Reading life review: March

■ The Questing Knights of the Faerie Queen (Geraldine McCaughrean)
Classic. A competent retelling of Edmund Spenser's epic poem. We loved it; and, no, you're never too old for illustrations in your text.

■ The Hole We're In (Gabrielle Zevin)
Fiction. In 2008, I read Zevin's Elsewhere, a YA meditation on the afterlife. It was all right. Her most recent novel dispenses with fantasy elements and examines a decidedly adult issue: personal financial debt. My verdict? Don't miss this one.

■ The Bronze Bow (Elizabeth George Speare)
Newbery Award Winner. With the Misses.

■ The Snow Goose (Paul Gallico)
YA fiction. Aloud. Angela Barrett's lovely illustrations will confuse some readers -- they will think it is a picture book, a child's story. It is not. The lyrical prose and the deeply felt story are meant for adults, young and old. Beautiful, beautiful.

■ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows)
Fiction. Oh, how I resisted, dismissed, and denied this book! I finally succumbed because I remembered that Girl Detective (who had also resisted, dismissed, and denied it) mentioned it in the same sentence as Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road -- without guffawing. I share her conclusion: "more than a mere confection." Recommended.

■ I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President (Josh Lieb)
YA fiction, audiobook. Underscored our at-home artistic pursuits during the last two weeks of the month. Lightweight entertainment.

■ The Secret Life of the Dyslexic Child (Robert Frank)
Education. In a word, excellent.

■ William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-200
Photography, essays. Brilliant complement to our recent trip to the Art Institute to see the exhibit of the same title.

■ The Passenger Pigeon (A.W. Schorger)
Nature. From the book description: "Through painstaking research, [Schorger] examined every aspect of the species -- behavioral characteristics, feeding methods, traveling and roosting habits, nesting – and the various stages of the species encounter with man, from utilization by the Native American to extinction at the hands of white settlers."

On the nightstand

■ My Life in France (Julia Child)

■ The Snow Goose (Paul Gallico)

■ The Passenger Pigeon (A.W. Schorger)

■ Critical Thinking: Book One (Anita Harnadek)

Not pictured
I'm nearly finished with An Abundance of Katherines (John Green), which I finally found in a bag I had been toting back and forth to the pool, and I'm a few pages into Alan's War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope (Emmanuel Guibert), which Girl Detective recommended to me.

"I read novels in order to indulge in a concentrated and directed sort of inner activity that is not available in most of my daily transactions."

From "Reading in a Digital Age" (The American Scholar, Spring 2010):

Metaphor, the poet, imagination. The whole deeper part of the subject comes into view. What is, for me, behind this sputtering, is my longstanding conviction that imagination—not just the faculty, but what might be called the whole party of the imagination—is endangered, is shrinking faster than Balzac’s wild ass’s skin, which diminished every time its owner made a wish. Imagination, the one feature that connects us with the deeper sources and possibilities of being, thins out every time another digital prosthesis appears and puts another layer of sheathing between ourselves and the essential givens of our existence, making it just that much harder for us to grasp ourselves as part of an ancient continuum. Each time we get another false inkling of agency, another taste of pseudopower.

"Contrary to a widespread caricature...

... it emerges that most philosophers do not go around doubting the existence of physical objects (and thus colliding with them)."

From "What Do Philosophers Believe?" (More Intelligent Life, Spring 2010):

Some 82% of the respondents accept or are inclined towards “non-sceptical realism” about the external world, which means they believe both that physical objects exist independently of the minds that perceive them, and that we can be said to know of their existence. Some 4.8%, though, are inclined to deny that we have certain knowledge of the existence of physical objects, and 4.2% accept or lean towards “idealism”, which is the theory that matter somehow depends on mind. As for the status of so-called “abstract” objects, such as numbers, the most popular view (scoring 39%, narrowly ahead of its closest rival) is “Platonism”, according to which abstract objects have a real existence independently of our minds.

This song just makes me happy. How 'bout you?

"Winning is an attitude."

Earlier this month, Miss M-mv(i) received the [insert memorial name here] Award. Given at the conclusion of both the winter and summer seasons, the award celebrates the swimmer who sets an excellent example of sportsmanship and can-do spirit for the rest of the team. (Neat side note: It's the same award her brother received in his first season with the team.)

As you can see, she was both stunned and delighted by the honor. And we were delighted for her.

She and her sister had an excellent season, and both made the conference team: Miss M-mv(ii) as an alternate to the Girls 11-12 squad; Miss M-mv(i) as one of the two 13-14 girls from our team swimming in the 100 Free. She was seeded sixth and took fourth, improving her best time by .25 seconds.

Good stuff.

Some of the best stuff, though, happened on the deck and behind the scenes, including the grace and style they model -- thanking the timers, for example; congratulating competitors; extending their hands to swimmers climbing out of the pool; and so on.

Prior to the end-of-season celebration, when we speculated on the possible winners of the [insert memorial name here] Award, Miss M-mv(ii) enthusiastically maintained that Miss M-mv(i) most certainly deserved it -- especially considering her excellent work ethic at practice. Since the head coach had already advised me that Miss M-mv(i) would be receiving the award, it was a parental delight to know that her sister would so thoroughly support her.

On receiving the award, Miss M-mv(i) thanked the coaches profusely, and then turned and said, "Mom! You're the best secret-keeper... EVER! And [Miss M-mv(ii)]? Thanks for rooting for me!"

As I said, some of the best stuff.

But the truly wonderful stuff? Right this minute? The idyllic interlude between the end of winter season (early March) and the beginning of summer stroke clinic (early May).

Ahhhhhh. Bliss.

Sign me chlorine-free in the little house in the tiny woods on the prairie -- and lovin' it.

Still more artistic pursuits

Our class in charcoal techniques ended this week. The instructor brought in a number of "inspiration images" -- photos and calendars and clips from magazines -- that, as she put, "Said, 'You!'" meaning her students. She had specific suggestions for each of us, and, yes, the Misses and I received several birds.

I spent the first part of the class laboring over a charcoal and red crayon rendering of a puffin that just. wasn't. working. (The Misses, of course, never seem to have that problem.) And then I decided to give the ink a whirl. As I mentioned last time, the instructor wanted to "shake things up" by introducing another medium. I liked it. A lot.

In fact, I've thoroughly enjoyed all of the art courses we've taken. The Misses and I are greatly looking forward to further exploration on our own.

Some of our most recent work follows.

John Polkinghorne: "I call myself a bottom-up thinker."

Quantum physics shows, I think, that physics has not proved the closure of the world in terms of its own laws and equations. Physics can’t tell us that the exchange of energy between bits and pieces is the only thing that is going on in the world. Quantum theory, and in a different way chaos theory, have a more subtle picture of the world. If the world were simply mechanical, as people thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it would just be a gigantic piece of cosmic clockwork, and its creator would be an unseen cosmic clockmaker. That’s the creator who just makes the clock and lets it tick away. Quantum theory is something more subtle than that. We can believe a world in which we ourselves interact — we’re not clockwork at all — and we can believe in a world in which God interacts. We can believe in a God who doesn’t just sit and wait for it to happen but is involved in the unfolding of creation.

Read the complete interview here.

"...I want my daughter to be challenged and inspired, but not overworked and stressed out....

There’s plenty of time for that. It need not be now." Read the complete NYT blog entry here.

Challenged and inspired, but not overworked and stressed out.

Wow. That is precisely the balance that (we hope) defines the family-centered learning project (FCLP). In fact, now that one of our students is out on his own, we have begun (cautiously) to believe that the FCLP might actually be a successful endeavor -- as in, We graduated one class; we can certainly graduate two more. Right? Right!

But what is success?

Reading between the lines of her mother's blog post, I surmise that Nicole may think success is earning a thick envelope from the "right" college. It follows, then, that she and her mother would probably not view the FCLP's (comparatively speaking) low-key pursuit of interests, passions, and excellence as an avenue to success.

I was going to say that there are many ways to define "success," but then I had to laugh. Isn't that just what someone whose child isn't attending the "right" college would say? Heh, heh, heh. How 'bout this? For some, success will be measured by admission to this or that college. For others, success will be measured by income potential. For still others, awards, advanced degrees, and certain career paths.

And for still others? Success may be measured using tools and charts few families consult any more.

More on that another time. Until then, my daughters -- challenged and inspired, but not overworked and stressed out.

Look: My own personal "cake wreck."

It sure was the talk of the party, I'll tell you. Heh, heh, heh.

And Theater of the Absurd had nothing on the conversation I had with the, erm, cake decorator.

ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go. They do not move. *

:: ::

OLD GENTLEMAN: So then logically speaking, my dog must be a cat?
LOGICIAN: Logically, yes. But the contrary is also true. **

:: ::

MRS. M-MV: What does that say, exactly?
CAKE DECORATOR: What you said: Congratulations.
MRS. M-MV: No. No, it doesn't. It's missing an A... and an L... and....
CAKE DECORATOR: No. I just do my Rs differently.

Cue theme music from "The Twilight Zone."

They offered to fix it, but in my (overactive, occasionally paranoid) mind's eye, all I could see was a big green smear and gobs of spit on an otherwise tasty cake. And, as I said, it would be the talk of the party, right? So I insisted on taking it as it was, which, you'd think would have earned me a modest discount. But, no. This cake wreck came at full price.

Live and learn, people. Live and learn.



* From Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett)
** From The Rhinoceros (Eugene Ionesco)

Butterfly in the sky...

On 9.06.2009, I blogged about the demise of "Reading Rainbow." Turns out that rumors of its death may have been exaggerated -- at least that is what Levar Burton is Tweeting.

"This decentering of the human can become a devaluing of the human...."

From "The Thrill of Science, Tamed by Agendas" (NYT, March 21):

Of course, the insignificance of human existence is one of the fearsome lessons of modern science. But when we are young, we learn differently. We begin by learning to value our own understanding and only gradually come to recognize its limits. We begin by making sense of the world before we see how much lies beyond sense. The process doesn’t work well in the other direction: we can be left mystified by the world and lose respect for the human.

Something like this has started to happen in some museums. This decentering of the human can become a devaluing of the human; the museum may even begin to see human frailties as a great flaw in the cosmic order that must be repaired. So this new variety of science museum must not just display or explain. It must be relevant, useful, practical, critical — something that helps with fund-raising as well.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Chapbook entry

Little Bee (Chris Cleave)

p. 78
Everything was happiness and singing when I was a little girl. There was plenty of time for it. We did not have hurry. We did not have electricity or fresh water or sadness either, because none of these had been connected to our village yet.

[...]

This is this is the trouble with all happiness -- all of it is built on top of something that men want.

p. 133
But now that I was hiding in the jungle behind the beach I wished I had never fought with my sister. Nkiruka loved music and now I saw that she was right because life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.

p. 168
Serious times. Once they have rolled in, they hang over you like low cumulus.

[...]

I think I must have been depressed too, the whole time. You travel here and you travel there, trying to get out from under the cloud, and nothing works, and then one day you realize you've been carrying the weather around with you.

An embarrassment of riches

Thank you, Mr. M-mv!

Click image to enlarge.

I knew I loved her!

Apparently, Joyce Carol Oates gets her best ideas while vacuuming. Oh, honey! I do, too! I do, too.

From "Joyce Carol Oates: Princeton's 'dark lady of fiction' comes shining" (The Star Ledger, March 15):

Her home is filled with windows, sumptuous couches and colorful contemporary art, including ethereal glass boxes made by her good friend Gloria Vanderbilt. And despite the hours she spends at her desk, she also cooks and cleans. She says she often has to bribe herself to write — dangling an hour or two of gardening as her reward — and gets her best ideas while vacuuming.

Related entry: "Joyce Carol Oates: (Woman) Writer."

"YOU: The Experience" at the Museum of Science and Industry

If you were wondering, yes, it's worth the price of admission. (Related article here.) And we really enjoyed the Omnimax presentation of The Human Body, which I first saw with Master years ago.

It was beautiful in Chicago today, so we darted outside for a few photographs.

Just look at those smiles. And to think: These pics were taken before we spent two hours at Powell's. Go figure.

Heh, heh, heh.

Get "real."

Isn’t it simply a given that some aspects of parenting – and, by extension, home education – are more difficult than others? Isn’t it a given that some ages and stages are more demanding than others? That some things work and others just... don’t? If you agree, then tell me: Why is it considered more “real” to focus on the difficulty than to focus on the good stuff? I mean, I can’t be the only one who finds it more tiring (and tiresome) to read one narrative after another of the “Life [parenting, marriage, homeschooling, friendship, relatives, etc.] is hard” variety than to read about the triumphs, celebrations, tender moments, and, yes, fun.

The appeal to be “real” is a regular refrain in the virtual homeschooling community (blogs, message boards, forums, etc.). Hey, what about a clamor for posters or bloggers who celebrate their unbridled affection for their spouses to “get real”? Aren’t folks at all concerned about their transparency? After all, it can’t all be roses, romance, and rocking slowly, right? How ‘bout the posters or bloggers who chronicle their culinary adventures? What’s with all of those recipes for and photos of great food? Aren’t folks concerned about the transparency quotient there? After all, not every meal turns out well.

Does it?

No, of course it doesn’t.

And no marriage is one unending honeymoon.

And not every homeschooling day looks like a behind-the-scenes tour of the Field Museum.

Duh.

Look. Let’s stop blaming the writer for the reader’s flawed assumption that a collection of happy posts or stories mean that some homeschoolers get it all right, never raise their voices, and never experience a bad day. Some people may simply find it more life-affirming to write about what is going right (in their marriages, their kitchens, their homes, their lives), given that, by virtue of being human, so much can go wrong… very, very wrong.

More, some writers may simply share my own conviction that one should share no more in such public spaces as blogs or message boards than one would in conversation with acquaintances. Why? Because when you tell a story or share an anecdote about your family, you are sharing someone else’s story. And sometimes? It's just not your story to tell.

______________________

Misery loves company, doesn’t it? I think that is where the appeal to be "real" is conceived. We arrive at a difficult stage or an uncomfortable realization or a really bad day, and we want to drag everyone down with us. That’s human. It’s also human to blame someone else for our misery, as in, Why didn’t anyone tell me about this? Well, it could be that not everyone experienced the same difficulty. ‘could be that not everyone needs or wants to write about it – not because they’re not “real” but because it’s not just their story to tell.

You know what? I close the door when I use the restroom. Wouldn’t it be more “real” to leave it open? After all, what happens in that stall happens to all of us – a couple of times a day, in fact. I’m thinking, though, you’d prefer that we all close the door, right? Well, analogously, when we have bad days – as parents, as a parent-teachers – we could leave the door open, forget to flush, leave the lid up. But how does it enliven your sense of self to wallow in someone else’s sh*t?

In other words, it happens. So do bad days. We don't need to see or smell them to know they're real.

Besides, good days are real, too, folks.

Good days are real, too.

I hope you have one today.

Artistic pursuits, redux

As I mentioned in the last artistic pursuits entry, we worked in reverse -- white chalk on black paper -- two classes ago. Here are a couple of examples from the Misses' work portfolios:

This week, we worked with gray-toned paper and a specific still-life arrangement. You could focus on one element or attempt to capture a larger selection of the elements using more of "gestural drawing" approach. If the images seem unclear, that's my problem, not the Misses' -- these pieces are actually quite compelling in person:

Next week is the final meeting of this particular class. The instructor decided to "shake things up": She is bringing the supplies required for experimenting in ink-wash drawings. Miss M-mv(ii) has been fascinated by Japanese sumi-e painting techniques since a student in portrait drawing class compared her gestural style to that particular art, so this will give her an opportunity to try something similar with guidance.

After that? Well, we toyed with the idea of enrolling in the oil-pastel painting course (I know -- interesting, right?) but decided to leave ourselves free during April (Master M-mv's leave) and May (stroke clinic), so our next art class will likely not begin until August. Until then, we have plenty of supplies to continue exploring, learning, experimenting, and creating.

The recommended daily allowance

What a splendid film for a rainy Saturday morning! Jessica Biel is competent, beautiful, and absolutely watchable, and Colin Firth as her father-in-law... well, isn't he always watchable? Expect splendid acting and excellent dialogue from this adaptation of Noel Coward's play.

You'll find Ebert's review here.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Behind the scenes at the Field Museum

I know. It's a little disturbing... unless you understand the context. You see, he is in good company.


And someday he and his companions will join their friends on the other side...


where they will be deeply appreciated by avid birders and aspiring scientists and scientific illustrators.


Speaking of scientists, meet David Willard, collection manager (birds) at the Field.


He is, in a word, awesome. He immediately draws you into what he is doing, describing the task in accessible language, and addressing every question as if it were the most compelling query he had ever heard. In the photo above, Dr. Willard is determining the sex of a specimen and explaining to onlookers how crucial the accuracy of specimen tags is to future research.

From a Q&A with Dr. Willard:

How did you become interested in science? What made you want to be a scientist, and how did you get to The Field Museum?

My interest in science goes back to childhood when I spent summers on my grandparents' farm. My first love was butterflies, but an experience watching grosbeaks, tanagers and waxwings getting tipsy at a pile of fermenting apples hooked me on birds for good. After graduate school, I came to The Field Museum for a three-year job reorganizing the bird collection…25 years later, I'm still here.

We met a number of other cool people last night, including artist-in-residence Peggy MacNamara, zoology department chairman John Bates, and staff research scientist Jason Weckstein, and I'd like to tell you more about them and what they taught us...

But I am tired. We stayed downtown overnight in order to visit the Art Institute this morning, and I never sleep as deeply away as I do at home. So check back for more about our adventures. Until then, here are a few other cool pics from last night's behind-the-scenes event.

Christmas in March

The Field Museum presents
59th Annual Members’ Nights
March 11 and 12, 2010
5 to 10 p.m.
Experience our mission of discovery at the Annual Members’ Nights. Explore our vast collections, interact with our curators and staff and witness Behind-the-Scenes work that defines The Field Museum as a distinguished, cultural institution.

Related entry here. Pics to follow.

The recommended daily allowance

Entre Les Murs (The Class; 2008)

From Roger Ebert's review:

The title of the original novel translates as "Between the Walls," and indeed the film stays for the most part within the classroom. We know from Jack London that the members of a dog pack intensely observe one another. There can only be one top dog, and there are always candidates for the job. A school year begins with the teacher as top dog. Whether it ends that way is the test of a good teacher. Do you stay on top by strict discipline? With humor? By becoming the students' friend? Through psychology? Will they sense your strategy? Sometimes I think the old British public school system was best: Teachers were eccentric cranks, famous for their idiosyncrasy, and baffled their students.

Also recommended:

Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company (2006)

From A&E TV:

Featuring candid interviews and never-before-seen video, we tell the story of the hardest hit combat unit of the Iraq war. Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, a reserve unit out of Columbus, Ohio was deployed to Iraq from February 28-September 30, 2005. This two-hour documentary captures significant moments from their tour of duty, including dramatic combat missions. Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company provides an unprecedented and harrowing window into the harsh reality of war.

Reminder: You will find this site's disclosure statement here.

Spring arrived here at about 10:45 a.m. yesterday.

It was then that I saw a chipmunk emerge from a hole beside the patio. And, as I have every mid-March for six years now, I thought, "If only a human could sleep for four or five months and awake thin -- well, wouldn't that be remarkable, eh?"

Most of the snow has melted, so it was only a matter of time before we saw the galanthus.


The Misses first espied them this morning, so although spring pulled in to the little house in the tiny woods on the prairie yesterday, we didn't call on her until about 3:15 p.m. this afternoon, which is when the sun finally showed up.

Yes, while the crows circled lazily overhead and the squirrels watched anxiously from the yard next door, we broke in new rainboots and tried to photograph a squirming infant spring.

Community college

Longtime M-mv readers remember J.B., a member of the "best and perfect audience," if ever there were one. Consider this reader-thinker-writer-teacher's thought-full response to my post "Paying for college, revisited" (2.18.2010).

There is another advantage to community college: the teaching. I am a community college teacher, and I have been in the university system as a student and graduate student.

At the community college, teachers are there to teach; at the university, teaching is secondary in many cases to research and publishing.

Our students get individual attention, usually smaller classes, and full access to professors. For example, In the last three weeks I met with every one of my 130 students for a 15 minute individual conference to coach a draft toward a final argument paper. This time is invaluable. And oh, so exhausting.

I was lucky, in the university systems, to meet with my professor for 3 minutes in a hallway; even my graduate advisor, whose responsibility to me was contractual, saw me perhaps an hour in two years.

I know my students are getting a far better education than they would if they were going to a major university, though they won't have the prestige -- but that prestige can be picked up in the last two years.

Many community colleges have TAGS, which are specific contracts with specific universities: you follow the course plan and maintain good grades, and you are guaranteed admission to the university. That's worth looking into when your girls get to that point (still a ways off, but time flies).

Even though it isn't any of my business, I feel a bit invested in your kids since I've been reading about them so long. I confess to very mixed feelings about [Master M-mv]'s enlistment, especially before finishing his [four-year] degree. But I have very mixed feelings about some of the choices my kids have made -- and they tend to be the right choices for them.

We trust that the values we offer them for the first 18 years will serve them well the rest of their lives -- and I think they generally do.

And folks wonder why I don't enable comments.

From "Thank you for not expressing yourself" (The New English Review, March 2010):

With the coming of the internet, the tone of the criticism changed. It became shriller, more personal, more hate-filled. It wasn’t just that I had made a mistake, I must be an evil person, probably in the pay of some disreputable organisation or other. (There are very few of us who are not in the pay of someone, and no one is entirely reputable.)

[...]

The immediacy of the response which the internet makes possible also means that people are able to vent their spleen in a way which was not possible, or likely, before. The putting of pen to paper, to say nothing of the act of posting the resultant letter, requires more deliberation than sitting at a computer and firing off an angry e-mail or posting on a website. By their very physical nature, then, letters are likely to be less intemperate than e-mails.

"Maybe they'd get more respect if the truly bad teachers were let go." *

From "Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers"(Newsweek, March 15):

Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. Much of the ability to teach is innate—an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not). Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, with a lot of insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not. [Emphasis added.]

Gee. No kidding. (Related entry: "[T]he quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.")

From later in the same article :

Some teachers resent the reform movement as a bunch of elitists denigrating loyal and hardworking teachers—of whom, of course, there are many. But others welcome a boost in status that would come with higher standards. "You know, the Marine Corps never has any problem meeting its enlistment goals, because it's an elite corps, and people want to be part of something that is seen as the best," says Daniel Weisberg, general counsel of The New Teacher Project and coauthor of "The Widget Effect," a critique of teacher-evaluation programs. In Europe, where teachers enjoy more social prestige and higher salaries, schools have no trouble attracting new teachers with strong academic records.

Ayup.
__________________________________

* And, please, feel free to draw analogous conclusions about home educators. No, really. The quality of the teacher can make or break any classroom. So while we should encourage scholarly independence in capable students, we cannot and must not understate our students' need for teachers -- for excellent teachers. Look. If our middle school or high school students were in conventional classrooms, we would be outraged to learn that their teachers had handed them textbooks, videos, and/or software and left them to their own devices while claiming to be nurturing their autodidactic tendencies. "Teach!" we would demand. "Get in that classroom and do your job!"

We should demand no less of ourselves, folks.

Teach! Get in that classroom (kitchen, livingroom, library, family room, whatever) and Do. Your. Job.

"If you saw how it was made, you would never eat sausage again." *

According to Master M-mv, logic studies represent one of the family-centered learning project's "Top Ten" pursuits. We worked through Books One and Two of Critical Thinking (Anita Harnadek) over two years, beginning when he was about twelve, and seven years after we cracked the cover on the first book, he was still raving about the benefits of the program. The Misses, twelve and fourteen, are now working through the Book One, and they love it as much, if not more, than their brother did.

And, yes, it was bittersweet to open the folder of notes from my work with Master.

Speaking of Master, we're cautiously optimistic that he will graduate on time and so have begun paging through Frommer's San Diego. We lived in Southern California for several years when Master M-mv still had blond hair and dimpled knees, so we're somewhat familiar with the places we'd like to show the Misses. Apart from seeing Master, though, the women of the FCLP mostly just want to spend time by the ocean and birdwatch. We're just not tourist-y folk, I guess.

Let's see. Bardolatry probably tops the FCLP's "Top Ten" pursuits, and it's with interest and delight that the Misses are making their way through a number of graphic retellings of plays they've studied. Their three favorites so far are

■ Manga Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing (Richard Appignanesi)
■ Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (Richard Appignanesi)
■ Henry V: The Graphic Novel (John McDonald)

Manga puzzles me, but I like these adaptations well enough.

I refuse to enter into a conversation about math programs, but, ayup, that's the text and answer key for the one we use.

And Girl Scout cookies make me smile.

Read. Think. Learn. Teach, folks. Don't just hand them the books. Teach.


* See "Homeschooling expert? Nah."

Artistic pursuits

We worked in reverse today: In an exercise designed to make us think more clearly about contrast, we worked in white chalk and white pastel on black paper. I'll post the some images from today's class later this week. Until then, we completed the following pieces a week ago.

"... I know a hawk from a handsaw."

It's not every day that a red-tailed hawk lands in the front yard of the little house in the tiny woods on the prairie. This imperfect image was captured on February 21.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

"[T]ransforming ordinary moments into indelible images"

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008 is the first U.S. retrospective of Eggleston's work, and, yes, I am greatly looking forward to our upcoming trip the Art Institute to see it. (Eggleston was featured in a Fine Art Friday entry back in November 2008.)

From "Y’all come back now: The Art Institute showcases the South" (The Loyola Phoenix, March 2):

William Eggleston’s photographs are simple. They offer a snapshot of the nouns (people, places and things) of the South. Upon first hearing and seeing a glimpse of Eggleston’s work, one might assume his works and this collection at the Art Institute of Chicago will be boring. You might ask yourself, “Why would anyone want to see a bunch of photographs of what I live through most days?” You might be correct in this initial assumption; however, in their very simplicity they achieve complexity. Like truly artistic photographs, they allow a glimpse into another world.

Other planned gallery stops include In the Vernacular and Chicago Cabinet: C. D. Arnold Photographs of the World's Columbian Exposition.

"Pick up that book! And turn the page! ... 'Cause this book's gonna be a good book."

This video makes me happy. Hat tip: Stefanie at the wonderful So Many Books.

Today is Casimir Pulaski Day!

... and for many of us, it's a holiday.

From the short bio that was once hosted on the Chicago Public Library's site:

Casimir Pulaski belongs to that select group of heroes, including the Marquis de Lafayefte, Thomas Paine, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Pulaski's fellow countryman, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, who opposed tyranny not only in their homelands, but wherever they found it. We especially honor Pulaski because he paid the ultimate price, having sustained a mortal wound while fighting for American independence at the battle of Savannah in 1779. Today he remains a symbol of the ideal of valiant resistance to oppression everywhere in the world.

The Polish American Center offers a biography and image at this link.