Key To Geometry served us well in the younger years. Wee Girl, currently 6, is working slowly with dh through the first book. Points to consider: - It teaches through constructions. Geometry becomes intuitive. - It's light on explanation, long on demonstration. - It is much lower-level than most of your listings: no problem for an elementary student to be guided through it. - It's relatively inexpensive, but consumable; you'd have to order new workbooks for the next child. - If you use it in tandem with other Key To materials, you can integrate your subjects.

A recent thread caused me to reach for my John Stuart Mill, and I've accordingly shoved aside my teetering TBR pile for On Liberty, a book which once excited me in my idealistic youth and now just makes me want to cry over the cold, stiffening corpse of what used to be Liberalism. --------------- Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society itself is the tyrant - society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it - its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them[.]

20. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain I hardly know what to say about this book. It's about an ordinary young German man, Hans Kastorp, who goes to visit his cousin in a tuberculosis sanatorium on a mountain and ends up staying seven years. It's about time, love, disease, death, extreme philosophies, and the way they're all somehow tied together. And I think it's trying to say something about Europe on the eve of the first World War. And it's 700 pages long. ----------------------------------- Time--not the sort that train station clocks measure with a large hand that jerks forward every five minutes, but more like the time of a very small watch whose hands move without our being able to notice, or the time grass keeps as it grows without our eyes' catching its secret growth, until the day comes when the fact is undeniable--time, a line composed of elastic turning points (and here the late, ill-fated Naphta would presumably have asked how purely elastic points can ever begin to form a line), time, then, had continued to bring forth changes in its furtive, unobservable, secret, and yet bustling way. The boy named Teddy, to take just one example, was no longer a boy one day--though of course that did not happen "one day," but emerged out of some quite indefinite day. The ladies could no longer set him on their laps on those occasions when he left his bed, exchanged his pajamas for a sporty outfit, and came downstairs. The tables were turned, and no one had noticed. He now set them on his lap on such occasions, which both parties found just as delightful, even more so. He had--we won't say blossomed, but rather--sprouted into a young man. Hans Castorp had not seen it happen, but then he saw it. Time and sprouting, by the way, did not agree with the young man Teddy, he was not made for such things. Time proved no blessing--in his twenty-first year of life he died of the illness to which he had been susceptible. They fumigated his room. We can relate all this quite calmly, since there was no significant difference between his new condition and his previous one.

I've always allowed my kids to be out alone during daylight hours. Traffic is the main danger here: once I'm secure in their ability to not get hit by a car, they may go to the park or store alone. Great Girl was once stopped on her way to the museum by the campus police, who (after a year of her tooling around campus) noticed that a 13-year-old on a pink bike seemed out of place. GG explained she was homeschooled and offered dh's phone number and office address; the officer declined and told her to get a better bike lock or even a pink 3-speed would be stolen.

No one should denigrate the gifts of the musicians to the liturgy. The question however asked specifically if there was some equivalence to the cantor in Judaism, which is a clerical role. But in Catholicism, the cantor is not clergy, but is a layperson like the rest of us, even if a layperson doing something considerably more useful than the rest of us.

The latter.

One downside of crossed-arms-for-blessing-only is that Eastern Rite Catholics cross their arms when they approach to receive, and it can be confusing in an area like mine where there is a substantial Eastern Rite presence. And where there is an altar rail, it can be difficult to see if the person has arms folded, and the priest often has to ask if they're requesting communion. Relatedly, in parishes where reception on the tongue is rare, approaching with folded hands is often mistaken for a request for a blessing, especially with children.

Henry Kissinger's signature is a possible model for those who can't write in cursive: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/Henry_Kissinger_Signature.svg/301px-Henry_Kissinger_Signature.svg.png It's surely handy for those electronic credit card signatures.

I feel your pain. My dh is a philosopher.

Whenever I leave Texas: "You're from Texas? You don't sound Texan!" Yes, it turns out that if you live your life in a large urban area and its suburbs, you don't end up with the regional accent of more rural areas. Sorry. I'll try to fake a drawl.

Summer afternoons. Sometime shortly after lunch .... The house is hot and drowsy ... the cicadas outside are buzzing ... the fan whirrs rhythmically as it stirs the stagnant air ... Heads begin to nod, eyelids droop....

Machaca: http://www.texascooking.com/features/jan2002beefmachaca.htm

Word Wealth Junior by Ward Miller (and the later book, Word Wealth) is the best vocabulary program I've ever seen. Middle Girl has gone from an atrocious, incorrigible speller - despite reading widely AND studying both Greek and Latin - to having an excellent sense of etymology and spelling. Unfortunately when I first recommended WWJ on this board, it was to be had for a few dollars; now, twenty or thirty. I wish it would be reprinted.

Machaca with eggs. Mmmmmm.

I meditate on the mysteries of the rosary more or less daily. It's not for mental health or anxiety relief, but it does actually help with that.

Still climbing up Mann's Magic Mountain....

Robert Pondiscio! Late of the Core Knowledge Blog! Excuse me, I'm having a fangirl moment.

Back when dh and I were being forced to read pretty much every Baum Oz book to Great Girl, we couldn't help noticing a weird decapitation theme throughout. The Tin Woodsman gets it started, and then it pops up in just about every book.

I appreciate how you've enabled my next bookstore trip. As long as I get fewer books than you, I don't have a problem, right? Like not being the first one to get smashed at the party.

I strongly second the recommendation of Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? It has been very successful as a resource for my family.

Poetry is in a way the most fundamental form of literature. It's the place where language shows itself to be of value for its own qualities, rather than as a mere utilitarian means of conveying information. It's fundamental to every culture. In our home, a child is expected to be working on memorizing a poem at all times. Different ages and length or difficulty of a poem means of course that it may take a day, a week, or longer to learn. Selection is a matter of personal preference, with strong guidance. As with other literature, I steer the child toward verse that will be a good challenge level for her. I mostly want them to see how, in Pope's famous words, the sound is an echo to the sense. For example, Wee Girl is learning Eleanor Farjeon's "The Tide in the River": The tide in the river The tide in the river The tide in the river runs deep. I saw a shiver Pass over the river As the tide turned in its sleep. We talked about her experience of tides from our recent trip to the coast, and what "tide turned" meant; then we talked about how the poet makes the river seem like a person rolling over in bed without waking up. Then we looked more closely at how the poem is like a song, with repeating, easy-to-say verses, but then the last verse is difficult to read because of the arrangement of sounds (this is especially marked for Wee Girl, who has speech difficulties), and how the forced slowing resembles the almost imperceptible turning of the tide. Naturally we didn't have all this discussion at once. My goal is to draw their attention to how poetry works in a pleasing, gentle way that leads them to enjoy reading, learning, and reciting. YMMV.

Mistakes that cost $$$: Mapping the World by Heart: pretty expensive for a program where you have to make up your own lessons. MCT: Cornucopia of wrongness about grammar, poetry, phonetics ... probably would have been able to list more if I hadn't cut my losses and given it away. Artistic Pursuits: At this point, I stopped buying things just because they were recommended by people on the board, even if I agreed with their educational principles. Cheaper mistakes: A year of Sonlight, partial and used. A Spanish curriculum: Can't be much help when you don't know any of the language yourself. Used Saxon books.

I think it's more like, "You and Fyodor would enjoy a three-hour Lenten Vespers together. In a Siberian chapel. Followed by an impassioned discussion of morality, suffering, and the nature of the soul over glasses of vodka."

"You got: Fyodor Dostoevsky You know the world is a depraved and twisted place, and you want a man who cuts through all the bull to what’s really at the dark heart of human nature. But, you also know that love is that glimmer of hope in the black kingdom of our souls, and you dream that your innocence and goodness will help heal this tormented bad boy…if only for a little while."

Thong Man bikes down our street pretty often. http://mo.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/kelso/entries/2010/10/12/theres_been_more_response_to.html (Scroll down. Or don't.) My mom has convinced herself that he's wearing a flesh-colored body suit. That's right, Mom.