science. Most of the girls will be studying biology next year - some through their formal homeschool programs, some not. We'll do science experiments every other week in co-op and use the alternate weeks to learn how to do lab reports and discuss results.

My friend Mary Z. (she's my homeschool conference assistant) and I will be coordinating literature and writing (her expertise) and history and religion (definitely my cup of tea) and have group discussions and work on writing together. So these won't be complete classes in themselves, but opportunities for the girls to study some good books together (perhaps only a handful per year) and work on important skills together.

We'll see how it goes. We're pretty excited about it. (I'm calling it a frame curriculum.) Our meetings so far have been amazing. I'll never forget sitting across the table from our two science moms and being grateful to the point of tears to have some support in the science dept. (one of the moms has a degree in nursing, the other in science education) while they felt the exact same way about me working on history and religion (which to me seems completely fun and delightful to start planning). It sure seemed like the Holy Spirit was there with us at the table.

Perhaps sharing our plans here will be helpful to others. I will be posting specifics of the more complete curriculum Ria will be studying with Gilbertgirl this year (which will be, for the most part, the "frame curriculum" filled in with a lot of living books- heavy on history, literature and religion, but substantial in the science and math departments too) as well as details of what we come up with for the frame curriculum. This is very much in the planning stage and is somewhat experimental, so I'll also let you know how it turns out. :)

Bernie's Poem

I am from birds, from Emperor's Kitchen and movies.

I am from a white house with lots of trees; flower gardens and vegetable gardens.

I am from roses and tulips, and from my garden with butterfly bushes, moonflowers, dahlias and hanging plants.

I am from Easter and co-op, Mommy, Daddy, Ria, Gus, Terri, Kate, Frank, Grandma, Grandpa, Grandma, Granddad, Aunt Anne and all my aunts and uncles and cousins and friends.

I am from playing in the sandbox, swinging on the swingset and swimming; from watching movies, playing with dolls and drawing.

I am from St. Charles and Holy Hill; from God and angels and saints.

I'm from Wisconsin; from tortillas with cheese, spaghetti and salmon.

From yelling "chair" at my siblings when I was little because they were fighting over a chair.

I am from pictures at the Art Museum and in photo albums.

Where I'm From...

Ria discovered this fun poetry/form on one of her favorite sites - UK Bookworm (she got hooked on this blog when the bookworm was doing a literary tour of England) - and I thought I'd give it a try too. Looks like I finished mine first. Here is the template the bookworm referenced and which we used, but some of it got a little lost in the cutting and pasting. (after I finished mine, Ria said "What's 'sensory detail'?" Me: "Where was that?") Anyway...

I am from bag lunches, from Cheerios and school uniforms.

I am from quiet suburbs that overgrew fertile orchards.

I am from the morning glory, the daisy; lemon bush and orange tree and a piece of garden all my own.

I am from taffy pull parties and gingerbread houses at Christmas, from my parents and six siblings and lots of laughter, noise and love.

I am from "the latest" computers and thrift-store clothes and singing around the fireplace when the power went out.

From listening to my mom read Narnia and believing I could do anything if I worked hard and put my mind to it.

I am from the Catholic Church for generations and from far-off lands.

I'm from San Francisco, Canada, Ireland, Luxemburg and the Azores; spaghetti, linguica and sourdough bread.

From a third order Carmelite Portuguese whaler, from an Irish noblewoman who married a blacksmith and from her great-grandson who never made it to New Zealand because he met my grandmother while stuck in San Francisco with the flu.

I am from hundreds and hundreds of pictures and slides squirreled in the upper shelves of my bedroom closet; glimpses of the past treasured more each day as my children begin to see where they're from.

Diane Ravitch on Literature

I've been slowly making my way through Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch for many months. It's important, worthwhile, eye-opening and even good for the occasional laugh (certainly many gasps of astonishment). But this paragraph is simply delightful to read, particularly coming from a modern day teacher and thinker...

I began this quest with a strong belief that schools are supposed to lay a foundation for love of literature by exposing children incrementally, based on age appropriateness, to the best writings of our common language and, to the extent possible, to the best writings from other cultures. There are so many superb novels, short stories, poems, plays, and essays to choose from that it is impossible for any student to read them all. But this fact makes it all the more important that teachers make the effort to identify the writers and works that will broaden their students' horizons beyond their own immediate circumstances and reveal to them a world of meanings far beyond their own experiences. Great literature is "relevant" not because it echoes the students' race, gender, or social circumstances, but because it speaks directly to the reader across times and cultures. A child who is suffering because of a death in the family is likely to gain more comfort from reading a poem by John Donne or Ben Jonson or Gerard Manley Hopkins than from reading banal teen fiction about a death in the family.

Without a Net

One tricky thing about being a reviewer (and every parent is a reviewer to some extent) is that you can't let yourself get too comfortable with things like books, movies or the Internet. I don't use a filter for the Internet. The primary reason is that I don't want to inadvertently send people to something that looks clean to me but that hides something nefarious. It also gives me a sense of what constitutes safe behavior for avoiding problematic sites and such. There are lots of movies I won't watch, but when I watch a movie, I watch the whole thing to be reasonably sure I can give people an accurate picture of the value of the movie and who it might be appropriate for.

Experience has taught me a few lessons in this regard. Once I bought a movie I enjoyed in high school on TV and thought my young children would enjoy but was shocked to find out how much language and suggestive scenes had been edited out for TV. I sent some of my Latin students to a chat site where we could conduct some online classes and didn't realize until later that my pop-up ads blocker made me unaware of some underwear ads that were a significant embarassment to some of the teenage boys in our class. These weren't huge problems, but they made me more aware of the issues involved in keeping children safe.

Don't get me wrong, I think filters can be a great thing and some movies are quite a bit better after editing, but basically there's no substitute for parental vigilance and involvement. We can't afford to be clueless regarding the dangers of the world and the issues our children will face as they grow older. Sometimes this involves going a little outside of our comfort zone in order to keep informed.

I finished two Chesterton books today...

You don't know how amazing this is for me, who tends to think of myself as someone who has difficulty finishing books; someone who had difficulty talking much in my college classes (seminar style) and got completely lost in Senior Philosophy.

Anyway, I finished reading The Man Who Was Thursday aloud to Ria and Gus this afternoon. This was much more engaging and engrossing than I ever expected. Certainly it will be worth additional re-reads in the future (and I should say that at this point in my life, I seldom have the desire to read a book twice). This experience also reminds me of how helpful reading stories aloud can be to the reader and the listener(s). It often brings out more meaning (I think of this especially with Shakespeare which we've read as a group on occasion) and makes things more interesting as well as promoting conversation afterwards.

The other book I finished (these things happen when you end up reading three Chestertoon books at once)is Orthodoxy. These are hard books to review and sum up, though I will make an attempt to do so at some point. For now, I'll take the easy way out and share a quite lengthy quote (part of which I quoted in a post late last year after discovering it on another homeschool mom's website):

I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable about everything - they were quite jolly about everything else. I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace about everything - they were at war about everything else. But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe.

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies, while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down in a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heaven is too loud for us to hear.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this resepct, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

On a tangentially related topic - you know your keyboard is going when the word "earth" consistently comes out "ear".

Fun with Blog Creation

Ria and I really had a great time with Gilbertgirl and Margaret yesterday (two of my Latin students, by the way), helping them set up their blogs and come up with titles. They had their screen names picked out already, but margaret had a blog title in need of a url and gilbertgirl had a url in need of a blog title. Through the use of a Latin dictionary, Henle's grammar, a Thesaurus and an assortment of other books with interesting words (such as Fr. Brown and Grimm's Fairy Tales) we had a major brain-storming session, complete with lots and lots of laughter.

Margaret was up first with a blog title "I Came, I Saw, I Contemplated" ready. The Latin dictionary naturally seemed like a good place to start to come up with a fairly simple url. We tried contemplo and contemplatio, but they were already taken on blogger. Finally the Latin grammar book came out to attempt an appropriate version of one of the verbs. Videam, meaning "that I may see" was quickly proclaimed the winner.

Gilbertgirl was quite a bit trickier. Just to give you an idea of the flow of conversation, she happened to mention when we first got there that she had narrowed down her choice of confirmation saint names to twenty. For a blog title, I think she wanted something flamboyant without being ostentatious, perhaps something felicitious but not too flippant. Well, in any case, she loves to use a lot of big words. :) We started throwing all kinds of crazy words around (mostly from the thesaurus) and were amused by how much we all enjoyed the sound of certain words - paradox, fallacy, querrelous, raze and lots, lots more. We even came up with a few fun blog titles that wouldn't be quite right for her - my personal favorite was "Domestic Paradox". She almost decided on "Chestertonian Propaganda", but when she came back in from sharing that one with her mom (who watching the other kids from both families by the pool), we had a whole bunch of new ideas. Finally, she picked out three and pulled one out of a symbolic hat and ended up pulling out the favorite of the three other schemers, if not her own; Catastrophic Pontifications. To know Gilbertgirl is to know that this fits her to a "T".

Summertime Fun

Terri and Bernie were walking by my desk after coming in from the back yard, paper cups and plastic spoons in hand (this might be significant, I'm not quite sure) when Terri announced, "Mommy, we're going to try to teach Kate some Math."

Comment Complications

My sincere apoligies for blowing away all of the comments one last time (I lost all my comments when I switched to Haloscan last fall). I finally had enough of Haloscan (ads, limitations in editing, etc.) so I switched back to the normal blogger comment options which have worked well on the other blogs I've worked with. I won't be making any more changes. This does mean, by the way, that all of my old comments from before the original swich have returned. Hurray!